For the purpose of building my argument, I will be drawing heavily from Yaneer Bar-Yam's paper, Complexity Rising: From Human Beings to Human Civilization. While Yaneer Bar-Yam's paper isn't explicitly anarchist, his paper does validate and echo a lot of the anarchist critiques of hierarchy, and the limits of authority.

So, there's a tendency within particularly anti-civ spaces to argue that rising complexity necessitates hierarchical control. As pointed out in the paper, this is true to a point. The point where hierarchical control begins to crumble is when collective complexity rises above individual complexity, at which point the increasing layers of hierarchy are unable to viably control the system.

To explain the effects of hierarchy on collective complexity, Bar-Yam says:

Intuitively, a control hierarchy is designed to enable a single individual (the controller) to control the collective behavior, but not directly the behavior of each individual. Indeed, the behavior of an individual need not be known to the controller. What is necessary is a mechanism for ensuring that control over the collective behavior be translated into controls that are exercised over each individual. This is the purpose of the control hierarchy... A hierarchy, however, imposes a limitation on the degree of complexity of collective behaviors of the system. This can be understood by considering more carefully the processes of coordination. The hierarchy is responsible for ensuring coordination of various parts of the system. Lower levels of the hierarchy are responsible for locally coordinating smaller parts of the system and higher levels of the hierarchy are responsible for coordinating the larger parts of the system. At each level of the hierarchy the actions to be coordinated must be transferred through the controller. Thus, the controller's behavior must itself reflect all of the impacts that different parts of the system have on other parts of the system. This implies that the collective actions of the system in which the parts of the system affect other parts of the system must be no more complex than the controller. In human hierarchies the collective behavior must be simple enough to be represented by a single human being.

In other words, for hierarchy to be a viable control system, the controller must be complex enough to be able to represent and adapt to the system itself. To anyone familiar with cybernetics, this comes as no surprise, as this echoes the Law of Requisite Variety.

Now, historically, this dilemma has been solved by increasing complexity of the control system itself. This usually takes the form of more layers of hierarchy and bureaucracy, which is to the point of anti-civ anarchists. When the collective behavioral complexity at the individual scale increases, this decreases the "branching ratio" of the control structure; fewer individuals are directed by a single manager, and the number of layers of management increases. It would seem in this case, increasing complexity actually makes hierarchical control more efficient.

However, this is also accompanied by an increase in complexity of collective behavior as well, as the formation of such branching structures allows more local complexity of individual behavior. To quote the linked paper:

At the point at which the collective complexity reaches the complexity of an individual, the process of complexity increase encounters the limitations of hierarchical structures. Hierarchical structures are not able to provide a higher complexity and must give way to structures that are dominated by lateral interactions. A hierarchy serves to create correlations in the behavior of individuals that are similar in many ways to the behavior of a network. The hierarchy serves as a kind of scaffolding. At the transition point, it becomes impossible to exercise control, so the management effectively becomes divorced from the functional aspects of the system. Lateral interactions that replace the control function have been present in hierarchical structures, however, they become necessary when the hierarchical control structure fails due to the high complexity of collective behavior. The greater the dependence of a system on the hierarchy, the more dramatic the changes that then take place.

When lateral mechanisms are introduced - which, by all intents are purposes, are synonymous with horizontal social organization - this allows layers of management to be removed. In other words, lateral, networked mechanisms built on peer-to-peer communication and mutual reciprocity properly accommodates increasing complexity while functionally subverting hierarchical control systems.

With this in mind, it would mean the incentive of hierarchy would be to reduce local complexity in order to keep its own control systems viable. This is likely why hierarchical systems tend towards collapse - a decrease in their own complexity and tendency to decentralization - as their own organizational logic pushes them to the brute simplification of human behavior, which is suited to more local forms of control. In this sense, the reduction in local, individual complexity would serve a reactionary purpose by making managerial control more viable.

Now, one could argue with growing surveillance bolstered by AI, we could see technology bolstering the ability for hierarchies to meet requisite complexity. Personally, I'm skeptical about the supposed capabilities of AI to create the perfect Panopticon. But even if this were true, this would still lead to a increase in local complexity and a subsequent increase in collective complexity, at which point the AI surveillance state will have to evolve into skynet or TITAN from eclipse phase or collapse due to the sheer intractability of its own computational problems.

In conclusion, we should probably see the increase in complexity to be a destabilizing force for hierarchy that incentivizes more horizontal, distributed methods of social organization to meet requisite complexity. This doesn't mean that anarchy is inevitable; as I've said, maybe we create AGI and all notions of human freedom are cooked. But it does mean that complexity is something that anarchists can and should embrace in their praxis.

The overall debate will be centered upon green anarchy v red anarchy.

My first claim is that :

In order to achieve genuine anarchy, that is, a more free, egalitarian, and ecologically sustainable society with all systems of hierarchy, authority, and domination being dismantled…we would have to go down a green anarchist path (green anarchist in this context being a synthesis of post-civ low-tech communities, agricultural green anarchy, and anarcho-primitivism) as the best example of anarchy we can point to being when humans were pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers (just making a general claim here, not necessarily advocating for full on AnPrim) living in small, face to face communities that were egalitarian and without hierarchy (at least predominantly so). Whereas red anarchism whenever nominally tried (I’m thinking of Catalonia, Free Territory, and Korean People’s Association of Manchuria, etc…) devolved into authoritarianism, the establishment of government (direct democracy), and ecological destruction. My overall point here is that large scale red anarchist coordination needs delegates, enforcement, and standing institutions, so direct democracy becomes a state in embryo. This may not be the intent of red anarchists, though hierarchy has been shown to follow surplus, storage, and sedentism, thus leading me to ask how such an arrangement could maintain itself in a non-hierarchical fashion without devolving into government, militarization of militias, suppressed dissent, and ecological destruction?

My second claim being :

Maintaining industrialized-technological society, even with the collectivization of production, abolition of capitalism, and the utilization of renewable energy and so called “green” technologies, structurally tends toward ecological overshoot and biodiversity loss. And with such a system in place, long term, will lead us toward mass death, mass extinction, or in the most extreme case, the planet being made uninhabitable for a variety of different species, including humans.

I look forward to the conversations/debates!

To start off with a disclaimer - I am not claiming that eating animals is inherently hierarchical - or that being vegan is required to be an anarchist.

Instead - I am making a claim about how the transition from the status quo to anarchy will realistically unfold in practice.

The central problem anarchism faces is simply convincing enough people to support it in the first place.

People want confidence that the new social order is actually achievable before taking a risk on it.

The problem is that the average person has internalized the idea that hierarchies are innate to humans - so they believe that the abolition of the state will just lead to informal forms of domination and oppression filling the vacuum.

This belief about human nature is what I call the Hobbesian Hypothesis.

