Discussions about scarcity and anarchism that I’ve seen online seem to always talk about “scarcity in the large”, i.e. how does an anarchist society allocate production, food, labour, materials etc.
I’ve a question about anarchism and scarcity in the small. Say, a really nice location, eg. a breezy location in a very hot climate, or the room with the nice windows in the community centre, or Bag End at the top of the hill. Say, an anarchist community has decided to use the location for purpose X, but a minority wants to use it for purpose Y. Maybe an even smaller minority wants to do Z, and a bunch of other people have their own little ideas about how to use it. Some are transient and could be accommodated (you get it on Tuesdays 5-7) but others might not be (“our sculpture project needs to dry out in that specific spot for the next 4 months, we know it blocks the view but it’s the only place the breeze hits just right!”) or could be contradictory (the siesta people vs the loud backgammon players can’t both use the spot at high noon) or antagonistic (the teenagers who want to party late vs the new parents who need quiet for the babies). And dis-association doesn’t really help here because that’s the nice spot for many kilometers around or there is literally no way to create another beach for our small island community because that’s literally the only place on the island where sand exists, so we can’t just off and leave. (* Many of these examples are imagining a hot summer in an anarchist Greece, sorry it’s almost August.)
It looks to me like a simple non-life-and-death scenario like this could potentially completely poison and destroy a community and in the face of that it would be the little death of anti-authoritarian organizing. Like yea, when life and death matters are at hand, anarchists will band together and conquer the bread. But petty small-scale little shit where it’s managing annoyances and small grievances, I don’t think non-authoritarian decision making can solve. And I suspect it’s crap like this that has killed off many intentional communities and experiments or made them veer away from non-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian organizing.
Have anarchist thinkers seriously thought of this?
This seems to be more of a case of:
my two favourite types of questions from nonanarchists:
you can’t reject the premise of the question, because their eyes gloss over and they call you an idealist.
Literally on the sidebar.
I don’t think my behaviour in this thread has been smarmy or antagonistic, as your cartoon implies, but if it has, I apologize.
I got my answer from Flora, so I’m thanking good faith responses and I’m outta here, glossing my eyes and back with the other nonanarchists. Checkmate, I guess.
This seems kind of unnecessary. They’ve been pretty reasonable and polite, and after a quick look at their post history I didn’t see any sign that this was asked in bad faith.
I get that anarchists probably get tired of answering questions, but it also seems like an important part of getting people who aren’t already 100% onboard to better understand anarchy?
It may be a lack of imagination on my part, but I had trouble understanding most of the answers they got too, so I guess I sympathize.
They backtracked a bit in their later replies, but the original question is exactly the type of contrived theoretical scenario that when you try to also answer it theoretically there is an endless amounts of “gotchas”.
Discussing anarchy theoretically online is IMHO a bit pointless anyways, as there is no agreed canon and every scenario will be always highly context specific.
People will either come to agree with anarchism because they agree with the basic principles (which do not need convincing in arguments) or because they see it working in praxis…
not the GP, but i did voice frustrations that were probably uncalled for.
i resonated with the image after this specific comment:
this brought to mind thousands of conversations i’ve had before which would have effectively ended there — with the words ‘utopian’, ‘idealist’ or ‘unrealistic’.
OP got some good answers which they seem satisfied with. this was all a reaction to the state of the discussion at the time.
i think this works best thru sharing anarchistic (not specifically anarchist) books (to add perspective), and praxis (to experience/internalise anarchist organising principles).
hypotheticals can be amusing among likeminds, but it’s usually just deconstructive otherwise.