It's disheartening but I guess predictable that a society which seems to be committed to democratic reforms in the Middle East is the one getting thrown under the bus.
This article talks about the US as monolithic, but my limited understanding is that although SDF's key ally was the US Army, CIA had clandestinely been backing a different Syrian faction, so "the US" has never wholeheartedly been onside throughout. (and, presumably, now it's State's turn to be backing Erdogan? Pawns will be sacrificed.)
'America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests' — HAK
The West just wants to hurt Assad and by extension Russia and Iran. It is truly an evil war. Syria would have been better off under Assad than with what has happened due to Western intervention. The bar for toppling a sovereign order should be very high, and should almost always include a high chance of quick success and a viable alternative regime.
Thank you! (if you'd care to expand a bit on the compatibility of legal codes and court power with anarchism, I'm all eyeballs.)
For example: in my country, police can act on their own in criminal matters, but must have a court order to act on civil matters. This, to my uninformed mind, is already a proto-hierarchy. How would this sort of distinction be handled in a non-hierarchical manner?
Rotation would be one way to do it. The problem with hierarchies is not that they exist, but that the people who are within them get used to their positions and start to abuse them.
If you limit those priviledges in time and make them part of civil duties you not only get a more ephatic, educated public (as they learn what a police force has to deal with first hand) you avoid them developing into a paramilitary structure within your society.
Or so goes the theory. Would be interesting to try this one out in practise.
As with rotation between military units, it would also solve the problem of cops and criminals (due to being pretty much in the same milieu) finding their interests more aligned with each other than with society at large.
The immediate drawback I notice is that in my country, local police have substantial training: 2 years full time (IIRC) so they must sign contracts beforehand such that if they were to quit before X years they would owe their jurisdiction the prorated amount of their training costs.
(OTOH, IIUC US County Deputies have almost no requirements, so YMMV)
Perhaps your first several rotation could be a provisional/training rotation where you receive on the job training.
Another thing to consider is that, at least in my country, police have a huge mandate. If we narrow the scope of the mission, we can reduce the amount of training necessary.
Spitballing... maybe rotations are by subject area, but you'd have to have passed qualifying exams for certain posts within that subject. People who didn't find the more responsible posts to their temperament would still be exposed to the problems of the field as they cycle through, and those who do would be doing on-the-job training until they felt confident in (or the other people currently in that subject strongly recommended to) challenge the exams.
(come to think of it, that's not too far off from the apprenticeship model of many trades and professions in my country, except it would tend to develop T or even W shaped people instead of just I shaped...)
I agree that what you're describing is a hierarchy. What I would say is that, as much as possible, policing should be dismantled. My understanding is that in Rojava policing is a shared responsibility, sort of like jury duty. They educate as many people as possible in how to fulfill this roll, and then people rotate through it for short periods of time. This helps prevent a professional class of police from arising and starting to use the powers of the police to pursue their own interests and protect themselves from accountability. Similar logic could be applied to judges.
An advantage to applying similar logic to judges is that the legal code would have to be simple and straightforward to make it work.
(lawyers might be more difficult to rotate? but if the legal code were simple enough, maybe almost all cases would come down to questions of fact instead of questions of law, enabling pro se representation? I suspect our anarchist citizens would have be substantially better educated than current modal standards.
I can't remember what their term for it was, but someone once told me the various different "first responder" trades in the US now have a shared vocabulary for building and modifying a temporary (limited to the duration of the incident) on-site hierarchy.
Everyone would be participating in governance, sometimes because they were on a council, other times because they were part of democratic processes. People wouldn't master opaque bureaucracies, but we should be eliminating those as much as possible. It's also my experience that there's never a shortage of opportunities to practice leadership and decision making when you're working with other people in a real world environment, where unforseen circumstances are constantly forcing your team to react and adapt. It's also my observation that when there is a problem, most people's instinct is to get everyone who's expertise are relevant into a room, discuss the relevant facts, and make a decision by consensus - if you leave people to their own devices, they reflectively form a direct democracy.
Seems nice if all you need are bobbies on the beat, but where do specialists come from in this anarchist utopia? Protection rackets generally form pretty quickly in power vacuums, and in this scenario, the criminals are more experienced and better equipped than a force of volunteer rookies. Also seems like a good place to operate a computer crime group, since none of these short-term police officers are likely to even know where to start looking for a gang of hackers and scammers.
