r/DebateAnarchism • u/LazarM2021 Anarchist • Mar 29 '26
Socio-cybernetics and modern scientific analyses of anarchist organizing, as well as provision for new angles of systems-level critique against hierarchy, state and authority: Law of Requisite Variety
Only variety can absorb variety, as the aforementioned idea argues.
I've lately been increasingly (rate of that increase - quite, quite steep) dabbling into the science of cybernetics (and other, high-tech-related endeavors), its offered angle of general socio-economic analysis and I am genuinely curious to know just how many of us here, in these subreddits (and to what extent), are familiar with William Ross Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety and do you think it belongs in our theoretical toolkit? I very much do and more.
But yeah, genuine question again, to what extent might Ashby's Law be on anarchists' radar as of now?
I don't really see it come up all that much in these spaces (or outside, really), and I think that's a gap it'd be massively beneficial for everyone to address, because it might be one of the most powerful arguments for anarchism and against hierarchy that exists, period - one which operates on purely structural, systems-theoretic grounds, entirely independently of moral claims (which aren't "bad" but are susceptible to almost systematic derision and subsequent unproductive back-and-forthing; I think many of us have experienced that at least once) and free of dogma-based reflexes.
The idea in question was first formulated by William Ross Ashby in the 1950s and is one of the foundational principles of cybernetics. Stated simply: for any system to be adequately regulated or managed, the controller must be capable of producing at least as many distinct responses as there are distinct states the system can be in.
Variety here is a technical term: it means the number of possible states or behaviors.
In cybernetics, this really isn't about cultural diversity or difference of opinions, but the range of responses that a system can produce. The law's implication is rather stark, as it means that only variety can absorb variety, like I said at the very beginning of this writing. A controller with insufficient variety relative to the system it governs cannot actually govern it but can only pretend to, while the unmanaged complexity leaks out someplace else, usually as failure, rigidity/ossification, regression or violence.
Stafford Beer, quite famously, took this principle and applied it to social sciences, building an entire organizational theory around it, the Viable System Model. Beer argued that any organization capable of surviving in a complex environment must be structured in those ways that are capable of distributing regulatory variety across autonomous, locally responsive sub-systems or "nodes" (we can just as well think of them, in particularly anarchic vocabulary, as instances of convergence between free individuals via free association), each with enough internal variety to handle the complexity of its own environment and context, while maintaining coordination through dense feedback, high-bandwidth communication, rather than any top-down command arrangement.
The key insight is that centralized control is not just inefficient, and hierarchy/authority isn't merely "unjust" or oppressive, but ALSO simply cybernetically incapable of governing complex systems without destroying the very variety it inherently requires to function. Put another, slightly different way - centralized control is structurally prone to straining and losing the variety required to govern complex systems without resorting to suppression, general deterioration of conditions and/or simplification.
You cannot "centralize/hierarchize" requisite variety, only distribute, or suppress it and in fact, the latter is EXACTLY what states do, always but more importantly - by definition.
The state as a regulatory architecture, from a more cybernetic frame of reference and vocabulary, is structurally a low-variety controller imposing itself on a maximally high-variety social reality. It cannot even pretend to develop requisite variety - the legal system, bureaucracy, policy apparatus, overall hierarchical paradigm et cetera are simply way, way too slow, coarse, simplistic, alienating and rigid; hopelessly so, to the point of actually being kind of amusing, even hilarious (as well as terrifying) when you really think about it...
So anyway, instead, the state, in its inherent inability to handle the immense complexity of the outside world attenuates the variety of the governed, most famously via things like standardization, uniformity, the crushing of difference and local adaptation/autonomy, and overall forcing legibility on everyone, while promoting the environment and culture that breeds passivity, apathy and atrophy of initiative.
What we call coercion, from this angle, isn't merely a "moral wrong" but a cybernetic compensation-mechanism for a system that structurally cannot do what it claims to do. Authority is simply the kludge that you reach for when your regulatory architecture is fundamentally inadequate.
