@@igorigor5342 when we create democracy, things will be different. Then we shall see. If you don't like it. You can always play the other game, the one called follow the leader. It's not as much fun though...

@@Tybold63 Thank you for the appreciative comment. I quite like engaging with people here, and at risk of having said some of this stuff before, I thought I'd reply to what you've said. The video was a description of how the worker's unions within the International Workers Association (IWA-AIT) oppertate today. The IWA has been around since 1922, and some of the unions within it date back to the mid-1890s, so the idea that the organisational principles set out in this video could only apply to a future society (one that is a nice idea but couldn't work in practice) is wrong. These principles also can work at scale. Out sister union in Spain, the CNTE, had approx 1.6 million members in July 1936, on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. But many people who comment on this video think it us just theorising about a future utopia, so you are not alone and can be forgiven that mistake. You also make an error common to people who are exploring anarchist ideas for the first time, and that is to be overly influenced by dictionary definitions and etymology. How could you not be? Almost everyone starts in the same place. I was there myself once. It affects your understanding in the following ways. Because you haven't delved deeply enough into the history, you see it as an ideology that is mainly anti-state. It is anti-state, but you have to have a precise grasp of what the state is. (Most books on politics or social theory don't bother to define "the state". Why would a fish define water? The result is that a tremendous amount of slippage and misunderstanding occurs, even amongst post-graduates and people who teach this stuff and who ought to know better. There are institutional reasons for this, but it risks dragging me too far off topic to go into them here.) The state is a hierarchical and bureaucratic apparatus of power that sits seperate to and dominates the people it governs. The state exists as a formal bureaucratic power whenever people do not have direct, actual and effective control over the political decisions that affect them. Which is the normal state of things in today's world. Nor all societies have had states. The state can be found as far back as ancient Mesopotamia. Rome and China are classic examples of civilisations with states. But the poleis of Ancient Greece were not states (although neighbouring Persia and Egypt were). The Greek polis is often described as a city-state, but it was not a State in any formal sense, and the term city-state is the dominant translatation, nit because it is precise ("community is a closer translation), but because translators are following a precedent that has been set with the intention of making explicit that each city was a sovereign jurisdiction not unlike nation-states are in the modern world. However, translating with one meaning in mind risks obfuscating another. The fact is that Greek poleis of the classical period simply did not have bureaucracies that dominated, and in large measure controlled, social life in the towns and cities of Greece. This is important, because it tells us that a community in which the citizenry actually and effectively govern their own affairs is not (and cannot be) a state. Ancient Athens was not a state. It had no bureaucracy. (Even oligarchical Sparta was not a state.) This tells us something. Where direct democracy is established in a community and is the effective power, the state does not exist. This is why the anarchist idea of revolution is to create and extend direct democracy to every institution of society. To do this automatically implies both the destruction of the state AND the destruction of capitalism, which is an institution of domination based on the relationship between employer and employee, and made possible by (even if it is not reducible to) wage labour. Capitalism grows out of the private ownership of the means of production, distribution, exchange and communication, but it need not be private. When control of society is managed by a technocratic elite organised as political party and bureaucracy, the relationship between managers and those who do the work is essentially no different to that in a capitalist organisation owned by shareholders and run by a board of directors. Which is why, from an anarchist perspective, the USSR was a form of state capitalism, and China today can so easily be a blend of state and private capitalism despite being nominally communist. Because hierachical and bureaucratic control invest both capitalism and the state, and anarchism is against both, anarchism is therefore a type of socialism, one aimed at direct control of the means of production by workers who decide things democratically amongst themselves. If we look at the historical facts, we see that anarchism emerged from within the revolutionary socialist movement and defined itself in opposition to three things: capitalism, the State, and Marxism. (They saw the authoritarian implications of Marx's plans for coup d'etat immediately.) This should also indicate something else. There can be no right-wing anarchism (despite what the many bullshit artists who plague the world would like you to think). Anarchism occupies the extreme left. It's commitment to direct democracy means it our flanks everything else on the left. The whacky neo-liberal shit that North Americans sometimes call Libertarianism (but which is as far from genuine libertarianianism as night is from day), is a radicalised form of classical liberalism from the 18th century. North Americans have a very weird and unique political vocabulary by virtue of not having had an aristocracy in the European mold, and their preponderance in cinema, TV and the English-speaking portion of the internet prevents them from seeing how parochial they are. This is why they call neo-liberalism "conservatism", progressivism "liberalism", and neo-liberalism without aytendant bible-belt social conservatism "libertarianism". With a political vocabulary so desperately fucked up, its no wonder they presently seem one election away from going down the fascist road.

@@anisau Am glad you took time to deliver this long reaction comment and that is appreciated and also done with a good amount of respect. Especially that you touch the connection or disconnection with what is broadly called socialism (which is kinda fucked up from many angles). Cheers from Sweden and good luck with your fight am not fully convinced but my respect is higher.

@@john-lenin Honesty, one of the best things about having posted this video is the never ending stream of idiots who post foolish comments hoping for a rise. Today, sir, you are that fool. Thank you for the chuckle.

@@anisau People like you are why Anarcho Syndicalism is such a successful political movement today. You'll never fix the status problem by pretending it doesn't exist.

@@john-leninMore accurately said it’s an unsuccessful movement and failed (obviously) because it can’t compete against other political orders. If you can’t produce commons then you fail.

Technology has its uses, but the way we practice direct democracy within the local groups within our union is to debate and aim for consensus rather than voting. Typically, we don't vote. We raise an issue, propose a solution, talk about it, and then ask if there are any objections. We keep talking and honing our solution until there are no more objections. Working in this way, it is rare that we vote. Within the wider federation, groups are asked to develop posititons (for, against or abstain) for proposals that are either raised in agenda prior to Congress (held annually) or at referenda (held on an ad hoc basis). We develop the position of our group by consensus (method outlined above), and that position is then put forward as the group's position (which is essentially a vote). We do things this way because we understand anarchism as a type of socialism and essentially collectivist in nature. The principles of anarchism live in the way we relate to each other in our groups, and those relations are facilitated by face-to-face interaction. The aim is to work with people and build solidarity, rather than seeking to dominate them through the amassing of a majority. There are some issues where we have decided to take things to a vote within our local group, but they are rare and characterised by an agreement that we need a decision one way or another. Generally, when people find themselves in a minority, this is recognised and they yield on the issue, recognising that this is necessary for the solidarity of the group. Often in these cases, there is an agreement to revisit the issue at a certain date based on an assessment of how the majority solution is working. Critically, when we work this way, we think very carefully about what does and does not need agreement within a group or within the wider federation. Decisions within the federation tend to be meta-political, meaning they frame the way groups interact within the federation, and tend not to be the substance of that interaction. This limits the volume of decisions that require decision at congresses, when they are held. We are in the habit of speaking for ourselves and not on behalf of others, so we don't go around seeking to represent the group or being its leader. Also, when we have an initiative, there is an understanding that we will take the responsibility for it ourselves. So, when we are taking it to the group, we are often not asking for the group's approval, but for the support of those who have the time and inclination to put in the effort to make the initiative a success. If everyone in the group agrees to participate, then it's a group decision. If only half the group volunteers, then those who volunteer do it. But we always ask if there are objections or things members would prefer that we do or not do, because its basic courtesy and taking into consideration the views of others is an important part of the democratic culture of our groups, and suggestions often flow that improve the intended outcome. What I am trying to point out by describing this is that there is more to the life of a group working in accordance with direct democratic principles than the mere act of making proposals and voting. Technology helps. It's a great way of keeping others up to date and keeping communication flowing. But there is also a benefit to having regular meetings, especially where those meetings occur in person. Also, where we have experimented with using online tools to create agendas and minutes of meetings, we found those activities can become tied to certain platforms and potentially hostage to issues of access, gatekeeping and transparency. In the end, we reverted back to typing up minutes and circulating them by email. Then everyone has access to them and there is an understanding that if you want to participate in the life of the group, you need to get off your arse and meet. In the end it is about creating and preserving the conditions of trust, and if you don't have that, you have nothing and your group will fall apart.

Apples and oranges. Federation is a relationship between groups of people. Blockchain is a tool for recording interactions between social actors. You might conceivably use blockchain in the context of a federation (though I struggle to see how this would be desirable or useful), but the two concepts are not directly comparable, yet alone interchangeable. If someone came to you and asked if the minutes of a meeting could replace the meeting itself, you'd point out the absurdity. Sure they are related, but they are not of the same order of things.

@@anisau I appreciate your reply, and thank you for your valid point.

You are wrong. Why? Because the decision on the boundary between the perogatives of the group (let's call it the public sphere) and the prerogatives of the individual (let's call it the private sphere) is a decision that can only be agreed at the level of the group (because the division between the public sphere and the private sphere is a social institution). Your objection, which you haven't (can't?) explained, but only gestured to, seems to be based on the idea that because there are individuals and decisions fittingly left to the perogative of individuals, there can be no collectivism, and hence anarcho-syndicalism cannot be collectivist. But as I argued in the video, individual freedom and collective freedom are two sides of the same coin. They are mutually reinforcing. All collectives require individuals capable of thinking, acting and speaking for themselves. All individuals require social institutions that create and school them to be people who can think, act and speak for themselves, and which creates institutional spaces in which they can express their opinions meaningfully and without penalty. All modern societies do this. All modern political ideologies must deal with the question of the boundary between freedoms and duties in some way if the are to seek legitimacy. Anarchism does this too. What I do in the video is explain how the anarchist concepts of group and federation articulate this requirement. So, I stand by what I explained in the video. If you would like to argue with it the onus is on you to go beyond assertions and actually mount an argument. The floor is yours and I'm all ears.

@@anisau Collectivism is incompatible with anarchism, there is no way to have both. In collectivism individuals are forced to do what the "collective" wants ( and I put in cote because this collective is really always the rich class ). Anarchism means you as an individual, cant be forced to do something because others wants you to do, until you are not directly doing bad to others, no one can force you to do anything, for example, in the name of "climate change", cut your left leg off, because some politician said it will save the planet or something... And I agree with Miley that said collectivism, socialism and fascism are the same thing... I did notice he didnt says about comunism, that really are an anarchist system in root.

Coletivism is incompatible with anarchism, there is no way to have both, chose one. Coletivism means you will be forced to do what the "coletive" wants ( and its coted because coletive is allways really the rich ). Anarchism means you cant be forced to do anything unless you are doing direct damage or forcing something into other person. Even a 10 years old can figure it out. Anyway, coletivism means also some crazy politician in the name of climate change or something demands you to cut your left leg, to save the planet or something, is this anarchism to you ?

Yeah, I can understand that. There are a number of political terms (incl. "liberal" and "conservative") that have a a very different feeling to them in North America than in the rest of the world. When I used to teach politics at university, I used to do a classroom exercise with my students where we'd map out historically and geographically how the meanings of specific words shifted during the 19th and 20th centuries. Even the word "democracy" is understood by most people now in a way that was very different to how it was understood during the French Revolution or when the US constitution was drafted. It was understood then (c.1789) in a way that was broadly similar to what the Ancient Greeks would have understood. However, since WW2 it has come to be attached to the act of voting to elect people (rather than voting directly to decide an issue). The ancient Athenians, however, thought of electing someone to office as an aristocratic and anti-democratic method of doing things. They much preferred rotation and/or selection by lot when a standing council needed to be appointed. The problem is that it is rare for these things to even be taught outside the History department, but the problem has gone on for so long now that political science and political theory in the English speaking world have a vocabulary that floats free and no longer matches that used in history, anthropology and social theory. Back to "libertarian": anarchists only started to be described as "anarchists" in the 1880s. Prior to that, they were described as the "collectivist", "federalist" and "libertarian" wing of the revolutionary movement, as a way of differenciating them from the more centralist and "authoritarian" wing grouped around the ideas of Karl Marx. This way of talking about about the two groups made its way across the Atlantic by way of Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker, and from there to idiots like Murray Rothbard. The reason it got picked up as a right wing term in North America and stuck there is because "conservative" and "liberal" also came to have different meanings in the US than they did in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world. Where Americans say "libertarian", people in Britain and Australia say "neo-liberal" (which is short for "neo-classical liberal").

Thank you for your kind words. In responce to your question, there is not and cannot be any such thing as an anarcho-syndicalist commune. "Syndicate" is one of the words the French use for "union" (as in "trade union" or workers' industrial union"). Certainly, you can have an anarchist commune. (The planet of Annaris in Ursula Le Guin's book, "The Dispossessed", is supposed to be exactly that.) But the idea of an anarcho-syndicalist commune isn't a logical one, since anarcho-syndicalism implies a particular relationship of struggle against the institutions of capitalism. The idea of an anarchist commune implies the members have escaped that relationship (possibly by revolt, rebellion or successful revolution, which is the end goal of anarcho-syndicalism). Please understand that the structures of anarcho-syndicalist organisations described in the video do not refer to an ideal future world. It describes how the member unions within the International Workers' Association (IWA-AIT) organise and relate to each other today, and have done since 1922. I suggest you research the IWA-AIT and look at the aims and principles of the IWA and it's members. This will help you understand how these organisations work, how the run their congresses (which are periodic events rather than standing councils), and how they reach agreement and mediate disagreement. Also, I've responded to these questions a number of times in the comments to this video, and am certain that if you explore those comments you will find answers to the questions you'd seek answers to. One more thing. Rather than merely write some utopian or distopian fantasy about a mythical future world, there is plenty of grist for context in the present struggles between the revolutionary unions of the IWA-AIT and the reformist and authoritarian factions have been forced to split off in recent years when their attempts to gain control of the IWA and its member federations have failed (or in Italy, Germany, Argentina and parts of Spain succeeded). You might also draw some inspiration from the democracies of Ancient Greece, since the anarchist ideal draws strongly on the idea of direct democracy. If you do this, it pays to he very careful about understanding the relationship between democracy and slavery in Athens. Much research fails to understand that the great majority of Athenian citizens were too poor to own slaves, and in fact that democracy emerged as part of a class revolt during a period when poorer citizens were at risk of being permanently sold off into slavery when they couldn't pay their debts. To get a good understanding on this issue and how it affects contemporary scholarship, it is worth reading what Cornelius Castoriadis has to say on the issues. His writings are freely available in English translation through the Not.Bored website. Good luck with your book!

