TIL about the Christiana commune. Interesting!
I love that story! I tell it every time someone tries to sell me on anarchism.
Christiana was an old military complex that the government gave up on, so anarchist squatters moved in.
Soon they realized, that they needed some way to decide matters that concerned everyone. So they formed small councils, and in these councils they each chose some people to represent them in one big council. These people weren’t elected politicians, just people chosen to represent them. They then voted on issues, and no, that wasn’t a form of democracy. It’s still anarchism.
Then then realized, that the upkeep of common areas and infrastructure costs money, so they required that everyone paid their share. That obviously weren’t taxes. Just mandatory contributions.
When organized crime started to spread, they decided on some mandatory rules (you read right: these weren’t laws, just mandatory rules that you had to keep if you didn’t want to face punishment). Then they chose some strong men that should make sure the rules were followed. No, not police men. Just concerned strong men.
They worked together with Kopenhagen’s police. Basically, they’d call the cops and then drag the offenders outside of Christiania to the waiting cops.
Part of the rules were that it wasn’t allowed to consume hard drugs or to wear motor cycle gang attire.
So in the end, they had no politicians, no government, no taxes and no police force. Just things that where basically identical to these things. The only thing they really don’t have is a prison, because they outsourced that to Kopenhagen.
Anarchism directly leads to a form of government, no matter how you call it.
If you want an opposite example, how anarchism lead to an anarcho-capitalistic nightmare, where the community decended into a rule by organized crime, google the Kowloon Walled City. It’s equally interesting.
But anarchism is a form of government. Just a collectivelly decided on one. Self-gorvernment, in particular.
When was the last time you directly chose your policemen and direct representatives in a community meeting?
Obviously, though, you can’t have an anarchist oasis in the middle of a capitalist city and world, so in the end any isolated anarchist experiments are bound to be imperfect.
Your depiction of anarchism is literally just direct democracy.
They’re the same picture.
Sure, but what happened in Christiania was more direct democracy than anarchism. The problem with democracy is that engagement goes down the drain when you reach “good enough” and then you get situations like the ones arising all around the west. Corruption, incompetence and the hateful minority getting an outsized mandate due to the apathy of the masses.
How long has Christiania been existing for? Decades instead of centuries? Give it time.
Did anyone argue that time was the problem?
Nope. Though I did say that time was a reason.
Isn’t sheriffs elected officials in the US?
Yes, and that’s part of the reason why the police in the US is in such a terrible state. Because uneducated populists who have no clue about policework can easily become sheriff just by fearmongering during the elections.
The difference is than in an ideal anarchist polity, the minority can secede, even down to the individual. “Majority rule” only happens to the extent that the minority doesn’t find secession to be a worthwhile option. Whereas under democracy, the land and resources of the minority, and even the people themselves are considered to rightfully belong to the state. Any serious attempt at secession is met with violence.
Actually-existing “anarchistic” societies may not completely live up to this ideal, but it is what we strive for. Anarchists consider freedom of association and freedom of disassociation to be paramount.
That’s a nice concept that maybe could work if you live in a society without any shared resource, no infrastructure at all and no things that are built in a shared way, since everyone needs to be independent and self-sufficient enough to secede at any time.
I think, even at neolithic times we might have been too advanced for that to work.
It doesn’t mean that people can’t coordinate, just that the coordination needs to be voluntary. Think networks rather than hierarchies.
It’s similar to how the fediverse is organized. Any instance can defederate from any other for any reason, but we all try to mostly stick together, because there’s benefits to doing so. Those that are dissatisfied with the policies of the instance that they’re on can break off and form their own (ideally we’d have account migration too, but that’ll take time). No one is forced to connect, but the whole thing works regardless.
Infinitely dividable secession sounds sort of like capitalism’s limitless growth. There’s only so many square meters of land, how can everyone have their own private anarcho-commune?
Well, it’s not infinite. The individual can’t be divided, by definition. But also I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that more land would be required? It doesn’t mean no more high-density housing. You just shouldn’t be forced into an undesirable political association with your neighbors, beyond the practical minimum coordination involved in living in the same building.
