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ChaosAnarchy wrote

A society with no coercion would need the condition to have no coercion

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stagn wrote

A society with no coercion would need the condition to have no society

Fuck society

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subrosa wrote (edited )

Coercion is voluntaryist-speak. In a sense I want to force my existence into others' life without their permission or consent. My freedom is a threat to everyone's certainty. I want to be compelled into involuntary responses of laughter and exstacy ecstacy. I want to be threatened with a good time, coerced into moving towards my best destinies.

But less pedantic, the condition required is anarchy. And I think we already have a few ideas about what is required for anarchy: abandon polity-based social organization and the entire democratic project, for example.

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Tequila_Wolf wrote

Coming back to this because I'm curious if you came into contact with this position via any anarchists? Proudhon?

I've come by it from Deleuze, and it seems to plug into what the destituent power folks do. But I would love to hear if there were anarchists doing this before them, or what its history is.

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subrosa wrote

Good question, but I'm hoping you could clarify a bit because now I'm less sure what "this position" is. Sure some Proudhon in there. "Best destinies" was Fourier talk, a little bit out of place maybe.

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Tequila_Wolf wrote

I'd summarise the position as the rejection of a voluntarism of a specific type, accepting that a form of violence/force is an important part of shocking us out of the lull of docility and turning us towards liberation.

I also elaborate on what you've said here more in this post, with two comments here, if that is useful.

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[deleted] wrote (edited )

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Tequila_Wolf wrote

Thank you, this is helpful. Probably involuntarist approaches to personal/societal change go at least as far back as Marx in relation to anti-capitalism, though I don't know. And in general I think it goes back to Plato. But I would love for some anarchists to have done it before Marx. I wonder if Stirner was one.

I'm curious what the anti-foundationalist element might have to do with the involuntarist element, and how they might be related.

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subrosa wrote (edited )

I'm curious what the anti-foundationalist element might have to do with the involuntarist element, and how they might be related.

Same, that's the gap I've been struggling with. The pattern of anti-foundationalist tendencies somehow overlapping with some kind of refusal of voluntarist logic may have been too much of a suggestion.

I'll get back to you on this.

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Tequila_Wolf wrote (edited )

My general answer to this is that (following Bonanno), in terms of societies, anarchy is a tension, not a realisation.

Maybe another way of framing what u/subrosa said also is to say that an anarchist society (for lack of a better term) would full of coercion, because it would be a constant tearing-down by all of everything that seeks to stand above.
A society without coercion would be more like stigmergy, which I don't think makes sense for people and evokes a kind of Brave New World situation where people are playing their roles with consent, always consenting while being totally comfortable with their hierarchical existence.

Accepting authority can be understood as consenting to being ruled. One can kneel without coercion. So for us at least I think it's about undermining the conditions that cause people to kneel.

u/ziq's bio is succinct on this point: you don't need to be ruled.

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Tequila_Wolf wrote (edited )

I want to expand on this because as life happens I came by someone to reference worth engaging in relation to this: Canonical anarchist anthropologist Pierre Clastres's posthumous book:

on the affirmative role of violence in “primitive societies.”

"The war machine is the motor of the social machine; the primitive social being relies entirely on war, primitive society cannot survive without war. The more war there is, the less unification there is, and the best enemy of the State is war. Primitive society is society against the State in that it is society-for-war."

Elaborating upon the conclusions of such earlier works as Society Against the State, in these essays Clastres critiques his former mentor, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and devastatingly rejects the orthodoxy of Marxist anthropology and other Western interpretive models of “primitive societies.” Discarding the traditional anthropological understanding of war among South American Indians as arising from a scarcity of resources, Clastres instead identifies violence among these peoples as a deliberate means to territorial segmentation and the avoidance of a State formation. In their refusal to separate the political from the social, and in their careful control of their tribal chiefs—who are rendered weak so as to remain dependent on the communities they represent—the “savages” Clastres presents prove to be shrewd political minds who resist in advance any attempt at “globalization.”The essays in this, Clastres's final book, cover subjects ranging from ethnocide and shamanism to “primitive” power and economy, and are as vibrant and engaging as they were thirty years ago. This new edition—which includes an introduction by Eduardo Viverios de Castro—holds even more relevance for readers in today's an era of malaise and globalization.

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rot wrote

ideally. anarchy hopefully gets close

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Fool wrote

I generally think about how the route to Anarchy is not an abolition of rulers but a proliferation of rulers, such that the concept is almost meaningless.

Bring this back to coercion, depending on perspectives what can be considered coercion varies considerably, and as such it becomes more about personal awareness of owning one's actions and exerting the authority one has over one's own personal fiefdom.

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