@@anisau I will certainly use the information you provided, but just to explain myself a bit here, the reason I used the word "Commune", was because the software I use to visualise my world does not have a closer category to represent a syndycalist movement :) Of course you're right, that the word isn't accurate, but that's the reason I used it haha

A republic may or may not be democratic. They are different concepts derived from different languages. And, although I disagree with his politics, James Madison was right to distinguish the two concepts. Speaking of distinguishing things, whatever point your trying (and failing) to make is lost because you can't articulate yourself clearly. Would you like to have another try?

@@anisau 9:35 "Representative democracy is not actually a form of democracy". Do you often make these kinds of simple contradictions?

@@SadisNic I stand by what I said. If you can mount a convincing counter argument, go ahead. The ball's in your court and so far you've failed to get it over the net. Have another try.

@@anisau "Representative democracy is not actually a form of democracy" and "A republic may or may not be democratic". "I stand by what I said" congrats, so not only do you make contradictory statements, you completely ignore them when addressed.

@@SadisNic Contradictory how? ...Can't explain? Thought so.

Bullshit. Everybody (quite literally everybody) in history from Herodotus to James Maddison understood that democracy was direct or not at all. Read Aristotle's Politics and James Maddison's contributions to the Federalist Papers if you want proof. It is only after the French Revolution and due specifically to the backsliding if the middle class that the definition was bastardised. You are welcome to your opinion of course, but it is historically parochial and demonstrably, factually wrong.

Hi Aaron. This is a really good question. So, thank you for asking it. I'm going to set up my answer first be clarifying some contextual issues first, and then answering your question. The first thing to point out is that my video is a sktech of how anarchist organisations are set up. Specifically, it is a sketch of how the International Workers Association (the IWA-AIT, formed in 1922), its member sections (the earliest being the Spanish CNT (formed in 1910), and the unions and regional federations of unions that comprise those sections (the earliest dating back to the mid-1890s) relate together and operate. Because anarcho-syndicalist unions have a revolutionary aim, they organise and militate according to the same principles the hope to institute on a society-wide basis. This matters for a number of reasons: Firstly, their practical operation is as much a proof of concept as a path towards their aims. But its not just "prefigurative". The IWA is (a fortiori) the revoltion. I know this sounds a bit pompous, but what I mean is that, if the organisation manifests its ideals organisationally in the process of militating for revolution (which we do by advancing workers' rights and outcomes, and building our organisations and capacity in the process), then its not just a means to the end but participates in the end it is trying to achieve, perhaps not fully, but at least partially and in a growing way. (This is also our great difference in comparison with the Marxists, whose methods betray the very ideals they defer until some post-revolutionary date.) Because, for us, the means and end are bound up together, the history of the organisation can be examined for an indication of how it is likely act in the future. Not totally, because history is always open. But anarcho-syndicalist organising do have a definite organisational character; a personality, if you would like to characterise it as such. This means we can look to its past and how it reacted in certain contexts to make an educated guess to how it might react to similar situations in the future. Now, to answer your question. The life of the an anarcho-syndicalist union is to be found in the workings of its local assemblies. It is the forum of discussion, argument and decision making. All of the proposals that are put to congresses whether this be at the regional, national or international level originate, are debated, and have positions taken (for or against) at the local level. (Not to mention all the decisions that only pertain locally.) Now, people don't always agree. And, actually, there is a lot to disagree about. All of these disagreements manifest at the local level as well as the various confederation levels. But the debate it is not restricted to lines of formal communication, precisely because so much of it is informal. None of this is captured in the video, and you are right to ask about it. The IWA has multiple channels of informal communication that envelop it. The IWA is not a state. It is not even a proto-state, but its structure could (and hopefully will) one day replace the state. This means it will need to relieve the state by taking over many of its functions But (and this is my point) the relationship between the state and civil society is necessarily paralleled within the IWA. All of the informal communication (seperate to the formal channels mediated by the regional, national and international secretariats), all our chatter on social media, all the pro-anarchosyndicalist propaganda groups and journals, etc. can be thought of as a sort of civil society that operates in the wider environment of the IWA. This is where a lot of the aguements and faction forming occur, if they occur at all in any issue. To get a good sense of this (because it is historically well documented, you can look at the propaganda groups that emerged in the 1920s in the orbit of the Spanish CNT, and from which the FAI emerged. The FAI was less an organisation with a singular, coherent program and more of a corresponding society made up of different affinity groups and across which journals, newspapers and propaganda materials were circulated for consumption by each other and the broader CNT. All of the arguments within the CNT were reflected in those publications, because this was a means of broader persuasion. It was a sort of DIY mass media and very important to influencing the debates that took place in the assemblies of the CNT. But these publications were not just narrowly political in focus, they were a vehicle for all sorts of cultural expression, and reflected much of the informal life of the movement. Things like picnicking excursions out to the countryside, theatre troops made up of union members, poetry and essays, stuff on rational education to try and break the Catholic church's strangle hold on education, ecologism and naturism in both its nudist and non-nudist forms, which was part of questioning what a healthy life could and should be and which was a big thing in those days. So, they had a wider cultural importance. But their political importance was key and cannot be overstated given that they were central to maintaining a culture of revolutionary militancy. During the late 1920s, as the membership of the CNT grew above 900'000 members, a reformist faction sprang up within the organisation. How? Well, while the CNT was anarchist in inspiration, form and action, it was open to all workers. The great majority of people who joined the CNT did not have any specificly anarchist leanings proir to joining. And from amongst this group developed a political tendency that wished to forego the CNT's revolutionary stance for a more reformist approach. Because of this, for a while in the late 20s, the CNT was at risk of losing its revolutionary character. To combat this, various anarchist propaganda groups wrote and published with furious activity denouncing reformism and promoting a belligerent revolutionary perspective. Together, as the FAI, these groups helped each other circulate this material. This successfully influenced the outlook of the great mass of members and the revolutionary aims of the CNT were reaffirmed when the issue was debated in the various CNT assemblies, plenaries and congresses. So, hopefully this answers your question. Different tendencies and factions do form. The fights and arguments can be ferocious. But they are tempered by respect for the broader revolutionary project and the ideals of direct democracy and anarchist federation. Revolutionary success requires a mass organisation, and that cannot be achieved if the arguments result in expulsions and splitting. Above all, organisation needs to hang together. But what holds it together isn't the aims and statutes or any legalistic structure, but a commitment to its fundamental culture, one that is simultaneously libertarian and built on working class solidarity. Also, because the secretariat is not a decision making office, but more of a clearing house for formal union channels of communication, there is no value in seeking out positions within the secretariat. It is not a central committee and it cannot be used to try and project power and control. This is one of the reasons the Marxists don't try to infiltrate our organisation. The only point of centrality (the secretariat), does not and cannot make decisions. So, for the Marxists, there is nothing to be gained from the attempt to infiltrate. But the informal, civil-society-esque role played by all the spontaneous chatter, journals, blogs, zines, forums, is all crucial. Anarcho-syndicalism provides a point of focus around which all these manifestations of anarchist culture come together, but our federations are also the bones around which the flesh of anarchist culture grows and gives the movement life. And, to return to your question once more, there is an inter-penetration between all that external activity and the debates that take place in in the assemblies of anarcho-syndicalist unions

Two last points: Anarchists are always very careful about not overstepping the mandates of the group that delegates them to look after an activity or to communicate their positions at Congress or any other forum. This constraint requires self-discipline, collective-monitoring and preparedness to call out behaviour that misrepresents the decisions or positions adopted in the local union assembly or at congresses. This means that other avenues are required to maintain free debate and the free expression of ideas. So, having these other, informal avenues for broader communication and debate is vital. There is always a very clear distinction between what is formal and mandated, and what is not. Maintaining this distinction is part and parcel of creating and maintaining the trust that allows us to cooperate effectively. Its part of the normative structure of anarchism which binds us together in solidarity. Lastly, local autonomy is prized, and we tend not to create overarching rules that require adherence by a whole federation where there is no need. Consequently, our statutes tend to be meta-political rather than political. What do I mean by this? Meta-politics is less about what we do and more about how we do it. You can think of it was the minimum set of rules required to play a game: due process; whose got the conch and how it is passed about; that sort of thing. We are very structure on how our secretariat behaves and how our congresses are run. And abiding by the decisions of our periodic congresses is mandatory. We require that collectively of ourselves. But there is no need to bind ourselves to positions, strategies or tactics that are unnecessarily restrictive or which will work only in some areas or not in others. This respect for local autonomy and other ways of doing things moderates disagreement. And sometimes the fact that there is disagreement is enough to convince those who proposed something that, while they are actions that can be adopted in some places, they shouldn't be mandated everywhere. We had an example of this recently. Anarchism has traditionally been militantly atheist. And our aims and statutes expressed a commitment to a separation between politics and the church. There was a recent proposal from one of our European sections to strengthen this to declare an opposition to all religious organisations. Although the proposal was passed, it passed narrowly, and two sections explained that an expression of agnosticism and anti-clericism rather that militant atheism was better, because it didn't act as an impediment to joining in their countries, and also made their situations less dangerous, because the governments in those countries were less likely to persecute their organisations in the name of the state religion. Because if this, even though the proposal passed by a democratic process, the issue is going to be revisited at the next plenary and the decision either reversed or a compromise acceptable to the minority position reached. It's an example of argument and disagreement being carried on in the right spirit and finding the right balance between universalism and particularism. If we keep the universal to the necessary minimum, there will be sufficient autonomy to adapt to the particular circumstances at the local level.

@@anisau I like how the formation and formulation of "political will" is treated here distinct from forming factions as power groups, something anarchists as far as I understand it despise. Influence not power.

While the monty python boys were doing a piss-take, I think there was a genuine level of understanding when they wrote that scene. Either way, Thank you for the kind comment. Happy New Year, mate!

All hail the algorithm

I bet you didnt even watch half of this video

Anarchism exists in the world: look at Syria (also, though they aren't anarchists just near anarchism) look at the Zapatista. Also, no one wants to do the washing up, but they do it.

@@something1600You mean it exists where groups can parasitise upon others for the costs of defense and trade.

Thank you for the kind comment, compañero!

I don't understand the enthusiasm for blockchain. It's a hideously expensive (i.e. resource intensive) answer to a question no one asked and which was solved spontaniously thousands of years ago with standard measures of grain and cowrie shells. It really is that simple. Oh, just to clarify: democracy (qua direct democracy) is the collective mode of autonomy and thetefore the positive content of anarchism. Liberty has two aspects: individual autonomy and collective autonomy. They are mutually reinforcing and therefore two sides of the same coin. Without grasping this fact and seeking to extend direct democracy to every institution of society, genuine liberty is not achieved. Why? Because you cannot fully realise individual liberty outside of a society characterised by collective autonomy. Right wingers who think of themselves as libertarians are nothing of the sort. They are in fact neo-liberals (i.e. neo-classical liberals). They desire minimal government so as not to pay taxes. But they are very quiet when it comes to capitaliat exploitation and the lack of freedom those without wealth experience within capitalist society. There is nothing intrinsically libertarian about anything they say or do and blockchain and crytocurrency change nothing from this point of view.

@@anisau Well Blockchain would probably be the best solution in micromanaging the needs and wants of the people without it being tampered or manipulated with. Especially if the protocol is "Proof of Work", which is, unfortunately, as you said, very resource intensive, but to what extent are we willing to negate it, if the network is more than extremely secure from centralization? Theres also other types of cryptos as well that are way more efficient in their Blockchain with energy use and transactions. Transactions that could help delegates utilize information to efficiently run the direct will of people in a syndicalist structure. It goes way beyond grain and cowrie shells, imo, but I hear you. Crypto establishes individual autonomy by economically empowering or even liberating individuals, and therefore perhaps empowering and liberating entire unions of people? I also agree with your point on right wingers, and right wingers associated with crypto, but perhaps people from different walks of ideology have seen a potential use case for Blockchain in an Anarcho syndicalist society(maybe Blockchain alone, and without crypto?), or maybe there isn't one?

@@Obeywulf Empower? How? How does crypto empower anyone more than or compared to the coins jangling in your pocket? (Oh, any your use of the word micromanaging was funny.)

@@anisau well the idea is that crypto, especially Bitcoin, isn't controlled or owned by anyone or anything. It works off an autonomous, decentralized Blockchain, which subsequently liberates people economically, in an autonomous way. Allowing anyone in the world with a device connected to the internet to have access to capital or a bank (the "bank" being themselves). But really, there's multiple ways to approach this topic and how it could maybe relate to anarchism, and maybe even Anarcho syndicalism. We didn't get to it but I found this interesting piece talking about "DAOs" (decentralized autonomous organizations) and how they could essentially act as unions in an Anarcho syndicalist structure, in a modern digital world. "DAOs" are a topic a little further down the Blockchain rabbit hole, but the fellow leftist in this piece relates the two very well! Please give it a read! I found it very interesting in relation to our discussion! theblockchainsocialist.mirror.xyz/gbJl6EE9Z5l3U1j_D5gM1fZmcxstb1VuQdLm-JBjgKE

@@anisau micromanaging was a funny word to use I guess😂😂😂

Very glad you liked it. It's good that people still watch it and find it useful.

a fellow comrade! its nice to see another anarcho-syndicalist here!