If every individual is fully independent and self sufficient everyone needs land to grow potatos and go to bed. You can’t be truly independent. Anarchist society is inherently contradictory because society means having rules and standards we all have to abide by. If everyone is that independent then who is making the building they’re sharing in your example? Are they all just sort of taking care of their own corner? And when the boundaries conflict? Major structural damage, who pays to fix that? If the resources can’t be found then some just get wet when the roof leaks? Independence is bunk. Dependency is bunk.Interdependence has a chance of working. Anarchy is just a libertarian wet dream about existing in a vacuum with infinite resources. Instead of trying to create a hypothetical null set civilization we could improve the one that exists, and that allows for MASSIVE changes but they all presuppose that we agree collective society is a good thing.
It seems like you think I’m advocating for something that I’m not? “People should be free to choose who they associate with” does not mean “people should not cooperate with each other”.
There are plenty of natural incentives to cooperate, and people mostly do so by default. They just shouldn’t be forced to stay in organizations that abuse them. Being opposed to abusive relationships doesn’t not imply that one is opposed to relationships in general.
Second comment: the thing about anarchy is we tried it. It was the natural state of things before Homo sapiens was very different from any other hominid. Bonobos may have an idyllic anarchist society but they have no defenses against those homo sapiens who show up and wreck shit. Maybe if the bonobos had organized.
No, some people will want to cooperate. But others will not. Bad actors will organize and ruin what’s built unless there are systems in place. The second you have systems it isn’t anarchy because somebody is making decisions for somebody else.
Anarchism directly leads to a form of government,
yes, and anarchism never claimed otherwise.
What you’re deliberately ignoring is that anarchists organise horizontally, not from the top down, and also that capitalism is inherently incompatible with anarchism since it demands hierarchy, and hierarchy is what anarchism opposes.
So basically your entire snide and ill informed comment here is irrelevant, since you clearly just pulled a bunch of propaganda out of your ass and have never spent more than 30 seconds researching what anarchism actually is.And yet I’m sure you feel super proud of yourself.
Clown.Nothing gets your point across like finishing on an ad hominem. Good job. You showed them and they will totally see things your way now.
ad hominem
lol, I don’t think those words mean what you think they mean.
Clown.Regardless, you still just come off as a dick.
A clown, even.
Well, I’ve never heard of a well-informed anarchist either, so there you go.
They just don’t understand any of the basics of organisation.
They just base their whole ideology on the delusion that everybody’s just gonna play nice, nobody will want to do anything for their advantage and, cucially, that crime just doesn’t exist.
I wanna see how any anarchist society deals with a murder. Or with someone who is dangerously mentally ill.
But that’s already much too high for anarchists, who barely understand basic human incentives.
Well, I’ve never heard of a well-informed anarchist either, so there you go.
They just don’t understand any of the basics of organisation.
It sounds like you haven’t had much interaction with anarchists beyond maybe high-school, and haven’t read anything that we’ve written.
Also, police organizations complain that anarchist activist groups are too hard to infiltrate because there’s too much reading to do:
Infiltration is made more difficult by the communal nature of the lifestyle (under constant observation and scrutiny) and the extensive knowledge held by many anarchists, which require a considerable amount of study and time to acquire.
Literally “I can’t blend in with these fucking nerds because they read too much”.
They just base their whole ideology on the delusion that everybody’s just gonna play nice, nobody will want to do anything for their advantage and, cucially, that crime just doesn’t exist.
Our philosophy is centered around dealing with the organized crime of the state and the exploitation of the capitalists. If you generally can’t trust people to play nice, putting a few of them in positions of power tends to make the problem worse, not better.
I wanna see how any anarchist society deals with a murder.
Which aspect of it? Basic security is pretty simple, and there’s a number of ways to provision it. Forensics would be handled by contracting professional specialists. Trials would be handled by a polycentric legal system (as opposed to the monocentric one that we currently have. Punishment would generally be in the form of either restitution paid by the perpetrator to the victim (or next of kin), or exile.
But that’s already much too high for anarchists, who barely understand basic human incentives.
C’mon now, this is just confidentlyincorrect material.
The society won’t work without hierarchies. The important thing is to not forcefully involve other people in your hierarchy.
Nobody wants to organize horizontally.
Nobody wants to organize horizontally.
