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Yeah. I find it weird that when people dream up the "best" social structure, it's often explained by a simple overarching philosophy. How convenient would it be that the entire complexity of human society can be ideally governed by a small set of principles?

It's always "only capitalism" or "only communism" or "no money" or "no government" or etc etc.

It seems pretty obvious to me that the optimal solution isn't based purely on some philosophical idea about how things 'should' be (whatever 'should' even means!), but instead would be a pragmatic, adaptive solution based on what actually happens and works on a case-by-case basis.

It would be a patchy, ugly system, compared to the perfect elegant algorithm people want. And indeed that's kind of what we have. We just gotta keep patching and amending. There are a lot of existing problems, but we have the framework for fixing them, and no doubt it is a difficult process. But to insist that the solution is to start over is naive and dismissive of the generations of sacrifice made to get to this point.

It's frustrating when people argue that all evil is because of capitalism, or that capitalism is purely good. Can't we just acknowledge that there are good and bad aspects of all systems, and work to boost the good parts and improve or attenuate the bad parts? And work in the good parts of other "competing" systems too? Yes, things don't have to be 100% pure capitalism or not. Hybrid solutions exist! That's basically what is happening, I just wish people would stop arguing by simplifying everything into some catchy moral gimmick.

> I just wish people would stop arguing by simplifying everything into some catchy moral gimmick.

Things work well enough that we can afford the luxury of chasing a feeling of moral superiority. Under worse conditions, most people don't have time for that.

I agree with your skepticism regarding people who express a lot of certainty about what will work, and what will happen in extreme and untested circumstances.

However, I strongly disagree that principles and morality aren’t essential. This is because when figuring out, as you say, ‘what works best’, there is no single definition of ‘best’. In fact, as a general rule, there’s thousands of competing ones. Principles are how you do a reasonable job of making consistent decisions towards meaningful change.

In addition to a system working well, it also needs to be understood to be working well by the people that live in it. If some definition of a ‘best’ metric was delivered by a Kafkaesque convoluted system that people found confusing, one which works well-enough on simple principles might be preferable.

I agree. I didn't mean to imply that principles aren't important - surely there must be some metric to judge progress against. Principles should hold in a generalized, zoomed-out view of a society. But in practice, there are numerous exceptions and edge cases. Like, "maximize freedom" is generally a good rule but not always.

I feel like the principles we come up with are just rough approximations of what we intuitively know but can't elegantly express. The true moral principle for society is probably a monstrous concatenation of if-else statements. If the zoom-out view of society still follows the principles, then I think that ought to be sufficient for its citizens' concerns about the society's effectiveness and direction.

> You run into the exactly same resource and distribution problems as the government has, and you are going to start instituting the same sort of structures sooner or later.

Yes. Volunteers fixing potholes seems fine.

But when about when a bridge needs replacing? I want to know that someone is following standard engineering and construction practices and that they're accountable to do so. I don't want to learn about Jimmy's Artisinal Welding by plunging to my death.

Welding? You wish. That bridge will be held together with baling wire and duct tape, just like the buildings in the cityscape scenes from Idiocracy.

Actually there are a lot of problems that anarchists wouldn't run into that the government does. Political corruption - collusion between state and corporations with welfare for the wealthy and prisons and environmental destruction for the poor. Overspending on the military and on wars. A bloated and inefficient healthcare system run more for the benefit of insurance companies than for those requiring medical attention. Etcetera etcetera.

There's also no good reason to believe that anarchists wouldn't follow standard engineering and construction practices. Look at open source software, there's no state in control of practices there yet engineers tend to do just fine. In fact, there are plenty of examples where people cut corners on safety procedures within a capitalist society in order that they can get a competitive advantage in the market. I'd say the incentives of capitalism are more detrimental to good bridges than those of anarchism.

> There's also no good reason to believe that anarchists wouldn't follow standard engineering and construction practices.

There's also then no accountability for when it fails. Not that we have that now, necessarily, in software "engineering", but in other engineering disciplines, we do.

A licensed engineer can lose their license (a huge professional blow) and be potentially civilly and/or criminally held liable for designs they signed off on that fail or violate appropriate ethical standards of their governing body, e.g. IEEE for electrical engineers.

The people who want the bridge built will hold the bridge building group to account.

Well, really, they'll choose a few qualified people from amongst themselves to hold the builders to account, because the whole town can't be asked show up to inspect their work every Tuesday.

Eventually they might even make it official by referring to those people as a "government".

> Look at open source software, there's no state in control of practices there yet engineers tend to do just fine.

A very large fraction of open source software is crap. Fortunately we get to choose which OSS programs we use. Not so for bridges.