What you just said strikes me as a very interesting thing to say. It suggests that you see anarcho-syndicalism and anarchist-communism as separate and perhaps parallel in not opposed. Can I ask you to please expand on how you understand the relationship btw the two? And how you arrived at your point of view? I suspect we don't see this relationship the same way and I think there is an interesting discussion to be had.

@@anisau im working on a digital version of my graphic which is very much inspired by your graphic but is showing ancom so that includes the abolition of money/voucher/market but free thus also voluntary mutual aid. I found your model to be the best I've seen regarding anarchist organisation.

@Likely Lad I will be interested to see this and wish you the best if luck. Please let me know when it is available to view. Personally, I am sceptical about that particular element of anarchist theory. In terms of the collectivist vs communist debate within anarchism that originally took place in the late 19th and early 20th century, I side firmly with the collectivists and therefore have an ambivalent attitude towards Kropotkin, who (as you will be aware) was (and still is) is greatly responsible for the popularisation of the economic thinking associated with the anarchist communist perspective (i e. the abolition of money and free appropriation from communal stores) to which you to refer. When I made my video, it was done partly out of a need I saw to address a tendency within anarchist circles to focus on a desired economic regime at the expense of due attention to the question of anarchism's model for a political regime (i.e. direct democracy and anarchist federation). I think the project of individual and collective autonomy, which anarchism embodies, must see politics (understood here as a sphere of values) to be ontologically prior to the other five spheres of social value (i.e. law, religion, art, economy and science/technology). My criticism of the anarchist-communist perspective is that it tends to treat the economy (as a value sphere) as either primary or ontogically coeval with politics. (Marxism makes a similar mistake, but sees it as coeval with science/technology.) I also worry that anarchist-communism, as defined above, tends to conflate the market as a social institution with capitalism as a specific set of social relations made possible by, but distinct from, the market. The market is a potential site of exploitation, certainly, but I don't think it is necessarily so. Rather, it relies on a system of exclusive property rights (guaranteed by the state) over the means of production, exchange, distribution and communication to make systemic exploitation possible. For me, solving the question of how to do politics presents the solution to the problem of economic exploitation. This is the point of the collectivist perspective within anarchist theory. Whether or not we choose to adopt the anarcho-communist model of economic relations or to retain money and markets is a question subsequent to the question of how we should do politics. And of course, we are free to choose either path when it comes to how to organise an anarchist economy. Personally, I can't see a complex modern society operating without an impersonal abstract medium of exchange. Aytempts to abolish it will only see it's spontaneous re-emergence, if only because it makes possible ready comparison between otherwise incomparable options for making, doing and consuming. I am also worried that the anarcho-communist model necessarily implies either explicit rationing or the socialiation of individuals towards an ethic of self-limitation and psychology of aesectism. If you can point me towards any anarcho-communist text that doesn't implicitly or explicitly fall back on the messianic assumption that a new humanity embodying this ethic will emerge in the context of the revolution, I'd be very grateful. The fact is that free appropriation might potentially work if economic abundance occurs in the context of small autarchic societies that are socially and technologically static, but no society is static or sufficiently so in the long term. There is much that Marxism gets wrong (e.g. it's philosophy of history and model of revolution), but one thing that Marx got right is that human society develops in the context of an expanding horizon of needs. Anarchist collectivism as a political model is adequate to the challenges this insight poses. Anarchist communism as the abolition of money and free appropriation from communal stores is not. You no doubt have a different view on all of this. If you have the time, I'd look forward to hearing them. In the meantime, please keep me posted on anything you publish.

@@anisau yeah I disagree. It is unfortunate that there are still people having that notion - Instead of looking to the examples of actual working anarchist communist areas, they tend to mainly see the problems that there were within the context of our still current system existing besides them. The people who lived in the ancom areas for example in aragon (Anarchist Spain) successfully abolished money - the means of production were free accessible to everyone who could operate them and the resources/goods were free accessible based on need. The success of such a society is based on the knowledge that mutual aid is necessary for a society to prosper and that therefore people are responsible and held accountable when they abuse/exploit. That knowledge was the collective understanding and ironically the "price" of the high stage of liberty. They knew that any artificial, imposed means of exchange thus currency is at the end still coercive in the way that it ignores the human condition: 1. You were forced into this world 2. You have needs given by nature, this inherently entitles people to freely fulfill their needs without any barrier between them and obviously equally regarding that fact to everyone else. I see that Anarchist collectivism is more achievable now than Anarchist communism but it does not even necessarily be so. A transition from ancol to ancom is feasible but even a direct transition to ancom is. The reason why is the today's standard of technology. We can produce more by having less. We can be highly efficient while also being sustainable and providing high quality. Anarchism needs utilise and implement these elements and realise it's radical potential. This could help us achieve Anarchist communism way faster and in a manner that would attract larger and larger populations. To create a sustainable access abundance monitored by high tech would make society stable, combine that with the checks and balances of democratic oversight and organisation and there it is. A free and social society with a high technological and scientific standard. Due to its obvious advantages, the people want to maintain it and will educate generations in it which would see any less of that as non acceptable. It's a matter of perspective to acknowledge the possibility of a totally different society when you know that we have the knowledge and the technology, means and people we just need to get them under democratic and social control. I think the transitionperiods themselves towards any libsoc system are more difficult to successfully manage than the maintenance of it because of the many factors people cannot forsee interfering. I'd recommend also researching the concept a "resource based economy" and jacque fresco, the venus project. It would be a shame and not only that, it would be a waste of potential if the libsoc movement as a whole just ignores all of that. We need to adopt all what is compatible with Anarchism and cannot let this crucial aspect of potential, radical change slide.

Anarcho-syndicalism is revolutionary unionism. It's a strategy for organisation building in preparation for a revolutionary attempt. Syndicat means union. It is not a term to describe a post-revolutionary society. Such society would be called anarchist or (direct) democratic. It would be a true democracy and not the pseude-democraric electoral representationalism we have today in the modern West. Note that an organisation building strategy involves precisely that: organisation. Anarchists are not opposed to organisation. Nor at they opposed to mass organisations. In June 1936, the Spanish CNT had more than 1.5 million members and in the cities they controlled, they had the capacity to take over the functions of the state. (If you would like to read more about this, check out Chris Ealham's History of Barcelona, "Anarchism and the City".) Note also the term "functions of the state". The functions we typically associate with the State are functions the state takes on because they are demanded of it, and are provided in order to maintain the State's legitimacy. But these functions are not the state. It is worth dwelling on this point. The functions of the state are not the state, but functions it takes on, functions it serves. These functions can be served by other means. For example, neo-liberals seek for these functions to be taken over by the market. So, if the functions the state serves are not integral to the state and can be separated from it and served by other means, what is the state? Most books on politics side step this question. They do so because they either assume (wrongly) that the state and its functions are the same thing, or they resort to Max Weber's characterisation of the state as a monopoly on the means of violence. But this is again to mistake attribute for essence. Protection from violence (due to the treat of the state's greater capacity for violence) is a function served by the state, but not the State itself. So what is the State? The State is a hierachical and bureaucratic apparatus of power that sits seperate to and above the people it governs. It is essentially oligarchical, and it's character as oligarchy (oligos, few; archē, rule of/by) is the same regardless of whether the few who rule are elected to stand in a parliament, take power by force of arms, or claim to be anointed by God. However, if people come together on the basis of equality to deliberate directly on that which is common (rather than through representatives who would think and speak for them) this not only to create democracy, it is(!) the destruction of the State. Direct, participatory democracy is(!) the destruction of the State. It is a different form. Now these preliminary clarifications are out if the way, I can respond to your questions about military and civil defence. I can understand why people closely associate an army with the state. Not only do states create them, bureaucracy is essential to both. Bureacracy is a hierarchical organisation with a particular flow of information: in at the periphery, up to a level empowered to make a decision regarding it, this decision is them communicated back down the hierachy to be acted in at the periphery. An army is such a bureaucracy. Bureacratic organisation is essential to the effective organisation of some functions of the state, but we have already discovered that a state and its functions are separable. If you would like to understand how an anarchist society would organise militarily, it is worth looking at two historical example of how (genuine rather that pseudo-)democracies have organised themselves in times of war: the ancient Athenians and the anarchist militias that fought during the 1936 revolution in Spain. Both the Athenisns and the Spanish anarchists elected their officers. This didn't mean combatants were free to disobey orders on the battlefield. Military cohesion requires this sort of discipline. The militias of the Spanish anarchists were drawn from members of the CNT, which is the anarcho-syndicalist confederation (i.e. the anarchist federation of trade unions. Those who fought volunteered. In ancient Greece, the ability to arm oneself and make oneself available to go to war, was a criterion of citizenship in all cities. In Athens, the urban poor (who might not have been able to afford hoplite armour and weapons, maintained their citizenship by serving as rowers in the naval trireme ships. One if the reasons Athenian poor were able to preserve its democracy against old aristocratic rich was that they were ready to fight and Athenian economy could not survive without naval power to secure its trade.

There is a myth that Athenian democracy was founded on slavery, but while Athens (like all ancient societies) had slaves, they did not fight and they did not form the basis of the Athenian economy. People assume this, but it is an assumption not based on evidence but on the idea that the structure and makeup of Greek society parallels that of Rome and the slave owning states in the 18th century Americas. The only ancient Greek state with that sort of economics and social composition was Sparta, and we know that Sparta was seen throughout Greece as an anomaly. It's helot serfs were created through the conquer and enslavement of neighbouring Greek populations, principally the Mycenians. This was seen as scandalous by the rest of the Greeks. While it was normal in times of war to keep captured men, women and children as slaves, if they spoke Greek, they were usually ransomed back to their cities of origin. The Athenians did have a form of national service. The youths of the city would be garrisoned at forts in the rural hinterland where their military education would take place, and they also might serve in the navy, either as marines or sailors. But there was no standing army of professional soldiers. People needed to farm and to ply their trade if their family land was not enough to support them. All citizens had land and often had a trade as well, and it was a crime punishable by death for a father to fail to teach a son his trade. Socrates, for example, was a stonemason by trade. Also, everyone learnt to read and to swim. An Athenian who couldn't swim was not fit to sail. So, the ancient Greek poleis during the classical era were organised around cities or towns, but they were not states. The Greek word "polis" was typically translated as "city-state" during the 19th and 20th centuries, but it is a mis-translation. Soverign city might be a better translation, but the Greek word "polis" is much closer to our word "community" and the Greeks living in the same polis thought of themselves as a community and were much more communitarian in their outlook than we typically are living as social atoms in modern liberal state-governed (pseudo-democratic) metropolises. But I digress... You also asked about Police. Police are a very modern invention. Sheriffs and magistrates go back to medieval times. Customs officials are an early modern invention. But police are a very, very new thing and coincide with the birth if the city as metropolis. All societies have a legal sphere (just as they all have spheres of politics, science/technology, economy, religion and law. In modern societies these spheres gain independence and operate according to their own logics and media (e.g. the medium of politics is power; the medium of economy is money). How these spheres function is a problem that a societies need to solve. Whether we need a police force, and what character the police have depends upon how a society solves the question of how politics, law and economy function. In liberal capitalist society, the police were invented to secure property rights in the absence of public social welfare. Previously the army served this function. And there have always been officers of the courts. But people also starved in the streets or occupied the cells of debtors prisons. An anarchist society is necessarily a socialist society, but one organised on genuinely direct participatory democratic grounds and achieving broader coordination through anarchist mode of federation. With a greatly expanded participation in the political life of the community, it is doubtful we will need courts or a police force as they function now. The trials can take place in community assemblies, as was done at other times in history. And people will understand the law and its processes better by virtue of their frequent participation in political activities. Also, with this greater participation comes greater scope for rotation of office. People can be less tied to careers within single disciplines. Crime will still happen, but the composition and relative frequency of different crimes will change. The people armed can defend themselves. But how they do it depends on how society is composed. Today the state does it through the police because our society is not genuinely democratic. But in a genuinely democratic society we will need to choose how we do it, but, through our democratic assemblies, we can organise it as fits the changing nature, composition and scale of crime in the new society. Importantly, different communities may choose to do it differenctly. Some might trust to community members to take responsibility to bring charges of wrongdoing directly before the assembly. Some communities might choose to incorporate policing into general civil defence as a form of militia-based national service through which training and the cultivation of responsibility can be provided and regulated. I would also expect any right to bear arms would be less an individual right (as in the US), but a trsponcibility regulated by communal assemblies and predicated on training and demonstration of continuous responsibility (as in Switzerland whether those who have completed national service can keep their arms but only under strict conditions, and who carry them only rarely and in legally defined occasions: shooting practice at ranges, in-season hunting, pest control). Or they might be stored only in community armories. Some communities might ban them outright. My point is that there is no need to define these things in detail up front. There are many plausible ways of solving these questions, and the further one digs into the detail, the more these possibilities open up and present themselves. The critical question is meta-political: how is politics to be done? Once this question is answered in favour of (genuine direct, participatory) democracy, the people can and will ask and solve all manner of political questions among themselves. If we can get enough people to push for greater democracy in the form anarchists suggest, then, rather than uniformity from place to place, we will have a myriad diversity of subtle or not so subtle differences on a range of issues. This variability is what freedom looks like. And it is a fool's errand to predict the future in too much detail. Either way, I hope this responce helps.