Yet you’re posting this on a rapidly growing horizontally-organized social media system, running on top of a wildly successful, half-century old, horizontally-organized global computer network governed by “rough consensus and running code”. Curious.
Obligatory “I am very smart”horizontally-organized social media system
Even the fediverse feels like a bunch of hierarchies. Some have a council with code of conduct on top, some have a benevolent dictator. As a user, you have very little say in the relationships between the large instances. It’s easier to become a sovereign instance at the moment, compared to the dark times of twitter and reddit, but as soon as the large instances decide not to federate with the world by default, you’re back to square one. It’s very similar to citizen vs country, and country vs country interaction.
half-century old, horizontally-organized global computer network
I’d say that only Tier 1 networks are horizontally managed. The name itself implies a hierarchy. There is an organization on top granting AS’s to legal entities, and assigning IP addresses to them. An average ISP customer has absolutely no say about what happens higher up in the hierarchy.
Sure, you can try to bootstrap a flat network, but that has it’s own disadvantages. And I’m saying that as a member of a project trying to build a meshnet using network protocols with more or less flat topology. (Disaster radio, Meshtastic, Reticulum).
There isn’t much I hate more than Christiania. Started as a project of privileged kids looking for a place to smoke weed and occupying a land that was meant for redevelopment and actual communal housing. Cool, cool. It quite quickly became a class society, with peddlers (those who sell drugs) ostentatiously flaunting their wealth, with the other side of the “commune” developing into a typical bourgeoisie, nuclear-family powered suburb, all with a horse rink included.
In this revolutionary commune that is not bound by the laws of European Union, as they claim, you can buy Nestle products and pay for them with a card.
It is, ultimately, a weed dispensary with state monopoly, holding together with the police violence against mostly minorities that sell weed outside its walls indispensable for its well-being.
But then, I wouldn’t say it’s a problem of the anarchist movement. Anarchists are generally aware of those contradictions and the anarchist praxis is that of building an alternative to the society within the society. Christiana was a hippie project. Hippies, in my opinion, destroyed the left wing movement. They decided that they can use their privilege (because, of course, it was mostly white, middle class kids) to fuck off from the society. They withdrew from the class struggle at large. Instead of working in the unions, instead of organizing with Rainbow Coalition, they just fucked off the their “horizontally governed communes” to smoke weed and have sex.
Fuck hippies. And fuck Christiania.
Also, fun fact, last year they legally bought the land from the city, using a loan from the city.
I mean if people want to “smoke weed and have sex” who am I to stop them? I don’t get the hate.
I’ve never heard this take on hippies but you make a compelling argument. I’m the US, Ive always blamed Gen X from withdrawing from the class struggle at large but it makes sense that the problem happened also with earlier generations. Arguably 3 generations after the labor movement in the US did very little to keep the fight going (though I will say civil rights has come very far during those generations)
If a bunch of potheads can destroy an ideology unintentionally, how viable was it in the first place?
Love it
You obviously have no clue what you are talking about lol
The people who generally want to destroy a system and rebuild anew are usually clueless or have an ulterior motive.
While we are nowhere near the best we could be, we are also nowhere near the worst we have been in the past. Today is the result of an endless amount of people putting their effort, and often their lives, into improving society. This fight never ends.
The people who generally want to destroy a system and rebuild anew are usually clueless or have an ulterior motive.
It’s worth noting that “destroy and rebuild anew” is a point of contention among anarchists. Some of us favor a revolutionary approach, but some (myself included) favor an “evolutionary” approach instead. Same end goal, just achieved through steady incremental change, rather than a big upheaval.
In practice though, success likely wouldn’t fall cleanly into either category. There’d be incremental change punctuated by occasional (smaller) upheavals. But I guess all social change happens like that, really.
So all revolutionaries are either clueless or deceptive but all reformists are philanthropists who dedicate their entire lives to the improvement of society? Fucking please
How incredibly naive and cynical, both at the same time
In terms of the current systems we have in the west, yes. In terms of older revolutions no. It wasn’t intended to be a universal statement.
And I said generally. Not absolutely as your ‘all’ implies. The anchor for what I consider a person with excellent ideals and a beacon for humanity is MLK.
But you’re welcome to think of me as a moron if it helps you fulfil your outrage needs. Sleeping well at night is important.
