Zexks comments on the trouble with anarchism is all that liberty

[–] Zexks@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago (4 children)

I think you’re giving Rojava way more credit as an “anarchist society” than it deserves.

First off, it’s not actually stateless. Rojava has an administration, courts, taxes, and a military. The Syrian Democratic Forces are literally the armed force that controls the territory. That’s basically a monopoly of violence, which is one of the defining traits of a state. It’s decentralized compared to most countries, sure, but it’s still governance.

Second, its survival hasn’t exactly been a pure test of anarchism. It survived largely because it was backed by the US coalition during the fight against Islamic State. Without that support it probably would’ve been crushed years ago by Turkey, ISIS, or the Syrian government. So it’s hard to claim it proves anarchism works when its security depended on external state militaries.

On the corruption point, decentralization doesn’t magically eliminate corruption. It just spreads it out. Instead of one big corrupt structure you get a bunch of smaller ones. Historically that often turns into local strongmen, militias, or patronage networks. Distributed power doesn’t automatically equal clean governance.

The bigger issue though is coordination. Splitting communities whenever they get big sounds nice, but modern societies require huge coordination systems: infrastructure, power grids, supply chains, water systems, environmental regulation, etc. At some point you need mechanisms to coordinate decisions across thousands of groups, and those mechanisms almost always turn hierarchical because hierarchy is efficient for large-scale organization.

And mutual aid doesn’t remove incentives for conflict either. Scarcity still exists. People still compete for water, land, energy, and strategic resources. Cooperation works great inside trusted groups, but once resources get tight the incentives change.

The part that actually reinforces my concern is the “external states destroy them” argument. If decentralized societies consistently lose to centralized ones, that suggests centralized coordination has real advantages in defense and large-scale organization. That’s basically the same evolutionary pressure that produced states in the first place.

At the end of the day I’m not saying decentralized governance can’t work at smaller scales. It clearly can. But once you start federating large numbers of communities together for defense, infrastructure, and dispute resolution, you end up recreating most of the same structures states evolved to solve those problems. You can call them councils or federations instead of ministries, but functionally they’re doing the same job.

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[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 1 point 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

You're right that Rojava is not Anarchist, but it was at least inspired by Anarchist theory (Murray Bookchin), and does act as a good example of at least the concept of federations of smaller communities working together, which is why I reference it.

Without that support it probably would’ve been crushed years ago

The US did abandon it years ago, but it was able to successfully hold the land it had, and even spread further on its own despite constant attacks from Turkey. Only very recently due a renewed effort from the new Syrian government (which allied with Western powers) combined with much stronger attacks from Turkey have they lost land.

decentralization doesn’t magically eliminate corruption.

I never claimed it did. But it does make corruption far more difficult take hold, and far more limited in its area of influence. Instead of bribing a handful of the people who hold the keys to power, you'd then have to bribe an entire community to effectively corrupt them. Any individual delegate elected to some position who does become corrupt can be immediately recalled by the community if the corrupt delegate no longer adequately performs the duties assigned by that community.

Historically that often turns into local strongmen, militias, or patronage networks.

This usually occurs due to an initial imbalance of power or control of limited resources that is able to be exploited. If every citizen was militarily capable (such as in Switzerland), and each community and person helped each other with mutual aid, resource scarcity would be so reduced that it would be difficult for a strongman to convince others to join him (what would he realistically be able to offer as reward compelling enough to start shooting their neighbors, when they already have their needs met?), especially if the local populace was not significantly weaker militarily than the strongman and their goons.

Right now under centralized democracies, there often already are unelected militias (police forces) which operate on behalf of strongmen (wealthy elites and their interests, under the supposed control of corrupted politicians who are in the pockets of the elites). The elites pay almost no taxes, while the middle class and poor take up all the slack, which effectively becomes an unfair patronage network.

At some point you need mechanisms to coordinate decisions across thousands of groups

Which was effectively done in Catalonia, with many committees of delegates from various groups, all of which worked together pretty damn well from all accounts. If you want to read how all of that was done and and how well it performed in practice, then I highly recommend reading Sam Dolgoff's The Anarchist Collectives Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939.

And mutual aid doesn’t remove incentives for conflict either. Scarcity still exists. People still compete for water, land, energy, and strategic resources.

The entire point of building a society atop the principles of Mutual Aid and Anarcho-Communist principles is to effectively eliminate the artificial resource scarcity we currently live under. We currently have the technical capability to provide to virtually everyone on the planet enough food, water, and housing right now, even without a star trek replicator, we just don't mostly because of profit incentive, and because a subjugated populace is often more conducive to the interests of the elites.