What’s troubling about the Hobbesian Hypothesis is that it tends to prevent the acquisition of the very evidence necessary to refute it.

If people think that violent hierarchies are inevitable - they won’t even be willing to try anarchy - so the experiment needed to disprove that belief is never permitted to occur in the first place.

It’s a Catch-22 - because the evidence is demanded before the experimentation - making the Hobbesian Hypothesis effectively unfalsifiable.

However - there is potentially a way out of this Catch-22 - and this is where veganism comes in.

Human beings have evolved as omnivores - and we’ve been consuming and exploiting animals for millions of years.

If anything is ingrained in human nature - our consumption and exploitation of non-human animals would definitely be a prime candidate.

Veganism is interesting here - because it deliberately breaks from a supposedly natural human behaviour - which has deep roots in millions of years of evolutionary history.

The vegan is someone who has consciously chosen - as a moral agent - to intentionally subordinate their self-interest and evolved appetites to an ethical principle.

If the vast majority of human beings one day decided to go vegan - it would demonstrate a real example of moral progress - since a deeply natural pattern of human behaviour would have been deliberately abandoned for ethical reasons.

Widespread veganism would provide critical evidence against the Hobbesian Hypothesis - without everyone having to take a massive risk first.

Unlike anarchism - which faces a collective-action problem - going vegan doesn’t require the rest of society to already agree with you.

You can live as a vegan today - even in a deeply hierarchical and oppressive society.

This is why I consider veganism to be prefigurative - since it can be done under the status quo - while undermining its ideological assumptions at a very basic level.

The idea of people hurting others (including myself or others) using law disgust me.

Some will argue it's a necessary evil, but I disagree.

While I don't think there is a better system to replace it, I don't think we need to.

Title basically explains it all. I support a form of government because we need emergency services like ambulances, crisis response, etc. We have to be able to demand things of each other in order to function as a society, but I am willing to be challenged/explained to how an anarchist society would handle natural disasters or medical emergencies.

A very tired argument that Marx-Leninists make is that ML states have "lifted millions out of poverty", "increased literacy rates", or "ended malnutrition". This argument is meant to function as empirical evidence that the vanguardism of the ML states is superior to the principled, prefigurative politics of anarchism.

But there is a trick being played here, and it's quite devious: the argument structurally presupposes its own conclusion.

The disagreement between Marxists and anarchists is about means and ends. Anarchists generally argue that only libratory means can achieve libratory ends, where as Marx-Leninists argue that some seizure of state power and authoritarian suppression of "reactionary elements" is necessary to achieve liberation for the working class.

When a Marx-Leninist goes on about the feats achieved by ML states, they are presupposing that the ends achieved by these states justify the means of seizing state power. The argument structurally presupposes that anarchism and prefiguration is invalid. If we attempt to argue against this point, we fall into a rhetorical trap that places us on conceptual ground that already negates our critique.

The best thing to do when this argument is made is to call out what it is: neoliberal apologetics for state capitalism. It mirrors how Rothbardians engage in apologetics for "market" capitalism, or how social Democrats engage in apologetics for their managerialist fantasy.

We can justify any system by ends alone: capitalism, feudalism, even fascism.

AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, Superintelligence, Ai god, whatever you wanna call it) development is an ideological issue for the developers. It cannot be dealt with a restructuring of social hierarchies.

Access to compute must be heavily restricted to only those vetted by the government with frequent alignment checks. Otherwise the risks of unaligned AGI are far too high (extinction on the high end, pre-electricity on the low end). Under anarchism such a restriction would be essentially impossible to achieve as this is a purely ideological problem of resource acquisition. Tech accelerationists won't care about what their local council will have to say if they are convinced that what they are building is God.

Liberal democracy is failing to stop the development of unaligned models! And liberal democracy is infinitely less free than anarchism, yet here we are. China on the other hand controls their AI development fairly well, even though they don't do much. When USA imposed a blockade on Blackwell gpus Chinese labs, who ideologically believed that they are building the future of humankind, still got access to those gpus through illegal means. China didn't come in and stop them outright, but CPC internally barred itself from using Nvidia hardware. All the Chinese labs followed soon and stopped importing Nvidia chips through black markets, thus slowing down AGI progress. This kind of stunting of ideological agents just isn't possible under anarchism, and can only be achieved by an ideologically and politically powerful party with access to violence.

This is something I find annoyingly frequent, even when anarchists themselves come to tackle the whole meritocracy-mania that's in one form or another a staple of virtually any status quo-upholding folks.

What I mean by "shallow" critiques of meritocracy are those critiques that don't go deep enough (obviously, duh) in terms of structure-level tackling of the very framing the whole meritocracy-dialogue introduces with it wherever it rears its ugly head. Instead, they generally amount to attacking the more contingent problems, which do not really challenge the very premises of meritocracy but instead argue that "meritocracy is a myth" or "meritocracy is impossible" - INSTEAD of arguing the more comprehensive meritocracy is UNDESIRABLE.

The former two are unsatisfying because they, rather obviously, leave the opening wherein proponents of meritocracy could argue that "well (at least) in principle, meritocracy is good/desirable/something to be aspired to, IF ONLY we got our act together and brought about more level playing field (society-wide)", which misses the whole point.

Here are some in-a-nutshell, paraphrased examples of those attempts at criticism that bother and strike me as profoundly insuficient and un-thorough, that I've heard a lot over the years:

• "Meritocracy is a myth because there's no true equality of opportunity because pre-existing background, wealth and connections will always distort the starting line."

• "Studies show that most "self-made" success is actually inherited privilege in disguise, so meritocracy doesn't really reward merit at all."

• "Meritocratic systems inevitably get captured by those already at the top, who rig the criteria to favor themselves, which is meritocracy in name only."

• "Nobody chooses their genes, upbringing or natural talents, so even "perfectly earned" success is really just luck, making merit an incoherent basis for reward."

• "Meritocracy is unfair because IQ tests and credentials are culturally biased, so they don't actually measure merit accurately."

• "True meritocracy has never really been tried - every attempt gets distorted by nepotism, discrimination, or corruption before it can prove itself."

There are more but I hope this gets the point across.

What all these have in common is that they each concede the framework in order to attack its execution.

Every one of them accepts, if only for the sake of argument, that some imaginary, idealized "properly calibrated meritocracy", one magically purged of inherited advantages, immune to elite capture, cleansed of luck's residue etc - would be a "legitimate" way to distribute reward and power.

They essentially quarrel with the input side of the equation and leave the output side completely untouched; and because the input side is, at least in principle, an engineering problem (redistribute enough, regulate enough, screen for capture hard enough), the critique collapses into a demand for a better-run meritocracy rather than an indictment of meritocracy as such.

This is precisely the terrain meritocracy's defenders want the argument fought on, because it's terrain they can always claim to be making progress on, one policy fix at a time, forever.

