Sachyriel
Banned
Dude, if you want a peaceful co-existence between all races in the territory of America you're going to need a POD pre-1900...
WI an anarcho-communist country was established?
- Thread starter TheCrow__
- Start date
Dude, if you want a peaceful co-existence between all races in the territory of America you're going to need a POD pre-1900...
Uhm
I think the main point is to have a "permanent revolution" mentality, such that in CCCP in 1919 on in the Paris Commune in 1871.
It is not theoretically impossible, but it is very hard to keep, since it impose a serious strain (the human mind usually use the 'habitude' concept as a pressure valve to numb reaction and ease the strain).
Ironically enough (or maybe not), the most successful attempts to keep it alive were the bloodiest ones, unfortunately giving to the idea a bad smell.
I think the main point is to have a "permanent revolution" mentality, such that in CCCP in 1919 on in the Paris Commune in 1871.
It is not theoretically impossible, but it is very hard to keep, since it impose a serious strain (the human mind usually use the 'habitude' concept as a pressure valve to numb reaction and ease the strain).
Ironically enough (or maybe not), the most successful attempts to keep it alive were the bloodiest ones, unfortunately giving to the idea a bad smell.
I'm sorry I was not clear.
I was just saying that in order to make it reasonable we have to consider a deeply conflictual region and/or time and a short time period.
did you consider the involvement of religion in it?
TheCrow__
Banned
sorry I was'nt talking to you was talking to mmmeee0 lol but I will now, yes I believe permanent revolution will be needed but lets call it permanent evolution if something is wrong the citizens of the commune everyone who is a worker or part of the community should vote to solve such problems and I'm still considering the whole religion thing I myself am an agnostic and I believe that not everyone in this proposed commune should be agnostic but there should be no state religion and that open mindedness should be taught and that a person should choose what they believe and not what someone else wants them to believe
Goldstein
Banned
First of all, this should be moved to Chat, given it is not a discussion about the possibilities and effects of a lasting, RL example of anarchist communist society, but a discussion about how people would eat each other if such a thing happens.
Second, the experience failed during the SCW failed because the republicans first, and the nationalists later, put an end to it. According to the testimonies, society was fairly functinal during the Spanish Revolution. And I still think Spain was the best shot for an anarchist experiment, though I can't figure out a decent, definite POD.
Now... Let's not forget what an anarcho-communist society is: A direct democracy in which people decide about everything, including the means of production. The learnt lessons regarding communism don't apply here, for an economic democracy has much more potential for succeeding than a central planning. Its ethos is much much closer to that of Athenian democracy than anything else, except for the universal participation, and (here is the great problem), the lawlessness.
I don't think societies disintegrate without a good reason, and I think that, if both the society and the ones who have coertitive power (let's not forget the anarchist experience included a fair deal of militiamen) accept the legitimacy of a set of rules (anarchism, let's sing along, has rules), then the rules are into effect by all extents... but I also think that, by removing law, anarchist societies would remove themselves from the main prevention from arbitrary coertion. Let's not forget that law isn't there only for setting the rules of coertion, but also for putting the limits between an acceptable and an unnaceptable coertion. Of course, this is the liberal lecture on law, not the anarchist one, for which every rule is a form of aggression, but such a lecture owes everything to the Enlightement's dream of a primigeny lost paradise of natural justice and unstained, compassive men, corrupted by the original sin of private property... which is fucking hilarious.
An anarchist society wouldnt be one of warlordism and poverty, but one of something more subtle. I would be a society in which your neighbours would look bad on you if you don't participate or you don't do it according to what is perceived as the greater good, or just if the woman next door likes to go to bed with you rather than with the others (even in the hippie communes, sexual intercourse was an act of exclusion); and in which the charisma would be the only possible key of success; in which if you are not a liked person, people could (democratically, horizontally, after a fair trial) vote you from being expelled, or killed of tortured (yeah, yeah, there is an ideal of fraternity, but ideals have a most curious tendency to rot after a generation).
And anarchist society, rather than looking like a war-torn feudalism, would look like a secondary school. With blue collars, and without fucking restraint.
Jaded_Railman
Banned
This is exactly the point I keep trying to make:
Saying something 'should' or 'would' be like such and such arrangement isn't enough. I can talk about how we should live in a world without scarcity, but that doesn't help us to get there.
If anarchist communes would number in the 'few thousands', how do you square that with the fact that people live in communities of millions today?
There's going to necessarily be a time of change, and it won't be frictionless. The more drastic and world-altering the change, the more friction there will be. The longer the change takes, the longer those frictions have to turn into reversals.
Are you familiar with the full-stop, also known as the period? Please use it. Other forms of punctuation would be nice too.
Cook
Banned
Seriously TheCrow, this is really beginning to annoy people.