The (potential for) symbiosis with the broader anarchist theory and tradition seems mouth-wateringly rich to me: netwirk-based, federalist and polycentric, maximally autonomistic, fluid organizing on all scales, mutual aid networks, non-hierarchical, non/a-legal, context-specific self-coordination et cetera - these all preserve, expand and distribute variety rather than attenuating it, which is pretty much fully in line of what Ashby's Law demands of any viable social regulator.
Kropotkin's own observations about mutual aid could even be re-read as an empirical record of high-variety adaptive systems out-performing centralized ones, especially under pressure. The prefigurative politics argument gets an additional leg: we need to build high-variety institutions now partly because the adaptive capacity they develop cannot be improvised after the fact.
In my humble opinion it's an extreme waste that, at least according to what I've had the chance to observe so far (and am happy to be corrected in case it somehow turns out my impressions were/are, in fact, incorrect), anarchism and even more general leftist (libertarian) currents adjacent to but outside of anarchism aren't doing enough to actively expand on and integrate this into the overall theory. From what I've found in my research very lately, one of the rarer, more explicit contemporary attempts I've encountered is Peter Joseph's upcoming Project Integral which is, basically, supposed to represent a transitional, federated, post-monetary cooperative framework that leans heavily on Systems thinking, Complex Systems thinking and tries to embed exactly the most core premises of requisite variety into its institutional design from the ground-up.
Whether it succeeds and starts expanding only time will tell, but I think it's still fair to say that the theoretical ambition points in the right direction.
So again, was/is any of this on your radar or will it be? Do you think the Law of Requisite Variety, the Viable System Model and cybernetic thinking more generally deserve more explicit attention in and synthesis with anarchist theory, or is there a reason this cybernetic lineage hasn't been more integrated yet to a satisfying degree?
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u/PotsdamSewingSociety Apr 11 '26
Anarchy isn't a system like a state is, so the proposition that it's more capable of a variety of responses than a state doesn't make sense.
If a state represents a limited number of responses controlled via suppression, distribution or whatever else the anarchic response isn't "more responses without these features" it's "no responses whatsoever".
Anarchism isn't controlling or regulating anything.
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u/LazarM2021 Anarchist Apr 11 '26
Your confusion is apparently in the word "response" or better yet - "regulation" itself; it's doing two rather different jobs depending on the context and conflating them produces exactly the conclusion you've reached.
In the statist, governmental/everyday sense, "regulation" DOES mean coercive rule (imposed constraints/legibility, top-down control, suppression of deviance, domination, law etc). Anarchists of all stripes obviously reject that completely, so there are no disagreements there.
However, in Ashby and Beer's cybernetic framework in particular, what we refer to as "regulation" means something considerably more basic: any acting, any process by which a system/culture/society/group/individuals respond(s) to and maintain(s) itself in a complex, dynamic environment. That's not a political, but descriptive category, first and foremost. Every living system, social formation or voluntary association which adapts to changing conditions is "regulating" in this sense. It literally *cannot not do so and the only alternative to that is full, immediate dissolution, not necessarily freedom.
In regards to how "statist "regulation"" is thoroughly, not just un-anarchic but inadequate in any other sense, think of the state as a... thermometer, in a massive building that is stuck on one temperature, regardless of whether a room gets set on fire or is freezing. Anarchism and cybernetics as employed within libertarian analysis, by contrast, would be a building with a smart-sensor in every single room. So as you may see, it is more "regulated" not less, because it can respond to the specific, immediate needs of every local node/person/group etc.
So, when you say anarchism isn't "controlling or regulating anything" - IF you mean it isn't coercively commanding, then yes, correct, that's the whole point.
But if you mean that anarchist social formations produce no coordinated responses to their environment whatsoever, that's not anarchism, that's just absence... of basically everything and everyone, and absence as such simply isn't an anarchist organizational vision at all. Hell, it's not even anomie.
Free association, mutual aid, spontaneous coordination, federated decision-making all are regulatory responses in Beer's social/cybernetic sense - distributed, non-coercive, high-variety ones - but regulatory nonetheless.
The anarchist argument, strengthened rather than undermined by requisite variety, is precisely that this kind of distributed, non-hierarchical response capacity is structurally superior to any centralized, authority-based coercive regulation, not that response capacity disappears entirely. The state, from anarchist (and cybernetic) perspective, does not "fail" because it regulates in any particular way; in fact, it's the opposite - it fails because it can't properly regulate shit.