@@anisau so basicly, any community could decide it individually, e.g. a Healthcare union for everyone. Some suggest to rehabitalise criminals. But one question remains: how do you takeover and avoid fashists, the police force, military, propaganda, conservatives destroying union rights, etc. Thank you for taking the time to answer so many questions. I guess many ask certain questions, so you could make videos about the often called questions, if you've the time.

@@A.R.8755Post-revolution there will be no unions. During the revolution, the unions will take over the means of production, exchange, distribution and communication and will become worker's cooperatives, autonomous communities and federations of worker's cooperatives and communities. They will need to organise their military and civil defence. Because they are federated, it would make sense to do this in a regional or national scale, but there is no reason they could not do it on a trans-national scale. It world make sense to do it at least regionally due to economies of scale, and advantages to federating in ways that serve the same purpose mutual defense treaties do today. There would also be no practical limit preventing this, because the pattern of organising is always bottom-up rather than top-down, and anarchist federation does not imply ceding sovereignty upwards. In today's nation states, sovereignty is typically located at the national level. This will not be the case in a territory federated along anarchist lines. The pattern will be more akin to the old Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, although composed of democratic communities rather than aristocratic duchies. (Anarchist federations are always confederations, if you wish to apply the modern distinction between federation and confederation.) The Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth survived for 400+ years way yet was not a state and its is worth learning about it because it demonstrates that the State is not inevitable. There was a good episode about it a few months ago on BBC4's program, In Our Time, which is available as podcast through the BBC Sounds app. I do not see any anarchist society having a standing army of professional soldiers. But I do see them going down the road of civil militia and something analogous to national service, although it won't be called that. The historical example to look to to understand what might be done is the militia of the CNT during the Spanish Revolution of 1936‐39.

It wouldn’t. There’s a reason such polities have never survived in the market for statehood.

Autonomy has two aspects: individual and collective. They are two sides of the same coin. Liberalism makes the mistake of thinking of them as opposed. Understood correctly they are mutually reinforcing. Consider: democracy is the political regime consistent with maximising collective autonomy. Yet democracy requires individuals capable of thinking and speaking for themselves. Similarly, individual autonomy can only run so far before it runs into social constraints. To push beyond those constraints, you have to convince people of the need for social change, to bring them with you as you travel down that path. In the modern west, we tend to be socialised to be highly individualistic, but this outcome is an effect of our socialisation. Further, because the seat of consciousness and reason is within the individual, we it can be forgiven for thinking that an egotistic individualism is natural, however as any anthropologist will tell you, most cultures require a high degree of mutual reliance between members of the tribe. Consequently, they tend to think in collectivistic terms. Our relative individualism is partly a consequence of a highly developed market economy, which enables us to satisfy our individual desires and act in a self-regarding, atomistic way. Yet this potential is a consequence of the social arrangement in which we exist, which is in no way a trans-historical norm. Our individualism as social actors is a result of a system of social cooperation and coordination. We tend not to see it because it is mediated by money, which facilitates highly impersonal modes of transaction. Nonetheless, these transactions are absolutely social and socially mediated. Ontologically, however, society is prior to the individual. You and I are near total products of our society. You and I are totally, totally, totally(!) socially and historically embedded. Our possibilities as individuals are socially-historically conditioned. There is no escaping this fact. Whatever degree of alienation you feel relative to the social norms of your society is largely a product of our society's modernity and is facilitated by the fact that we have social spheres (politics, art, science, law, religion, economics) with different values and mediums of operation. This allows us to shift perspective from one sphere to the next, reletivising each in turn. This is a major contributant to our ability to take a critical perspective relative to each. This is a socially conditioned potentiality. In respect that to these considerations, to assert one's individual autonomy in the face of our social conditioning is naive to say the least. We need to face up to these considerations I order to develop our collective potential for autonomy. So, no individual autonomy without facing up to these social considerations. Individual autonomy needs to be developed alongside our collective autonomy. They are two sides of the same coin.

@@anisau Thank you for that detailed answer. I've never heard of some of those terms, but appreciate knowing more about them. The language is a bit technical for me lol, but I think I grasp the gist of what you're saying. Correct me in my attempts to paraphrase below: So, in your view, the society or collective autonomy precedes individual autonomy because the collective autonomy determines whether or not individual autonomy can exist? Also, how would a democracy resolve individual disagreement against the collective? For example, what if someone disagrees with how a community is behaving under anarcho-syndicalism?

@@dburgessnotburger You asked: So, in your view, the society or collective autonomy precedes individual autonomy because the collective autonomy determines whether or not individual autonomy can exist? Not quite. Individual autonomy and collective autonomy are mutually implicating and mutually reinforcing. They rely on each other. They are two sides of the same coin. You can’t have one without the other. But my point (which is largely drawn from the social theory of Cornelius Castoriadis) is that you will not find individual with a fully developed capacity for autonomy in a heteronomous society, that is to say a society governed by tradition and slavish adherence to tradition. You and I may disagree in our political perspectives. (I think anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron, because I am aware of the history of anarchism and its emergence and deep roots within European Socialism of the 19th Century.) But even through we disagree on things, I recognise that you are an inquiring individual who can think and act and speak for himself. (Indeed, it seems to be that your self-image, or at least your online persona, is built around this capacity.) The point that I want to impress upon you is that for all your capacity for autonomy, you are autonomous to the degree you are precisely because you are a product of your environment, which is to say a product of the social-historical conditions in which you were raised. If you are able to put our current society into question and dream up other ways of ordering our society (i.e. to reform or revolutionise it in different ways), it is because you are a product of the social dynamics of modernity. So it is not that collective autonomy determines whether individual autonomy can exist, but that (except in rare and limited instances) individuals with a capacity for autonomy do not emerge unless they are supported by social process that also support institutions of collective autonomy. This is partly because the key tools that you use to think with (language and the intuitable figures of thought and expression) are social products. Autonomous individuals do not come from nowhere. They do not spring out of the ground fully armed like Athena sprang, whole, fully grown and fully armed, from the thigh of Zeus. There so a set of complex social-historical processes that needed to take place to make you the type of person you are with the sort of capacities you have. This is why I assert that society is ontologically prior to the individual. I also want to get people away from thinking that the individual and the collective that are opposed. The individual is irremediably enmeshed in the collective. If you wish to grasp opposing poles, then it is not the individual that is opposed to society, but the social imaginary that is opposed to, and gives meaning to, the psyche and its drives. The individual is a product of that interaction. To think of the individual as a sovereign atom opposed to society is a total misunderstanding of our reality. You also asked: how would a democracy resolve individual disagreement against the collective? For example, what if someone disagrees with how a community is behaving under anarcho-syndicalism? Firstly, anarcho-syncialism is not a type of society. Syndicat is the French word for union. Anarcho-syndicalism is unionism anarchist-style, meaning we organise and militate according to anarchist principles. It is an organisation building strategy for revolution, but is also a way of putting anarchism into practice, demonstrating that it works, and schooling people up so that if a revolutionary opportunity presents itself, people have a sound understanding in the principles of anarchist social organisation and are not forced to invent it all on the spur of the moment. This hopefully will make the revolution more successful and avoid some of the pitfalls that socialists have fallen prey to in the past (e.g. Marxism’s falling prey to authoritarianism). If anarcho-syndicalists are successful, they will forge a truly democratic revolution and an truly democratic society. The resulting society would not be anarcho-syndicalist, because in overthrowing both capitalism and the state, the rationale for unions will cease to exist. The resulting society would be anarchist and the economy run by co-operative enterprises co-ordinated into federations with a bottom-up rather than top-down mode of decision making. So back to your question: how would how would a democracy resolve individual disagreement against the collective? Answer: the same way it does today and in the past. In any democracy, it is the collective will that is sovereign, but if one is serious that collective autonomy and individual autonomy are two sides of the same coin, this does not mean that the collective will simply grind individual dissidents under their heal. Everyone in a democracy also has an interest in individual autonomy, and in such societies the creation of a private sphere is a socially produced outcome. The private sphere doesn’t exist because individuals have fought against the collective to institute it, but because collectives recognise and understand that personal freedoms are important and agree to create a space for this. But the important thing to understand is that individual freedoms are a social thing. Individual freedoms are a social product that is socially recognised, and the limits of individual freedom are always socially instituted and social mediated. There are some individual freedoms an autonomous society will tolerate, some it will actively cultivate, and some that they will not. Individual freedom requires participation in the institutions that create individual freedoms as socially recognised and socially protected. Do these things make more sense to you now?

@@anisau again, thank you for the respectfully articulate answers here. I really appreciate you giving me your time and thought on this subject. So, I'll try to keep my responses as straight forward as possible, just out of reciprocity. Firstly, I want to highlight where we may have overlapping agreements, and then I'll pop a few questions your way if you don't mind. We both agree, it seems, that traditions can become rather slavish in nature (in my view, this is the monopoly posed by the state, and others may say that capitalism is also entailed in this description). I know there may be some nuances here given our diametrically opposing schools of thought, but I think it's safe to say that there is some common ground here. In addition, I would argue that tradition can also be pro-libertarian. I see tradition the same way people see tools. Take a hammer for example. In the hands of a psychotic serial killer, this hammer has the potential to be used destructively. But give the hammer to carpenter, and you will may see beautiful creations produced. My point here is that tradition is important to set parameters for future generations to follow. I believe we can do this through ideas, not revolution (or other forms of violent rebellion). Second, yes. You're correct. Anarchism is traditionally an anti-capitalist/ anti-property movement of the left-libertarian spectrum. And yes, I do receive the whole "it's an oxymoron" argument a lot. But on a fundamentally definitional basis (without invoking Proudhon or any other traditionalist thinkers), anarcho-capitalism can still work in the following ways: 1) Anarcho (derived from Anarchy) refers to the organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation, without political institutions or hierarchical government. So, in basic terms, this just refers to freedom from state oppression. Anarcho-capitalism does advocate a government-free society (or a monopoly-free, state-sanctioned society), and this is why I think there is no philosophical contradiction in the name "Anarcho-Capitalism". 2) Capitalism (referring to free-market capitalism) is an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state. This is where I think the major disagreement comes in... capitalism was a notably pejorative term coined by Marx, and although I think the free market does more justice, capitalism is what the ancaps have ended up with. But no, we do not support the government enforcing property rights. We generally believe that this can be done privately. In summary, semantics doesn't bother me much. If someone wants to say "ancap is a paradox" then that's fine with me. I'm more concerned with ideas, not nomenclature. Although I do think correct labels does help collective understandings. Your next point is about the nature of individual and collective autonomy. I think we both agree there too. I believe there is a synergetic relationship between the two. The individual seems to sprout forth from history and nature and nurture, and then c collective seems to develop from like-minded individuals. But I can't wrap my head around them both co-exisitng. Mainly because democracy shows that the majority has power (hierarchically and physically). This immediately puts the individual autonomy in a precarious position. Going by Noam Chomsky's advisement to question the legitimacy of hierarchies, then I think this is of the many contradictions that kept me from accepting syndicalist ideas. Am I wrong? Let me know. In regards to revolution (violent upheaval), I cannot wrap my head around this concept. I think violence is ineffective at changing human volition. As described in Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon concept, which showed that prisoners "acted" obediently if they thought they were being surveilled. But what about when they weren't being watched.... do you think the prisoners acted compliantly in private? My point here is that revolution forces people to act and capitulate through force, and not through the change of ideas. For instance, I give an anecdotal example (the weakest intellectual argument, I know, but I want to express something here) - children are good examples. Notice how some children act in private. Some children take advantage when their parents are turning the blind eye, others follow the rules of their parents voluntarily, regardless of who is around them --- this is why I believe ideas are more effective than revolution. Besides, one cannot supplant tyranny (the state) by using tools of the state (violent force and compulsion) - hope this was understandable in some way at least lol, soz if not. Feel free to respond to the other points above, and you really have given me some good ideas to mull over, thank you. Additional questions: 1. Do you think property is theft? 2. Do you think people own/ control their own bodies? 3. Why is capitalism/ free market trade tyrannical given that consenting individuals are trading for mutually beneficial gain? 4. Do you think value is subjective? 5. Is the majority in a democracy tyrannical or is it the result of a justified hierarchy? " In any democracy, it is the collective will that is sovereign," Thank you

