TIL about the Christiana commune. Interesting!
I love that story! I tell it every time someone tries to sell me on anarchism.
Christiana was an old military complex that the government gave up on, so anarchist squatters moved in.
Soon they realized, that they needed some way to decide matters that concerned everyone. So they formed small councils, and in these councils they each chose some people to represent them in one big council. These people weren’t elected politicians, just people chosen to represent them. They then voted on issues, and no, that wasn’t a form of democracy. It’s still anarchism.
Then then realized, that the upkeep of common areas and infrastructure costs money, so they required that everyone paid their share. That obviously weren’t taxes. Just mandatory contributions.
When organized crime started to spread, they decided on some mandatory rules (you read right: these weren’t laws, just mandatory rules that you had to keep if you didn’t want to face punishment). Then they chose some strong men that should make sure the rules were followed. No, not police men. Just concerned strong men.
They worked together with Kopenhagen’s police. Basically, they’d call the cops and then drag the offenders outside of Christiania to the waiting cops.
Part of the rules were that it wasn’t allowed to consume hard drugs or to wear motor cycle gang attire.
So in the end, they had no politicians, no government, no taxes and no police force. Just things that where basically identical to these things. The only thing they really don’t have is a prison, because they outsourced that to Kopenhagen.
Anarchism directly leads to a form of government, no matter how you call it.
If you want an opposite example, how anarchism lead to an anarcho-capitalistic nightmare, where the community decended into a rule by organized crime, google the Kowloon Walled City. It’s equally interesting.
But anarchism is a form of government. Just a collectivelly decided on one. Self-gorvernment, in particular.
When was the last time you directly chose your policemen and direct representatives in a community meeting?
Obviously, though, you can’t have an anarchist oasis in the middle of a capitalist city and world, so in the end any isolated anarchist experiments are bound to be imperfect.
Sure, but what happened in Christiania was more direct democracy than anarchism. The problem with democracy is that engagement goes down the drain when you reach “good enough” and then you get situations like the ones arising all around the west. Corruption, incompetence and the hateful minority getting an outsized mandate due to the apathy of the masses.
How long has Christiania been existing for? Decades instead of centuries? Give it time.
The difference is than in an ideal anarchist polity, the minority can secede, even down to the individual. “Majority rule” only happens to the extent that the minority doesn’t find secession to be a worthwhile option. Whereas under democracy, the land and resources of the minority, and even the people themselves are considered to rightfully belong to the state. Any serious attempt at secession is met with violence.
Actually-existing “anarchistic” societies may not completely live up to this ideal, but it is what we strive for. Anarchists consider freedom of association and freedom of disassociation to be paramount.
That’s a nice concept that maybe could work if you live in a society without any shared resource, no infrastructure at all and no things that are built in a shared way, since everyone needs to be independent and self-sufficient enough to secede at any time.
I think, even at neolithic times we might have been too advanced for that to work.
Infinitely dividable secession sounds sort of like capitalism’s limitless growth. There’s only so many square meters of land, how can everyone have their own private anarcho-commune?
Anarchism directly leads to a form of government,
yes, and anarchism never claimed otherwise.
What you’re deliberately ignoring is that anarchists organise horizontally, not from the top down, and also that capitalism is inherently incompatible with anarchism since it demands hierarchy, and hierarchy is what anarchism opposes.
So basically your entire snide and ill informed comment here is irrelevant, since you clearly just pulled a bunch of propaganda out of your ass and have never spent more than 30 seconds researching what anarchism actually is.
And yet I’m sure you feel super proud of yourself.
Clown.
Nothing gets your point across like finishing on an ad hominem. Good job. You showed them and they will totally see things your way now.
Well, I’ve never heard of a well-informed anarchist either, so there you go.
They just don’t understand any of the basics of organisation.
They just base their whole ideology on the delusion that everybody’s just gonna play nice, nobody will want to do anything for their advantage and, cucially, that crime just doesn’t exist.
I wanna see how any anarchist society deals with a murder. Or with someone who is dangerously mentally ill.
But that’s already much too high for anarchists, who barely understand basic human incentives.
The society won’t work without hierarchies. The important thing is to not forcefully involve other people in your hierarchy.
Nobody wants to organize horizontally.
There isn’t much I hate more than Christiania. Started as a project of privileged kids looking for a place to smoke weed and occupying a land that was meant for redevelopment and actual communal housing. Cool, cool. It quite quickly became a class society, with peddlers (those who sell drugs) ostentatiously flaunting their wealth, with the other side of the “commune” developing into a typical bourgeoisie, nuclear-family powered suburb, all with a horse rink included.
In this revolutionary commune that is not bound by the laws of European Union, as they claim, you can buy Nestle products and pay for them with a card.
It is, ultimately, a weed dispensary with state monopoly, holding together with the police violence against mostly minorities that sell weed outside its walls indispensable for its well-being.
But then, I wouldn’t say it’s a problem of the anarchist movement. Anarchists are generally aware of those contradictions and the anarchist praxis is that of building an alternative to the society within the society. Christiana was a hippie project. Hippies, in my opinion, destroyed the left wing movement. They decided that they can use their privilege (because, of course, it was mostly white, middle class kids) to fuck off from the society. They withdrew from the class struggle at large. Instead of working in the unions, instead of organizing with Rainbow Coalition, they just fucked off the their “horizontally governed communes” to smoke weed and have sex.
Fuck hippies. And fuck Christiania.
Also, fun fact, last year they legally bought the land from the city, using a loan from the city.
I’ve never heard this take on hippies but you make a compelling argument. I’m the US, Ive always blamed Gen X from withdrawing from the class struggle at large but it makes sense that the problem happened also with earlier generations. Arguably 3 generations after the labor movement in the US did very little to keep the fight going (though I will say civil rights has come very far during those generations)
The people who generally want to destroy a system and rebuild anew are usually clueless or have an ulterior motive.
While we are nowhere near the best we could be, we are also nowhere near the worst we have been in the past. Today is the result of an endless amount of people putting their effort, and often their lives, into improving society. This fight never ends.
The people who generally want to destroy a system and rebuild anew are usually clueless or have an ulterior motive.
It’s worth noting that “destroy and rebuild anew” is a point of contention among anarchists. Some of us favor a revolutionary approach, but some (myself included) favor an “evolutionary” approach instead. Same end goal, just achieved through steady incremental change, rather than a big upheaval.
In practice though, success likely wouldn’t fall cleanly into either category. There’d be incremental change punctuated by occasional (smaller) upheavals. But I guess all social change happens like that, really.
So all revolutionaries are either clueless or deceptive but all reformists are philanthropists who dedicate their entire lives to the improvement of society? Fucking please
How incredibly naive and cynical, both at the same time