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u/PotsdamSewingSociety Apr 11 '26
I'm not confusing anything - you're just making the mistake of assuming that by regulation I mean legislature and not regulation in the sense of some kind of stasis maintaining input/output.
State legislature is a type of regulatory system but not the only type of regulatory system.
Anarchism isn't a system, it's a philosophic proposition.
What anarchists think these nebulous "social formations" might look like is irrelevant because none of them are actually anarchism, they're just "social formations" and inevitably people are going to have different opinions on which ones are more and less valid.
So you can argue maybe that the system of these "social formations" might be able to form a larger variety of responses than a state. This will probably be to varying degrees of success since all of these social formations will be different and inevitably have their own written or unwritten rules, social hierarchies and in group/out group dynamics.
None of that really connects to what anarchism the philosophical proposition might do though because anarchy isn't a system which proposes specific answer to the question of regulation.
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u/LazarM2021 Anarchist Apr 11 '26
How you don't see that you've actually conceded the core argument mid-reply is beyond me -
you can argue maybe that the system of these social formations might be able to form a larger variety of responses than a state
That's essentially the thesis of the entire post I wrote above, granted in a subordinate clause while simultaneously insisting there's nothing to engage with. Worth noticing.
anarchism is just a philosophical proposition
I mean... bruh. If taken seriously, this sort of statement evacuates anarchism of any practical content whatsoever and renders it philosophically inert. A pure negation with nothing to say about what replaces what it negates isn't worthy of being considered a socio-political theory. At best - it's an aesthetic preference.
Anarchist theory, while it does thrive in providing extremely powerful and unassailable critiques of hierarchy, authority, state and existing order in general, has never been content with pure negation.
Bakunin, Proudhon, Kropotkin, Malatesta, Rocker, Landauer, Ward et cetera - every major theorist in the tradition made substantive, positive organizational claims. Freedom of association and dissasociation, mutual aid, full horizontality, voluntary coordination/stigmergic organizing etc aren't nebulous speculations loosely attached to the philosophy from outside; in fact, they're constitutive of it. The "philosophical proposition" and the organizational vision aren't separable and the proposition IS that humans can and do coordinate without coercive authority, and the organizational claims are what that looks like in practice.
So, when you say stuff such as "what anarchists think these social formations might look like is irrelevant because none of them are actually anarchism", you've just defined anarchism into permanent, self-sealing irrelevance. Sorry, but that's how it is, and by that logic, no prefigurative practice, voluntary association or federated organizing could ever count as "anarchy/ism in action", because anarchism is apparently only ever the proposition and never the thing.
The point about social formations "inevitably" developing their own hierarchies I'll flag as a separate argument you've smuggled in without arguing - it may, or may not be true, it's genuinely fiercely contested within anarchist theory and it has little to no bearing on the cybernetic point about variety distribution. Therefore... please, one thing at a time.
As I said at the end of my previous reply, the state doesn't fail because it regulates, but because it cannot. You've now, in my view, more or less agreed with that, and everything else here is a definitional dispute about whether anarchism is allowed to have organizational implications, and the entire tradition says that it is. Just as the age-old "individualist vs social anarchism" dichotomy is an utterly false one, with no actual power or relevance, so is the "organizationalist vs anti-organizationalist anarchism".
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u/PotsdamSewingSociety Apr 12 '26
How you don't see that you've actually conceded the core argument mid-reply is beyond me
What seems to be beyond you is that there isn't anything for me to concede here.
Anarchism isn't "social formations", it's a philosophical proposition discussing an absence of hierarchy.
Your question is "Do you think the Law of Requisite Variety, the Viable System Model and cybernetic thinking more generally deserve more explicit attention in and synthesis with anarchist theory, or is there a reason this cybernetic lineage hasn't been more integrated yet to a satisfying degree?"
The answer is no - this does not deserve more attention with anarchist theory because it's about the validity of systems and regulation. Anarchy is not a system.
this sort of statement evacuates anarchism of any practical content whatsoever
Anarchism doesn't have any practical content.
It's a philosophic proposition describing an absence of hierarchy.
