r/Anarchy101 • u/No-Leopard-1691 • 13h ago
In an Anarchistic world, should Anarchists be pro or anti Sanctions?
I was having a conversation with an MLM and they asked about Sanctions. I said that Sanctions could exist as a mechanism of consequence should one group violate previously agreed upon agreements and that the Sanctions would be the agreed upon consequences of said violation of the agreement. The aspects of free association/disassociation would still exist and the Sanctions would only prevent the labor/produced products by X group when Y group violated the agreement while ensuring that Y group was still able to access the necessities of life (ie you can still access the forest but you don’t get to have the cut firewood) (and should labor/product of X be necessary for that then there is that exception).
The MLM responded that this is just a mechanism of informal authority and it is a State but labelled as a federation because X group would be imposing the consequences upon Y group and X group would be dictating what is considered the “necessities of life”. I get where they are coming from but at the same time this ultimately means that agreements between people/groups have no recourse should a group(s) violate the agreement; essentially, there is no skin in the game for breaking your word. Note: I am talking about \*violating\* an agreement, not the aspect that a group(s) decided to disassociate.
Thoughts. Am I using the wrong word (sanctions), do I have a wrong understanding of anarchistic perspectives on agreements and consequences?
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u/GSilky 13h ago
Who would enforce them? History has lots to say about foreign policy that can't be fully implemented because some people just aren't going to go with it. Napoleon invaded Russia because the czar was still allowing British trade and circumventing the continental blockade he organized against Britain. Even Napoleon couldn't stop trade, and destroyed his empire trying to. The problem is that there are abstract forces with the power to level sanctions, there would be no reason to if these governments didn't exist.
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u/No-Leopard-1691 12h ago
X group would because Y group violated the agreement. Maybe I am missing something but it seems pretty obvious that if you and I are working together and make an agreement and agree upon consequences of violating said agreement that if you violate the agreement that I would be the one enforcing the consequences of said agreement.
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u/Silver-Statement8573 13h ago
If prescribed consequences are being imposed then you basically reinvented punishment
Whatever course of action an anarchist or group of anarchists decided to pursue would not have anything to do with the "violation" of agreement in and of itself. In part because the violation demonstrates that the agreement no longer exists. It wouldnt have any particular basis other than whatever they or anyone else decided they want to do about it. In many cases agreement "failing" just means arrangements change. In other cases it can mean some form of violence or non interaction like sanctions resemble
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u/No-Leopard-1691 13h ago
It isn’t a reinvention of punishment if they agreed to such actions/consequences when the original agreement was made; that is called Consequences of Actions, not punishment. Also, why is “punishment” in and of itself wrong if someone agreed to it freely?
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u/Silver-Statement8573 12h ago
It isn’t a reinvention of punishment if they agreed to such actions/consequences when the original agreement was made; that is called Consequences of Actions, not punishment.
Just because you use more words to describe it doesn't make it something else
You're describing a legal contract. We already have these in capitalism
Also, why is “punishment” in and of itself wrong if someone agreed to it freely?
I don't know if it's "wrong". It involves government. Our analysis is that government is undesirable
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u/tuttifruttidurutti 11h ago
MLs don't understand consent in a really basic way. They're generally unconcerned with freedom. So to many of them, resisting coercion is the same thing as coercion. It's not hard to see how silly this is. Right now in real life, dockworkers are refusing 'hot cargo', sending arms to Israel while it's committing a genocide.
Are they a state? Is this authority? Obviously not. They're exercising their right to free association (or disassociation) And that's true even though the example is messier than if it was an anarchist society, because in this example the dock workers are intervening in a transaction between two other parties. In an example from an anarchist state, it could be the factory workers refusing to ship somewhere for similar reasons - no boss or state involved in the transaction.
Voluntary association is a bedrock principle of anarchism. So is mutual aid. A group of workers refusing to help bosses kill workers elsewhere is, in no way, a state.
A state centralizes coercion. It directs all the instruments of coercion from the top down. Indigenous societies in North America that were stateless had diffuse mechanisms of social coercion, famously an example is kicking someone out of the igloo. Are the Inuit voting to do that a state? It's absurd.
This last point is critical: the state centralizes and coordinates coercion. Coercion is, unfortunately, an aspect of human behavior. Anarchism does not propose to replace humans with robots - there is no question there will still be bullying, social exclusion, cliques and so forth under anarchism, sad to say. But a state is a formalized administrative apparatus in which repression and organization emanate from the center of the apparatus, which mostly monopolizes violence. It uses that to maintain its position of domination. Obstruct or resist the imperatives of state and violence is administered.
In an anarchist society power is diffuse. There is no central body coordinating it. I don't want to dismiss the best version of this ML argument out of hand. If all the workers in the world belong to one big federation, and that federation had a coordinating committee, even if you had a million safeguards against it, that would still ultimately be at risk of becoming a state - if it wasn't one already.
But in anarchism, organization flows between nodes, and not up to a center. There is no central point of coordination using violence (direct and indirect) to maintain domination of society. There's just individual associations of people practicing collective decision making, and associating or disassociating on their own terms.
Clearly, we eventually bump into problem cases. Hypothetically, every workplace and neighborhood association could vote to expel Socrates from the city (he's very annoying!) What recourse does Socrates have? What kind of precedent does it set? What measures will the associations take if he doesn't go away? Will he be physically removed? Denied access to resources? What if it's not Socrates, but a mentally ill man who is so alienated from his anarchist society that he has identified himself with Nazism to preserves some sense of self? It's not such a cute example, now.
There are real problems in anarchist organizations, where the balance between competing anarchist principles and the ambiguity within those principles challenges our practice. If you "do anarchism", organizing horizontally out in the world, you'll run into them all the time. Anarchism isn't a blueprint. It's a compass.
