Consensually, through voluntary agreement, or by yourself, without coercive interference.
I’m sure that sounds like a cop-out to a lot of people, but it’s based on a principle of humility: we can’t possibly know what solutions people will pursue, negotiate, and adapt to the ever-evolving problems we face in the world.
Some anarchists have invested a lot of work in figuring out how we might organize ourselves if free—federations of councils and the like—and that work is valuable. Some people might adopt some of those solutions some of the time. But it’s not for me or anyone else to prejudge or insist upon any particular solution.
We’ll do it together, in free cooperation, by talking to each other, persuading each other, inducing each other, or by leaving each other alone.
And so is the interminable inefficiency of reaching solutions by talking to each other. I have frequently encountered people repulsed by the idea of having meetings, of talking to and negotiating with other people with equal agency, of having to do the boring and tedious work of anarchist direct democracy.
And there’s an element of truth to that! Reaching decisions through conversation and consensus building can indeed be difficult, tedious, boring, and without certainty of resolution.
But the costs of the alternative—aside from the pain and horror of state violence—are immense. The police, the surveillance, the rules and courts that adjudicate them, the military and the industry that arms them, the prisons and border fences, the internment camps and tax collectors and intelligence agencies—these are vast and crushing burdens on society. They are immensely costly and deeply inefficient.
Of course states fail and collapse all the time! How could they not? Control is very expensive and deeply inefficient.
I think this makes a lot of people very uncomfortable, because a lot of people dislike ambiguity—not in the interpersonal sense that might elude an autistic person, but rather an ambiguity of outcomes.
We can’t possible know how everyone would do this or that under anarchism, because conditions and people are constantly evolving. What might make sense to some people in some place and time might not work for someone else, or might evolve as conditions evolve, or might change as people negotiate and compromise with each other.
The allure of systematic and predictable answers is deeply attractive to a lot of people, from ancaps with their natural law deontology to the high modernists who bulldozed cities to make orderly grids of highways to the techbros who think they can engineer their way to eternal perfection. Lots of people want one singular, predictable, replicable Answer and are horrified at the thought of not knowing the results of a social negotiation.
Why would anyone be powerless to stop them? Coercion is not a synonym for violence; it is a subset of violence. Anarchism is not pacifism and anyone is justified in defending themselves from aggression.
I’m not aware of anyone given a meaningful choice, except maybe during the initial period of covid isolation, when global fossil fuel usage did decrease.
I’m generally skeptical of explanations that require millions and millions of people to all decide to act identically and simultaneously in spite of enormous costs, in ways that make lots of them miserable. I’m also really skeptical of explanations that assume people have political agency in ways that I’ve seen no evidence for.
I look at the world around me and see one of coercion: direct coercion by people, indirect coercion by institutions, and compulsion by impersonal systems.
I’ve made this argument in extensive detail over and over but I’ve got to admit that this is something I feel in my bones, beyond mere data and arguments.
I am not moved by arguments that we all somehow woke up someday and all simultaneously and coincidentally chose and continue to choose this failing hell-hole world we live in. They are non-starters for me; they stretch credulity beyond its breaking point.
I will never understand the audacity of showing up in someone’s mentions to be a condescending asshole and then being genuinely surprised when that someone mutes or blocks said asshole.
“Who could have anticipated these consequences of my own shitty actions???”
I am frequently an asshole to people I believe deserve it but I am under no illusions that they will enjoy it or like me. It’s the surprise that gets me every time. “Good heavens! They did not meekly accept my shit! This is unheard of!”
Reza Aslan argues that historical Jesus is best understood as a poor, revolutionary Jew who really wanted brutal Roman occupiers (and their Jewish collaborators) the fuck out of Israel. Aslan says “Jesus was a Jew preaching Judaism to other Jews. His was a Jewish mission, one concerned exclusively with the fate of his fellow Jews.”
Aslan argues that when Jesus referred to the Kingdom of God he wanted to usher in, he was referring to a Jewish Israel free of Roman rule
I haven’t read Reza Aslan’s book, but it sounds like it’s in the same vein as Michael Hudson’s work situation Jesus in the historical context of Bronze Age concepts about economic justice.
Hudson argues that the jubilee—the official erasure of debts and freeing of slaves—was the foundational pillar of Brone Age economies in the near East. The Iron Age Israelites continued this tradition by encoding it as a religious obligation on all Jews, the 50-year jubilee cycle.
Jesus, he argued, was revolting to restore this tradition that had been suppressed by the Romans and their local allies. The “year of the lord” he wanted to restore was the jubilee year. And, for that, the Romans crucified him.
I’ve spent more energy than I would have liked over the past few days responding to someone here who was stanning for China, bigging up the Belt & Road initiative as a fraternal and “socialist” gift bestowed out of boundless generosity, and ascribing Han anti-Blackness to the wicked Europeans. Let’s all be crystal clear, though, that in its obliteration of Tibetan culture, in its attempted physical erasure of the Uyghur people, in its own deep, organic racism, China is an empire like any other.
Chomsky was denying the Bosnian genocide because NATO was antagonistic to Milosevic years ago. He didn’t exactly wait until the end of his life to adopt geopolitics-as-team-sport in lieu of class analysis or liberatory politics.