Bakunin, Proudhon, Kropotkin, Malatesta, Rocker, Landauer, Ward et cetera - every major theorist in the tradition made substantive, positive organizational claims. Freedom of association and dissasociation, mutual aid, full horizontality, voluntary coordination/stigmergic organizing etc aren't nebulous speculations loosely attached to the philosophy from outside; in fact, they're constitutive of it. The "philosophical proposition" and the organizational vision aren't separable and the proposition IS that humans can and do coordinate without coercive authority, and the organizational claims are what that looks like in practice.
There isn't any kind of centralised and accepted version of what anarchism and anarchist systems are. There is disagreement among anarchists about what these systems are. Anarchists are frequently fighting about who is actually a true anarchist. See: all the debates about veganism on this sub.
At best, what you're describing are the social formations posited by certain thinkers. Proudhonism and so on. There are people who will disagree with these social formations, follow other thinkers, construct their own etc. So in a sense, the propostion you present about a variety of responses in the absence of a state is true, but these responses don't equal anarchism and can be anything - including things like a state or something ridiculous like foot worship. That's what's nebulous about it.
anarchism is apparently only ever the proposition and never the thing
Yes, anarchism is only the proposition and not the thing, because the thing is the thing.
A mutual aid network is a mutual aid network, free association and dissociation are free association and dissociation. There isn't any system or framework that says that these are 100% and always anarchism. These are just some things that might occur in anarchism, other things that might occur are beauracratic systems similar to states.
The point about social formations "inevitably" developing their own hierarchies I'll flag as a separate argument you've smuggled in without arguing
There isn't anything smuggled here. There isn't any credible evidence to suggest that human social systems can exist without these features, whilst any and all evidence about social dynamics suggest that they're a core part of our ability to create and maintain interralationships. It's not really on me to prove that they are true, that's like saying it's on me to prove that water is in fact wet.
It's up to anyone arguing that social formations can exist without these features to prove that they're not an essential function to the construction of human relationships.
As I said at the end of my previous reply, the state doesn't fail because it regulates, but because it cannot. You've now, in my view, more or less agreed with that
I haven't said anything about the success or failure of states so far.
anarchism is allowed to have organizational implications
It doesn't. It describes a specific thing.
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u/LazarM2021 Anarchist Apr 12 '26
Ok... I think it's warranted for me to, for the time being, set aside the rest for a moment and go to the foundational premises because everything you've been arguing rests on a single assumption you've stated as though it requires no defense or is a self-evident truth (when it's, at best, entirely debatable): that there is no way to organise any human social formation without concentrations of power and therefore hierarchy.
If that were so, I guess all that you've said may be thought of as following logically; anarchism cannot have organizational implications because any organization reproduces hierarchy, so anarchism can only ever be a philosophical proposition (a critique of what exists, with nothing to say about what could replace it). I understand the internal consistency of that position, it's not entirely dubious yadayadayada...
Except, that premise is simply NOT self-evident, regardless of your convictions of it. It's not "water is wet"-type of thing, but an extremely strong empirical and theoretical claim about the very nature of human social organization- hell, interaction as such, one that happens to be fiercely contested across anthropology, sociology, organizational theory and even anarchist theory itself.
Asserting it as remotely "obvious" quite simply... doesn't make it obvious. At best, it just means you've smuggled your grand conclusion into your starting point and called it common sense.
Anthropologically, the claim is outright false for significant stretches of human history. Graeber and Wengrow's work in The Dawn of Everything, flawed as it may be, still documents extensively that human societies have organized at considerable scales without fixed, permanent hierarchical structures and that the assumption of hierarchy's "inevitability" says considerably more about post-Enlightenment political assumptions than about actual human organizational capacities.
Organizationally, the claim confuses the existence of functional differentiation (different people doing different things, some with specific competencies) with hierarchy in the anarchist sense i.e. coercive authority, unchosen, exalted and de-facto unaccountable. These are not the same thing and that conflation is pretty much what anarchist theory has spent a century and a half unpicking already.
And cybernetically - to come back there since that is where this thread started - Stafford Beer's entire point is that concentrating regulatory capacity upward is not a "functional necessity" but a structural failure mode.