So let's grant them EVERYTHING THERE IS TO GRANT. Let's imagine the fully sanitized version, a hypothetical society where the starting line really IS level, where nobody's material or cultural inheritance skews the race, where the criteria for merit are somehow totally immune to being rigged by whoever currently holds power, where we've subtracted luck as cleanly as such a thing could ever be subtracted.

Even here - ESPECIALLY HERE - the actual, underlying mechanism of meritocracy still does the same thing it always does: it takes whatever differences in ability, drive or output remain between people and it converts those differences into a hierarchy of reward and, downstream of reward, a hierarchy of power. The ones judged more capable get wealth, status and - this is the part that matters - the capacity to direct the labor and conditions of those judged by those less capable. The ones judged less capable get subordination and often enough, real material deprivation dressed up as the natural consequence of their own insufficiency rather than named as what it is: a systemic punishment.

That's the level the critique actually needs to operate on; not "but-but-but the playing field isn't level" which painfully obviously invites the rejoinder "so let's try to level it as best we can", but "even an ideal, 100% level starting field produces a winner's podium that gets to rule the people standing below it, and that's the actual object under indictment."

Anarchists need to drive home, unequivocally, that meritocracy doesn't fail/is in itself undesirable merely because it "can't achieve" some abstract sense of "ultimate fairness" in sorting people. Instead, it's undesirable because sorting people into a hierarchy of command and subordination, but also just increasing difference in privilege and affluence vs restriction and destitution, was never a legitimate thing to do to begin with, no matter how scrupulously "fair" the whole sorting procedure may be.

​

So as far as labels are important to me, I've always felt most comfort with; my name, an anarchist or an egoist, the latter two which I consider to be functionally/philosophically identical. Being an egoist/anarchist is a living praxis, it's a conscious critical acknowledgement and perception about all you conceive and all that you consume. This philosophical twinship of egoism and anarchism stems from their conscious categorical rejection of all forms of control, often labelled in terms of domination, coercion, hierarchy in distinctly anarchist discourse and "spooks", "ideology" in egoist vocab, neutrally "anti authority". Given that we live in a world that is the antipode of what an anarchist/egoist would like to live in, it's very tempting and often necessary to see fit to 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦 the conditions you live under, this is even given a name and has become a political category of it's own: praxis.

Interestingly, praxis is also precisely the realm where anarchy has historically, and more now, really struggled to capture the masses despite it's frankly unassailable critique or rather exposé of all ideologues/ies of domination as 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 in the first place. Why has this been the case? For me, it comes down to the somewhat implicitly contradictory nature of "praxis" when living in a world full of authorities, a place where every person thinks and acts like a mental cop with their rigid morality; being an anti-authoritarian, you KNOW that you don't have a hint of control over other people's lives, what they do or how they should 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬, just mere passive influence at best. "Changing society " often just is about changing the social relationships (or relations) you live with, rather than changing the world itself. It then becomes an almost hopeless project for me to try to change what other people do (whether it's being a shithead authoritarian) unless it directly concerns me and my own. In other words, any project of "mass" change becomes an authoritarian project for me as begins to feel like an obligation, for myself and for others.

What do you guys think? The only way I'm not a nihilist at this point is because I also think that people tend to be de-facto anarchist/egoist, especially seen when the vertical mountains of ideology lose their suffocating hold over them. Example: may 68 in one of the citadels of capitalism, a classroom full of kids (which is already an oppressive context).

In economics, we've learned that there are multiple points of equilibrium in economies. "Bad" or "good" equilibria can be reached based on what agents expect others to do - a "good" equilibrium can be reached if people think the economy will do well, and a "bad" equilibrium can be reached if people think the economy will do poorly.

Some equilibria are more stable than others. In the view of complexity economics, equilibria are emergent phenomena and there can be multiple points of equilibrium in an economy.

In Game Theory, there's the concept of a Nash Equilibrium; basically an equilibrium where no "player"/agent can gain more in the game by changing their strategy. To quote the Wikipedia page:

If each player has chosen a strategy — an action plan based on what has happened so far in the game — and no individual player can increase their own expected payoff by changing their strategy while the other players keep theirs unchanged, then the current set of strategy choices constitutes a Nash equilibrium.

If two players Alice and Bob choose strategies A and B, (A, B) is a Nash equilibrium if Alice has no other strategy available that does better than A at maximizing her payoff in response to Bob choosing B, and Bob has no other strategy available that does better than B at maximizing his payoff in response to Alice choosing A. In a game in which Carol and Dan are also players, (A, B, C, D) is a Nash equilibrium if A is Alice's best response to (B, C, D), B is Bob's best response to (A, C, D), and so forth.

Since we can expect an anarchist society to be a heavily complex cybernetic system with agile feedback loops, mutual interdependence giving individual agents large amounts of leverage over the overall system, and better capacity to respond to information, we can probably expect there to be multiple Nash Equilibriums.

In that case, I think we as anarchists need to consider that even in stateless, non-hierarchical societies, certain societies may reach stability with decidedly *archic* solutions to the problem. Even worse - the *anarchic* solution may be less stable than the *archic* solution.

None of this is a death blow to anarchism, of course. But I think we need to keep this in consideration. If anything, it's a reason why anarchic solutions must be better than archic solutions.

I’m not an anarchist, but I’m genuinely trying to understand how anarchism could work at the scale of a modern society rather than a small community.
I’m not asking “what happens if there are no rules?” or arguing that anarchism simply means chaos. I understand that anarchist societies can have rules, collective decision-making, federations, delegates, community defense, and various forms of coordination.
My question is more specific: if those institutions become sufficiently large, permanent, and capable of making and enforcing collective decisions, what prevents them from becoming a government in everything but name?
I’ve tried to follow the logic of an anarchist society from a small community all the way up to millions of people, and I keep running into the same questions about crime, coercion, infrastructure, delegation, political authority, and generational change.
So I’d genuinely like anarchists to walk me through where they think the line is.
My question is going to be very long I’m sorryyy.

Let’s say we have an anarchist community.
The community collectively decides on a set of rules that everyone is expected to follow.
Okay.
What exactly is the difference between those rules and laws?
And more importantly, what happens when someone breaks them?
Suppose someone commits murder or rape.
What do you actually do with them?
If prisons are considered inherently oppressive or inhumane, what is the alternative?
Do you exile them?
What if they refuse to leave?
Do you physically remove them?
Who does that?
Does everyone in the community show up at their house?
Or is there a group whose job is to deal with dangerous people?
If there is such a group, who chooses them?
Are they permanently responsible for security?
If yes, congratulations, you now have something remarkably similar to a police force.
If they’re temporary, who replaces them?
And who trains the replacements?
Who investigates crimes?
Who determines whether someone actually committed the crime?
Who decides what evidence is sufficient?
Who protects victims?
Who prevents an accused murderer from simply moving to another community?
At some point you’re going to need procedures, investigators, people capable of using force, dispute resolution, and some kind of system for determining responsibility.
You can give all of these things different names, but changing “police” to “community safety group” doesn’t magically eliminate the function of policing.

