[P2P-F] Sapiens.org : Anarchism in Practice Is Often Radically Boring Democracy

[Dante-Gabryell Monson]

https://www.sapiens.org/culture/anarchism-democracy/

"What is anarchism apart from these caricatures? And how does it relate to
“antifa”?

The term “anarchy” literally means “without [a] ruler,” and not, as many
believe, “no rules.” Although many anarchists want radical change, the
change that most envision is not societal breakdown but rather people learning
to collectively rule themselves
<https://theconversation.com/what-is-anarchism-all-about-50373> (or in
other words, direct democracy).

The basic premise guiding anarchist political philosophy is simple: Humans
are fundamentally cooperative
<https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-prince-of-evolution-peter-kropotkin/>
by
nature and, when given the chance, flourish in situations of collective
self-governance
<https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691161037/two-cheers-for-anarchism>.
By self-governance, anarchists typically mean an arrangement in which every
person has an unalienable right to participate fully in any political
decision made on their behalf—and to leave any association that makes a
decision they find unconscionable.

Taking the term in this broadest sense, attempts at anarchist societies or
collectives over the last two centuries have been numerous and persistent,
if often short-lived. However, as anthropologists like to point out
<https://www.prickly-paradigm.com/titles/fragments-of-an-anarchist-anthropology/>,
humans organized themselves in stateless societies
<https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300169171/art-not-being-governed> with
great success for much of ancient history, and many continue to do so in
various ways, without using the label “anarchy.” In fact, “state-level”
societies have existed for only a fraction of the roughly 300,000 years
modern humans have thrived—emerging an estimated 5,000 years ago
<https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-0-387-72611-3_10>—and
should still be regarded as an experiment, with mixed results."

...

" As an anthropologist who has studied and worked with leftist activists in
the U.S. for more than a decade, I’ve come to understand anarchy as
something that looks very different from the violent, lawless chaos that
many people picture it to be.

...

The use of the term “anarchy” to describe the riot isn’t shocking—violent
chaos is, after all, one of its generally accepted meanings. But it has
little to do with how actual anarchists understand and apply their
political philosophy.

While an exciting idea, anarchism in practice is, well, boring. Far from
what window-smashing insurrectionists are doing, it mostly takes the form
of an extremely slow-moving and highly rule-bound process of collective
deliberation. Anarchy, paradoxically, means more rules, not fewer, and more
collective responsibility
<https://www.routledge.com/Constructive-Anarchy-Building-Infrastructures-of-Resistance/Shantz/p/book/9781409404026>,
not less.

Unfortunately, since much of the United States has been misled
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/22/technology/antifa-local-disinformation.html>
into
thinking that anarchists—specifically, those involved with “antifa
<https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-antifa-trump.html>”—were responsible
for the putative anarchy at the Capitol, an impressionable observer might
think that actual anarchists want violent chaos.

The cognitive dissonance would be amusing if the situation weren’t so
horrifying. If there had been *actual* anarchy in the Capitol that day,
rather than a right-wing insurrection, Ernst and her Republican colleagues
would likely have been in for a long, well-facilitated meeting aimed at
complete consensus. "
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ourproject.org/pipermail/p2p-foundation/attachments/20210225/9174f2a1/attachment.html>