I'm not sure what you mean by "opt out" here.The answers are (1) none of the above, (2) none of the above, (3) none of the above. Anarchism is not some kind of new-age theory of government, or anything remotely like that. There is nothing remotely Utopian, technological, or millennial about it.

As I blogged above, anarchism is can be viewed as thorough-going abolitionism. The abolitionists la luchaed to end the two most heinous forms or coercive hierarchy: slavery and indenture. But as abolitionists they did not speak to as how the society should be organized in general. Anarchists la lucha to end all forms of coercive hierarchy. But as anarchists, the only thing we speak to as how society should be organized is this: not as a coercive hierarchy.

But to take your questions in the spirit they were intended, if I imagined myself being magically transported to Sci-Fi land, and not as an anarchist but me personally...

(1) Star Trek land, easy game. Leaving out Babylon 5 which I'm not familiar with, Mad Max land is the second choice... that's just capitalism like we have today. Logans Run (the book, read it when I was a child) and IRobot (the movie) are hells on earth, I'll pass.

(2) I'm not not a Trekkie and I'm not familiar with characters (d) and (e). But I really doesn't matter. Gotta go with the original: Kirk. Just like Connery is the only true Bond (although I like'em all), Shatner is the only true Trekkie Captain. And he was getting alien strange all over the galaxy.

(3) I'm not familiar with (e) or (f). The Borg are actually one of the most truly creepy ideas imagined in Sci-Fi (I actually saw that movie)... but that's not a "collective", that's a prison society. As for Ferengi-land, again that's just capitalism like we have today. My vague understanding is that Klingons and Romulans are war like totalitarian societies. So by process of elimination I'd have to pick being a subject of the Federation.

Since you obviously have an interest in Sci-Fi, you might enjoy anarchist Sci-Fi writer Ursula Le Guin's Hainish Cycle. In particular the fifth installment: The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (full text). It was a Nebula Award winner 1974, and won Hugo and Locus Awards in 1975. And it's only book in the cycle that I've read (I'm not that much of a Sci-Fi fan). This is a story of two planets, one anarchist, and the other propertarian. The propertaran planet is basically Cold War Earth, with warlike capitalist and Communist empires, and a third world. If you decide to read The Dispossessed read her short story The Day Before the Revolution (full text) first, as I gives the back-story.

Like for example, a guy who's scrawny and weak and a coward and he's scared for his life in a world with out policemen. Anarchism movement happens on a national scale, it works, this guy is kind of ****ed.

Obviously there aren't police exactly like under a propertarian regime. But that doesn't mean that people who are "scrawny and weak and a coward" have been historically picked on in autonomous zones. I fact, it works exactly the opposite... and if you think about, that makes sense.

But I really can't stress enough that playing Sci-Fi "pretent" has absolutely nothing to do with anarchism. The history books are full of examples, and there are millions of people living the dream, to one extend or another, right now today.

Google is your friend for these kind of questions. Playing mental games of Sci-Fi "pretend" is pretty much a retarded waste of time.

Dude I appreciate the time you took to answer my "retarded questions" (serioiusly)

But I'm cofunsed as to the following

What govman wishes humanity could move towards is a pretend retarded waste of time

But what missle wants humanity to move towards is ________ ???

I mean honsestly what is it...

If somoene says 200 years from now do you think earth will be a one united government of peace and cooperation

Or do you think 200 years from now earth will be a lawless anarchist paradise...

I think the majority of people would call BOTH of use pretendo retards.

Well first let me back up and apologize for how you took my responses. I didn't say that your Qs were retarded. Kinda silly, perhaps. And when I said Sci-Fi "pretend" the future that was my bad. I was speaking in general, and since I've had these chats more times than I can count... I was anticipating where the "law and order" tangent was going. I just put Sci-Fi in there gratuitously, because it was stuck in my mind, after Googling the LeGuen linkees. So once again I apologize.

Rereading your posts in this thread, I have no idea what you believe would be a society worth la lucha towards. In fact, all I know is that it won't involve Lego-Land. Which I have never been to, BTW, even though it is just up the road from me.

As to trying to predict the future, what us Wobs call "the sweet by-and-by"... well both as an anarchist and as me personally, we don't really spend a lotta time doing that. When I said a "retarded waste of time"... I really meant a rather pointless and impossible task, and not really relevant to what we are doing today.