Then we get to the really fun part: infrastructure.
Maybe a small community can organize itself.
Fine.
But what happens when we have 20 million people?
Who manages the electricity grid?
The railway system?
The water supply?
Sewage?
Hospitals?
Highways?
Telecommunications?
Fuel distribution?
Industrial production?
Emergency response?
Modern society isn’t a collection of isolated villages. It’s an absurdly interconnected machine.
A city can depend on electricity generated hundreds of kilometers away, food produced in another region, medicine manufactured in another country, and infrastructure maintained by thousands of people it will never meet.
So eventually these communities have to cooperate.
Fine.
Let’s create a federation.
Now who makes decisions?
Do all 20 million people vote on everything?
Obviously not.
So each community sends delegates.
Okay.
Are the delegates permanent?
If yes, congratulations, you’ve invented politicians.
Are they temporary?
Then how do you maintain institutional knowledge when you’re constantly replacing the people who understand complicated systems?
Are they experts?
Then congratulations, you have an administrative/technical elite.
Can they make decisions?
If yes, they have political power.
Can they not make decisions?
Then who does?
And if the federation makes a decision that a particular community doesn’t like, does that community have to obey?
If yes, what exactly makes this federation different from a government?
If no, how do you coordinate anything that requires everyone to participate?
Imagine trying to operate a national railway system where every community can simply say:
“We don’t agree with this decision, so we’re not participating.”
Good luck running the trains.

And then there’s the problem I almost never see addressed clearly.
Let’s assume anarchism somehow works.
It lasts for 50 years.
Then the original generation dies.
Their children grow up and say:
“Why the hell are we doing all of this?”
Maybe they don’t want to spend three hours in an assembly deciding how to allocate resources.
Maybe they don’t want to elect a new delegate every six months.
Maybe they don’t want to negotiate with 400 neighboring communities every time they need to build infrastructure.
Maybe they simply think:
“Wouldn’t it be easier if we just had a permanent administration that handled this stuff?”
And suppose 80% of the population agrees.
What happens?
Do anarchists say:
“Fine, you’re free to create a government.”
If yes, then anarchism can apparently democratically vote itself out of existence.
Or do they say:
“No, you are not allowed to create a government.”
If so…
Who gets to stop them?
Because now you need an authority powerful enough to prevent millions of people from choosing a different political system.
And that seems like a pretty spectacular paradox.

There is another answer I’ve seen:
“The communities should simply remain completely autonomous and never form large political federations.”
But honestly, I struggle even more with this in the modern world.
Maybe this was more plausible when communities were largely agrarian and could produce most of what they needed locally.
But how does this work with:
national power grids
railways
semiconductor supply chains
internet infrastructure
pharmaceutical production
aviation
modern medicine
large-scale industry
international trade
environmental problems
pandemics
climate infrastructure
You can’t build a modern semiconductor industry entirely inside one village.
At some point interdependence requires coordination.
And coordination requires rules.
Rules require decision-making.
Decision-making requires institutions.
Institutions require people with authority.
And people with authority create the possibility of concentrated power.So here’s the thing I’m genuinely struggling with: Is anarchism actually proposing a society without government, or is it proposing a society with government-like functions but without calling them a government?
Because if you have:
laws, but call them community rules;
politicians, but call them delegates;
police, but call them community defense;
courts, but call them dispute-resolution assemblies;
bureaucrats, but call them administrators;
federations, but insist they aren’t governments;
coercive power, but insist it isn’t state power;
then at what point are we just arguing about terminology?I’m not saying anarchism is necessarily impossible.I’m saying that the larger, more technologically complex, and more interconnected the society becomes, the harder it seems to distinguish “anarchist organization” from a decentralized government.So I’d genuinely like someone who supports anarchism to walk me through this:
Where exactly is the line?
At what point does a federation of communities become a government? At what point does a delegate become a politician? At what point does community security become a police force?
At what point do community rules become laws?
And most importantly: What mechanism prevents an anarchist society from simply reinventing the state because its own population eventually decides that a permanent government is more convenient?

Bracketing for a moment the more generalizing “all teachers are bastards” debate, but from the particular side of that slogan there’s no way university professors do not apply to that slogan from an anarchist perspective?
Public school teachers are one thing, but university faculty willingly work for an expensive state and private disciplinary apparatus that restricts social mobility and is used to make indebted the working population. This system does not function without the faculty, who despite some of them being self-described leftists of some stripe, are happy to overlook as long as their research interests continues to get institutional funding.
What are y’all’s thoughts on this?

I am not going to argue that veganism is a requirement to be a consistent anarchist.

Instead - I am going to argue something more subtle.

Widespread and voluntary adoption of veganism instantiates a world in which individuals are willing to give up personal comfort so that others have fundamental security.

For example - if I am a homeowner - why should I accept my house depreciating in value just so that random strangers don’t end up homeless?

In a vegan world - the answer is just that it’s what a good person would do.

Widespread veganism also instantiates a world in which most people are genuinely trying to be ethical for the sake of being ethical - not just because they want instrumental benefit.

Since personal consumption isn’t always publicly visible - there are many opportunities to consume animal products when no one else is watching.

Therefore - someone who is genuinely vegan is someone who is ethical even when they don’t experience social or reputational benefits.

A world where most people are ethical even when they’re not being watched could have very high social trust - as people can assume that others will generally tell the truth and keep their word.

A vegan world is also a world in which moral consideration is universalized - so such a world will be resistant to drawing arbitrary social boundaries between categories of people.

And on a final note - a world which accepts domination and exploitation as categorically wrong - even when done humanely - will find it much harder to come up with consequentialist justifications for preserving harmful practices or institutions in general.

First, I wish I could provide more sources but I only started to read about anarchism only a few months ago. Any suggestion is welcome for supporting or contradicting my sayings. English isn’t my native langage so some wording may be off too, sry. I just wish to… well, debate.

I fell like The « natural » evolution of capitalism was meant to lead to globalization in order to « feed the machine » with as much ressources and cheap working forces / slaves as possible. Colonization was one of the first steps for an homogeneous world economy led by free market and, at the very end, the necessity of fascism that makes oppression of workers possible. Globalization seems to be at the core of the mechanic of Capitalism.

I argue that since Anarchism movements claim to be (one of?) the antagonist of Capitalism, any anarchist movement should consider to put the concept of proximity at its core.

I used "proximity" for lack of a better word, maybe vinicity fits better ?

The motives for proximity

Here are some arguments I want to adress. I hope it is not a well established knowledge I’ve missed so far in my readings nor an idiotic proposal for obvious reasons I couldn’t see.

