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   HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 03-Sep-2023 17:36:11 JST HeavenlyPossum

   I occasionally come across the following objection to anarchism:

   “We’ve already seen what life is like in places like Somalia where the state has collapsed, and it’s very bad, so we should have states instead of anarchism.”

   You’ve probably seen some variation of this argument; maybe the place cited wasn’t Somalia but it almost certainly was a country populated by brown people whom, the critic implies, cannot govern themselves.

   The problem with this argument is that it conflates #StateCollapse and #StateFailure with #anarchism, but I would argue that these are very different phenomena.

   1 of a #thread

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 03-Sep-2023 17:46:16 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     Historically, state failure is the norm rather than the exception—the vast majority of states that have ever existed no longer exist. Pour one out for the Avar Khaganate. But state collapse is pretty rare these days, and the example sine qua non is Somalia.

     In 1991, the Somalis overthrew their dictator Siad Barre. In his absence, no one actor or faction could assert control, and the country descended into an extended period of decentralization and factional violence. It wasn’t until 2004 that the Transitional Federal Government was established, and then until 2012 when a permanent Federal Government of Somalia was inaugurated.

     In the meantime, a variety of armed actors vied for control of some or all of the country: former military personnel-turned warlords, clan militias, the Islamic Courts Union and later al-Shabaab, etc. The government still doesn’t control the whole country—Somaliland has been de facto independent since 1991 and al-Shabaab still controls territory.

     2/

     Abolisyonista repeated this.
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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 03-Sep-2023 17:46:16 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     For many people, this is the quintessential example of anarchy as chaos.

     To understand why this is wrong, let’s turn to German sociologist Max Weber’s classic definition of the state, this one from his work “Economy and Society”:

     “A compulsory political organization with continuous operations will be called a 'state' insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds a claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order.”

     This is an idealized definition, and no state ever truly monopolizes violence in a given territory, so we might call some institutions more “state-like” than others on a spectrum. But the general idea is sound:

     - The state is an institution. It’s an organization of people.

     - The state is compulsory. If you’re in a territory controlled by a state, the state doesn’t give you a choice to opt out of its rule.

     - The state enforces an order. It makes rules and expects you to follow those rules.

     - The state uses violence to enforce those rules. The state doesn’t like anyone else in its territory using violence to enforce a different set of rules.

     - That violence is *legitimate.*

     3/

     Abolisyonista repeated this.
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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 03-Sep-2023 17:46:30 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     That last one often trips people up. People tend to hear “legitimacy” and think in terms of “valid” or “justified.” It conjures images of democratic validation—this or that government is “legitimate” because some community of people has endorsed it as their representative.

     But that’s not at all what Weber meant. Weber used the term “legitimacy” to convey the idea of *conformity* rather than *justification.*

     In his essay “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” Charles Tilly explained it like this:

     “Legitimacy is the probability that other authorities will act to confirm the decisions of a given authority.”

     4/

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     novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ (anarchopunk_girl@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 03-Sep-2023 20:47:11 JST novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     @HeavenlyPossum this is good. What I always point out when people bring up Somalia and similar is the fact that they are fighting over obtaining the legitimized station and powers of the state — each one wants to assume statehood and control the territory and prevent the others from doing so. They disagree on basically everything else, but the one thing they all seem to agree with is that a state is necessary. That includes actors like the United Nations as well who will recognize and legitimize the state that forms and to my recollection were actually *encouraging* the need for a state to exist. So all of this conflict and all of these problems were actually created by the continued existence of statism after the state itself had ceased to exist: the conflict was predicated on the idea that a state needed to exist and someone needed to fill that slot; it was that agreed upon statism that created a state shaped "power vacuum" in the first place. But "power vacuums" only exist if everyone agrees that that power must exist and that that station needs to be filled by *someone*, and if the populace will acquiesce to it and others will legitimize it. If everyone agrees that some station or power is unnecessary, and the actors who might want to attain that power realize that no one would treat them as legitimate, then there is no such power vacuum needing to be filled at all. Power vacuums are created essentially BT collective consensus in believing a certain station may exist. So in Somalia's case, it was the residual statism on all sides, encourages by the UN, that believed that the station of statehood actually did exist and just needed to be filled, that caused the conflict.

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 03-Sep-2023 20:47:13 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     In his essay “Anarchy is What States Make of It,” political scientist Alexander Wendt rejects this notion for states, in the absence of some over-arching global governance, in a way that makes as much sense for people and communities in the absence of the state:

     “If collective security identity is high, however, the emergence of a predator may do much less damage. If the predator attacks any member of the collective, the latter will come to the victim's defense on the principle of "all for one, one for all," even if the predator is not presently a threat to other members of the collective. If the predator is not strong enough to withstand the collective, it will be defeated and collective security will obtain.”

     In other words, people in a highly atomized society are more likely to respond to a threat by viewing *everyone* as a potential threat, and readying themselves for conflict all the time. But in a society that views itself as a community, with strong ties and sense of mutual identity, threats are more likely to be deterred or defeated by cooperative self-defense.