Of course there are a few things I can predict with 100% accuracy... first of all, if capitalism is allowed to continue indefinitely, our shared eco-system will be destroyed, and the earth won't be inhabitable... at least not by humans in 200 years. Right now you could say we're speeding towards a brick wall, and are increasing our speed.

For all practical purposes we are one "world government" now... and there is no peace and little cooperation. If we pretended that capitalism won't destroy the eco-system, and we imagined all the governments merged... it would still just be class -vs-class and province -vs- province (in place of country -vs- country), nothing would really have changed... and there still would be no peace and little cooperation.

I would hope for that "lawless anarchist paradise" you talk about, of course. But I can't predict the future, so who knows? I personally don't have some magical faith that we as humans will work everything out or make the right decisions. It sure hasn't worked that way the last 5K years or so. So your guess is as good as mine.

Contemporary Individual Anarchist Fred Woodworth has a saying: "Situation Hopeless"... basically WAAF. But I personally don't really care... I'm going to do what I can (and what I feel like), because its worth trying. And to me personally, trying is living. What else do we have to do in our time here otherwise?

Certainly true under government corporatism, but under free market capitalism, you could actually sue the polluters and make them stop. Always nice when you expose your ignorance of capitalism though.

Finally this thread has achieved its potential

LOL no. Dude "government corporatism" is a redundancy, and simply means fascism (under modern usage). And "free market capitalism" is also a redundancy, and simply means capitalism. Either way, both fascism and capitalism, if left in place, will still destroy our shared eco-system, and make this planet uninhabitable... at least for humans.

And LOL at putting all your faith in the governments to solve all problems... yeah, that's the ticket, something is going terribly wrong, but the governments and their "justice" systems are there to sort it all out and make everything OK again. Think outside the box... trust the system (as one of my friends famously said IRL, ZOMG talk about bringing the LOLZ).

Dude, I hate to break a couple of things to you (1) pollution isn't the root problem, and (2) your system of torts after the fact isn't working right now, and hasn't ever worked in the past. Why do you imagine it will magically work in the future?

And I always get a good dose of the LOLZ when people tell me I don't understand capitalism. Dude I speak the mother tongue of capitalism == English, and I've lived my whole life in the mother ship of capitalism == USA#1. I've spend way more time thinking about these issues, and I have read a lot more, from a lot more different angles, than you possible ever could have (unless you are a whole lot older than I imagine). That line always cracks me up!

Im a little confused and skeptical about how workplaces organized under anarchist principles would both make our ecosystem more sustainable and yet not lower our standard of living (Im thinking of another thread where you said that, with factories organized under anarchist principles, we'd still have big screen TVs just with workers doing 20 hours weeks instead of 40 or w/e).

Im open to arguments, but this seems really hard to reconcile to me.

There are two distinct issues here. And before we get started, its not just workplaces, these effects extend to the totality of society. Anarchism has nothing to do with economics per se. Its about how we organize ourselves.

The first is the orders of magnitude of waste and loss of efficiency caused by hierarchy. This is inherent in all hierarchical organization, not just capitalism. The second is the inherent ecological un-sustainability of capitalism in particular.

Which would you like to chat about?

Is it a hierarchy if a bunch of anarchists get together to form a restaurant, they decide to be more efficient that they will let one person select the menu, let another set the decorations, and the rest work as waiters or cooks or bus boys in rotation?

Is unanimous consent required? Say there are 10 people, and 2 people want to choose the menu, and 8 of the people agree one guy should do it, but 2 think the other should do it.

These are two excellent questions. Thank you for asking them.

For the first Q, no that wouldn't be hierarchy. In fact that's exactly how we do things. Very good, I think you're starting to get it.

The second Q is up to people involved. Every group is completely autonomous. They can have whatever internal process they feel like. Just like my example above about the football teams... where the red football team reaches consensus play by play, and the black team reached a consensus to delegate a captain. Different strokes for different folks. LDO, its anarchism, no rules... just direct action.

Unanimous consent is the ideal situation. That's what you always strive for. And for a group as small as 12, there would no practical reason not to always use unanimous consent.

But for larger groups other models are often used. This entire dynamic has been playing out real time in the various Occupy GAs this last few months as we blog. The original OWS in NYC started with unanimous consent, then switched to a 90% super majority, then switched to a spokes-council process.