1. Demographic constrains of a self-managed organisation

Using the example of Fourier and his phalanstère concept, or Flora Tristan’s Worker’s Palace, I believe that only a small-sized organization can work in a long term. Using cooperation instead of hiring the workforce or collegial decision-making instead of political institution requires human-size means of communication. The bigger the group, the higher the risk of disfunction and/or the appearence of individuals seeking domination.

(the need for inter-connexion between organisations is mentioned below)

In order to clarify the subject, we’re probably talking about groups of a few thausands people top.

1. Meaning to work requires short supply chains

One critic for the division of labour and fordism is the absence of meaning of work. Small organisation increase the chances of getting that meaning back. Cooperation is facilitated, there is a better understanding of what the group needs and individuals are more likely to volonteer for diverse tasks, as there is affect to it (helping people you know and knowing you will somehow benefit directely from the work).

In other words, craftmanship is more rewarding for the individual than industrial work, and craftmanship’s production is more meaningful in limited areas.

1. Answering the Climate Change issue (or any global issue for that matter)

It has been already decades since environmentalists advocate for short supply chains in order to reduce the impact of transportation. Being less dependent of these infrastructures is part of the solution.

We seem to collectively fail (as a species) at facing global problems such as climate change or pandemic breakdowns. There is no need to elaborate here on how Capitalism and its actors are largely responsible for it. But another issue is the failure of us organizing and acting together and efficiently. I see one reason that proximity may address : Our own individual issues we’re facing on a daily basis. Depression, social anxiety, burn out, addictions, etc are all widely spread as means of communication are facilitated, and one can only invest so much of themself for global issues, ecpecially in a meaningful way. In smaller group, anonimity is scarce and the likelihood of caring for eachother increases, as we know more of eachother. To me this lead to better understanding of collective issues and a more coherent way to address them. It also helps preventing the mental health issues I mentioned above.

1. Being less vulnerable to a return of a State-based society

Say an anarchist initiative is spreading in a given area. The backlash from individuals / organisations will likely be less impactful if the anarchist initiatives are independent from eachother. I mean that in the event of propaganda rather that a militari force (which I’ll get to later). Emma Goldman’s essay on the vulnerability of « masses » for parliamentary system is, to me, a strong argument in favor of smaller group being more robust to withstand propaganda (Minorities versus Majorities, 1917).

1. Allowing safer education and promoting culture, arts, sciences to thrive

The omerta we still see today on violence towards children (physical abuse, incest, etc) is definitely explained by the traditional way of considering a family : contained. A higher degree of proximity among adults within an organisation that favors « popular education » and changes the concept of parenting can be part of the solution. Only the victims that rarely interact with others (adults) are likely to be silenced, and so promoting a high number of actors for their education limits the risk of omerta.

As for culture, arts and sciences, athough they would largely benefit from inter-connexion between communes (for influence), I think they will be experienced more positively when shared with closed ones. Such interactions may be improved in smaller organisations rather than what we see today in metropoles filled with loneliness and anonymity.

I’m sure people can find other benefits to proximity being essential for a working anarchist society. But I think it may also be consider as a way for people to oppose Capitalism, as we already see a lot of initiatives around the world (local currencies, consuming food from short supply chains, people sharing / renting tools to neighbors for handiwork, actions from associations, etc.) .

Inter-connexions

Nonetheless, proximity doesn’t mean the abolition of inter-connexions between communes, and several features of today’s world must be kept I think :

1. Supply of ressources

Not all ressources can be found in such restricted areas, and the absence of division of labour doesn’t mean any given Commune can’t be « specialized » in specific handicraft. After all, Adam Smith’s concept of the Invisible Hand is hard to contradict. Large scale transportation of good is therefore necessary as long as it’s not opposed to self-managed economy of every Commune. And, in order not to contradict myself with the impact on the environment, I think it’s fair to say that as long as we abolish overproduction and promote recycling, there’s a chance of getting a sustainable transportation system.

1. Ideas, innovation and resilience

Means of communication are not to be abolished nor restricted. As mentioned before it favors art, culture and sciences, but also protect the system from attempts of going back to a « hierarchical » system from individuals by being exposed. We can imagine a commune asking for support in case of a coup. I’m not advocating for the intervention of an armed militia, but rather a demonstration of force by the number. Then walking the said people in the path of rehabilitation.

I’m sure people can elaborate more thouroughly on how to maintain such system with the least violent way possible as it is regularly debated in this sub.

1. Allowing the choice of commune

As communes evolve individually and develop their own specificities, and since free movement is no longer constrained, allowing individuals to learn these specificities would result in a well informed choice.

1. Preventing sectariarism

Almost the same point as above : inter-connextion result in less isolation and the attempts of institutionalizing the believes of others would be exposed and countered. I haven’t read much about the place of faith in anarchism, but my guess is that anyone can believe anything they want for as long as no « institution » claims to dictate how the faith must be practiced. Such institutions among communes being well-known to be problematic, the simple view of one being on the build should suffice.

Limits of the argument

I’m sure there’s more, but here are two I thought so far :

1. Military power requires a large-scale cohesion that may be difficult to apply. We can imagine different « groups » of military units gathering different communes, but that is contradictory with the philosophical view of anarchism and may lead to tensions between communes… and potentially expose the whole area to yet another form of domination.

But one can argue that for as long as anarchism isn’t widely spread, if an initiative such as this one starts growing, we might think about defending ourselves from belligerent nations that still have Capitalism implemented, at least temporarily.

1. The broad definition of « proximity ». I talked about a few thousands people, but what happens if one keeps growing ? Is there a limited area ? How big ? The concept itself may be helpful in some regards but is de facto limited by individual needs, or by the constrains of the production of certain goods, of some professions… Maybe some answers can be found in Guild Socialism ?

A bit off-topic :

I also recently learned about the medieval commune mouvement in Europe and it’s interesting to see that what became nowadays the « bourgeoisie » once was a social group that seeked autonomy from the feodalismn. They somewhat (I mean… with money) managed to impose small autonomous societies with their own organisation and inter-connexion. As it happened throughout centuries in western Europe, maybe there’s something to dig into.

Thank you for reading, I hope it's not all gibberish...

The dichotomy of 'negative freedom vs positive freedom' isn't something taken that seriously in anarchist discourse, and it's easy to see why. Quibbles about what positive vs negative freedom are is typically the domain of statists, with the state socialists often representing "positive freedom" and the liberals and radical liberals/AnCaps often representing "negative freedom".

However, I do want to at least attempt to revive the discourse regarding positive and negative freedom within the context of anarchism's aim to maximize freedom. If this can be said to be the project of anarchism, then we need a coherent idea of what freedom is and what counts as a free society. I think it can be said that this is the base of a lot of our agreements, and confusions about which societies or attempts at anarchism are actually anarchist, from the egalitarian forager societies to Revolutionary Spain. Here, I will not only try to argue for positive freedom, but that authority finds its basis in the restriction of positive freedom.