So, it's not that there would be a power vacuum, it's that there would be horizontal power structures instead of hierarchical power structures. If you snapped Thanos's glove and the state suddenly stopped existing, there's no reason to expect that would go well, I'd agree with that. You'd have to carefully dismantle it, piece by piece, and replace them with better structures. You'd need to maintain and adapt those structures as you encounter problems and as the world changes.
If people can just get the things they need or want straightforwardly I don't think many would choose to get them by force. I don't think people form mafias because they're just looking for something to do, I think mafias usually form because a certain ethnic group or social class isn't able to get what they require through licit means. Eg, when Italians arrived in the United States, they faced immense prejudice and discrimination in hiring. In my view this is a mirror image of the hierarchy that was oppressing them to begin with.
Will there be super sophisticated criminals who need dedicated, specialist investigators to pursue? It seems like reasonable speculation. In that case though, these specialists don't need to be the same people as beat cops. A big problem with the police is that their mission is too broad and they can't possibly to a good job across the board. If we have a big computer crime problem we can form a computer crime investigation team, with various checks and balances, and all they're empowered to do is investigate and to present their findings to the other mechanisms of the justice system.
In this hypothetical society there's one thing that can't be obtained legitimately: Power over other human beings. Look around you. Read the news. A lot of people desire power over other human beings more than they desire anything else. If mafias form because people can't get what they want through legitimate means, and people can't get power, mafias will form for the primary purpose of getting power, unless actively suppressed.
pedantry: I believe the mafia was actually native to sicily, but did develop for similar reasons you posit. The absentee-landlord Normans had wiped out whatever indigenous civil society apparatus there was in an attempt to arrogate all power to themselves, and so the mafia arose...
I think courts would be private as well, and you'd live in a jurisdiction of your choice.
I also think that jurisdictions that didn't enforce court orders from other jurisdictions would be black-listed by those jurisdictions. Furthermore, individuals from a black-listed jurisdiction would be stigmatized in, or barred from entering the jurisdiction that couldn't obtain their cooperation.
There has to be a cost attached to unreasonably uncooperative behavior.
David Friedman appears to be a so-called “anarcho-capitalist”, which is not what this article is talking about. Anarchy is inherently incompatible with capitalism. Anarchy is the dismantling of hierarchies, the removal of rulers. Capitalism depends on hierarchies and lauds rulers.
Anarchism describes a way of organizing society in a cooperative way without government compulsion. The idea that it is incompatible with capitalism, which is inherently based on mutual cooperation, is something pushed retroactively by socialist anarchists.
Also, the idea that hierarchies of any type cannot exist within anarchies is more socialist revisionism. Most anarchist societies over history have had hierarchies in some form or another. Somalia and Iceland's periods of anarchy are two such examples.
What do you mean by capitalism? The sort of more formal idea that ownership of an asset entitles one to the production from that asset? Or the more informal (but widespread) general cluster of ideas around free markets and all that jazz.
I don’t really see how the former could work really well in anarchy. Like hypothetically say you “owned” a workshop that could make something useful for the community, they would probably collectively agree that… they should just walk in and start using it. What next?
On the other hand, it seems to me that the general idea of markets could be used. Like, if there was a community workshop, but you were unusually good at making shoes, and had a workstation at that workshop, presumably nothing would prevent you from trading your shoes to other people. The economic value doesn’t really come from the asset of the workstation in that case, though, it comes from your abilities, right?
Anarchism describes a way of organizing society in a cooperative way without government compulsion. The idea that it is compatible with capitalism, which is inherently based on exploitation of labor and asymmetric distribution of returns favoring capital, is something being pushed retroactively by capitalist anarchists.
Capitalism depends on allocating capital goods to their long-term highest and best use. While this may often involve what is effectively a power hierarchy, there's nothing necessary or inherent about this. Many observers would say that large hierarchies in real-world economies are an outcome of undue government influence, for example.
I had a lovely conversation about cryptoassets with someone who held ancap views (we didn't exchange labels but I'd wager they'd embrace this one) earlier today. You can't tell if someone is a fascist based on their ideological label (outside a few obvious exceptions like, "I'm a Nazi," sure), because as a rule fascists don't want to be identified.
It might be worth mentioning that parent post is the anarcho-capitalist flavor of anarchy, which solution would sound like a dystopia to an ansoc or anarcho-communist person such as OP.