@@dburgessnotburger Sorry about the delayed response. I don't think you are quite right about legitimacy of tradition. It doesn't serve to set parameters we are in any way obliged to follow. Yes, we may institute and follow the libertarian characteristics of tradition, however, to act consistently with liberty, in such instances we must affirm it or contradict it it in accordance with the values we freely and reasonably choose. As soon as we locate in it an authority we are not free to countermand, it becomes a source of our own heteronomy, which is the opposite of autonomy. Unsurprisingly, I also disagree with you regarding the libertarian character of capitalism, but it is worth explaining why. Pro-capitalists mis-recognise capitalism's character because they are prone to interpreting social actors in the market as rationally self-regarding atoms abstracted from their real social context and needs. They therefore interpret transactions as free. But this ostensive freedom is an illusion, produced by the abstract nature of the analysis rather than a genuine freedom as seen in context. Consider: a starving man who pawns the shirt off his back for a crust of bread is not acting under conditions of freedom, nor the refugee who sells the jewels inherited from her mother in order to board a train away from persecution, nor the workers who return to work for reduced wages because the resources of the factory boss exceeded the time their families could survive on a reduced level of sustenance. Beware the temptation to read into the abstract nature of cash exchange a spurious freedom. It's a lebd that hides more than it shows. And beware of conflating the operations of the market with the social institution that is capitalism. The market is necessary condition capitalism, but it is not a sufficient condition. They are not the same. Capitalism signifies a specific relationship: the selling of labour power for a wage to the owner of capital defined as the means of production, exchange, communication or distribution. It is an unequal relationship and necessarily a relationship of exploitation. It is not free and cannot exist without the backing of the state. Just as the state is a hierachical and bureaucratic apparatus of power that sits sepertate to and above the people it governs, capitalist management is a hierarchical and bureaucratic apparatus of power that sits seperate to and above the workers it employs. Capitalism and the State are essentally isomorphic, and capitalism requires the state's monopoly on legal forms of violence to ensure its continuation. Both are odious to democracy rightly conceived. You advocate private enforcement of property rights, but I would like you to explain: (a) how a right is a right without public tecognition guarantee? and (b) how the privatisation of the public sphere's politico-legal functions does not represent a retreat into a form of neo-feudalism? Also, the idea of some original free act of appropriating land through homesteading is an incoherent fiction. This argument is straight out of John Locke, who proposed that property was acquired through the admixture of human labour, but while that might possibly give a man a claim to the crops produced, the land upon which the crops are grown belongs to no one and if possessed at all can only be rightly held in common. (I agree with Rousseau on this point.) Regarding democracy and the individual, you make of this a problem of majority and minority will. But the legitimacy of democracy derives from participation in the process, not the personal desirability of its outcomes. But I'd like you to understand that anarchism qua democracy needs not preclude either a marketplace or market transactions. It is opposed to capitalism, not markets. But it does subordinate the market and limit the scope of permitted transactions the demands of the democratically determined collective will. It will do this, for example, through mandating wage equality and thereby preventing labour's reduction to a bare commodity. How can it do this? I hear you ask. Isn't this: (a) the institution of rules and in effect law? (b) contrary to freedom? (c) ro presuppose the State? The answer to these questions is: (a) yes (b) no (c) no. How? Autonomy is the act of giving law (nomos) to oneself (auto). Giving the law to oneself is freedom. If the state is a hierachical and bureaucratic apparatus of power that sits seperate to and above the people it governs, then democracy (i.e. direct, participatory democracy in which people come together on the basis of equality to decide directly on the laws they choose to live by) is (a fortiori) the destruction of the state. Now the question of revolution: Revolutionary violence is only necessary because the forces of capitalism and the state will not respect the democratic will of the people and will not give up their privaledge without a fight. Yes, I understand the ancap idea that the market represents a violence free order of free transactions, but the property relations on which the capitalist market is based are necessarily backed by the overwhelming threat of state violence. This is a fact and our so called ancaps are a species of naive and deluded hippy to think otherwise. The only real guarantee of peace in the absence of state violence or its threat is equality: an equal stake in the social order as commonwealth of equals. The idea that "faith in the market as a sphere of free transactions" can prevent violence in the context inequality is the height of self-delusion. Violence is always a potential and the only things that can keep a lid on it is equality, a genuine stake in an egalitarian society, and democratisation of theq possibilities for individual human flourishing. Now your concluding questions. Property is theft: This is a reference to capitalism. What Proudhon was referring to was property as the means of production, i.e. as an individual's exclusive property and a means of exploiting those who are forced work for you. In the same 1840 essay he also described justice as the unity of anarchy and order (from whence the superimposed A and O as a symbol for anarchism is derived), and this only makes sense if one connects these concepts with the idea of (direct, participatory) democracy. The lesson: Don't get confused by Proudhon's love of apparent paradox. When seen from the intended perspective, the paradox is resolved. The point was to provoke people into asking themselves what was meant. By expressing himself in ironic and puzzling ways, Proudhon was trying to compel his readers to think for themselves. Do people own their own bodies? Of course, but that doesn't mean we should accept the body's reduction to the status of a commodity... ...Yes, a market transaction represents a benefit in the eyes of both transactors, but to consider the transaction as necessarily free means abstracting it from its real context. At best the context is innocuous. But it's all too frequently pernicious. Is value subjective? Value can be both objective or subjective. But as any undergrad philosophy or history of science student will tell you, objectivity doesn't exist independently of subjectivity. Objectivity's conditions of possibility are the product of science as a socially produced and mediated sphere of enquiry and knowledge creation. Objective valued are a product of socially agreed procedures of abstraction. For an example of this, think of any agreed standard of measurement. Is democracy tyrannical? No. By definition, no! Why? Consider these synonyms found in Aristotle's Politics: monarchy/tyranny, aristocracy/oligarchy, community/democracy. Aristotle considered these the public-interested and class-interested modalities of three basic forms: monarchy (rule of one), oligarchy (rule of few), democracy (power held by the People). But we can legitimately say that monarchy is simply an oligarchy of one. So, really there are only two basic forms: oligarchy and democracy, and of the two only oligarchy is tyrannical (e.g the oligarchy of "30 Tyrants" installed by Sparta in Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War). (And the Greeks invented these words, so who are we to tell them they understood them wrongly.) The concern regarding a potential tyranny of the majority derives from John Stuart Mill 1859 book, On Liberty. The propertied classes thought universal suffrage would result in socialism, and they was keen to ensure individual rights (esp. individual property rights) were tied to, legitimated by, and made consonant with the discourse of liberty. Notice however that the source of potential tyranny is the new 19th Century spectre of the working class as mass movement, and also the deafening silence on the actual, recent and (at that time) continuing tyranny ofthe propertied classes. JSMill, as a parliamentarian, was fully aware that, at the time of writing, holding taxable property above a certain valu acted as qualification to vote. He was also aware (but less keen to talk about it) of the intrusion and moral supervision by the propertied classes into the lives of the workers who rented from them, or in the colonial context they owned. In view of this, JSMill's middle-class hand-wringing about a potential tyranny of the majority seems a touch perverse. All of these concepts have a history and a different (often less savoury flavour) when understood in context.

So, what you are saying is that individual autonomy is possible but collective autonomy is not: that if one person deliberates rationally on the ends he wants to achieve and the best means he has available to achieve it, we can call him autonomous; but if two people deliberate rationally, agreeing on the ends they want to achieve and the best means they have available to achieve those ends, then we cannot call them autonomous. See what I've done here? I've set out clearly the implications of your assertion. Two scenarios: one person vs two people. Aside from this difference the structure of the scenarios is the same. I've done this because it shows clearly the problem in your thinking. You think agreement between two people is impossible. And you've implied that to assert its possibility is to engage in "double-speak". I think the issue here is less the logical consistency of the terms I've used and more your inability to engage in trusting relationships with those around you. The poverty of your philosophical anthropology is clear and apparent. But I'm worried about how you live your life and worried for those around you if your really think honest agreement between two people is impossible. I want you to reflect on this, because it seems that giving articulation to your stupid political opinions on the internet must be the very least of your worries right now. You have much, much bigger things to worry about.

@@anisau You know, your dissection of "collective autonomy" makes a really good point. Let's take two people who happen to completely agree with each other all the time out of the equation for the moment. I was thinking in terms of the word "anarchy" (no rule), but I was being quite un-idealistic. If two people get together, have some disagreements, and some of those disagreements cannot be rectified in a single policy, we have a situation where compromise is needed. In compromise, one person's (or both persons', across a set of policy questions or even in one policy) wishes have to be subordinated beneath the others. This contradicts autonomy (the ability to act as one wishes). We all do it all the time. But this last fact has us wondering, if we do it all the time, then aren't we now living in a state of collective autonomy (and only not by way of our attitude)? I get that much democracy today is not as involved, thought out, or free of the usurpation of capitalists (that are betraying capitalism in the doing of the usurpation), but these are problems some of which AnSyn does not fix and others which it does, as outlined by yourself, but with means usable by democracy in it's present national form. But if one genuinely, a their core, finds purpose and contentedness in the subordination, one could say that they've entered into a state of collective autonomy, and that to me makes sense, so thank you for the clarification. Two wrinkles still bother me though, which is the inclusion of the word "anarchy" in all this, and, secondly, what in your mind keeps the inevitable arrival of discontents from causing either endless fracturing of the syndicates (resulting in weakness) and the resulting attractiveness of the opposite (via both said appearance of weakness and the prior discontent) of the now freely available passing of policies that favor consolidation of power and the suppression of dissenting voices and then all the more trope-ish horrors that follow? Or, cut off the last, more apocolyptic part of that, and simply ask, what's to keep things from gravitating toward what we have today? The answer is some sort of binding rules (and even this is not necessarily sufficient), and all I ask is that once we've arrived here, dop the anarchy word. I don't know if at some point you loved it (I'm not making a personal attack here, I just really don't understand). Anyway, I loved it, as some sort of Rousseaian ideal. I look at these AnSync visions and I see a lack of difference from democracy (other than some really good ideas for its improvement) and also a somewhat clear line of vision to its undoing in ways that most democracies are not so susceptible to. "Trusting relationships with those around you..." At first I thought this was wild ad hominem, but then I thought perhaps you're attaching this to the idea that I cannot see my way to a world where collective autonomy makes sense. Maybe we can agree that my personal ability to cede any particular amount of my interests is not explicitly revealed in my doubts, but rather that of a sufficient number to make this work. Agreement between two people is not impossible. It's just sometimes not happening, and, especially when times get really soft, people get more and more picky about what they deserve, or, when times are hard, they get more and more fearful about what power structures are up to and if starvation is, by said structure's doing, around the corner. Contentedness is the problem in all this, and it's a problem that needs fixing within (not that we shouldn't strive for better human systems, but we should know that perfection will never be). Thanks for your time.

@@mh4zd No. In the scenario you presented, in which two two people cannot agree, you assume one person will be forced to subordinate his interests to the other and therefore autonomy cannot exist. But if so, the situation îs not democratic, because democracy is the coming together on the basis of equality to deliberate on that with is common. Psrhaps you also believe that even if they can agree to a compromise, neither gets what they truely want and both are subordinating their interests to the common good, so autonomy still doesn't exist. Part of the problem here is that you are invested in the idea of the utility maximising individual as a rational actor soverign to himself. This abstract image of a self-complete, pre-social individual was a mainstay of the philosophical anthropology that undergirded classical liberalism. Yet, this image was and is an incoherent fiction. The individual cannot be abstracted from society in this way. To ask "what came first, society or the individual?" is much like asking, "what cane first, the chicken or the egg?" But we also know from developmental psychology, that true individuation (not merely the expression of personal tastes but the ability to reflect on society and to put it into question), is a potential that emerges late in a person's development towards maturity. Historically, it also emerged as an adult norm only in modern societies (ones no longer governed primarily by tradition) and only rarely and sporadically in pre-modern societies. Therefore, we can safely answer our chicken and egg question by stating that society is ontologically prior to the individual. Individualtion is a social process that fabricates such thst they have a capacity individually defined (as opposed to socially defined (e.g traditional) ends. Consider also that no indivisible can attain to rational thought without the resources of his or her natural language, and that rational thought also facilitates a reflective use of language aimed at overcoming the ways natural languages tend to corral its speakers into societally specific patterns of thought. (Hence France produces French people with French customs and attitudes and Japan produces Japanese people with Japanese customs and attitudes. The implication of this is that autonomy and its potentialality is not a primordial quality of the individual, but a capacity of fully developed, individuals socicalised within historically specific communities. This also means that you make an error when you think of individuals as independent rational actors pre-possessed of an autonomy that they trade away for security when they enter society and bind themselves to others through compromise. Of course, tou are not alone in making this error. It's known as naive realism because we all tend to think this way initially, due to the fact that the seat of consciousness and rationality resides in the individual, and egotism is a universal trait of the young. But most of us grow out of it to a greater or lesser degree as we age and develop and learn more about society and the way it works. Many of us will have this illusion burst doe us in our first year of university. The upshot is that is that we are always bound to, embedded within and largely fabricated by society, and hence autonomy has two aspects which are inseparable and exist as two sides of the same coin: individual and collective. We cannot escape the collective aspect of autonomy. The political regime consistent with the full expression of collective automony is (direct) democracy. The only modern political ideology commiyted to democracy in its direct, participatory sense is anarchism, which emerged during the 19th century from within the revolutionary socialist movement and which opposed itself BOTH to capitalist liberalism AND to Marx's authoritarian centralism. Both capitalism and the state are authoritarian. Autonomy has both individual and collective aspects. They are mutually reinforcing. You cannot have one without the other. We affirm our capacity for autonomy in the attempt to be autonomous. But we cannot be truely autonomous without demanding, creating and participating in (direct) democratic institurions. Voting is not the criterion of democracy many think it tk be. In fact, it is only democratic when one participates in a vote as an equal member of an assembly and one votesdirectly on the issue at hand. As soon as you vote in order to elect someone to deliberate on your behalf, you have ceded your autonomy in crucial ways. The class of deliberators selected cis the mechanism of votingis an oligarchy, and parliament is an oligatchical institution. Don't just think that an-archē means no rules. An-archē means no rulers (archon = ruler), and this is why all of those aligned with the oligarchical faction in ancient Athens (Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes, Xenophon) characterised democracy as anarchic: if everyone is equal, there are no rulers. That didn't mean there are no rules or that a truely democratic society cannot give rules to itself. Autonomy means to give the law to oneself. We do this through the collective aspect of autonomy, but only when we participate directly as equals when instituting of our laws. This is what anarchism is all about: the achievement of democracy in its radically self-consistent, direct participatory sense. I hope this clears things up for you.