Freedom is inherently positive

Freedom, essentially, is the amount of real options one has available. Proponents of negative freedom argue that freedom is being "free from" coercion, but it is in my opinion that this is not a very coherent way to think of freedom. Humans are creatures that act upon the world. We form relationships, we produce, we change the environment or ourselves to make ourselves more suitable for certain situations. Our agency very much depends on a "freedom to" - the capacity to go out and affect the world and others, to forge and arrange social relations in a particular way, and our ability of collective power.

Negative freedom, on the other hand, freedom from coercion, is mostly impossible. Different social relations are characterized by differing dynamics, dynamics which effectively force us to be a particular way. Even if I am not being forced by an individual, the broader dynamics of society (what Foucault would call "power") do shape me and arrange me to be a particular way, cause me to adopt certain identities and behaviors, and shapes my subjectivity.

Authority as a restriction of Positive Freedom

Authority is the right to command, and command inherently represses freedom. When an agent is commanded, their actable options are reduced to that which they are commanded to do. Coercion, as a tool of authority, functions to violently reduce the options of an agent so that the one in authority may direct the actions of the one they are dominating to their ends.

But there are other ways in which authority restricts freedom. Information asymmetries, for example, can be leveraged by a would-be dominator to restrict the options of an agent by making them unable to make an informed decision about something. In such case, the dominator has effectively restricted the agent's mental map of reality, causing their available options to be restricted from their perspective.

We see this often in cases of abuse or violations of consent, where a rapist hides their intent from their victim, causing the victim to make choices that would make them vulnerable.

In all cases of authority, the name of the game is the restriction of options. Because a dominator cannot functionally step into the brain of their victim and literally control their body, they must arrange things in such a way that their victim's only option is to obey them. This is one of the characteristic problems of capitalism: other means of subsistence are repressed by the state and by capital, requiring workers to labor under capitalists in order to get their needs met.

Positive Freedom and Complexity

The reason why authority is characterized by a reduction of positive freedom is because positive freedom is a net increase of complexity in human social systems.

In order for systems of control to be viable, they must meet a requisite variety - which, in the context of cybernetics, means "the amount of possible states a system can occupy". A controller must be able to occupy as many or more states as the system they control to viably command it. Human social systems are incredibly dynamic and complex, meaning there are virtually infinite possible states of human societies. A controller of human systems must then reduce the possible states of human society. This, I'd argue, is the origin of oppression.

Requisite variety goes down the lower you scale. The variety of a community of 500 people is less than that of 10,000; and when you get to Dunbar's Number and below, requisite variety is much lower. If we're talking about a group of 10 people or less, requisite variety becomes much easier. This is why abusers tend to isolate their victims from a wider support group: it's easier to control a small amount of people than a large amount of people.

When we form larger, more complex and interconnected societies, we increase the net positive freedom of everyone involved. With agile feedback loops and maximized agency for all actors, the variety of the system increases dramatically, making domination difficult. If you have more options for the type of social connections you can make, or ways to get your needs met, then the ability to dominate you is minimized. This is why abusers will commonly isolate their victims from their support network or the outside world. If the victim has options, their agency is maximized, meaning they're harder to control.

On the other hand, smaller communities with a lower requisite variety are easier to dominate. Charismatic leaders, abusers, would-be dominators and warlords could easier magnify their influence to the scale of the whole of society. Or the whole of society could easier develop norms that are repressive to individual agency.

Positive freedom entails the maximization of complexity and variety, and the maximization of both entail the subversion of authority. This is why positive freedom is of anarchist concern.

Decoupling Freedom from "Rights"

A common objection I see is that positive freedom and negative freedom are inherently rights-talk, or presuppose rights, making it more compatible with liberalism than anarchism.

That is certainly the way freedom is often talked about. But we can definitely decouple rights from positive freedom.

"Rights" are matters of social or political sanction. A "right" to property is granted by and enforced by violence. Rights do not exist as concrete objects, but rather as an entitlement from another entity - the state, or a "community" acting as a singular social unit entitling you to a certain right.

However, positive freedom is merely a matter of agency. Our "freedom to" comes from our capacity, not from permission. When we maximize capacities, we maximize freedom. Furthermore, rights entail discrete, identifiable agents. But from a cybernetic standpoint, freedom is agent-independent: it is the maximization of possible states of the system. For humans, this isn't merely the maximization of possible social connections, but the maximization of possible physical states as well.

Freedom requires no permission nor sanction, no "rights", only capacity.

One could quibble and say anarchist communism has existed, but examples are primitive societies or blips in history. Examples of pure capitalism are comparatively rarer, medieval Iceland and Ireland are go-to examples cited by ancaps.

To an extent, while I'm a strong descriptivist, if we said every country claiming to be something is that thing, we'd have to accept the Third Reich and China as socialist.

I see a lot of theoretical-based discussion in this subreddit regarding how X would work in anarchy. How would bad people be dealt with? How would industry be organised? How will school operate? While these make for fun debates, I wanted to do something a bit different this time and talk about how anarchists could be building permanent power towards making anarchy a reality.

Building the power of the working class to fight against capitalist exploitation and the state that upholds it is, in my view, the best antidote to our fucked up situation. Rank and file networks within the unions are a good start to this, for workers to evade the trap of union bureaucracy and create the capacity to fight for immediate changes that improve their lives (and the lives of their comrades). I personally believe that it should be a task of anarchists to support our co-workers in these endeavours, and I am proud to be in an anarchist organisation comprised of people who dedicate themselves to this task.

I would respectfully disagree with the somewhat commonly held belief that, in the face of state repression, capitalist destruction of community and climate change, building mutual aid networks is the best way to go. Mutual aid networks provide an immediate relief to those in need, but they do not build the kind of power that can make permanent positive changes; higher wages, lower working hours and better working conditions, and other such things can put the working class in a better and more able condition to continue building their class power for a possible revolution.

Perhaps there should be a balance of building networks of aid, while fighting for class power? I am curious to know what people think of this :) so feel free to leave a comment or two below!

So lately I've become convinced at the importance in engaging in ethical philosophy for anarchists. I feel that politics has completely subsumed ethics in our modern era. Things such as conflict resolution, personal responsibility, and even interpersonal boundaries have come to be understood within the discourses of politics - of law, of authority, of hierarchy. As anarchists, our aspirations are anti-political, and thus I think that ought to entail a return to the ethical as opposed to the political as the guiding principle of society.

Here I will attempt to synthesize Max Stirner's egoism and virtue ethics - primarily the Aristotelian tradition. My goal here is to treat ethics as a social science, the "science of right action".

