On the internet I don’t see too many Anarchists give arguments past “communism doesn’t work because communists are doomed to repeat the same exploitative power structures of the capitalist state” and “we dont know what an anarchist society will look like we gotta wait til we get there!” Which like…is not convincing to me at all. I’ve engaged in what was supposed to be consensus based decision making systems and there were a ton of flaws, though that’s purely anecdotal.
So, I’d really like to have some suggestions on what to read that you think might really challenge where I stand/take anarchism more seriously. It might take me 5 years to get to them bc executive dysfunction but I really want to see if my mind can be changed on if it would be a better system from the get go than communism.
I think it would be super interesting to hear from anyone who shifted into anarchism from Marxism on why it made more sense to you
idk, looking at beehives and termite mounds I was never able to pick out which one of them was the General Secretary
were you?
the queen
The queen bee doesn’t exactly do any coordination and planning tho.
That said it’s a pretty nonsense analogy in the first place, people aren’t insects.
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Nah, queens in eusocial insects don’t control the hive. Afaik in honey bees the girls decide things in a weird communal democratish way, and ants make decisions using pretty strict behavioral rules. I’ve read several entomologists say calling them queens was a mistake and creates an incorrect impression about their role. They’re much more at the mercy of the hive than the other way around.
Eusocial insects are hard to map on to human behavior, though. Like bees do seem to have something that roughly maps to democracy, but ants and termites seem to be essentially machines that operate on strict behavioral rules.
Okay, a General Secretary neuron in the brain then. Or all different kinds of living systems that secure a collective security of all members, none of which have a chain of command to one cell or individual in the center, making decisions on behalf of the whole.
Distributed decision-making systems are far more common in nature, in networks, and in the human experience. The only reason why it has not seemed so for the latter is because during a specific period, it was possible for centralized societies to gain leverage to wipe out non-centralized societies.
I don’t consider myself anti-Leninist at all. I am fully on board with a vanguard party for the proletariat, as long as that vanguard party recognizes the congruity that monarchy and capitalism have with positioning individuals as absolute heads (or kingpins, or chokepoints) of command chains, and deliberately avoids the pitfalls of that model. That doesn’t mean scrapping the concept of authority; the only thing that needs to go is authority that encompasses all domains and that positions people in rigidly defined strata, instead of specialized roles that are not ranked against each other.
Yeah, bees kinda fit that. Like it does seem like htey use, idk if you can really call it democracy, but they do use collective flat decision making. Not like anyone can really take over when you have two months of life.