It makes any point you are trying to communicate hard to find and makes you look stupid when possibly you shouldn’t.
Cook
Banned
If you don't like him, his way of typing or the ideas in this thread let me remind you something: Get Out. No one forced you in here.
Not massively useful that Mmmeee.
I’m trying to explain that for him to get his ideas across he needs to use a bit of structure.
TheCrow__
Banned
I'm sorry. I tend to just flow sometimes. But, I realize your point and I am going to. Happy? Can we get back to the point of the thread now. It seems though I'm going to have to come up with a POD. I'm considering it to be something to do with Peter Kropotkin and his ideas catching on.
TheCrow__
Banned
Ok, let's say Kropotkin's ideas are used as the basis of the February Revolution instead of Marxism. Thus the Revoution Kropotkin speaks of in the Conquest of Bread starts and in the end is accomplished as did the revolution in Russia OTL. How would this new Russia be perceived and progress?
The reason total anarchy wouldn't work is the same reason why a government with absolute power also wouldn't work. People always abuse their powers. If the government was given more powers, they will abuse it. Likewise, if the people was given more power (or absolute power) then the people WILL abuse their powers. Anarchy would be total chaos because there would be nothing to stop the people doing whatever they want, right or wrong. A place where people do their things voluntarily would eventually collapse. For example, what if nobody wanted to work in the agriculture sector? Then everyone went hungry and die? Or what if everyone in the sector only wanted to grow sugar? Everyone went hungry and die?
TheCrow__
Banned
I am in the belief that naturaly all people are good but through the nurture of their society they can keep this goodness or they can be corrupted. So why could'nt people who have been oppressed for years and years not come together for the common good? Why is it so hard for you all to accept this. It has been proven that time and time again that cooperation of the masses can and will solve the problem of exploitation. To exist is to coexist.
Cook
Banned
Mate,
The point is still valid. Your society can’t exist in isolation and will have to deal with events and neighbours that can be hostile, especially if they see vulnerability.
If an Anarchist society cannot deal with competition it will fail.
And I agree, this thread belongs in the Chat section.
Throughout time immemorial, people in position in power without anything to check have been known to abuse them. From Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, too many European absolute monarchs to count, and even the people of Somalia. It had been shown that anyone with absolute power with nothing to check them will always result in abuses. Humans are naturally good you say? Then why do we as kids were taught to be honest instead of taught to lie. Why do our parents have to teach us to be good. I may be a cynic, but my observations so far had shown that humans are bastards. And if recent events are to be believed, it's not changing anytime soon.
Goldstein
Banned
But you're ignoring the anarchists had very little manpower, territory and firepower compared to the rest of the factions, so it is not, IMHO, a valid arguement to conclude that an anarchist society cannot defend itself.
I believe people can come together for the common good. I don't believe, though, that wat the majority wants is my good. I believe in the institutional limits to the exercise of power, and that includes the power of the masses. Because, when my opinion differs from the majority, I stop belonging to the masses. And when the power is absolute, it normally manifests itself sadistically. As, in such a society, not everybody would be as popular, or as good at speeches, or as attractive, nor we would have the same opinions, there would be plenty of room for collective envy (and I'm not even starting on the productivity of the workers. In the hippie communes, artists tended to prey on the farmers and gatherers), and without laws, there is not a definite notion of what constitutes a crime, and which punishment should be made. If you think, for that matter, that the principles of anarchism avoid to come with institutional crimes, then you underestimate the power of psychological warfare, and particularily, the power of the dehumanization of the enemy... not that the Spanish revolution was bloodless, or that all the victims were guilty, you know. I need more than a simplistic reductionist diagnosis made by 19th century subjects of a feudal society, to accept a recipe that will lead the society to bully the independent-minded.
Now you should ask yourself, and it is a fundamental question, why do you believe in the natural goodness of the human being. Unless you're using, ahem, authority arguements, you are probably aware that the classic anarchist writers' political tradition is linked with Rousseau's anthropological theory. And the theoretical basis for Rousseau's stances have been more than refuted by now; We know the primitive societies are brutally violent, we know the origins of empathy and the role it plays in the human natural history, we have more than enough evidence about how states in a plural sense came into being, we know the destructive psychological effects of an enviroment without discipline, and every attempt of a coertion-free pedagogy has failed miserabily. Nowadays believing in the goodness of the human being has as much of a solid justification as believing that burning objects are actually expelling phlogiston. So deal with that, and you will understand why people don't bow down before the shiny truth of anarchism.
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TheCrow__
Banned
I've told you the POD could be that the Russian Revolution instead of being a socialist revolution and took over by the Bolshiveks. It turns to the teachings of Kropotkin and organizes into the first truely Free Teritory. With the masses of oppressed workers joining together under black and red I'm sure they could defend their selves from any other oppression internal or external.