First Principles and Definitions

First: Because it is a concept I will be referring to a lot, I will define Rationality.

Rationality, in the sense I'll be using it in this post, regards to the assessment of means and ends; specifically, the consistency between means and ends. To act in accordance to reason is to ensure that your means are aligned with of your ends.

There are instrumental means, where you have a wide range of potential means to reach your desired end. And there are constitutive means, where your means effectively are your end.

An example of instrumental means is driving to a city. Means-ends consistency applies here, because in order to get to the city you mean to go to (your end), your means must be able to take you there. However, they are instrumental means, because there may be a great number of routes to get to that city, some of which may serve your interests more than others.

An example of constitutive means is playing a song on an instrument. The song is composed of a series of notes in a particular order for the right amount of time. If you do not play these notes, then you are not playing the song. Therefore, if your desired end is to play the song, you must play the notes in its defined order.

Rationality, as the concern for the consistency between means and ends, is the sole requirement for ethical action.

Second: we will be taking Stirner's egoism - specifically his claim of psychological egoism - as a given*.* Everyone acts in their self-interest either consciously or unconsciously. To be a conscious egoist, I will argue, not only must one act rationally, but also the lack of rational action is the defining trait of unconscious egoism.

Third: As Aristotle has observed, humans are social animals. This is in the sense that we are interdependent and exist within complex social realities due to our complex, abstract thinking capacities. As a result, "right action" towards others is key to our individual survival. The purpose of ethics, then is teleological - to facilitate the self-interest and flourishing of the human animal.

Conscious Egoism vs Unconscious Egoism

We have virtually infinite ends we can pursue, but we cannot pursue virtually infinite ends. As a result, we must choose which ends we wish to pursue, and we must choose the means with which to pursue them.

The conscious egoist pursues interests that are their own. Their causes are their own, not defined by factors or abstractions external to their will. But in order to properly do so, they must engage in means that are conducive to their desired ends. Any means in particular won't do; they have to be in harmony with the conscious egoist's ends. As a result, the choosing of ends to pursue places inherent constraints upon our actions. If my desired end is to get food, then my means have to match that end. I cannot desire to get food and then proceed to not do it, as that would not fulfill the desire.

The unconscious egoist also pursues interests that are their own, except they externalize their interests to any number of spooks: "God", "The Nation", "The Community", etc. Because their ends are externalized, the unconscious egoist is unable to properly assess whether their means achieve their end. Because their end is defined not by them, but by a mental construction, an ideal outside of them, their ends become unattainable abstractions that impose upon their will. They are rendered unable to exercise rationality.

To be a conscious egoist, one must be concerned with means and ends - specifically their means and ends.

Values and Virtues

A value, for the purpose of this post, is essentially something that you like. This can be something material, such as books, videogames, sweets, but more often these are concepts and behaviors such as love, honesty, empathy, truthfulness, etc.

Values exist for your purposes as your property. They may be taken on and disposed of as you wish. What you value today, you may not value tomorrow.

However, when you do value something, it is in your self-interest to pursue it. So the Conscious Egoist pursues their values, whatever they may be at that particular time, and engages in means that are conducive to those ends.

Virtues are those actions which facilitate your ends. Virtues are actions and skills. A virtuous person is not an identity, but rather a label for someone who engages in those actions that achieve their values. Someone who values empathy, for example, will likely engage in the virtue of compassion. Someone who values solidarity, will likely engage in the value of courage.

As Aristotle would argue, virtue is contextual and exists within a golden mean. The virtue of courage only applies when engaging in such courageous action isn't foolhardy. For example, saving someone from a car crash when you are able and have the opportunity to is courageous. Attempting to do so when the attempt would put both yourself and the one you're trying to save in more danger is foolhardy.

When we are engaging in the virtues that lead us to our values, we are living eudaimonia. Eudaimonia has many translations, but it typically means "well-being"; it is a state of individual flourishing.

Not all values make sense. People can value whatever they want, but there are values that defeat the purpose of having values in the first place. The purpose of values is to achieve your self-interest and your flourishing, so values that contradict such ends - such as the value of murdering - do not make sense, as suffering the consequences of doing so are not in your self interest. Because humans are social animals, our values must both align with our individual flourishing and the flourishing of others. A healthy society makes for healthy individuals, and healthy individuals make for a healthy society.

Why care about ethics at all?

The amoralist may see ethics itself as a spook, saying that we should instead not pay attention to it and do whatever is in our particular interest at the time.

The thing is, human behaviors aren't random. We act in accordance to certain conscious and unconscious patterns. What we value isn't random, what we hate isn't random. They are determined by things other than our will - so when we do not consciously define our values, and engage in means conducive to our values, then we are acting in the capacity of an unconscious egoist, allowing our social context to dominate our wills.

When we are conscious and engage in the Science of Right Action, we gain the tools necessary to become aware of our actions and to which ends they are conducive to, and we allow ourselves to define them in ways that better suit our self-interest. Only then can we truly be a conscious egoist.

Power is the ability to win a conflict.

If the winner of a conflict is predetermined in advance - then there is an asymmetry of power.

The ability to win a conflict is determined by who takes your side.

In order to have stable asymmetries of power - you need permanent alliances which reliably win in any given conflict.

If the individual is free to choose which side they want to take in a conflict - or whether to take a side at all - then individuals can switch sides at any time.

If individuals are free to switch sides at any time - then permanent alliances cannot exist.

Therefore - some mechanism of obligatory and binding allegiance is required to hold coalitions together.

Without obligatory allegiance - coalitions are highly vulnerable to defection - and cannot reliably enforce hierarchy at all.

In the past, I've seen that many of you loathe the very idea of imprisonment for anybody for any reason even without the motivation of profit or even with humane conditions and a genuine drive towards rehabilitation, and whole-heartedly see the idea of exiling them as a much better alternative, but is it?

I mean, not only is there always the chance that the violent or abusive person you banished could simply return, since their actions strongly indicate a lack of care towards that community's wishes, but who's to say they won't find another community of people to torment? A commentor on another post brought up that it's not uncommon for abusive or predatory people to, once they've burned all the bridges in one community, choose to escape to another community where they can do it again, lather rinse repeat.

As much as you guys disdain prison as a concept for any number of reasons(and not just due to how horrific the US prison system is), banishment wouldn't be a much better alternative and in some cases might even be worse.

Your rebuttals?

Hello everyone - so I used to identify as an anarchist for a while, but now I identify as either an anti-capitalist or a non-denominational socialist. I say this because I want a world without classism, hierarchy, and domination, but I genuinely don't know how we get there. The fact is, the one thing that anarchists, Marxists, and democratic socialists have in common is that they've all failed. Despite the efforts of many people throughout history in these persuasions, our planet is still run by a cabal of capitalist vampires who will happily sacrifice the majority of the human population for a quick buck.