If decentralized societies consistently lose to centralized ones, that suggests centralized coordination has real advantages in defense and large-scale organization.

Many centralized states also consistently lose to other centralized states. The Axis powers were all centralized, but lost to the allies. They didn't lose because they were centralized, they lost because they couldn't support the logistics required to win due to circumstances unrelated to their form of government. The same was true of the decentralized societies, they didn't lose due to some flaw in their choice of societal structure, they lost because literally every other state in the world saw them as a threat to their hold on power.

The tankies betrayed them and crushed them because they were ultimately seeking to become dictators, not liberators, and thus a genuine anarchist revolution is a threat to their hold on power.

The centralized capitalist countries are just as concerned of their hold on power, and the elites are especially concerned with perpetuating capitalism above all else, so they most certainly aren't going to assist a movement that is explicitly against the interests of the capitalist elite.

Had an Anarchist revolution occurred in the US due to the great depression (instead of FDR putting a cap on it with labor reforms), then the Anarchists in Spain could've had a powerful ally to supply them logistically, and they could've won, similar to how the USSR was able to logistically help tankie revolutions into succeeding.

You can call them councils or federations instead of ministries, but functionally they’re doing the same job.

A bottom-up federation of recallable delegates is fundamentally different in practice to a hierarchical centralized representative democracy.

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[–] Zexks@lemmy.world 1 point 8 months ago (2 children)

I think we’re actually circling the same issue but drawing different conclusions from it.

You say Rojava is just an example of federated communities working together, which is fine, but the important part is that it only works because it has state-like structures. It has an administration, courts, and a military command structure. Once you have those, you’re already outside anarchism and into decentralized governance.

That’s kind of the point I’m making. Once enough communities federate together to handle things like defense, infrastructure, logistics, etc., you inevitably recreate the same coordination structures states evolved to solve those problems. They might be called councils instead of ministries, but they’re doing the same job.

The corruption argument also doesn’t really work the way you’re framing it. You say someone would have to bribe an entire community instead of a few officials, but that assumes communities behave as a unified rational actor. In reality local politics can be just as corruptible. Social pressure, patronage, intimidation, and local alliances still exist. Decentralization often just spreads power across many smaller political arenas instead of eliminating corruption entirely.

On the “everyone is armed like Switzerland” point, Switzerland actually works because it’s a highly organized state with centralized institutions and logistics. The militia exists inside a coordinated national structure. Without that coordination, widespread armament alone doesn’t produce stability.

The scarcity point also seems a bit optimistic. Even if we solved basic food and housing, scarcity doesn’t disappear. Water rights, strategic land, energy infrastructure, and transportation networks still create conflicts between groups. Mutual aid works great inside trusted networks, but it doesn’t automatically resolve competing priorities between communities.

And on the “they only lost because outside states crushed them” argument — that actually reinforces the structural issue. If decentralized societies consistently require centralized allies to survive against centralized opponents, that suggests centralized coordination has real advantages in defense and large-scale organization.

I’m not saying decentralized governance can’t work or that councils are a bad idea. Local governance often works better than distant centralized control. I’m just skeptical that a system made entirely of federated local councils can scale indefinitely without recreating the same coordination structures states developed.

So I guess the question I keep coming back to is this:

If two communities strongly disagree over something critical — say water access, land use, or infrastructure — and neither side is willing to back down, who ultimately enforces the final decision?

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[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 1 point 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 child)

If decentralized societies consistently require centralized allies to survive against centralized opponents

That's not what I meant.

They don't require centralized allies, nor do they necessarily require strategic allies at all depending on the circumstances.

The point I was making was if the US had undergone a Catalonia style anarchist revolution nationwide in the 1930's, It then would've been able to render aid to Catalonia, which had much less productive capacity pre-revolution, and thus could not out-logistic the 4-on-1 battle they faced. As an aside, an Anarchist US would not be dependent upon outside help to defend itself militarily from Mexico or Canada, had they wished to intervene. Nor would any other nation have been able to interfere due to the logistics of landing an invasion force and holding all that territory, or competing against the industrial capacity of the US.

I was also pointing out that in the specific scenarios where this style of organization was attempted but destroyed, they were destroyed due to their specific circumstances, not due to any aspects of it being decentralized. You appear unfamiliar with the details of both the Spanish Civil War and the Ukrainian Black Army which would make that apparent, otherwise you would not be making such blanket statements.

It would be like if I pointed to Germany losing in WWI or France quickly falling at the start of WWII purely due to both having a centralized governments. That would be an absurd statement because each lost for a multitude of reasons including logistics, war fatigue, tactics, the specific defense treaties they had signed before hand, etc.