​@@anisau I agree with your breakdown of individualism, as a thing in reality not actually in existence (chicken, egg, etc.). I think where were crossing paths in the night is that I'm not referring to the interests of the individual as some transcendant moral ground that I hold as valid, as an article of faith, but rather that, despite the reality of the socially driven underpinnings of most of our natures, we persistently do not behave according to this reality, and consistently, in interpersonal and political life, assert the immediate, or perceived in any considered term, desires of the individual. And of course this comes often cloaked as something other than it is - cloaked from not only others, but our own selves. This, along with the problem of the errant or immoral federation (capable of imposing its will on other federations and therefore leading to unequal opinions about the degree to which this threat needs to be prepared for, leading in turn to disputes regarding the allotment of communal means), are things I see not addressed in your vision. Perhaps I'll get there further into your response. But it seems that you are resting your dream on a moral state, the leveraging of which you lack because you lack a hell, or some other device upon which to have people have the social good at top of mind, sans even the cognitive foibles that stand in the way of even the greatest of intents to possess said state. It seems you've gone along - with all due love and respect (again, could be missing something) -believing that the only thing standing in the way of this extant state of the human being is the proper social mechanics, and perhaps some bad actors. We're all the bad actor, our relative disenfranchisement being the number one reason behind the degree to which we are not. I realize I'm not arguing against a socialist (I think...) and the above seems like I'm putting forth the reasons why it's unwise to place people in power in order that means get allotted properly (because, when the chips are down, these people always seem to "deserve" not to suffer quite as much as the rest, which is one half of the standard argument against socialism). Rather, I mention this element of human nature because you seem to suggest that direct democracy will be so beautiful as to cancel out the very existence of dissatisfaction with social systems, and the degree to which we regard our dissatisfactions with such incredible lack of objectivity. But you go too far in your definition of democracy, and it matters. The only place where democracy touches the issue of equality is where this means of social organization to most people implies one vote per one person - an equality of representation. With this in mind, and given any permutation of democracy one can imagine, people will often be subordinating their preferred vision to that of the majority's (which is the primary impetus for the concept of a constitution, owing to the understanding that majorities are capable of literally anything, including oppression of the minority, which, in strict terms, is what's happening all the time in democracies, albeit in less than horrific ways, thanks to the constitution, which attempts to predict are react to said horrors. One of the problems with democracy, which we are living through right now, is that the Overton window on what constitutes a horror moves, particularly when life gets easy. When you combine that with siloed media perpetuating myths, ugliness gets brewing, and, along with that, people start imagining nifty ways to reconfigure things such that fairness is maximized. "To deliberate that [which] is common..." Hmm, and whatever else they have to deliberate, like how to get along on that which is not held in common. Also, you take the individual versus society thing a little far by stating that ontologically we can say that the individual arises from the social. The arrival of reflection upon the society being late is only one, more conscious-level, manifestation of the individual. The child is acutely socially driven, but, mind you, for reasons of his weakness (pragmatically detected and evolutionarily designed means against weakness), and, importantly, one of the threats is other humans (at least evolutionarily speaking), which drives the child to the protection of (primarily) mother, and, to a lesser but emerging degree, clan (familiar faces). But the individual is always there and, in your layout, not disproven, and, by a close look at evolution, and observation (I have children), is always waiting in the wings and emerges to assert itself where it feels secure enough to do so. While appearing - with assertion and challenge - late (18 months or so) that does not mean the phenomenon was not present in the form of design. Rather, the design was present, lacking only the knowledge of what to engage with. I think we can agree this makes sense. In your model, the individual arises from the social, but the individual is the design represented by both the id (that which takes over for the self when the social fails to provide the necessary material needs but that is always present to ask, do for itself and receive for itself) and the ego (that by which the self senses its worth to the group - a phenomenon grounded in why that worth matters, namely, the group's ability to deliver a host of goods to said individual). Both parts are grounded in the needs of the material individual. Looked at like this, the driver of society is individual material need. But I'm happy to go with the chicken - egg trope, because so much of the design is evolved toward social dependence and social leveraging. But, it must be noted, that a primal view of evolution features the individual as carrier of the unique environmental-parlaying into species proliferation, and as such, evolution has placed a high degree of selfishness into creatures - a selfishness degraded by later stages of evolution wherein the advantages of sacrifice, for the species, has been cracked into by the phenomenon of life, albeit with quite evident limitations to the mechanisms herein for this group-success strategy, as the adaptive aspect of evolution still reside firmly in the individual (sacrificial features coming at a cost by way of watering down the average presence and proliferation - via sexual success - of successful traits). The child lays down associative habits in the brain whereby the draw of mother and the familiar has caused things like moral adaptation (doing as the group and individuals want) and this echoes into later life, making us, yes, extremely social. But the aforementioned dynamic of continual burbling up of individual desire continues into adulthood, and does so in a way synonymous with the childhood, and can be seen in social dynamics, whereby, for instance, a nation becomes less self-centered and more pre-disposed to subduing personal interest in times of (serious) war. In other words, when things are less secure. When things are more secure, people get less agreeable. But this reality that you paint delivers a problem - if it was always there, then why the problem that you wish to amend? Is it the presence of bad actors? How many bad actors? Where are the bad actors in your future world? How do you know how many bad actors there are, and the degree to which those that people your well-structured parliaments are not bad actors? (acknowledging of course that there are not simply bad and good actors, but shades across the spectrum coloring all, most important among which is not some level of individual good and evil, but rather the ability to be objective in self-analysis). "Both capitalism and the state are authoritarian." Ya, in a manner of speaking, although I somehow feel more ok with suffering the ills of this non-pointed, non-intentional (other than the intentions of selfishness) authority of merit capturing means that is the capitalist authority (if capturing means can be called authority, but I'll demure, as lions and tigers and all of nature exert an authority of a kind). I feel ok with this because there are no high-falut'n ideas behind them, and ideas for the final end to all that is bad is where the really sucky stuff comes into our history. I prefer the perpetual but bloodless state of revolution that is democracy (that you have good ideas for improving). But, while you seem dedicated to democracy, there's also a socialist vein in your thinking, and I don't think all people agree with you, particularly if you're vying for equality of outcome. This seems stupidly obvious, but I'm not sure your democratic mechanisms anticipate the presence of this disagreement. They seem rather to anticipate the existence of a present and predominate (or better) mindset whose only present obstacle is the lack of the proper governmental mechanisms.

@@anisau ....."Capitalism is authoritarian" - Yes, in the way that lions and viruses and the cold and the volcano are authoritarian to the us all. Monopoly is not only a bad manifestation for all within a capitalist society, but also for capitalism itself. But monopoly arises naturally from capitalism. This is why capitalism, while being the closest representation to nature in the economic systems, is an artificial, socially preserved, state (preserved by the banning of monopoly). But it's true that ever since one could no longer "go west, son" (since there was no longer any land left), the availability of the fruits of individual efforts were to a degree that could be called discriminatory (beyond the state of discrimination that existed in the prior state of a broader meritocracy (in theory, of course)) cut off from certain types of people whose prior exploits owed themselves to energy and strength (with the remaining opportunities being sequestered more now into the realms of intelligence). "Consider also that no [individual] can attain to rational thought..." Is this, and the paragraph that follows it, trying to say that the way in which the individual manifests itself a product of the culture? In superficial ways, yes, but there are strong commonalitiies too that are precisely mappable onto the concerns of democracy and the ability for it to truly represent people. The ways in which the individual desire (autonomy) are not common across cultures deliver important insights, and the ways in which they do, I agree, do not always point to something best called primordial, as the primordial does collide with the phenomenon of groups in ways that bring about socially invented devices that are shared across cultures, simply because said devices are both effective and commonly available to the human mind. But in either case, there are common individual desires. "This also means that you make an error when you think of individuals as independent rational actors pre-possessed of an autonomy that they trade away for security when they enter society and bind themselves to others through compromise." Well, I never said rational, but, other than that, couldn't have stated it aby better myself. We are no where near rational, as we are no where near capable of accurate and objective introspection. Objectivity itself, in the context of social matters, being a fiction. I might also point out to you here that you may be segregating autonomy too much, in a way that contradicts your other purposes. I would say, and your other lines would seem to agree, that autonomy itself contains within it freely and selfishly chosen non-autonomous states. This seems to be what you're saying elsewhere. "We are fabricated by society...." Yes, in ways we don't even realize too. I get it. Where did you make the bend whereby autonomy was seen being proposed as an assertion of a moral ground or a state that can be internally and objectively reflected upon? I don't even believe in free will my man. Autonomy is a beast that boils up and our lack of objective self-awareness is the very awe -inspiring feature as to its power to defy any and all political systems. If you're looking to transcend that you need to start a religious discipline, not push a political system. "The political regime consistent with the full expression of collective autonomy is (direct) democracy." Using your definitions, I agree. Not sure what it results in, or if the more specific prescriptions you lay out survive, but, ya. O to the friggn M G. "An-arche....(Archon=ruler)." Dude, archy=rule. It's not Anarchony. I'm willing to meet you at your definitions, but in light of your condescension re youth and college and consciousness, etc., this unrigorous and dishonest argumentation is not unappealing to the point of being discrediting. "Voting is not the criterion for democracy you may think it is..." This is getting pedantic my friend. Who clicks on a anarcho-syndicalism vid and is not already versed in what you cover here?

Mate! I can deal with verbose, but no one can de with florid. You are not going to persuade anyone of anything if you can't order your thoughts into clear sentences. At best you lose your reader. In your case, you demonstrate inarticulate confusion. What does this say about your ideas? You've let yourself down. You've let your side down. Nobody is thanking you. Come back and try again when you've got less ice/speed/coffee in your system and had a good sleep.

Thanks for your comment. You raise an interesting point. To address it, I'm going to restate what is at issue and then walk you through three levels of explanation (physical, biological, psychological) and explain how they interelate. Please bear with me. To start, you raised issue with idea of spontaneous motion, which I used as a metaphor to explain the concept of "spontaneity" in a political context. (I wanted to define spontaneity as "emerging from the resources of the self" and use it to reconcile this idea with autonomy as a potential for rational deliberation and capacity for planning, rather than the more usual connotations of "spontaneity", which, due to their association with improvisation, tend to associate it with whimsy and a lack of prior or sustained thought.) Also, I agree with you that the idea of spontaneous motion is, strictly speaking, contrary to the principle of efficient causality. The position you are advancing is called Determinism. I acknowledge it is a fundamental tenet of the physical sciences. It is not my intention to contradict it. I do however think its explanatory potential is limited to specific domains. The problem is that, followed to its logical conclusion, Determinism denies the possibility of Free Will. If we accept this, then also: (a) the sphere of Politics eases to exist as a domain of free (i.e. open, unpredictable) contestation (b) the emotions of hope and anxiety have no meaning and both ought to be supplanted by resigned fatalism (c) consequentially much of our lived experience ceases to make sense. In short, philosophical determinism, taken to its logical conclusion, confronts us as deeply (even existentialialy) paradoxical. So, how do we resolve the apparent contradiction? By limiting the concept of efficient causality to its proper domain: the physical and biological sciences and acknowledging that is applicability to psychology is both limited and partial. To explain.... Please recall that I deployed the concept of "spontaneous motion" as a metaphor to explicate the idea of spontaneity as a predicate of autonomy, defined here as a capacity for reflective deliberation and creative action emerging from out of the resources of the self. This appearance of spontaneity has something to do with the complexity of the systems in question. But it is not simply a question of complexity or our inability to adequately model it. For example, we may have difficulty predicting weather systems, but no one would argue weather systems develop in anything other than rigorous accordance with Determinism and the principle of efficient causality. And its not just a question of where we define the system/environment boundary. To explain, let's first consider a hypothetical microbiologist observing the movement of protozoa, and who might describe them as capable of "spontaneous movement". What he really means by this is that their movement under the microscope appears random and that their motive force is attributed to the movement of the cilia of each individual cell rather than to currents within their environment. In this instance, the microbiologist may use the phrase "spontaneous movement", but what he means is that the impelling force is attributable to the internal resources of each cell. In this moment he is not talking about the longer term energy exchange between the cell and environment that nourishes it, which is a perspective that would see them as part of the same system. Rather, he is arbitrarily asserting a system/environment boundary between the cell and its environment and "bracketing out" (temporarily ignoring) the fact that the protozoan cell is part of a more general system. In this he is not denying the fact of efficient causation nor the infinite chain of chemical or physical causes. He is not contradicting the determinism that underpins his vocation as a scientist. He is speaking figuratively to communicate the fact that the protozoa demonstrate propulsion that exceeds the means attributable to their environment alone. I was thinking of this sort of scenario when I originally suggested "spontaneous motion" as a metaphor to explicate the idea if spontaneity as "emerging from out of the resources of the self". But my explanation does go beyond it in a way that goes beyond determinism and the principle of efficient causality. Is this a contradiction? No. Why? Because figurative uses of speech are valid if they adequately communicate the intended meaning. Let's continue... The microbiologist in our example used figurative speech to as a means of locating the effective cause of the protozoa's movement internal to the protozoa itself. He did not speak contrary to philosophical determinism when describing the movement of protozoa as spontaneous because his meaning was figurative. Yet, the meaning I attempted to convey in the video goes beyond determinism and the principle of efficient causality, because I am not talking about protozoa but about humans: humans capable of political action. Humans are capable of reflective intentionality (including the comparative evaluation of means and ends) and of symbolic expression. Hence, humans are capable of acting in ways that exceed the effects of either instinct or of classical or operant conditioning. Perhaps this is an effect of system complexity, but it results in what seems to be a genuinely emergent set of phenomena that transcend deterministic explanation and yield a relative, fraught and incomplete, yet nonetheless real and significant, capacity for free will and genuine creativity. My point is that this creativity doesn't need to be relegated to making shit up on the spur of the moment because we are suddenly confronted with an opportunity. Our spontaneity can be expressed by a decision to enact a long term strategy expressed in the form of organisation building, such that we can foment revolutionary opportunities and increase the liklihood of success when these opportunities arrise. We affirm or spontaneity through deliberative action. We are affirm our freedom because we will something, and especially so when we will something in the face of opposition. We affirm our autonomy in the attempt to be autonomous, even if we temporarily or persistently fall short of our goals. Sorry for the long and complex explanation, but your question opened up a deep set of issues. Hopefully this responce not only clarifies things for you but helps you to feel confident that beneath an apparently simple and straightforward 24 minute video is a much deeper and more philosophically rigorous vein of thought than might otherwise be apparent at first glance.

