XPost: alt.politics.radical-left, alt.society.anarchy   
   From: etacx18@etaoin.com   
      
   [6]ClubOrlov   
      
      published on tuesdays   
      
   Tuesday, November 20, 2012   
      
   The Practice of Anarchy   
      
      [7][SpreadAnarchy.jpg]   
      In my previous three-part series on anarchy (available [8]here, [9]here   
      and [10]here) I argued, among other things, that anarchic (that is to   
      say, non-hierarchical and self-organizing) systems are the norm in   
      evolution and in nature and have also been the norm in human societies   
      through much of their existence. They have a great deal to offer us as   
      we attempt to navigate a landscape dominated by the failure of various   
      centrally controlled, rigidly organized, explicitly codified   
      hierarchical systems based on complex chains of command that have come   
      to dominate human societies in recent centuries. I have also pointed   
      out that, based on recent results from complexity theory, such   
      hierarchical systems are collapse-prone. This is because they scale   
      badly, increasing their metabolic cost per unit size as their size   
      increases, which is just the opposite of how living organisms behave.   
      This is also because, in order to continue to meet their internal   
      maintenance requirements, they have to grow exponentially until they   
      encounter physical limits.   
      
      But, as some astute readers have pointed out, what are we to do with   
      all this excellent information? We live in a hierarchically structured   
      society whose sometimes oppressive but always ever-present top-down   
      authority we cannot escape. With many generations of people having   
      become used to hearing anarchists vilified as terrorists, communist   
      revolutionaries and having been conditioned to accept anarchy as a   
      synonym for chaos and mayhem, any attempt at advocating anarchism as a   
      political program is bound to go nowhere. We may be able to accept that   
      anarchy is the way of nature, but we must also accept that it is no   
      longer (at least for the time being) the way of human nature—or, if you   
      like, not the way of man—or at least not the way of “the man”—the   
   one   
      who pays us a little something if we are helpful to him and orders us   
      to be beat up or locked up if we are not. The advocate of anarchy is at   
      best an amusing disembodied voice on the Internet (who must be dong   
      something or other more practical to please the hierarchy in order to   
      be able to afford the free time and the Internet connection). At worst,   
      the compulsion to advocate anarchism as a program of political reform   
      is a sign of mental illness.   
      
      Yes, the advocate of anarchist revolution is a sad sort of imbecile,   
      but this is not to say that the theory that underpins anarchism is   
      without any practical applications. It is just that such applications   
      have nothing at all to do with politics. Just as anarchist thinking has   
      at its source the scientific observation of nature, so must its   
      applications to contemporary society start by observing the   
      constructive role that anarchy normally plays within contemporary   
      society, and then look for ways to extend it. Are there any examples of   
      that? Yes, indeed there are. Whenever an existing hierarchically   
      organized system becomes sufficiently ossified and dysfunctional to   
      give an obvious edge to an improvised, anarchic, perhaps initially   
      inferior alternative, there is a possibility that such an alternative   
      will materialize out of nowhere, spread virally, become dominant, and   
      then, in turn, become hierarchical and ossified. Let's list some   
      obvious examples.   
      
      The Protestant revolution is an obvious one. Once the Catholic church—a   
      hierarchical organization par excellence, though built on top of the   
      wreckage of anarchic early Christianity—became sufficiently corrupt and   
      obnoxious, putting up toll booths before the gates of heaven and so   
      forth, a variety of new self-selected religious leaders led a revolt,   
      providing viable, though rather primitive, alternatives, which then   
      took over in many parts of the world, and eventually sprouted their own   
      hierarchical structures thanks to the efforts of Luther. The Russian   
      revolution is another one: once the general senility and obsolescence   
      of the Czarist ancien régime became compounded by its failed effort   
      durng World War I to a point where it could no longer quell bread   
      riots, a variety of new self-selected political leaders stepped into   
      the breach and provided an alternative, until it, again, sprouted a   
      hierarchical organization of its own thanks to the efforts of Lenin.   
      Seventy years later the stiff and morbid hierarchy into which it   
      evolved was also tipped into the dustbin. More recently, when the first   
      efforts at trade liberalization provided advantages of economies of   
      scale, as well as labor and jurisdictional arbitrage, with which   
      national enterprises could not compete, the trend became unstoppable,   
      until there is now a single transnational business environment which is   
      beyond any one nation's control. If history is any guide (as it   
      sometimes is) the inevitable result will be that a dangerously   
      centralized global economic bureaucracy, conceived in an effort to   
      control the forces of chaos globalization has unleashed, will briefly   
      attempt to dominate the scene before crumbling into dust under its own   
      weight.   
      
      Equally significant (and somewhat less fraught) examples of anarchy in   
      action can be found in the area of computer technology. There was a   
      time when computers made by different manufacturers came with their own   
      different and incompatible operating systems. The manufacturers liked   
      this state of affairs, in spite of the fact that it greatly   
      inconvenienced the users, because it created lock-in: switching from   
      one manufacturer to another involved expensive and time-consuming   
      rewriting of software. Then it just happened that two minds at Bell   
      Labs dreamt up a very simple and primitive operating system called Unix   
      (its very name was initially a joke) which was written in a language   
      called C that ran on a lot of different computers—and virally took over   
      the world. Then Unix became a commercial product, instantly going from   
      anarchical and free to hierarchical and expensive. But anarchy   
      triumphed again when it was rewritten, through various efforts, in a   
      way that pried it away from grubby corporate hands. A big role in all   
      this was played by self-selected leaders. Richard Stallman's GNU   
      project (the acronym stands for “GNU is Not Unix”) created gcc, a free   
      C compiler, and rewrote a great many Unix utilities to be free as well.   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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