Mutual aid works great inside trusted networks

What research are you referencing when making that statement? What is or is not a trusted network?

Even if we solved basic food and housing, scarcity doesn’t disappear. Water rights, strategic land, energy infrastructure, and transportation networks still create conflicts between groups.

If there were large Anarchist territories, the places with abundance could transfer that excess to the places that need it, or people could easily move away from places with scarce resources to places with them, as they would not be land-locked to their particular area due to poverty. A large mutual aid network really does solve the problem of scarcity. If you want to see that depicted in a very realistic and sensible matter, I implore you to read The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin.

I’m not saying decentralized governance can’t work or that councils are a bad idea. Local governance often works better than distant centralized control. I’m just skeptical that a system made entirely of federated local councils can scale indefinitely without recreating the same coordination structures states developed.

I don't mean this as an insult or to demean you in any way, but I think that without you personally wanting to do more research into this area to go beyond the surface level idea or theory, you will likely always remain skeptical of it regardless of its efficacy. This is a natural response, as you're already quite familiar with how our current systems operate, and they're quite old, so they seem quite viable just by their very nature of being the current default.

I've proved some research material in my previous comments, and I could provide more if you're interested, but ultimately I don't think any of my arguments will be terribly convincing without the real-world context to back it up, which is out there, but I realistically cannot provide all of that in a comment chain.

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[–] Zexks@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

Before we keep going, I want to point out something that keeps happening in this thread.

Several times now when a structural problem gets raised, the response shifts away from the actual mechanism and toward theory, examples, or suggestions that I just need to read more. That’s not really answering the question.

For example earlier you argued that anarchist societies fail because centralized states destroy them:

“The times horizontally structured societies were tried… they were always targeted and destroyed by external states with centralized exploitative power structures.”

But when I pointed out that repeated defeat by centralized systems suggests centralized coordination might provide advantages in logistics and defense, the response became:

“They didn't lose due to some flaw in their choice of societal structure, they lost because of their specific circumstances.”

That’s moving the goalposts. Those cases can’t simultaneously be evidence that anarchism works and irrelevant when someone analyzes why they failed.

The same thing happened with scarcity. Earlier the explanation was:

“Mutual aid creates interdependent connections that reinforce good-will and cooperation.”

When I raised resource conflicts, the answer became:

“Places with abundance could transfer that excess to the places that need it.”

But that isn’t actually addressing the issue. That is the logistics problem. Saying resources can be moved doesn’t explain how a system coordinates that movement across large territories without creating large coordination structures.

The Switzerland example also ends up reinforcing the same point. You said:

“If every citizen was militarily capable (such as in Switzerland)… it would be difficult for a strongman to take power.”

But Switzerland’s militia system works inside a highly organized federal state with centralized logistics, infrastructure planning, and national command structures. The armed population doesn’t replace those institutions — it operates alongside them.

And if the argument is that widespread armament prevents power concentration, the United States should be the clearest counterexample. It has one of the most heavily armed civilian populations in the world, yet power has still concentrated in many of the exact ways you claim militias would prevent — corporate capture of politics, entrenched political elites, expanding bureaucracies, and increasing economic centralization.

So the issue clearly isn’t just whether people are armed. It’s how large systems coordinate power.

At this point there’s also the repeated suggestion that I simply need to read more to understand the issue:

“Without you personally wanting to do more research… you will likely always remain skeptical.”

Disagreement isn’t evidence that someone hasn’t read enough. Looking at the same cases — Catalonia, Rojava, the Black Army — and drawing a different conclusion is not ignorance. It’s interpretation.

What I’ve consistently asked about, and what still hasn’t been directly addressed, is the operational mechanism when cooperation fails.

So I’ll ask it again directly:

If two communities strongly disagree about something critical — water rights, land use, energy infrastructure, whatever — and neither side is willing to back down, who actually enforces the resolution?

Because if nobody enforces it, then the stronger group simply imposes its will. And if a federation, council, or militia enforces it, then you’ve created a governing authority performing the same coordination and enforcement roles states historically evolved to perform.

That’s the piece I still haven’t seen a clear explanation for.

If there is a clear answer to that question that doesn’t eventually recreate some kind of durable authority structure performing those roles, I’m genuinely interested in hearing it.

But if the answer just circles back to “the councils,” “the federation,” or “mutual aid,” without explaining how conflicts are actually resolved when communities refuse the outcome, then we’re just going in circles. At that point there isn’t much left to debate here, because the core mechanism that the whole system depends on still hasn’t been explained.

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