I'm pretty skeptical about whether these private courts would/could work in the long term, but it is fascinating to read the theories.
In some sense they already exist in modern society. Most insurance companies arbitrate in private courts for instance. Public courts are too slow and inefficient.
Public courts are slow and inefficient by design. The principle (and practice imx) is that most cases should settle before ever taking up much of a public court's time. Making public courts faster would reduce the incentive of the parties to avoid externalising their failure to agree onto the public.
Robert Evans (the author) has done a lot of important reporting in the middle east. I first heard about him through a friend who recommended his podcast "It Could Happen Here", and I loved his reporting on the BLM protests in Portland. Very interesting stuff.
Here's an article from a few days ago: https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/syria-turkey-kurds-roj...
It's disheartening but I guess predictable that a society which seems to be committed to democratic reforms in the Middle East is the one getting thrown under the bus.
'America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests' — HAK
For example: in my country, police can act on their own in criminal matters, but must have a court order to act on civil matters. This, to my uninformed mind, is already a proto-hierarchy. How would this sort of distinction be handled in a non-hierarchical manner?
If you limit those priviledges in time and make them part of civil duties you not only get a more ephatic, educated public (as they learn what a police force has to deal with first hand) you avoid them developing into a paramilitary structure within your society.
Or so goes the theory. Would be interesting to try this one out in practise.
The immediate drawback I notice is that in my country, local police have substantial training: 2 years full time (IIRC) so they must sign contracts beforehand such that if they were to quit before X years they would owe their jurisdiction the prorated amount of their training costs.
(OTOH, IIUC US County Deputies have almost no requirements, so YMMV)
Another thing to consider is that, at least in my country, police have a huge mandate. If we narrow the scope of the mission, we can reduce the amount of training necessary.
(come to think of it, that's not too far off from the apprenticeship model of many trades and professions in my country, except it would tend to develop T or even W shaped people instead of just I shaped...)
(lawyers might be more difficult to rotate? but if the legal code were simple enough, maybe almost all cases would come down to questions of fact instead of questions of law, enabling pro se representation? I suspect our anarchist citizens would have be substantially better educated than current modal standards.
cf RA Lafferty, Primary Education of the Camiroi)
If people can just get the things they need or want straightforwardly I don't think many would choose to get them by force. I don't think people form mafias because they're just looking for something to do, I think mafias usually form because a certain ethnic group or social class isn't able to get what they require through licit means. Eg, when Italians arrived in the United States, they faced immense prejudice and discrimination in hiring. In my view this is a mirror image of the hierarchy that was oppressing them to begin with.
Will there be super sophisticated criminals who need dedicated, specialist investigators to pursue? It seems like reasonable speculation. In that case though, these specialists don't need to be the same people as beat cops. A big problem with the police is that their mission is too broad and they can't possibly to a good job across the board. If we have a big computer crime problem we can form a computer crime investigation team, with various checks and balances, and all they're empowered to do is investigate and to present their findings to the other mechanisms of the justice system.
I think courts would be private as well, and you'd live in a jurisdiction of your choice.
I also think that jurisdictions that didn't enforce court orders from other jurisdictions would be black-listed by those jurisdictions. Furthermore, individuals from a black-listed jurisdiction would be stigmatized in, or barred from entering the jurisdiction that couldn't obtain their cooperation.
There has to be a cost attached to unreasonably uncooperative behavior.
Also, the idea that hierarchies of any type cannot exist within anarchies is more socialist revisionism. Most anarchist societies over history have had hierarchies in some form or another. Somalia and Iceland's periods of anarchy are two such examples.
I don’t really see how the former could work really well in anarchy. Like hypothetically say you “owned” a workshop that could make something useful for the community, they would probably collectively agree that… they should just walk in and start using it. What next?
On the other hand, it seems to me that the general idea of markets could be used. Like, if there was a community workshop, but you were unusually good at making shoes, and had a workstation at that workshop, presumably nothing would prevent you from trading your shoes to other people. The economic value doesn’t really come from the asset of the workstation in that case, though, it comes from your abilities, right?
Competition is not cooperation. Profit is not cooperation. Privatization is not cooperation.
*Cough* ICC *cough*?
That's similar to the definition of countries, international treaties and frontiers.
I'm pretty skeptical about whether these private courts would/could work in the long term, but it is fascinating to read the theories.