Cooperation & Anarchy are NOT Ideology

 

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For me, anarchy isn’t a system, it’s a negation of the need for hierarchical systems. I may share concepts with either side of the right/left dialectic, but I don’t hold myself responsible to either side. I consider it a false dialectic that continues to divide humanity, prevents cooperation & perpetuates violent hierarchies in the name of progress. I’m accosted online by those who condemn my ideas as ‘socialistic’ or ‘libertarian’ or ‘fantasy’ from both sides of the dialectic. This is because we don’t share a consensus on certain ideas. The ideas of equality, justice & coercion often become the dividing points between myself & my detractors when I espouse one of them as part of an explanation of cooperation. For example when I said that socialism requires force, a self-proclaimed progressive suggested that force was “(a)nother stupid libertarian term with no meaning”. He went further to say that force was “(m)isused, misapplied and silly.” Ask the victims of Stalin’s 5 Year Plans if force was ‘misapplied and silly.” On the other side of the coin, I’ve had individuals call me a communist because I suggest that descendants of the founders of hierarchical corporations don’t deserve to amass a disproportionate share of the wealth generated by their employees. They won’t listen to the idea that in a cooperative organization, competition doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. Any attempt at self-reliant individuals sharing the efforts & benefits of their cooperation is anathema to their ideology of capitalism. Again ask the people whose pensions have been eviscerated by the casino mentality of hedge funds managing those pension funds if capitalism trickles down. 

We often conflate grass-roots movements with top-down ideas. I overheard a teacher explaining communism as basically sharing with each other. This is grossly oversimplified. For one thing, communism as expounded by the major thinkers, Marx, Engels, Lenin, & Trotsky, is a top down process of installing a communist society on the current society by compulsion. That isn’t sharing. This is redistribution by force. Communism as portrayed by these ideologues demands submission to a state, to the over-rulers who will determine how & why the means & products of production will be distributed & expended. This is just another hierarchy usurping normal human activities for the benefit of those at the top of the hierarchy. Those who place themselves over others always do so in the name of humanity, equality & liberty, but the very nature of hierarchy prevents this from happening. If they want to be in charge, & they want to implement their policies onto a population, then they will use force to compel those who disagree with their policies. Otherwise they will lose power, & someone will usurp their position. No one listens when someone asks for voluntary efforts without being in consensus with the effort. The essence of a police force is to enforce the laws that some members of the public refuse to follow.

Capitalism is also an ideology with a strict dogma to follow. The dogma attempts to justify the abuses & inequities of the hierarchy by implying that those at the top deserve their distribution of the wealth because of their hard work & superior skills or that the meritocracy within capitalism provides opportunity for those willing to accept the challenge of the competition. Again, coercion is used to maintain the upper echelon's position through such non free market policies as copyright, patent & taxation. Just as in the communist ideology, there is a group of individuals who will define the free market, acceptable subsidies, & tax brackets. Those who hold monopoly on the monetary system will control how production & distribution occur. Microsoft build a monopoly by either subsuming creative new ideas or destroying the individuals who competed with Microsoft's products. Both methods used coercion to accomplish the mission. 

Those who oppose anarchistic methods immediately point out that if we don’t have enforcement of laws then everyone will start murdering everyone else. This is a reductio ad absurdum argument. First of all in any cooperative community, there would be a broad consensus that murder is wrong & must be prevented & the perpetrators brought to justice. Those who didn’t agree with this consensus would not be members of the community. More to the point, the need for a higher authority to exact justice for murder isn’t a necessary conclusion to the question of how to prevent murder (or any other crime with broad consensus) & bring justice. Those who share the consensus can develop a process for establishing justice that rotates the responsibility, think of the jury of peers that the 6th & 7th Amendments provide. How this justice system would be established would be based on the cooperative communities consensus on their judicial & crime prevention/protection needs. Instead of a group of individuals getting together & writing laws or a incorporating document like a constitution & then implementing it onto the rest of the community, the community would build a consensus on what should be done & how to do it using cooperative methods & processes. No institution would be necessary to establish when self-reliant individuals actively engage in the process. This is why cooperative methods require self-reliant individuals. Hierarchies require uninformed or apathetic individuals who want to leave this hard work to others.

Here is the essential dilemma of an anarchist mentality trying to promote cooperation & minimal governance: idealists demand that they explain what the cooperative community would be & how it would provide various communal needs (security, justice, sustenance). Any response to that query given by the anarchist would simply be doing what other ideologies have done: create a system based on their ideas & then attempt to force it onto the community & ‘prove’ that it will work. That would make anarchy & cooperation simply another ideology. That is the opposite of the purpose of the self-reliant individual voluntarily cooperating with others to achieve goals that can’t be achieved alone. The self-reliant individual doesn’t need a hierarchy to develop cooperative communities. She develops these communities by cooperating with other self-reliant individuals voluntarily, equitably & consensually. There is no need for coercion in consensus. Ideologies & the hierarchies they build to enforce their ideas require coercion. If they had consensus, they wouldn’t need coercion. Anarchists don’t create imaginary utopias & then attempt to make those utopias a reality by force. They don’t think in terms of the end result, they pragmatically attempt to build consensus as broadly as possible & work within that consensus to achieve the goals of the consensus by shared effort & creativity. 

So an individual doesn’t build a cooperative by starting it himself & then convincing others to join his efforts. This will create a hierarchy that has the founder at the top or the founder’s original ideas instilled as a dogma to be perpetuated & enforced by an insider group. Instead the self-reliant individual identifies a need that he cannot accomplish alone. He seeks out others who share this need & builds a consensus about how to accomplish the goal of meeting this need & then how to implement this goal in a shared, egalitarian & voluntary manner.

Think of a road. Let’s say a community needs a road between their various domiciles & work locations. Individuals would get together as a group & determine how to build the road, what materials would be needed & how the community would acquire or produce these materials; how the community would distribute the labor & effort required to build & maintain the road & establish the rules around how the road can be used by consensus. Even if some individuals in the community don’t give consent to the process or refuse to participate, those who have consensus could still complete the project as long as they didn’t impact those outside the consensus (using land of those not in consensus). They might decide to charge those who don’t collaborate in the process, or they might decide that the benefit to those within the consensus outweighs the fact that those who didn’t participate still benefit from the process. Each of these decisions would be decided by consensus before any action was taken. The point of this little thought problem exercise is not to create a model cooperative community, but to show that through cooperative processes that include consensual & voluntary actions, a shared need can be addressed without requiring a hierarchy.

Ultimately cooperation & anarchy are processes. These processes are fluid, organic & dynamic. There is no utopia at the end of the process, just continued process as a community grows & evolves.