     10/

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 03-Sep-2023 20:47:13 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     Wendt continues:

     “Predation will always lead victims to defend themselves, but whether defense will be collective or not depends on the history of interaction within the potential collective as much as on the ambitions of the predator. Will the disappearance of the Soviet threat renew old insecurities among the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization? Perhaps, but not if they have reasons independent of that threat for identifying their security with one another. Identities and interests are relationship-specific, not intrinsic… ‘Mature’ anarchies are less likely than ‘immature’ ones to be reduced by predation to a Hobbesian condition, and maturity, which is a proxy for structures of identity and interest, is a function of process.”

     The member states of NATO do not fight each other, despite their shared history of world war and the absence of some super-national government, because they view themselves as members of a community. No warlord inexorably emerges to conquer all of them.

     11/

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 03-Sep-2023 20:47:13 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     As an anarchist, I do not advocate for the sudden removal of central state authority, because that is likely to lead to exactly the scenario that the Somalia example suggests: conflict among sub-state actors seeking paramountcy over other sub-state actors. As an anarchist, what I do advocate is the establishment of mutual aid and cooperative sociality outside of the state’s purview, because *that* is what builds real anarchism.

     Instead of Somalia, we can and should look to the countless non-state societies that existed all over the world for thousands and thousands of years without the emergence of “warlords,” a phenomenon that is, for all practical purposes, a function of rather than exception to the state.

     The San bushmen of Southern Africa are likely descended from the first human inhabitants of that region. They likely lived in isolation, without the state, for at least *100,000 years.* Miraculously, mysteriously, no warlords seem to have emerged in that time, no war of all against all. It seems like this alleged critique of anarchism isn’t so inevitable after all.

     12/end

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 03-Sep-2023 20:47:14 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     What happened in Somalia is what happens in every state: competition between sub-state actors for power and resources. Sometimes this competition is peaceful and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes intra-state violence is abrupt (the coup in Gabon) and sometimes it’s drawn-out (the Yugoslav wars). Sometimes intra-state violence is orderly with well-defined sides and clear front lines (the US Civil War) and sometimes it’s a chaotic mess (Somalia and Syria).

     But in all of these cases, we’re talking about sub-state actors—elements of the state itself—fighting each other for the power and prerogatives of the state, not the absence of the state.

     8/

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 03-Sep-2023 20:47:14 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     These actors did not emerge from the aether; they did not spring into existence ex nihilo. Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid had previously served in the Italian colonial police and as a general in the Somali National Army. We cannot point to examples of violence between state actors to illustrate or critique the absence of state actors.

     In the absence of state authority (and state violence), there would inevitably be conflict and violence among people. We cannot infer, however, from examples of state collapse and state failure, that the human condition in the absence of the state is the inevitable emergence of warlords and a chaotic and Hobbesian war of all against all.

     9/

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 03-Sep-2023 20:47:15 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     States are institutions, or more precisely, they are networks of institutions, a sort of meta-organization. We often speak of them as unitary actors for the sake of convenience, but this is an over-simplification. A state might consist of a legislature, an executive, a judiciary, a bureaucracy, a military, a police force…or multiples of all of those. Sometimes all those sub-state actors cooperate with each other for their mutual benefit, but sometimes they compete or even fight each other.

     We sometimes call those fights “civil wars” or “insurgencies” or “coups” or “rebellions” but they all fall under the rubric of intra-state violence.

     Sometimes, one sub-state actor might seek to supplant another as the paramount authority within the state, as with the struggle between parliament and the monarchy in the English Civil War. Sometimes, one sub-state actor seeks to establish its own monopoly over violence in a particular subsection of the state’s territory, as was the case in the US Civil War.

     But we rarely think of intra-state conflict as “anarchism.”

     6/

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 03-Sep-2023 20:47:15 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     What happened in Somalia wasn’t structurally all that different from what happened to the United States in the 1860s: sub-state actors challenged each other for supremacy over the state and over territory.

     Somalia stands out, however, in the multiplicity of actors involved. Rather than coalescing around two big-tent factions, Somali sub-state actors splintered, more along the lines of what we’ve seen in the Syrian civil war. And Somalia stands out in terms of how weak each faction was compared to the unified state: while the Union and Confederacy both maintained order and services in their respective territories, Somali factions weren’t able to maintain the same degree of pre-conflict functionality.

     It probably doesn’t help that Somalis are Black Africans, which helps to Other them to many Westerners who like to use them as a cautionary tale against anarchism.

     7/

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 03-Sep-2023 20:47:16 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     If I were to stop you on the street, brandish a gun, and tell you that I was taking you to a cage, I would probably be understood as a “kidnapper.”

     If a police officer were to do the same thing, the police officer’s actions would be “legitimate.” Other police officers would likely assist rather than interfere. A judge would probably agree and endorse the action. If the police were to bring you to a prison, the prison officials would likely cage rather than free you. Civil authorities would ensure the police officer receives a paycheck. The news media would probably ignore or even praise the police officer’s actions.

     That’s what Weber means by “legitimacy”: the measure that all the various actors that make up the state will support rather than oppose each other.

     5/

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 03-Sep-2023 21:39:30 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     • novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

     @anarchopunk_girl

     Absolutely. The state system reproduces itself.