this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
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So, honest question, genuinely not here to argue but to learn: how is this approach scalable to a society of millions, or even billions? What are some thoughts on this?
It seems to me that any society in history that operates this way successfully consists of small groups of people living very differently than we generally do today, often sharing a common ethnic or familial bond or some common purpose. Although I'm sympathetic to anarchism in principle and in smaller groups, human society seems to have gone beyond any hope of a successful anarchic turnover long ago. Any breakdown of societal order seems to result in bad actors taking advantage, even when such developments seem positive at first. And any positive ahierarchical community that becomes too big eventually becomes corrupted it seems.
This is sort of way too big for a lemmy comment haha.
I think if you're interested then it's the sort of thing maybe best learned from books directly. Anything I try and write will be an extremely crude summary pre mangled through my own imperfect understanding.
You could read about what the CNT/FAI did to manage a war economy, they learned on the fly pretty quick. Conquest of bread is good to lay out the sort of fundamentals. Murry Bookchin's works are pretty influential. Other's probs have other suggestions.
I agree, thanks for the recommendations! Exactly what I was looking for.
Onya! Even if you end up thinking it's all a load of horse shit it's worth learning about. It's a very different lens to the hierarchical society (and long history of such) most English speaking people are used to.
Oh if you like reading just random essays and rebuttals and so on browsing anarchists library can be interesting too.
There are examples of libeterian socialist societies today (chiapas, rojava) and historically (spain, ukraine etc.). What's common with both is that they have to put up with relentless attacks from capitalists and fascists. Yet despite that they, in the case of rojava and chiapas, have prevailed.
If you think anarchism can only work in small communities then there are anarchist theories focusing on smaller communities, like Bookchin.
Revolution also isn't something that happens in a day and suddenly you have to re-strucure all of society. During and before the revolution you are already creating these anarchist structures so when you get to that point you are prepared. Working with mutual aid for example doesn't just help people now but train ourselves to live a different life based on solidarity. I believe that even if anarchism will never happen it still worth pursuing these different forms of organisation. This is partly because I am fairly confident capitalism, at least globally, will collapse. Climate change among other things will see to that. What will come after might truly be horrific but I believe anarchism is going to be the only real alternative to it if we want to live truly free.