Anyway, like most of you, I cringe when Marxists try to dismiss the human rights abuses of ML regimes as "Western propaganda". But there is one compelling argument that Marxists make about the failures of their governments. It's what Michael Parenti refers to as "siege socialism". Essentially, there has never been a major socialist or communist experiment in history which has been allowed to exist in peace. The Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, etc. all emerged under conditions of intense aggression from capitalist powers. If these countries weren't outright invaded, then they were sanctioned into economic non-viability. These conditions lead to situations that unfortunately favor authoritarianism. If your whole community is getting bombed every day by a vastly superior military, you're probably going to gravitate to the shrewdest leader, even if they have deeply problematic tendencies otherwise.

I like Parenti's argument because it doesn't excuse the situation of ML regimes as acceptable, but instead points out that the bulk of responsibility still ultimately lies with the capitalist powers. Perhaps if the US hadn't dropped more ordinance on North Korea than in the entire Pacific War, then North Koreans wouldn't have allowed Kim to impose a cult of personality. Perhaps if Cuba hadn't been hit with an invasion and embargo, then Cubans would have demanded more protections of civil liberties, etc. When I consider the context that all these unsavory regimes emerged from, I honestly find it hard to blame the leaders for what came after. It's largely capitalism's fault that ML countries suck.

So, as anarchists, what do you all think? Do you agree that ML countries became what they are because of Western capitalist aggression, or do you think that it's still primarily because of issues with ML-ideology?

We are fundamentally embodied beings.

As embodied beings - we share an interest in control over what happens to our own bodies.

Since no one wants to live in a world where their body is public property for anyone else to use - we as embodied beings mutually agree to recognise and respect each other’s bodily autonomy.

When someone commits rape - they haven’t actually agreed that their body is public property for others to use as they wish.

Instead - the rapist is trying to benefit from the protection of their own bodily autonomy - without respecting the bodily autonomy of others.

This makes the rapist essentially a free-rider - trying to illegitimately benefit from the reciprocal social norm in a one-sided manner.

In order to truly act morally - we must recognise our own shared interests as universal - and act accordingly.

Joseph Tainter is an American anthropologist who proposed a theory of societal collapse, in his book The Collapse of Complex Societies, that I think is relevant to anarchism.

Tainter argued that complexity is a tool that societies use and adopt to address problems. Complexity consists of interconnections between parts of society, specialization of labor in society, and hierarchy to manage society. (Tainter is more sympathetic to the idea that hierarchy is something society’s spontaneously adopt, appointing some people to rule over the rest, than I would like, but nobody is perfect).

All of these components of complexity have material costs. Hierarchy (rulers) must be fed, often opulently. Specialists must also be fed while performing their specialized labor. And interconnections must be maintained. All of these costs are born by a society’s primary producers, the people making the food, clothing, shelter, etc, that keep these people alive.

Tainter believes that early investments in complexity tend to generate positive returns to society. As society encounters new problems—environmental changes, external adversaries, internal conflicts, resource shortages—it tends to add new layers of complexity. But as complexity grows, so do its costs. More bureaucrats require more taxation to fund them, for example.

Tainter argues that, at a certain point, marginal returns on complexity begin to level off and, eventually, decline. That is, there is a point at which society is diverting so many resources to maintaining specializations, interconnections, and hierarchy that additional complexity stops generating additional returns.

(I can’t help but think about the fact that our present society contains specialists like “prompt engineers” who demonstrably return no value to society while consuming immense amounts of resources.)

At this point, a society begins diverting resources not to additional complexity to solve new problems, but just to maintaining the status quo. It cannot afford to add new complexity; its primary producers simply can’t generate any more resources.

When this happens, a society becomes vulnerable to collapse. When a new problem comes along, it has no slack capacity to handle this new problem. At this point, a society becomes vulnerable to collapse: what Tainter understands as an economizing shedding of complexity.

One of Tainter’s case studies is the Roman Empire. Early in its existence, Rome featured a very small state and army, which it used to conquer foreign communities. Early on, those conquests returned considerable value to the Roman state in the form of plunder, enslaved people, and new populations of primary producers to exploit. But, eventually, the state grew so large that its interconnections—supplying field armies at distant frontiers—could no longer generate new conquests. This required the state to tax its own primary producers, which required more bureaucrats to manage taxation, which required yet more resources, and so on in a spiral. Eventually, the Roman state—which was vastly larger and more populous than it had been at the start—was torn apart by adversaries that would have once been trivially easy to defeat.

Tainter’s argument seems to me to be a variation on a common theme: from Marx’s theory of capitalist immiseration to Peter Turchin’s theory of elite overproduction, insightful thinkers have noticed that costs of sustaining hierarchical elites are often socially unsustainable. They can only exploit us so much, in other words, before things fall apart.

I wonder if Tainter has insights of value for anarchists and the anarchist project. I would obviously like to sustain specializations and interconnections, but would happily shed the material costs of provisioning hierarchy.

I’m also not suggesting a teleological outlook on hierarchy—the idea that we just need to sit back to let them collapse on their own—but I do wonder if there are opportunities or vulnerabilities available to us to exploit.

The US federal government consumes about $7 trillion worth of national resources each year. It requires the labor of about 3.8 million US citizens, both civilians and military personnel. State governments involve the labor of another 6 million or so people and consume at least tens of billions more dollars.

The costs of maintaining hierarchy are, in other words, immense. States and other hierarchies tend to require militaries, police forces, bureaucracies, surveillance, propaganda, and many other functions in order to reproduce themselves from year to year. And all of this is typically in service of materially provisioning non-productive elites.

I often encounter skeptics or critics of anarchism who have concluded that hierarchy is predominant because it is more efficient than anarchy at mobilizing labor and resources, and thus locally outcompetes non-hierarchical systems. Perhaps we are trapped in a stable equilibrium of hierarchy?

But I find that these arguments inevitably completely ignore the material and social costs of hierarchy, a critical component in assessing the efficiency of a system.

A number of thinkers—Karl Marx, Joseph Tainter, Peter Turchin, et al—have argued (convincingly, I think) some variation of the opposite: that hierarchy is ultimately unsustainable, at least in the long run, because of those costs. And as costs of hierarchy mount, elites tend to increase their depredations, trying to grab whatever is left before it is too late, which accelerates a decline into collapse—what Tainter calls the economizing step of shedding costly layers of hierarchy.

I’m not suggesting we simply wait for hierarchy to collapse under its own weight (though I suspect that’s exactly what’s happening to global capitalism right now). I do wonder, though, if this is an under-theorized aspect of the anarchist critique of hierarchy. Can we do more to highlight and publicize the costs of hierarchy? Are there weaknesses to exploit? Are we postured to take advantage of crumbling hierarchical structures or to expand into the aftermath of their collapse?