> Actually there are a lot of problems that anarchists wouldn't run into that the government does. Political corruption - collusion between state and corporations with welfare for the wealthy

I don't know why you think that a different organizational scheme would prevent corruption.

If you're going to build a bridge, somebody has to do the work. Everybody else is going to pay them somehow. And if you're going to pick someone to do the work, somebody has to choose. It's untenable to have every decision made by all people, so everyone will delegate, say, construction hiring decisions, to someone.

Now the Construction Hiring Decider can pick who gets paid to work. Who will he/she choose? Will it be based on skill, personal connections, ethnic bias - or maybe kickbacks?

You can't run any large group without delegating some responsibilities. As soon as anybody has any decision-making power delegated to them, they can misuse it. There is no system that can totally prevent that. And the more structures of accountability and shared decision-making you build to safeguard power, the more it looks like a democratic government.

I don't know why you think pay comes into this. Anarchists generally don't believe in a market economy.

You do raise good points but anarchists are not all juvenile and naive as many think and, seeing as anarchism has been around for >100 years, people have thought of these issues before you. Decision-making definitely has to be delegated to people sometimes and the manner in which this is done is important. Usually anarchists emphasise frequent rotation and possibility for immediate recall in order that no one may abuse their power.

I think of it as being similar to how science is funded by national agencies. There is a big pool of resources and it gets dispersed among researchers according to some process. That process usually involves nominating a team of scientists in the relevant field to judge where the resources would be best spent. Everyone ultimately has the same goal of advancing research most effectively and so they usually make the best choices possible. The panel is different every year so there it's hard to have collusion going on. Academia definitely has its problems with entrenched hierarchies of course but those come about for different reasons.

It's impossible to make a perfect system but it's clear we could do better. Anarchists just want to dilute unjust power structures as much as possible. There are examples of organisations that are successfully run like this so it's not like these are utopian ideas.

People used to do lots of things that they don't do anymore. When we look at history, whom do we admire? Those who "dreamed" enough to make improvements, or those who said "slavery, that's just human nature"?

The first problem is that it's not obvious to me what the benefit of an anarchistic society would be.

The best rule of figuring out fair playing rules in a society is thinking you are someone else, and what would you like to happen in their shoes. Once you find something that seems more or less fair for all parties it's a good sign it's not obviously bad.

Slavery almost immediately fails this test.

For example, it's not obvious to me how anarchistic societies will deal with violence and crime. Mob justice? Public opinion is extremely sensitive to mass paranoia. If we apply the test of "stepping into the shoes of someone else" and imagined myself as the suspect of a crime, I would much rather take the process system of a modern state over mob rule to handle my case.

Could you offer a counter example, from this fairness point of view, where an anarchistic society would outperform the state as implemented by western democracies?

No software patents.

Less neocolonialist mass murder in foreign lands for the purpose of enriching armaments manufacturers and their agents in government and media.

It sounds like you are positioning anarchy as a reactionary tool of retribution towards the elites, rather than as a better way to govern.

It sounds like you are positioning anarchy as a reactionary tool of retribution towards the elites, rather than as a better way to govern.

So much packed into one sentence! If you think of anarchism as ever having been suggested as "a better way to govern", please go back to the beginning and try again. It is instead a better way to live. This thing you think we need, we don't actually need. And what "retribution"? Would it be "retribution" to tell "the elites" sorry you can't continue spending trillions of our public dollars bombing innocents for no discernible reason?

Also, I would object to the form of your discourse. You asked for a counterexample, and multiple people have provided those. Please either argue against the counterexamples or concede the point.

A counterexample: I live in Finland, we have no colonialist past or present and our foreign policy is based on not trying to piss anyone too much. We are a parlamentarian democracy, we are among the most egalitarian countries in the world and according to the metrics of a recent UN survey currently 'the happiest'.

Like I wrote above, I don't really see 'not being anarchistic' as the root cause of whatever ills anarchism is claimed to cure.

Look, if I could choose the psychological characteristics of my species I'd want to live in a communist utopia with actual egalitarianism. But it just does not work. It's been tried with a heavy human toll. Likewise for anarchism. If someone is pedddling a system for you that has no chance of working in the current world we are living in I would really question either the motives or the rationality of the proponent.

This is turning rapidly quite political... I think our main difference is in how we believe a large ensemble of human beings is capable of behaving. We both would like that humankind could live as a huge trusting family. I don't see how that could be possible at the present moment.

I don't perceive anything we've said here as particularly political? (Other than the obvious: arguments for and against anarchism, which is a political concept but doesn't field any candidates.) But since you raise the issue...