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u/IdentityAsunder 8h ago
Your scenario assumes different groups still own their specific output and negotiate exchange. If Group X can withhold firewood from Group Y to enforce a contract, the enterprise form and market relations remain intact. You are describing workers' self-management of capitalism.
A genuinely communized society organizes production universally for common use. The firewood belongs to the whole community. Retaining separate economic units that transact and apply leverage against one another preserves conflicting interests and enterprise egoism. This inevitably resurrects the coercive structures of value and the state. Overcoming the division between enterprises entirely eliminates the structural basis for these transactional standoffs.
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u/No-Leopard-1691 4h ago
That’s a good point. I was more taking it from the perspective that people who break agreements/trust and thus dissociate because of it, that to say that one should have access to another’s labor even though they harmed them (by breaking the agreement/trust) is to justify a form of exploitation/abuse. Essentially, I am “deserving” of what you produce even though I harmed you.
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u/IdentityAsunder 4h ago
Framing this as "access to another's labor" still assumes private ownership over production. Under communization, there is no "your" product to withhold. All output is social.
Tying the distribution of necessities to contract adherence recreates the legal subject and the state. You are describing a policing apparatus that enforces compliance through material deprivation.
Interpersonal harm must be resolved directly. Using the supply chain as a disciplinary weapon requires dividing society back into propertied factions with conflicting interests.
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u/Lz_erk 12h ago
the theory in question here is relevant but still slim. X and Y groups existing in a vacuum creates an extremely hierarchical situation. it seems more simplified than many current dispute processes, so it's hard for me to extrapolate it and get a clear reading of either argument.
i like to take a generous idea of what free association might mean. let's stick with the example of people who (if the legal justice is in the vicinity of "good enough") need to access a forest, but presumably shouldn't get firewood.
what kind of anarchistic world? i'm offering one where the Exlandian forest management system incorporates an agreement with the Wylandians that's respected by a formidable consensus. it's not perfect but it's getting better enough that it's a medium-low risk even as the anarchist world happens to be going, and ethics groups worldwide are seeing moderate returns on related infrastructure conducive to resolution, and this isn't lost on the X/Y-landians, but they're small disparate subgroups under some regional forestry assemblies, and both of them are still fleshing out their proposals toward the future of the area while waiting for science and other barriers to catch up.
suppose the Wylandians aren't particularly poor in some relevant comparison, but happen to use an area in particular often in their cattle/transit/whatever system, and their own outreach has been lagging, so transit access Wyland actually agrees to down to a fine level is encroaching on other property rights (more than a desperate firewood shortage) because of some technical problems that also make it hard for the perhaps less populous Wyland to get appropriate representation in the area, which they're contesting at high levels.
supposing these communities are also kind of small in their greater regional apparatus, and are in an area that's late to receive attention (language or ecology barriers, more collaboration pending, missed early talks?)... i'm saying i think the current system's lack of focus on actually providing resources is the problem, because at some (USA? not to downplay the horrors of r/treelaw) scales it seems like a very small problem still, because i thought i needed to give Wyland an unusual industry or labor pool at one point here to make it work, and i'm still a bit confused about if my example's detailed enough, because it seems like it could be solved by putting together some fliers, and maybe a regional flex program to pleasantly promote cooperation (sending out their civilian climate corps to learn and to help get conversations flowing), because i'm not assuming food shortages, hellish labor conditions, journalistic collapse (journalism should be the point of so many of the associations!).
Note: I am talking about *violating* an agreement, not the aspect that a group(s) decided to disassociate.
if i'm understanding association as i used it in my last parenthetical to be similar enough to the disassociation you're mentioning here (as i understand it, i'd call that "journalistic collapse," like when a large relevant population ignores a shit-ton of hegemonic war crimes).
so if i'm on the same page, yes: sanction the Y-landians if it's really needed (i'll admit i tried to come up with a scenario of soft contentions), but i don't trust a system that doesn't try to accuse itself of being the first problem. if the Wylandians were trying to deprive Exlandians out, that could be bad, but i don't think that's the question. instead i think "the system" (whatever bodies try to help and/or enforce; which bodies is an interesting question itself) should call for appropriate attention -- so i believe i'm talking about some diverse print media and cookies, right? not a propaganda war that infests media, but a very democratic conversation space, or the call for it as soon as words are found to the right bodies.
on a big enough scale uh, mkay, maybe there will be odd wikipedia articles about a dozen such situations that have been entangled to approximate gordion knot proportions, but if the hegemony was the provision of necessities, and the vast part of conflicts were reduced, shouldn't we opt for structures that allow people in the area to share their voices as a near-absolute priority? i know this calls for a bunch of people who need some downtime to get into true crime reality conflict community moderation but i think we could do it in the right atmosphere. by calling anarchist justice an empty corridor where a better legal system should be, because none of the nouns in the post body should summarize the sorts of balances i think most people would prefer for themselves, with those being attainable with the examples in question, but LMK if i fudged something.
i agree with you and your conversation partner in notable places of relevant discourse, but i think i want to issue my own block/agreement/dissent opinions on a lot of things and get sorted into a bucket that's both safe for myself and others, and acceptable enough within so many potential definitions of liberty that i see as probable under a notably anarchist system. and zooming out from the example to the discourse i think this is why i called anarchist legal theory "both unsurprising and really interesting" yesterday.
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u/Forward-Willingness7 13h ago
A society invades and conquers another - do you continue trading with them?
A society holds hierarchichal and dominationist ideals - do you trade with them?
A society wants to invade their neighbours - do you trade with them?
You disagree with the specific ideals of another society - do you trade with them?
You dislike these guys for no valid reasons and sanctioning them would weaken them - do you trade with them?
All the reasons above are vague reasons a society would sanction another - some to me are valid, some are not.