@@anisau @Anarchy is Autonomy @Anarchy is Autonomy wow that's a lot to read and even harder to truly unpack and give a response. But I will do the best I can. 1: Free will doesn't exist. Plain and simple. We can make choices but none of them are truly "free" because none of us are "free" and never truly can be. Its impossible task to attain. As for the "will" aspect, it's usually meant to refer to a person's hardened conviction and willingness to arrive at a particular goal. But in order to have that goal, there has to be external sources influencing that. You referred to this "will" as the "resources of the self". 2: I'm very familiar with Determinism as I identify with the term. though I understand and appreciate the desire to throw in a more Compatibalist explanation of how things happen, it's just that; a desire. It's wishful thinking, a lie we tell ourselves to feel in control of our destiny. Well there is no destiny and there is no fate. Only the past, the present and the potential future decided by the events that came before it. Everything can be explained in q logical, scientific and rational way if we look hard enough for the answer. It might take hundreds of even thousands of years for confirmation of those facts but we will find them. 3: We are reflective creatures with great capacity for forethought and planning, as well as instinctively ingenuitive, some more than others for a variety of reasons. You are correct that just because we can't comprehend the complexity of something, it doesn't mean it occurred randomly. Chaos and randomness are not synonyms despite the common mistake to the contrary. But anything we think, decide and do whether it's impulsive and poorly thought our retributive plans of anarchistic terrorism or it's all thought out, intentionally planned action, is brought about by a series of conditions. Not to mention our natural genetic influence by our forebears. This reflectiveness is proof not of free will, but rather proof that we have an unparalleled mental capacity to observe, respond and deal with complex situations in our environment due to our large and highly structured brain that is rivaled only just barely by Dolphins, Octopus, Crows and Elephants. 4: It's not accurate to say something is external to the law of cause and effect. Nothing it beyond it, or else we get into religious, deity spanning entities that interfere and manipulate reality. People are nothing more but complex organisms that constantly are at war between seeking a functional and coherent system structure while competing in a constant conflict between those who have structural power who wish to organise and control the function of the system as well.like the events unfolding in Ukraine, there are many moving parts, even more catalysts that Putin himself may not be consciously aware of, and infinitely more possibilities that will stem from it. Everything anyone does is determined by something or someone else. That is why it's so important to decentralize power and have a democratic society, so that the realm of influence is not squarely on the shoulders of a few. But sadly, this will always occur. Nature demands it. As much as we wish to mitigate the nasty and brutish effects of the state of nature, we cannot escape it. There will be leaders, lazy people, disabled people, intellectual people, dumb people, dedicated people, people prone to criminality, people prone to altruism, people prone to selfishness. I appreciate your well thought out life philosophy and it's direct association with a material foundation for how to change things, but it simply won't result the way you wish. 5: In my opinion, there must be a state apparatus. It must be there to quell certain acts and behaviors. Things not entirely caused by economic growth and stability but often made worse explicitly because of it. Certain behaviors cannot and never should be accepted by the majority and once the majority accepts them, it's sadly left to the government to control what society can't on its own. Thomas Paine said it best when discussing the role of the State and it's relationship to the civil/private political sphere. Today, we live in a society that stands for nothing but degeneracy and arbitrarity. It's by design. If we can't agree on basic codes of conduct, if we can't agree on the problem then there will never be any meaningful solution. Personally, I wonder if it's too late. No amount of union membership or worker management will save us from social anomie, the destruction of the family (not specifically the nuclear family mind you, but the extended and multigenerational), the tossing away or discipline and the eradication of roles, typically associated with gender but not always. 5: I share your desire for a society, nay, economy, that is but around the people themselves, working and collaborating. But the argument for an anarchist society sounds dreadful because it's fantastical. People are meant to be led, to place trust in community elders and leaders. There will always bees it be a strong authority to keep things together. No matter what kind of father figure it is. Whether an actual father, which society is suffering from a lack of due to specific laws and cultural adoptions by Capitalism, or the State itself, which serves as a beacon of guidance and security. The effect of today's generation is a cultural decline paired with and partly created by inequality, uncertainty of roles, destruction of fatherhood and the incessant division created by the elite to convince men and women they are enemies rather than complimentary to one another. Until that gets fixed, nothing will. Because the motivation to be a contributing, productive member of society dwindles the more and more we fall into this "I don't need no man" and "I'm going my own way" nonsense. But each is a reaction. Created by a set of conditions whether real or imaginary. When I saw imaginary I'm referring to manufactured outrage and deviance to further the ends of the elite by destroying families and convincing those people they would be better off alone or without them.

The aim of anarchism is revolution, but we understand this revolution in a two-fold sense. Negatively speaking, what we are against is capitalism and the state. Positively, what we are for is the extension of (direct, participatory) democracy to every institution of society. The creation of democracy is (a fortiori) the destruction of the state, because what makes a state a state is that it is a hierarchical and bureaucratic apparatus of power that sits seperate to and above the people it governs. The creation of democracy is the destruction of capitalism, which is is the hierarchical and bureaucratic relationship in which the workers are subordinated to the bosses and shareholders who direct and exploit our labour for profit. Democracy is not voting for leaders to decide for on our behalf. An oligarchy selected by vote is still an oligarchy. No, democracy is the creation and changing of situations so that we can come together on the basis of equality to debate and decide by voting directly on all the issues that affect us in common. You asked about real world projects, so how is this to be achieved in the real world and on a real world scale? Through the strategy of anarcho-sydicalism! The International Workers' Associatiom (IWA-AIT) is a federation of workers unions organised and operating according to anarchist principles. It's aim is to advance and defend workers interests against the capialist and rent-seeking classes today whilst building an organisation capable of carrying through social revolution tomorrow. The key thing is that the organisations federated within the IWA are not waiting for tomorrow to bring democracy into being. To join is to start participating directly and immediately in the project of collective and individual autonomy. Collective and individual autonomy are two sides of the same coin. You cannot achieve a full development of your individual autonomy unless you actively create and participate in social institutions that realise and practice collective autonomy, which is to say democracy in its direct and participatory sense. While the end game all anarchists work towards is social revolution, the extension of (direct, participatory) democracy to all institutions of society, we affirm our autonomy in the here and now by making the attempt to build organisations with this character. Every meeting, every picket and every strike represents an event in which the power of capitalism and the power of the state meet resistance and are made to retreat. Every attempt at organising and extending or organisation further represents the fact of our thinking and acting for ourselves both as individuals and as members of the working class. This is what makes it a real world project. The revolution isn't some far off all-or-nothing event. The revolution is all of the steps on the way to and through and past any single climax of struggle. And nothing that we do to support each other through the organisation and militancy of an anarcho-syndicalist organisation is wasted. This is what makes it realistic as a long-term strategy for revolution. The benefits of participation are direct and rewarding despite the distance to our end goal. The values, actions and forms of relationship, (equality, autonomy, solidarity, mutual aid, direct democracy, direct action, federation) that we put into practice today within our organisations are the same values, actions and forms of relationship that will characterise a future anarchist and libertarian socialist society. And nothing builds confidence in oneself and real friendship with others than engaging in a struggle for better wages and conditions or to get sacked workers reinstated or compensated. We don't need the bureaucrats within mainstream unions to tell us how to do these things. We are more creative and achieve better results when we do it for ourselves. We can do without the bosses and the bureaucrats and politicians, but they cannot do without us. That is our strength and our power. All we need to do is think and organise and stand together when we act. We have the tools to do this. They are called anarcho-sydicalism and the IWA-AIT.

1. How can an individualist federate? Answer: by joining a group. Why? Because federations are, by definition, comprised of groups. If an individualist seeks to federate, is he still an individualist? I think not. Autonomy has two aspects, individual AND collective. They are two sides of the same coin. And an individualist is, quite literally, a halfwit. Think about it. If individualists could organise themselves into movement, as your question implies, they could only do so through some mode of collective action, since collective action is what constitutes a movement. Those who think of themselves as individualists tend to be fools who can't open their mouths without contradicting themselves. I think your question demonstrates this admirably. 2. Regarding your exhortation to (*ahem*) think for oneself, you mention having been lied to. Who do you think has lied to you? And why do you think this?

I've got an hour long presentation on anarcho-syndicalism and the IWA that I need to fix the audio on. It was part of a presentation given at the invitation of Liberté Ouvrière journal in November, which I plan to post as soon as I find the time to fix it. In it I spend some time explaining how the commonly accepted public understanding of the term "democracy" was subject to change between 1790 and 1835, and that this had a direct effect on Proudhon's decision to describe himself as an anarchist in 1840, despite his politics clearly being democratic. I'm impatient to get this out there because I'm keen to arm people to critique the common misconception of democracy I'm especiallt sick of reading how the 6 Jan. 2021 insurrection by Trump's supporters was an attack on democracy. Certainly it was an attack on electoral representationalism within a state governed by parliamentary institutions, and of course Trump and the other fucktards involved are a first class shitcunts, but the middle class handwringing irks me as missing a number of key points. Electoral representatonalism is not democracy. The ancient Athenians understood this. Even the drafters of the US constitution understood this. (James Madison stated so explicitly.) Yet the historical amnesia and muddled thinking that affects (a) academic historians and political scientists and (b) their current and former students working in the media and in public policy roles is extraordinary and profound. That misunderstanding has as near to universal acceptance as it is possible to get. It's taught in schools and repeated ad nauseum in our newspapers and TV bulletins. It is what Castoriadis would describe as a cardinal social-imaginary signification; a foundation stone of our current Western liberal ideology so deeply entrenched as to be almost unquestionable. Talking about it typically meets with embarrassed incomprehension because it not only undermines the accepted worldview everybody shares, it throws into question the self image of one's interlocutors as lucid adults who have a rational and correct grasp of the world they inhabit. In terms of human psychology, it's much easier to dismiss someone who questions such a pervasively held view as a crank, conspiracy theorist or a philosophical romantic with their head in the clouds. Yet, I don't think the contemporary situation in the US, for example, can be understood without abandoning that misconception. Democracy, rightly understood, is coming together on the basis of equality to deliberate on what is common. This is not what goes on when and elected elite deliberate in a parliamentary setting, regardless of whether they are selected by plebiscite or not. A parliament is an oligarchy (oligos = few; arche = rule) and they deliberate in a chamber in the absence of the demos (people) they purport to represent. When a demos is not present at deliberations, it cannot be said to have a grasp on power (kratos = "grasp" and only signifies "power" via secondary derivation). Representative parliamentarianism is therefore logically, etymologically and historically something other than democracy. Electoral representationalism, as an institution, has always been much closer to fascism than people realise. Fascists too make a claim to being representative, even if the supposedly "authenic" people they claim to represents a narrowly circumscribed fantasy of national rebirth. In imagining the demos in idealised terms, and imagining themselves as the authentic representative of that demos and its interests, fascist leaders clothe themselves in the language of democracy as a method of political legitimation. But they can only do this if the discourse of representationalism is both available and sufficiently pervasive for cooperation. The fact is that the US, like most other places in Western modernity, is not a democracy, but a liberal oligarchy. The attack on the Capitol was not an attack on democracy per se but an attack on the liberal culture that balances out the authoritarian structure of governmental institutions and enables the elites that govern from them to share power by contesting periodic elections. None of the column inches currently wasted in analysing those events correctly capture this. They all conflate democracy with representation and so fail to recognise participation as democracy's true essence. Why is this? I think the answer is structural. Our society is just as invested in dividing people into experts and clients, managers and executants, politicians and citizens as it is in dividing people into bosses and workers. The media commentariat's place in the order of things relies on maintaining these distinctions as right and proper. And so their perennial misrepresentation of democracy as representative rather than participatory extends from this as a natural consequence. What is the anarcho-syndicalist response? To continually point out that if we lived in a democracy things would be different and to continue to offer a strategy for revolution that will achieve a genuine democracy.

'Bullshit' is a relatively tame word, but it was still a mistake. I had a high-school teacher get in touch to say it was the only thing preventing him from showing it to his Year 11 and 12 students. Either way, thanks for the nice comments.

