I’ll believe in corporate anarchism when corporations don’t have any shareholders other than people who work there, and the person who cleans the toilets has as much say in how the company is run as the CEO.
Otherwise it’s the same old hierarchical bullshit wrapped in a new package.
From my position on the far left, it’s just evidence that the centre can have as many stupid ideas as the left or right wings.
No, my point is that I’m not sure these are real center or left wing sites. All my years on this site, and I’ve never heard of any of them.
Transgender people too.
Remember when Trump went from a permissive attitude to states rights regarding bathroom laws?
I think I have seen a few of them linked to on the BBS, but not often. I didn’t think much of them, but I honestly couldn’t tell you if they were false flag or not.
It seems you would have positive connotations you associate with anarchism. I do not. I think Mad Max. OK, so maybe that’s not the philosophical version you’re describing, but to my mind, it’s what the real version quickly becomes.
I am talking about voluntary collectivist, direct democracy anarchism. Anarcho-communism, or anarcho-syndicalism if it is in the workplace. I don’t think you are, but what you describe isn’t anarchism of any kind, even at the start.
Think more along the lines of the Zapatistas (although they don’t like labels like anarchist, they have similar beliefs) rather than Mad Max. I am watching Rojava (now the Democratic Federal System of Northern Syria) to see if that goes along similar lines, but you can’t really judge properly from what is going on during a war. It looks promising though.
Local elections were held in March 2015. The Rojava system of community government is focused on direct democracy. The system has been described as pursuing “a bottom-up, Athenian-style direct form of democratic governance”, contrasting the local communities taking on responsibility versus the strong central governments favoured by many states. In this model, states become less relevant and people govern through councils.[66] Its programme immediately aimed to be “very inclusive” and people from a range of different backgrounds became involved, including Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Syrian Turkmen and Yazidis (from Muslim, Christian, and Yazidi religious groups). It sought to “establish a variety of groups, committees and communes on the streets in neighborhoods, villages, counties and small and big towns everywhere”. The purpose of these groups was to meet “every week to talk about the problems people face where they live”. The representatives of the different community groups meet ‘in the main group in the villages or towns called the “House of the People”’. As a September 2015 report in the New York Times observed:[3]
For a former diplomat like me, I found it confusing: I kept looking for a hierarchy, the singular leader, or signs of a government line, when, in fact, there was none; there were just groups. There was none of that stifling obedience to the party, or the obsequious deference to the “big man” — a form of government all too evident just across the borders, in Turkey to the north, and the Kurdish regional government of Iraq to the south. The confident assertiveness of young people was striking.
I have described it before as “instead of no government, everybody is the government.” You can never have no say, you can only abstain from voting.
Something tells me that without a spiritual leap/speciation event, the anarcho-syndacalist model isn’t going to work (scale) outside of a few hundred people. And because of that, I see it as a cute anomaly, but not a viable system. There are also other connotations to “anarchism” and “anarchy” that may not be the ones you embrace, but to my mind, are much more realistic, given the nature of things. That’s the warlord-feudalistic Mad Max scenario that we actually seem to be spiraling toward, and the right-leaning anarcho-Libertarians a la The Tea Party are working toward (again, no regulation, corporations have all of the organizational power, etc.)
The Zapatistas have scaled it to three or four orders of magnitude higher, as did CNT-AIT in 1930s Catalunya.
Barcelona may not have worked out (being stabbed in the back by your supposed Stalinist “allies” will do that), but the Zapatista system has been working better than it’s predecessor for over 20 years. Not perfectly, but nothing ever does work perfectly. There’s always room for improvement.
I’m confused – the last time I checked, the Zapatistas were a loose-knit rebel/terrorist “army” living in the jungle. How this has anything to do with my life, and how “armchair anarchism” really scales in modern society is – beyond me.
You are the one who brought it up, and it is clear you have done absolutely no research on any of this that challenges your views.
If you really don’t care, don’t reply and stop wasting both of our times.
Oh please, like Noam Chomsky is someone I’ve never heard of. We’re not even having the same conversation. Lots of people, not just myself, describe the extreme oligarchical corporate Libertarian “thing” that the USA is now dealing with as “anarchistic.” For christ’s fucking sake, I’m not talking about the fucking Zapatistas in the jungle, I’m talking about the specific movement I am describing, and yes, in the sense that they would prefer for there to be no real government, there IS an “anarchistic” aspect to the philosophy, even if it is not YOUR anarchism. The fucking Nazis were called the National Socialists, and I consider myself a socialist, but I’m a grownup enough person to not confuse the two.
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