One wouldn't expect anyone from Finland, Switzerland, etc. to complain too much about the government. For the time being, these nations have "good" governments. Voters have some effect on national policies, police aren't slaughtering innocents with impunity at home, military isn't doing the same in numerous locations abroad. Please have some sympathy for the majority of humanity! You'll turn into us before we turn into you, if for no other reason than by a reversion to the mean. After all we export our delusions. Some people have seen enough American news to believe that it's an advantage to be on our "side" in an armed conflict.

I have really enjoyed the TV series "Okkupert", and I do sympathize with any nation that borders a schizophrenic totalizing militarist kleptocracy, because the in the long term there will be violence. That's why I sympathize with Mexico.

As a person living in a country next to Russia, I actually find US military industrial complex as a comforting geopolitical counterbalance.

I know lots of places have turned to shit thanks to US, so, I have no idea how to balance this fairly.

How would an anarchy prevent a powerful and wealthy armaments manufacturer from funding and recruiting mercenaries to do neocolonialist mass murder in oil-rich foreign lands for fun and profit?

As long as its profitable, I can only see there being less constraints in doing so than there is now.

They didn't become wealthy and powerful by spending money. They did so by constructing an elaborate fear-based belief system by which the apparatus of the State could be steered to pay them money, much more money than was ever admitted, directly out of the pockets of those subject to the State. Like a religion, except more violent and less consensual. Note that I'm talking about steering the State, not the electorate. If a truly democratic vote on the topic were held today, the military would be a tenth its current size tomorrow. They don't have to worry about democratic votes; they just need to leave Congress enough plausible deniability about what's really going on.

They love this myth you perpetuate, of stealing foreign oil for fame and profit. As a nation, we have yet to see dollar one for all of our Middle Eastern atrocities dating back to the 1950s. All of this evil and violence has only ever profited the war pigs and their cronies. The rest of us have been stuck with the bill.

This line of thinking reminds me of the drug prohibitionists. "If we stop killing drug dealers, they'll be even wealthier and they'll kill everyone!" No, silly, if drugs could be sold without fear of violence then drug sales would not require violence. Our fifty-year prohibition has created a cohort of thugs who would have to age out of the business, but if we stopped giving them vast sums of money then they could be dealt with like any other violent people.

You seem to know a little about what you're talking about but you should really read further before making the kinds of claims you're making. There is lots of literature on how anarchist societies have dealt with crime and there is no question that they are fairer than modern western societies with their gross wealth inequalities, mass incarceration, racism, colonialism, etc.

Right now, in Kurdish Syria (otherwise known as Rojava), there is a society built on principles that resemble anarchism pretty closely. They have very interesting decision-making processes, resource-management, and systems of justice. They also have pretty much no police as it isn't seen as necessary. There are lots of resources to learn about the details, here's one account I think is pretty good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4PVYxa28eE

I'm living in a western democracy (Finland) with very little inequality, very lenient justice system and no colonialism. Out police is respected and admired. Recently we were gauged as the happiest country in the world (0).

I just don't see how anarco-syndicalism would improve our lot.

With this background, I would search solution to the worlds problems from somewhere else than pitting ananrchism against democratic hierarchy.

I would suggest you look into the current situation on gender equality in kurdish nation before claiming it all together a 'better way'.

(0) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/14/finland-happie...

Finland may be pretty exceptional but your economy still benefits from western subjugation of people in poorer places. Where do all the parts and raw materials for your electronics companies come from?

One of the major components of the kurdish revolution is gender equality and female liberation, that's why the YPJ units have been so popular in the media...

> you are going to start instituting the same sort of structures sooner or later

You and others in this thread seem to think that anarchists oppose all forms of authority, social organization and rules.

This is not correct. Anarchists oppose only irrational authority as explained in:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Anarchist_FAQ/Why_do_anarchist...

My favorite recently was the model explained to me where instead of receiving civil services from a single government without a choice, there are multiple corporatist organizations that run business and provide protection/security, a judicial system, enforcers, an executive system, so on and so forth, and you can pick and choose which one you want to be part of, swearing into their system and agreeing to pay your share into their system.

Then it hit me- this form of government already exists, and it is called the Mafia.

Yep. Going further, you will realize that the government is simply the largest mob organization in the region (you can choose among mobsters but you always have to pay the government's tax in addition to that).

> Humans self organize into hierarchical system

I never asked for this system, let alone actively tried to organise it

> “You run into the exactly same resource and distribution problems as the government has, and you are going to start instituting the same sort of structures sooner or later.”

This is spot on. I think we would have to radically change our species behavioral tendencies before anarchy based societies would ever work like they think they should.

Yes, the problem with anarchy is exactly the same problem as with communism. It's principles are not compatible with human nature as it currently is.