@@anisau I do believe you used the term ‘fucked up’ at one point, though I’ll need to listen again to check and I’m on my phone atm so it’s awkward. But it doesn’t really matter that you swore as far as I’m concerned. I understand why your teacher couldn’t use it but I just see ‘bad language’ as a way to control discourse, and that it’s only offensive because we’ve declared that it is. I’m not usually a fan of communicating anger, I’m much more concerned with communicating logic, data and critical thought clearly, but I also think we can lose a lot of emphasis and importance in our messages when we stifle what we want to say by being ‘decent’, with regards to swearing only, especially when we find nothing ‘decent’ about the subject at that moment. That, and I think there’s something honest about swearing that humanizes people, and teenagers will probably appreciate that more than most, if anything.

Anarcho-syndicalism is the formation of workers' unions that are organised and which struggle according to anarchist principles. But it is also a strategy for progressing towards libertarian socialist (i.e. anarchist) revolution through the building of mass organisations. The character of the revolution we desire is the extension of direct democracy to every institution of society. This implies the overthrow of capitalism and seizure of the means of production, distribution exchange and communication, which will be collectivised and subject to workers self-management and federated modes of coordination. If revolutionary attempt is successful, the resulting society will be anarchist, not anarcho-syndicalist, because there will be no more need for unions as such. So, to start answering your question, will your family's capitalist enterprise be collectivised? Well that depends upon whether it employs workers motivated to collectivise it. If so, then yes. If not, then no. If the number of non-family employees is very small, then it is unlikely to be collectivised by force. However you will likely face the prospect of your non-family employees abandoning your enterprise to participate in collectivised industry elsewhere. In which case you may find you have a labour problem. But the best way to see what might happen is to look at history. The history of the social revolution in Spain, such took place in the context of the Spanish Civil War 1936‐1939, is instructive. For part of this period the anarchists controlled Catalonia and Aragon and pushed forward with their plans for revolution. Industry and agriculture was collectivised, but it was also the declared policy of the anarchists not to collectivise the farms of peasant families by force. Large industrial farms owned by the aristocracy and worked by landless peasants were of course collectivised, but most small holdings were not forcibly collectivised. Admittedly, the situation was messy and in some areas small holders were not given a choice. But many small holders did voluntarily chose to collectivise. Some did it out of conviction, others did it because collectivisation enabled them to have access to the farm machinery they needed bit world otherwise have not been able to afford. As tome went on, those that initially held out against it chose to collectivise, because without doing so, they were not integrated integrated into the new direct democratic and federated political structures and had no influence in community decision-making. So, if your family's business is small enough, it will likely not be collectivised forcibly, however in the new post-revolutionary situation you may eventually find yourself compelled to choose collectivisation because it is in your interests to do so. Is this to impinge on your autonomy? From an individualist perspective that asserts the primacy of personal property rights, then Yes. But not in any way that is different to how social, political and economic forces impinge upon your autonomy already (or how you impinge upon the autonomy of the workers whose labour you exploit when you hire someone). After all, there is nothing natural or inevitable about the economy you operate in or the laws of the state you operate under. Is this individualist perspective philosophically defensable? No. Why? Because it is founded on a naive realism that, in terms of the history of philosophy, is about 170 years out if date and is subject to an understanding of autonomy that is narrow, blinkered, self-cotradictory and (ultimately) wrong. Not that you should feel bad about this. It's basically was everyone thinks until 6 weeks into their first university course on anthropology, politics, sociology, psychology, social theory or philosophy. If you didn't go to university, or you studied something different, like engineering or chemistry, you may not had opportunity to get acquainted with this stuff. But I promise you, if you really want to argue with random cunts on the internet, you'll do yourself a big favour by spending a couple of spare hours reading up about social constructionism from the perspective of the history and philosophy of science and neo-kantianism in philosophy. If after that you want to come back for an argument about the ins and outs of rival political philosophies, I'll be here.

It's also important to point out that basically every original anarchist called themselves an individualist as well. If you want collectivism, go to Marxism.

Bullshit. Anarchism emerges out of the socialist tradition and can only be understood in that context. Yes, individual autonomy and collective autonomy are two sides of the same coin, but to claim that Marxism is collectivist and anarchism isn't is to misunderstand both and do justice to neither. The difference between them is that Marxism is authoritarian and anarchism is libertarian, but they are both socialist, which is also to say collectivist. To claom otherwise is to be unable to account for why BOTH Marx and Bakunin were members of the first International Workers Association and what its purpose was. The very fact that the anarchist faction was at that time known as 'the federalists', and drew inspiration from Proudhon's 1865 pamphlet on federation speaks volumes, for a federation, implemented on anarchists lines with initiative from below, is a collectivist institution. The individualist strand within anarchism is an aberration born of dispair in the context of the crushing of the 1871 Paris Commune and the two decades of extreme state repression that followed. This is the period in which some anarchists turned to lone wolf acts of assassination and terrorism, but these acts were always undertaken in hope if inspiring mass revolt and socialist revolution of a libertarian kind (which is a collectivist end). The 1880s was also in the decade in which some anarchists discovered the writings of Stirner, who is not an anarchist and was never connected with the movement. The turning to both Stirner and terrorism manifested in a period when collective organising was impossible. Both are mistakes and were realised to be so by the overwhelming majority of an anarchists who in the mid-1890s returned to the organisation building strategy of the First International, and who devised anarcho-syndicalism as a strategy for libertarian socialist revolution. So, you are wrong to claim that anarchism is not a collectivism, and if you can't see the (direct) democratic methods of anarchist organising as a species of collectivism it is because you can't see the forest for the trees.

@@anisau Rudolf Rocker, probably the most important theorist in anarcho-syndicalism, quite literally referred to himself as an individualist. You're wrong. It might bother you, but you're wrong.

@@noiamnotjohn3351, where does Rocker refer to himself as an individualist? Can you provide a publication and page reference? No? Thought so. You're talking out your arse.

What part of workers' self-managenent don't you understand?

@@anisau mostly the self management bit.

@@harryshaw3760, why? Can't you manage yourself? You must be a mess, mate!

@@anisau nah, just comes from a life of managing others.

@@harryshaw3760 managing who? The people who put a roof over your head and put food in the mouth of your children?

Some points of clarification: The organisational principles I described in the video is how anarchist unions have organised since the mid-1890s. ("Syndicate" comes from the French "syndicat" and Spanish "syndicado" and means labour union). Anarcho-sydicalism is a strategy for revolution by which we aim create mass organisations that carry forward working class interests today and which might successfully attempt revolution tomorrow. A successful revolution of the kind we seek requires that a culture of (direct, participatory) democratic practice be developed which is strong enough to withstand the stresses of revolution and civil war. The adjective "anarcho-sydicalist" does not describe a future society. If an anarcho-syndicalist revoltion is successful, the society that will result will be an anarchist society, which is to say a truly democratic society. It will be organised according to anarchist principles, but in overcoming both capitalism and the state, it will no longer comprise or have need for unions, since the workers will be in control. In place of unions, we will have collectives and federations of collectives. In broad terms, such a society might be called anarchist, libertarian socialist or anarcho-communist (although these terms are used with various minor differences depending on whom you read). As for your post, I find almost nothing in your second paragraph I can agree with. The presuppositions you are working from are different from mine. You say you have always thought that the best way a natural ruler-ruled polarity to manifest is if everyone is a ruler over oneself and enters into cooperation with other rulers over self. But... (1) If rule is reduced to "ruler over oneself" surely this destroys any "ruler-ruled polarity"? (Plus, autonomy shouldn't just be reduced to relations of political equality; just as, for example, the members of a group of equals cannot say they are autonomous if they are slaves to tradition.) (2) Why "natural"? Sociology, anthropology and social and political theory abandoned the idea of "naturalness" as a meaningful concept in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Given the diversity of social forms to be found in "primitive" and "archaic" societies, it is difficult to think what naturalness might consist in. Whatever inate potentialality we might have towards language and rationality, our sociability is "asocial" (i.e. it can be both anti-social and positively social) and so there is no such thing as human nature in any real or deep sense that is immune to the vagaries of socialisation. Without the "nature" of humans being open (and so not "nature" at all), there would be no potential for human freedom. (3) You imply that, ideally, individuals are soverign (rulers over oneself) and enter into cooperation on the basis of free agreement, but I don't think of individuals in this way and think free agreement between soverign parties is a flawed basis for thinking about autonomy. Individuals cannot be abstracted from society and few of our relationships with others are voluntary, except in relatively trivial situations. Individual and collective autonomy needs to be developed in the context of situations in which individuals have no prior independence from each other. Hence free association cannot be reduced to voluntary association. Rather, free association needs to thought of as a mode of reciprocity between individuals that allows them to relate as equals who negotiate shared outcomes and the means to achieve them. Only the democratic attitude orientated towards consensus (as an aim if not always as an acheivement) can cultivate freedom in this sense. I agree education is important. One reason anarcho-syndicalism works is that it teaches people how to do democracy through direct participation in it. It requires thinking for oneself and speaking for oneself, and building one's confidence to represent oneself in argument. Because we practice rotation of office, it also means cultivating the skills and confidence of your comrades in whom you are going to rely as delegates to congresses and as office bearers. We don't have paid offices. It's all voluntary, but it is expected that you will do your turn. As for education in a future anarchist society (which I think your question was mainly seeking an answer to), I don't think it would be radically different from education today. There will still be teachers and students. There will still be masters and apprentices. And best-practice methods of teaching will be much the same as best-practice methods are now. What might be different is that the ends of teaching will always be towards the creation of autonomous individuals: people who can think, act and speak for themselves. Education starts when a master takes a student or apprentice, cultivates that person's talent, and finishes with the development of an equal. This used to be how trades work. Capitalism doesn't do that. Sure managers replace managers as top dogs retire and shit eaters climb the greasy pole, but is not so much an exercise in education towards autonomy as the breeding of conformity and a preference for those who are docile and complient. Rocking the boat is the last thing that will see someone promoted. And why invest in cultivating workers' skills when they are only going to be poached by the capitalist down the road? If anything, anarchism will rehabilitate an appraoch to education which is gradually being lost, in which the wider personality is cultivated, rather than an increasingly narrow focus on work ready skills. If nothing else, this means reinvesting in the importance and value of Arts faculities in our universities and in history, literature and philosophy in our schools.

Mate, if it is "inevitable [we] have to talk about Panrchism", it is solely because we are perennially confronted with gobshites and idiots. "Panarchy" (viz De Puydt) was never anything other than fuckin silly, and, as a thing, hardly warrants being dignified with the term "idea". But if you would like to mount a defence of it, be my guest.

@@anisau Woah woah! Calm down man, I'm on your side, I was just trying to make the point that even in a 100% Democratic Society the whole Anarchist Movement will still be highly Marginalised to the point that WE are beset on all sides with people who disagree on the basis of Interest or Counter-Ideologically-induced Ignorance...

@@anisau furthermore, such a Democracy would lead us back to square One, this is a very old contention in Anarchist Thought, even you must see that...

@@repubblesmcglonky8990, okay answer me this: (a) how would an overarching panarchic constitution (viz De Puydt) be established? (b) is such a scenario even remotely possible? (c) is such a scenario psychologically or sociologically likely? (d) even if it could be instituted, is a variegated polity of the type De Puydt describes sustainable given it presumes some parts of a population will make a free and rational choice to be unfree? Sorry, mate. Even you must realise that it's just stupidity of the most flabby and idle kind, and even the merest breath of clear thought disperses it like sunshine disperses fog.

@@anisau Okay, okay, listen, I'm ngl, I thought "Panarchism" meant something totally different from an Etymological Standpoint ("Pan" = "All" and "Archos" = "Rule") and I'm sorry I was being totally pretentious, what I was trying to convey was that all the Factions and Ideologies are bound to have a say in a Completely and Direct Democratic System that will affect the outcome of Anarcho-Syndicalism, which may as well for the record be termed "Anarcho-Syndicalism with Pan-Democratic Features" at best, with Freedom comes the Freedom of Ideology and Democracy is Darwinian, not necessarily Marxian for instance but ignore me, I'm an idiot -.-'

Old and done 1000 times, mate! Everyone who was here for that joke has already departed to go watch the Philosophers v. Popes football match...

Care to explain?

@@anisau no

Hi Alex Thank you for your comment. While I support your efforts to unionise your fellow workers and welcome your interest in anarchism, i'm at a loss to understand why a member of the IWW would be inclined post a comment on a video about the organisational principles of anarchist organisations. Historically, those sympathetic to anarchism, particularly in North America, have been attracted to the IWW for its revolutionary aims, its direct action methods, and its cross industrial rather than trade specific mode of organising. However the IWW is NOT an anarchist organisation. Its organisational principles and structure are electoral-representative in form, not direct-democratic and federalist in the manner that would qualify it as anarchist. Even the preamble of the IWW constitution is hostile to anarchism (see the reference to "anti-political sects" which is Marxist double-speak for anarchism). There are a lot of good people in the IWW, but there is also a pervasive misunderstanding about it possessing an anarchist character. It does not. From an organisational perspective its character is Marxist, centalist and, in the final analysis, authoritarian. It shares an isomorphism with the state, and its revolutionary aims therefore stand in contradiction to the organisational means it has developed to achieve them. If you have plans to organise a union amongst massage therapiats (or any other group of workers), I urge you to consider organising a union along anarcho-syndicalist lines and federating as an affiliate of the International Workers Association (IWA-AIT) such as Workers Solidarity Alliance (WSA) in North America, SolFed in the UK or CNT-AIT in Spain. It's a question of consistency between revolutionary aims and revolutionary means, and of creating a culture of worker's autonomy and genuine democracy within unions that have a structure capable of promoting them. I wish you well in your endeavours.

@@anisau what a thoughtful comment thank you. I will reply fully when I am not on a cell phone.