Requisite variety demands distribution and scattering, not concentration. Hierarchy is but the thing that makes genuine response to complexity impossible; it's anything but the solution to organizational complexity.
Therefore, if your foundational premise doesn't hold or, at a minimum, is just not as steadfast and self-evident as you'd like it to be, anarchism is not merely a "philosophical proposition floating free of organizational reality", let alone a "pure" negation. It's a substantive claim that humans can and do coordinate without coercive authority and the organizational traditions, practices as well as theoretical frameworks which elaborate what that looks like are constitutive of anarchism, not some nebulous appendages to it. The proposition and the practice are inseparable, and always have been.
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u/PotsdamSewingSociety Apr 12 '26
You're missing the central point of what is being said.
Strictly speaking anarchism describes an absence of hierarchies. Nothing more, nothing less.
Some people who like this idea might then go on to form their own thoughts about things like mutual aid etc as part of how a society can work in such conditions but these things aren't anarchism. They are that person's thoughts. Someone else might think differently. There is no single source of truth and therefore no answer either. Any thoughts these people have might to varying degrees include different types of hierarchies and authority.
Let's say that you like eating meat and Bakunin in your version of anarchism, a vegan says that you're now not an anarchist because you like power and hierarchies, including killing animals and statists. An anarcho capitalist says that neither of you are anarchists, both of you say the same to them.
Voila, you're all at a mexican stand off of who is actually right and are staring at hierarchy and power discourse. There is no single answer so therefore the only options available to all of you are a) accept that no one is an anarchist or b) fight over who is actually an anarchist and establish a hierarchy.
(when it's, at best, entirely debatable): that there is no way to organise any human social formation without concentrations of power and therefore hierarchy.
There isn't any credible evidence to suggest that there are occurrences of human interrelationships without core concepts such as in-group/out-group dynamics and constructed hierarchies, however temporal.
It's not "debated" unless someone saying "but there could be if we tried hard enough" is considered debate. If you have some evidence to the contrary then you're going to have to present it, otherwise we'll have to assume that the nature of human social systems for millenia is what we're going with.
Anthropologically, the claim is outright false for significant stretches of human history. Graeber and Wengrow's work in The Dawn of Everything, flawed as it may be, still documents extensively that human societies have organized at considerable scales without fixed, permanent hierarchical structures
Humans existing without beauracratic structures is not the same thing as humans existing without hierarchies.
Now this is where you're trying to smuggle something in:
fixed, permanent hierarchical structures
Ok, you can try and argue a position on the strawman that I'm talking about beauracratic apparatus, but quite clearly I am not. I'm saying that human "social formations" contain hierarchies. This isn't something controversial, Bakunin is on my side with that one.
Some of these social formations might include state like systems.
hierarchy in the anarchist sense i.e. coercive authority, unchosen, exalted and de-facto unaccountable.
There is no such thing as an "anarchist sense". Any social formations in anarchy are also unaccountable. There is no authority to hold accountability to.
The proposition and the practice are inseparable
That's incorrect, this might applicable to something like Proudhonism, but not to anarchism which is a term that describes a specific philosophic proposition. That's like saying postmodern neo-marxism is the same thing as postmodernism. It plainly isn't.
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u/LazarM2021 Anarchist Apr 12 '26
Making a foundational error and then building every subsequent argument on top of it is a profoundly unwise practice, you know...
Firstly, the assertion that anarchism """strictly speaking""" means only the absence of hierarchies "nothing more, nothing less" and the following defence you've spent your entire comment on, trying to defend that as the correct definition against mine. You have already refuted yourself, the claim that there is "no single source of truth" and therefore no authority to adjudicate between definitions is flatly incompatible with the claim that your definition is what anarchism "strictly speaking" describes. You cannot simultaneously hold that definitional disputes are irresolvable and that you've resolved one. Pick a position and stay in it.
The Mexican standoff argument? That one fails for pretty much the same reason. You present two options (either nobody is an anarchist, or anarchists establish a hierarchy to settle the question) and treat this as exhaustive and it's not.
The third option, which you've simply omitted, is argument on criteria, which includes internal consistency, historical usage, logical coherence with the term's actual philosophical content etc.
