The aim is to establish communal horizontal power while living under existing power structures. An example is bringing neighbors the excess fruit from a harvest. The practice is common in rural communities. The magic is cooperation and mutualism. No bosses required.
The problem begins when trying to scale that to a societal level, which is necessary for things like high speed rail, the internet, huge power grids, etc. Trying to compartmentalize production to be both high-yield and small-scale is ridiculously difficult, and to do so would require technology far beyond what we have now without a serious lowering of living standards. That’s why Marxists advocate for collectivization, and planning production and distribution at a societal scale, rather than trying to focus on creating communalist structures emulating early hunter-gatherer societies but with the niceties of today.
You can voluntarily co-operate together without having a central authority dictating to you. Anarchism is not mutually exclusive with large scale projects or distribution networks.
That’s a bit like saying you can have battlefield success with only footsoldiers and no tacticians or strategians, or like saying a factory can run smoothly without foremen, or that a ship can sail safely without a capitain. We develop administrative positions because of their utility even within a class, not just class-based hierarchy like workers and owners. The latter, class-based distinctions are a product of unequal ownership and control, the former are a product of material necessity.
Cooperative production can work, but only for certain industries and certain scales. Agriculture is a good example, but for something more complex like smartphone production that involves global supply chains and intense safety risks for mining, shipping, silicon processing, etc, it’s just not feasible to do cooperatively and horizontally. Even then, for agriculture, as we advance to more efficient industrialized production we too develop beyond the basis for cooperative ownership to function.
Administration is not a bad thing. What’s bad is class society, which allows a small portion of society to plunder the vast majority of the spoils of social production.
Yes, but there are bosses right now. And they would still be very powerful, even if they lost control of the state. They don’t care about what’s best for everyone. They care about what’s best for them. They would still control all those machines, institutions, money, private armies, the media and they would have the total support of all the capitalist militaries of the world, ready to come in and completely crush horizontal power and suppress mutualism. So the class of bosses wouldn’t magically disappear over night.
If people organized (either “horizontally” or otherwise) to form some thing, some kind of organization or institution or loose federation of grassroots cooperatives or whatever you want to call it, that would be able to suppress this boss class and their military and everything. That thing would be what marxist leninists call a state by definition. Because when we talk about a state, we mean nothing more or less than a weapon able to force the will of one class upon another. Even if that will is just:“stop forcing your will on us non-bosses”.
How horizontal it is internally dosn’t matter at all for the definition of a state.
The aim is to establish communal horizontal power while living under existing power structures. An example is bringing neighbors the excess fruit from a harvest. The practice is common in rural communities. The magic is cooperation and mutualism. No bosses required.
The problem begins when trying to scale that to a societal level, which is necessary for things like high speed rail, the internet, huge power grids, etc. Trying to compartmentalize production to be both high-yield and small-scale is ridiculously difficult, and to do so would require technology far beyond what we have now without a serious lowering of living standards. That’s why Marxists advocate for collectivization, and planning production and distribution at a societal scale, rather than trying to focus on creating communalist structures emulating early hunter-gatherer societies but with the niceties of today.
You can voluntarily co-operate together without having a central authority dictating to you. Anarchism is not mutually exclusive with large scale projects or distribution networks.
That’s a bit like saying you can have battlefield success with only footsoldiers and no tacticians or strategians, or like saying a factory can run smoothly without foremen, or that a ship can sail safely without a capitain. We develop administrative positions because of their utility even within a class, not just class-based hierarchy like workers and owners. The latter, class-based distinctions are a product of unequal ownership and control, the former are a product of material necessity.
Cooperative production can work, but only for certain industries and certain scales. Agriculture is a good example, but for something more complex like smartphone production that involves global supply chains and intense safety risks for mining, shipping, silicon processing, etc, it’s just not feasible to do cooperatively and horizontally. Even then, for agriculture, as we advance to more efficient industrialized production we too develop beyond the basis for cooperative ownership to function.
Administration is not a bad thing. What’s bad is class society, which allows a small portion of society to plunder the vast majority of the spoils of social production.
Yes, but there are bosses right now. And they would still be very powerful, even if they lost control of the state. They don’t care about what’s best for everyone. They care about what’s best for them. They would still control all those machines, institutions, money, private armies, the media and they would have the total support of all the capitalist militaries of the world, ready to come in and completely crush horizontal power and suppress mutualism. So the class of bosses wouldn’t magically disappear over night.
If people organized (either “horizontally” or otherwise) to form some thing, some kind of organization or institution or loose federation of grassroots cooperatives or whatever you want to call it, that would be able to suppress this boss class and their military and everything. That thing would be what marxist leninists call a state by definition. Because when we talk about a state, we mean nothing more or less than a weapon able to force the will of one class upon another. Even if that will is just:“stop forcing your will on us non-bosses”. How horizontal it is internally dosn’t matter at all for the definition of a state.