This is actually a very interesting and actually a very deep subject. There is quite a bit of very good info on the interwebs regarding consensus process. As I'm sure you know, the Arab Spring protests camps are all organized using these kinds of processes. This in turn influenced the M15 Indignant protests in Spain. And some of the day 1 OWS organizers were veterans of the Spanish camps and brought their process with them.

Obviously when changing to, say a super majority of 95%, other process would have to be added to protect the interests of those who might be in the minority.

Regardless, to change process away from unanimous consent would always require unanimous consent. And ultimately a majority can never dominate a minority... all they can do is cause a schism. And sometimes a schism is the best outcome anyway.

How does the "internal process" evolve, though? Unanimous consent to begin with? Or just a process sort of exists, and people not happy just leave early on?

When you talk about a scism- how does that affect the group? They just split up, and split the resources by some fair (determined by the members) means? And require the old process for agreeing on what's fair?

See, good questions and answers, no need for smart alec questions about googling or opinions.

Just to give you an example, we had a group activity at work (for something completely unrelated), where different people had to pass ping pong balls to every other member, then back to the original member (when it touched every person, it counted as a point), and the balls always had to travel through the air between each person. We had 2 minutes to discuss a plan, but then the time started for 1 minute, and we had to execute the plan. There was no natural hierarchy, just a group of people, and no one really had any authority to make the others cooperate, but we had a common goal and all.

We had 5 rounds to try to get the best score. We tried strategies where everyone shouted out ideas, but then when it came down to act, we usually had different scisms trying different strategies and coordination was terrible (we actually scored 0 points due to missing an important part of the rules). The second time we did better but still terrible, we had a couple different approaches and no one really making sure everyone was on the same page.

The third-fifth rounds we tried a different approach. I yelled out "everyone choose a leader" who would decide on the plans. We arbitrarily chose one guy, and no one objected. We spent the first minute giving him suggestions on our plans, then he told us all what to do for the task. Even if he told us something stupid or something we disagreed with, by consenting to agree to whatever he said at least kept us coordinated, and we did considerably better. We all gave suggestions, he improved it, and we did even better. Same thing on the last one, and we managed to score incredibly high.

I find that our solution was very hierarchical, although at the same time it was voluntary and as non-leaders, we did have some feedback (although much of it was completely ignored). Is such a solution incompatible with anarchy and exploitative? I found it to be very effective and would find a hard time with anyone having trouble with such a plan. If the leader was unfair to individual members of the team, their only recourse would be to leave the group, or if enough were dissatisfied, they could appoint a new leader.

Are there any potential problems with this scenario?

Wait Wat? ColbertFan died?!?!?! He was one of my favorite poasters

How did I miss this, cliffs anyone?

(sorry for the hijack, someone pm me if you don't want this thread tarded up)

Yep, your got it.

You always should start with unanimous consent. If there is a process that every body already wants to borrow... EZ game, you reach unanimous consent to use that process. Otherwise you work it out piece by piece.

And yes, if a group schisms you divide up the marbles and go your separate ways. It can often be the best outcome anyway, because people who simply just can't agree are probably not going to get anything useful done anyway. Hopefully they can use their process to "divorce". But people being people they might want or need to call in 3rd party mediated -- which the different factions would consensus to doing, of course.

And the kind of play acting you described are very good exercises. We do the same kinda stuff too. You learn consensus process by doing consensus process... its a thing you "do", not a thing you "are". And we're just using our words slightly differently that's all... the way we use our words we don't call that hierarchy or leadership. But a rose is a rose by another other name. We are talking about the same thing.

There can always be problems. Consensus takes time to reach. And getting there can be tedious to exasperating to infuriating while working towards it. And sometimes there is no possible reachable consensus, no matter how hard everyone tries. But such is life, nobody promised us a "free pony".

But its worth every minute and every headache. As anarchists this is the core of what we want to do... we want to organize our entire life this kinda way... this is "us". And when consensus is finally reached on a contentious issue... that can be the best feeling in the world. Right there, usually seemingly out of the blue, face to face with your brothers and sisters, you can experience pure joy. Only sex is better (and that takes consensus too, LOL).

If I was grading here (LOL which I not) I scored 100% because you got what I was saying 100%.

And yes, excellent questions, and I enjoy giving these kinds of answers. No "google it", no smart ass questions, no mindless "dictionary" thinking, no name calling. No "assertions" or arguments or #winning. ZOMG, they're going to ban us from politards if we keep this up. We are actually having an adult chat!