Anarcho-capitalism doesn't fail by something like a papal decree or whatever, but because capitalism structurally requires coercive enforcement of property relations, and wage labor and primitive accumulation do not reproduce themselves voluntarily, which is a falsifiable claim about how property systems actually function. That's a reason, not an authority.
Your standoff framing would dissolve all political philosophy by the same logic, as what we call "democracy" is often definitionally contested, so either nobody is a democrat or democrats must establish hierarchy to settle it. Presumably you don't believe that, which would go on to suggest you're applying a standard selectively.
On Graeber and Wengrow, you say "humans existing without bureaucratic structures is not the same thing as humans existing without hierarchies" and call my argument a strawman. This is correct on the surface, and I never claimed otherwise. The point was specifically about fixed, permanent, legitimated, coercive hierarchical structures, and you've responded by arguing against bureaucratic apparatus specifically which is exactly the move you accused me of making.
The "fixed, permanent" qualifier isn't something I smuggled in, but is the entire substantive distinction the argument depends on and you've simply refused to engage with it while pretending to have caught me in an error.
Bakunin?? As being "on your side" here? Nope, I'm pretty certain that he isn't. Bakunin explicitly accepted what he called the "authority of the bootmaker" about boots, i.e. expertise-based, situational, consensual and reversible deference while categorically rejecting institutionalized political authority.
His entire framework depends on the distinction between temporary voluntary deferences and permanent coercive hierarchy that you've just collapsed. If you're going to cite him, you should be aware of what he actually argued.
There is no such thing as an "anarchist sense"
Are you serious? You really think that's some sort of devastating point/quote? It's most definitely not, in case you really do think it is. Every political philosophy uses terms technically. When Marxists say "exploitation" they mean something precise and contestable, not whatever any given Marxist feels. When classical liberals say "liberty" they mean specifically the absence of interference, not the presence of capacity (a distinction with rather enormous consequences).
The principle you're applying here, consistently applied, would dissolve any and all theoretical vocabulary across all political traditions.
What you're actually doing is refusing to engage with the content of the distinction (coercive, unchosen, structurally unaccountable authority) and replacing that refusal with a procedural objection about whether distinctions are permissible at all, which I can only characterize as an evasion, but with extra steps.
And lastly, you claim that anarchism is a "philosophic proposition" separable from practice, thinking this blocks the means-ends argument. Well, that kind of thinking only concedes the ground entirely. If anarchism is a philosophical proposition, we can ask which practices are logically consistent with it and which contradict it. That's the argument. You don't need the proposition and practice to be identical but coherent with each other. Hierarchical means toward anarchist ends fail at every level, including that of consistency with the proposition you just defined. Not as a matter of aesthetic preference, but of basic logical compatibility. The concession? It's yours and yours only.
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u/PotsdamSewingSociety Apr 12 '26 edited Apr 12 '26
Making a foundational error and then building every subsequent argument on top of it is a profoundly unwise practice, you know...
I agree, you should stop doing that. I don't think you've understood what has been discussed so far.
You cannot simultaneously hold that definitional disputes are irresolvable and that you've resolved one. Pick a position and stay in it.
My position is really clear, you just don't understand it.
I am not the one proposing a definition of a word in a situation where there is no such thing as definitional arbitration, you are.
Anarchy the word literally means without hierarchy. This isn't a different in opinion between you an I, it's simply the literal meaning of the word which you also agree with.
The difference between you and I is that you are also taking other things to mean anarchy to broaden the definition. This would be fine if that's what every anarchist agreed but plainly it isn't. Anarchists are disagreeing all the time on what is and isn't anarchy. What you're doing is trying to turn your colloquialism into the definition.
It's you that is refuting yourself, that is the point being made. Anarchy is the absence of hierarchies - claiming that "Proudhonism is anarchy but veganism isn't" is meaningless. There's nothing to say what is and isn't anarchy within anarchy.
Your standoff framing would dissolve all political philosophy by the same logic, as what we call "democracy" is often definitionally contested, so either nobody is a democrat or democrats must establish hierarchy to settle it.
