I received the following email in my box today and figured I’d share it and my response with ya’ll:

Hi,
I tried to contact you on Rethos, but could figure out how.

I wanted to ask you to recommend a few seminal books on anarchy, with which to inform myself.

I will be quite honest, granting my ignorance on the subject, I nevertheless do not see how the anarchist program is feasible beyond a small group of like-minded people – communism works excellently in the monastery or convent, but not so much on bigger scales in societies where civil liberties and the Rule of Law exist. Even then, if I know anything about human nature, I know irreconcilable disputes will inevitably arise. In the monastery there exists the dictatorial power of the abbot to settle disagreements. My question is who gets to arbitrate disputes in an anarchist system? How is the coercive power needed to arbitrate (some institution has to impose any final decision), kept from devolving into totalitarianism?

As I said, I acknowledge ignorance on the matter, but I am a rather scholarly person myself, so rather than asking you to write a tome in response, I am game to read any monographs you might recommend.

Sincerely,
Ignacio

Ignacio,

I’ve already written a pretty good summary of modern anarchist thought, at least I think it’s pretty good. It’s as good a starting point as any so here it is as a pdf.

a few things to keep in mind:

1 - anarchism is not communism. there are people who attempt to blend the two (anarcho-communism) but the two are not synonymous. I myself am more of a mutualist, that is to say I favor collective ownership of primary goods by local communities with directly democratic oversight by the community to ensure they are not abused, fused with a free market economy where individuals and collectives are free to sell anything and everything they produce. removing capitalist-style privatized ownership removes the barriers to entry that create and maintain institutionalized divisions of wealth in a capitalist system while the market economy avoids the tendency of communist systems to place economic power in the hands of an individual or committee who is responsible for overseeing distribution - something that seems to me extremely likely to lead to unaccountable concentrations of power.

2 - anarchism is not a lack of structure, it’s non-hierarchal structure. meaning that direct democracy and/or consensus are the rule. there may be occasions when the collective needs to empower individuals to make snap decisions but, unlike in a representative democracy, the individuals power is restricted to the single decision or type of decision they are specifically empowered to make and they can be recalled and replaced at any time by a simple vote of the collective that empowered them. Which makes it hard for tyrants to arise since the minute someone steps outside the lines and attempts to grab personal power they can be removed. some anarchists propose that these roles rotate on a periodic basis to every able member of the community, much like Jury duty.

3 - everywhere is local. anarchism is designed to function at the local level within local communities. it’s basically a modular approach to government, rather then building a massive single structure for an entire nation or collective of nations, anarchism proposes that power always be kept as local as possible and as accountable as possible. groups of Anarchies who have something in common - a language or culture or regional location - may form syndicates in which they are all co-equal members and in which the collective of collectives works to advance some common goal. Unlike in Statism, however, these syndicates are not exclusive. There is nothing to stop a single Anarchie from belonging to dozens of different Syndicates - just because a group of communities shares a common language, for instance, doesn’t mean that they need to decide allocation of water resources together.

Also, referring back to point 2, whatever coordinating bodies and committees end up getting set up as part of this process don’t have final decision-making power. They can formulate proposals which get sent back to the collectives to vote on for approval or disapproval, much the way states like California allow citizens to vote directly on proposed policies through ballot initiatives.

Economic units (collectively-owned democratically-run factories) may also form syndicates. Collectives who produce steel or computers or blankets may well benefit by sharing knowledge and know-how with others who work in similar industries. Since all intellectual property is “open-source” (to borrow a term from the free software movement) there is a clear advantage to collaboration between groups and the progress of technology and no-how cannot be slowed down by patents that prevent industry from using the latest and most efficient methods.

4 - you will never be able to find a single tome or even a good collection of tomes that clearly lays out anarchist thought because anarchism is not a single ideology. It is a set of belief systems, economic models, and political theories which share a common aversion to hierarchy and tyranny but which don’t necessarily agree with each other on much of anything else. There are as many ideas about the best way to organize a non-hierarchal society as there are ideas about how to organize one hierarchically and the gulfs that separate anarchocumminism, mutualism, anarcho-primitivism, anarchosyndicalism, and anarchocapitalism are every bit as deep as the divisions between their authoritarian counterparts. The worldview espoused by me in my writing is one piece of that. Obviously I think it’s the most logical interpretation of anarchism and the most likely to function well on a global scale, but that doesn’t mean that others who also call themselves anarchists would agree with the details of it.

cheers,
lynx