Mastodawn

HeavenlyPossum Nov 14, 2023

It’s often the case that critics of anarchism will demand to know how we might obtain public goods without the state, because their entire frame of reference for public goods is in the context of state monopolies.

And I might reply that all sorts of public goods predate the state by thousands of years or more. Neolithic peoples were building trackway roads and monumental architecture and all kinds of neat things.

And critics of anarchism will often gleefully seize upon this as if it presents some clever gotcha. They think this means that *the best* we can hope to achieve without the state is a Neolithic-level of technology and cooperation.

And I find that response to be…so immensely sad. They see a dead-end; I see incredible achievements with only the barest of technologies and available knowledge, and can only wonder at the marvels we’d be able to achieve together now.

Mark T. Tomczak Nov 14, 2023

@HeavenlyPossum I generally wish anarchists the best, but most descriptions of how the world would work under anarchy widely-deployed remind me of this meme.

I can't fault the optimism though.

HeavenlyPossum Nov 14, 2023

Human beings have been around as a distinct species for at least 300,000 years. States date back to the Bronze Age, at the absolute earliest about 6,000 years ago, and didn’t come to dominate a majority of the global population until about 500 years ago. There are still extant stateless societies that states haven’t been able to assimilate.

Mark T. Tomczak Nov 14, 2023

@HeavenlyPossum You look at those facts and see "We have a lot more experience, organismically, being small disconnected groups than large organized states. If anything has a claim to being the 'natural state' of humans, it's anarchy."

I look at those facts and see "Wow, this 'state' technology sure did completely dominate the paradigm, to the point where the stateless societies only exist at the benevolent largesse of their neighboring states anymore. I don't know how to get into a mindset where I'd think anarchy is possible when it can only live until the nearest large group of people organized around a common collective myth can just beat them up and take their stuff."

... were anarchy to succeed at scale in the modern era with 8 billion people on the planet, I think we'd need, somehow, to arrange things so that a large enough group to engage in group self-defense does so while simultaneously maintaining the purity of ideology to allow their members to act independently and self-organizationally when the whole group isn't threatened. And I have no idea how to square the circle of the apparent inherent contradiction in those goals.

Not saying it's impossible; definitely saying I'm not smart enough to see it.

@mark @HeavenlyPossum

That interpretation is consistent with the facts, but is it likely given the facts?

States existed for thousands of years simultaneously with stateless societies. Then something happened a few centuries ago and the state became the prevalent form of social organization.

Given those facts, the prevalence of states is almost surely more closely related to that ‘something’ that happened a few centuries ago than to the state ‘technology’ itself.

Mark T. Tomczak Nov 15, 2023

@magitweeter @HeavenlyPossum Agreed. My wild guess would be the era of seafaring colonialism. Which is a pile of technologies one atop the other (that could be collectively labeled the "guns, germs, and steel" set).

Massive improvements in sailing, navigation, power, weapons, medicine, and communications happened in a very short amount of time, which summed up to the ability for a nation to force-project in a way never before possible. And organization fed upon organization: a country that already had an industrial base had means to seize the resources of people it may have otherwise, previously, left alone, and an industrial system to feed those resources to. An East India Trading Company exists in the context of people to take wealth from and people who you can trust will give you something of value in return on the other side of a very long ocean voyage.

(I actually have a pet theory in this vein that what made the Industrial Revolution special wasn't machines alone but regularized, standardized, highly-accurate technological process. They had wing-nuts, hasps, and fasteners in the suit-of-armor era in Europe, but if one broke you couldn't pull a replacement out of a standardized bin of them to do a quick-patch. Mass production and the standardization that came along with it brought about an era of "machine stratum" that let more complex machines and processes build on simpler ones... Suddenly, you could assume steel, of a certain quality and strength, was available, which lets you build more accurate machines, which lets you build better mining equipment, which lets you mine steel better, which &c).

Fabio G.Nov 15, 2023

@mark @HeavenlyPossum

Yeah, something like that.

Yet technology didn't stay put: it has kept advancing. Sure, it has advanced in ways that help the state, but also in ways that help resistance to the state.

The more feasible it becomes for people to satisfy their material needs without the state, the sooner the state becomes an obsolete form of social organization.

HeavenlyPossum Nov 15, 2023

@magitweeter @mark

I don’t think it was technology that facilitated and compounded this divergence. Early European settler colonists were often equally matched or outmatched by indigenous technologies. But, especially in the Americas, the effects of pandemic diseases (along with constant, deliberate violence) reduced the indigenous population to the point that two entire continents’ worth of resources became available to a handful of Western European states.

HeavenlyPossum Nov 15, 2023

@mark @magitweeter

Which isn’t to say that the effects aren’t real, but they’re likely also not replicable. For most of their existence, states have been absurdly fragile and most that ever existed have failed and no longer exist.

Fabio G.Nov 15, 2023

@HeavenlyPossum To his credit, @mark did mention “germs”—though that's admittedly fortuitous, a consequence of herd immunity rather than medical competence.

I think technology matters—more generally, the material context, which includes technology, matters. The material context is what made the colonial project possible as well as desirable. The material context is what will make global anarchy possible if it ever comes to be.

HeavenlyPossum Nov 15, 2023

@magitweeter @mark

I am less convinced that the material context is what makes anarchism possible or not.

Fabio G.Nov 15, 2023

@HeavenlyPossum Well, what's the key factor then, in your view?

HeavenlyPossum Nov 15, 2023

Some secret third thing.

Violet Madder Nov 15, 2023

@magitweeter @mark @HeavenlyPossum

I believe the "something" that happened, was agriculture.

The moment we started claiming swaths of land as property, and building up populations too large for our tribe comprehension to keep pace with, our current path was in some ways inevitable.

Violet Madder Nov 15, 2023

@magitweeter @mark @HeavenlyPossum

Oh and another big "something" that happened, was the moment we figured out how paternity actually works.

That's when children became property, too.

HeavenlyPossum Nov 15, 2023

@violetmadder @magitweeter @mark

I would encourage you to check out James Scott’s Against the Grain and Wengrow & Graeber’s Dawn of Everything, which both directly address this issue.

Fabio G.Nov 15, 2023

@violetmadder @mark @HeavenlyPossum

Agriculture didn't start a few hundred years ago.

Agriculture started several thousand years ago, and it's (very broadly speaking) what made states possible, but it would take thousands more years for them to become the dominant form of social organization.

“Something” is more probably somewhere between mercantilism and industrial capitalism.

Violet Madder Nov 15, 2023

@magitweeter @mark @HeavenlyPossum

Compared to the hundreds of thousands of years that came before, the 7,000ish it took to build up the new dynamics with sufficient population levels and tech to kick off massive invasions is a snap.

HeavenlyPossum Nov 15, 2023

@violetmadder @mark @magitweeter

We do know of stateless agricultural societies, as well as non-agricultural societies that had deeply hierarchical state-like institutions. I don’t think the connection is as causal as this.