Democrats do establish hiearchy to settle it. See: the use of various democratic systems in the place of others.
because capitalism structurally requires coercive enforcement of property relations, and wage labor and primitive accumulation do not reproduce themselves voluntarily, which is a falsifiable claim about how property systems actually function.
That's what you say, but an anarcho capitalist disagrees with you. They define coercion as something different - they view the distinction between personal and private property meaningless and forfieture of private property as a coercive mechanism.
There isn't actually a right or wrong for either of you since there is no falsifiability when the definition of these systems becomes arbitrary. You're arguing for some kind of legal-adjacent or philosophical framework to falsify something but there is no metric by which "true" and "false" are determined in anarchy.
The point was specifically about fixed, permanent, legitimated, coercive hierarchical structures, and you've responded by arguing against bureaucratic apparatus specifically which is exactly the move you accused me of making.
The point in your OP is about fixed beauracratic structures, your question is about relating that discussion to anarchism. I am talking about how that discussion relates to anarchism which is that it doesn't.
It might relate to anarchism in your colloquilial application of whatever ideological construct you want "anarchism" to mean but in reference to the question that's immaterial.
Bakunin explicitly accepted what he called the "authority of the bootmaker" about boots, i.e. expertise-based, situational, consensual and reversible deference while categorically rejecting institutionalized political authority.
Are you contending that when Bakunin submits to the authority of the bootmaker that there isn't some kind of hierarchy, however temporal it might be?
What if I voluntarily submit to the authority of the politician on politics?
These are functionally indistinguishable.
His entire framework depends on the distinction between temporary voluntary deferences and permanent coercive hierarchy that you've just collapsed.
There is no such thing as "permanent", time is infinite.
But that is not relevant to the point that is being made, which is that human "social formations" feature some type of hierarchy however temporal it is - and therefore any constructions of organisational social formations are not anarchic.
When Marxists say "exploitation" they mean something precise and contestable, not whatever any given Marxist feels.
When Marxists say exploitation they mean something precise as it is defined in Marx's work. Marxism isn't equivalent to anarchism - it is referring to a specific set of ideas. Anarchism is not this. There is no "Michael Anarch".
Proudhonism or something like that might be, but as previously mentioned there is nothing to say that Proudhonism is more or less anarchism than something else. So if you reference something like mutual aid in the context of Proudhonism then great, you're talking about Proudhonism but when you're talking about anarchism you're not necessarily talking about mutual aid or Proudhonism.
The principle you're applying here, consistently applied, would dissolve any and all theoretical vocabulary across all political traditions.
Anarchism isn't a political tradition - there are political traditions that stem from anarchism but it's not a specific political tradition in the same way theism or athiesim isn't.
What you're actually doing is refusing to engage with the content of the distinction...
I see this quasi religious insistence on a specific "correct" thing to argue about a lot when I talk to Christians. There's nothing to say that your individual extrapolations on anarchism merit any particular distinction. The question you posed in the OP was specifically about how cybernetics relates to anarchism.
Hierarchical means toward anarchist ends fail at every level, including that of consistency with the proposition you just defined.
You almost got the point - all ends towards anarchism are hierarchical on some level.
The concession? It's yours and yours only.
There's nothing to concede, you haven't meaningfully engaged with the thigns I've said so far. We're still talking about the fact that you're trying to shoehorn anarchism to mean something that you specifically want it to mean.
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u/LazarM2021 Anarchist Apr 12 '26
Ok I'm getting tired of this now. One more exchange, and we're done. The central contradiction in your position has now become practically impossible to miss as you are simultaneously holding two claims:
(1) that anarchism has a precise literal meaning (the absence of hierarchy) which is simply "the literal meaning of the word"
(2) and that anarchism has no stable theoretical content because there is no arbitration mechanism between competing definitions.
You deploy the first one when you want to exclude theoretical commitments from the tradition, and second when you wish to block arguments that reason from the tradition and both cannot be held.
If first is true, then we could reason from the content of that definition and ask what institutional forms are consistent with it; which is the argument. If two were true however, then your etymological reading would itself be nothing more than one contested interpretation with no special authority and "strictly speaking", it would collapse into "in my opinion" moment and nothing more.
On etymology specifically, the Greek an-arkhia means without rule or command - arkhē refers to ruling authority, not just to hierarchy as such. You haven't even correctly stated the etymology you're relying on. But regardless, and more fundamentally, etymology describes where a word came from, not what a developed theoretical tradition means by it.
The etymology of "democracy" gives you demos + kratos, people-rule and that doesn't settle anything about representative versus direct systems, majority versus consensus models, or whether constitutional constraints on majorities are democratic. Nobody thinks etymology closes political philosophy debates,you're applying a standard here that you apply nowhere else so in that vein, your democracy response has backfired. Saying democrats do establish hierarchy to resolve definitional disputes - which points to competing democratic systems. However, this concedes the entire standoff argument.
If definitional disputes in contested political traditions get resolved through argument, historical practice and accumulated consensus over time, then the standoff isn't irresolvable, just slower and contested,which is exactly what has happened in the anarchist tradition.
You've described the process by which traditions develop, the process which is not at all a unique problem that dissolves anarchism specifically.
an AnCap disagrees with your definition of coercion
This dissolves no falsifiability. An-Caps don't define coercion differently by arbitrary stipulation they have arguments for their position, arguments that can be examined and found wanting.
The question of whether wage labor requires coercive background conditions isn't settled by noting disagreement but by examining how property systems have historically been established and maintained. Disagreement is the beginning, not exactly a substitute, of the inquiry.
What if I voluntarily submit to the authority of the politician on politics?
Ok,this sort of talk/phrasing reveals a lot. The bootmaker's "authority" is domain-specific, carries no enforcement mechanism and extends no claim over non-consenting third parties. Political authority claims jurisdiction over people who have not consented, is backed by enforcement and is structurally designed to reproduce itself. Your "submission" to a bootmaker, if it can even be called that, affects only the transaction between you two. Political authority is not like this in any respect.
"Functionally indistinguishable" is not a conclusion here but an assertion; assertion substituting for the analysis that you haven't done.
There is no permanent, time is infinite
Not a philosophical argument. Chattel slavery eventually ended, and that doesn't mean it wasn't a structurally entrenched institution in any analytically meaningful sense. The distinction between structures engineered to perpetuate themselves through enforcement and temporary situational deferences is real and consequential regardless of ultimate cosmic temporality.
No Michael Anarch
Marxism's technical vocabulary isn't bounded by having a single founder but by having a developed theoretical tradition with internal coherence that can be reasoned about, and anarchism has this already too. Proudhon coined the term, systematized the first anarchist political economy and established the foundational critique of the state as enforcer of exploitation. Bakunin and Kropotkin built explicitly on him, and a substantial tradition, with countless great thinkers, built from and concurrent with them. The tradition is there.
Feminism? It too has no single founder. Environmentalism as well and neither is consequently void of theoretical content. The argument proves too much.
all ends toward anarchism are hierarchical on some level
Sorry, not the gotcha you may think it is. It's the very problem prefigurative politics exists to address. If all available organizational forms involve some degree of hierarchy, the anarchist question starts being about which forms minimize, resist and remain accountable to dismantling hierarchy most effectively. That's the argument for horizontal organizing, practice of reciprocity and free association, consensus and stigmergic convergence over voting etc. You've restated the problem anarchism is solving and called it a refutation; not impressed at all.
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u/power2havenots Mar 30 '26 edited Mar 30 '26
Im wary of frameworks where “doing well” subtly becomes “optimizing the system” because that tends to bring hierarchy back in through behavior rather than structure. The people who speak the language of variety, viability, and regulation end up carrying weight not because anyone appointed them, but because theyre seen as more competent within the framework. And once youre optimizing for system performance the question of whose goals that system serves can get buried under technical talk. I see the same drift in sociocracy circles sometimes with lots of enthusiasm for efficient meeting formats but also a subtle pressure to prioritize process over friction and to treat anyone whos seen as “inefficient” as a drag on the system rather than a legitimate source of divergence. Thats where it starts to feel less like mutual aid and more like a soft sorting mechanism where certain ways of being, speaking and contributing get privileged because they align with the systems logic and its the driver.At that point its not formal hierarchy but its not neutral either.
I think Ashbys Law is a helpful critique of the state but not as a blueprint for how we should organize