this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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As for bureaucracy under anarchism, that's a contentious topic.
For anarcho-communists, it's probably going to be very similar to the examples that a communist will give you.
For syndicalists, the level of organisation or coordination would occur between "workplaces" (I can't use the term factory here for obvious reasons and "unions" can blur some lines that are less than ideal because a syndicalist understanding of their ideal system is not a "unions sitting on top of the political economy/unions sitting at the side" sort of deal like we see today.) There should be larger all-sector unions which represent each industry in a syndicalist society that would coordinate and collaborate with other all-sector unions, so let's say that there's new medical technology which is being implemented in hospitals but it places significant demand on electricity or telecommunications - the all-sector healthcare union would need to communicate this increased demand with the all-sector energy union or all-sector telecommunications union to coordinate building more infrastructure or increasing energy production etc.
For anarcho-primitivists - it's basically going to be tribal. As for healthcare, guess I'll die ๐คท
This gets contentious because it's not really considered to be orthodox anarchism but some of the more comprehensive theory on anarchist/anarchist-adjacent bureaucracy is found in Murray Bookchin's Libertarian Municipalism and, by extension, Abdullah Ocalan's Democratic Confederalism (which is what the YPJ and PKK are striving to achieve in Rojava in Syria currently.)
I think the reason why you can ask 10 anarchists what bureaucracy will look like under anarchism and you'll get 11 answers is because in terms of ideology, anarchism is very heterogeneous.
Anprims share little common ground with other anarchists, especially in regards to their conclusions or their prescriptions for society (if that makes sense). Like, they might agree with say 75-90% of what another anarchist holds as their political beliefs but what the anprim believes needs to happen as a solution will be wildly different to the other person's program.
There's virtually no common ground between what a syndicalist society would look like and what an anprim society would look like. The commonalities would mostly be negative, in the sense that there would be the absence of capitalism etc., than positive, in the sense of what would be present, in their respective societies.
This is probably worse than a non-answer but how those conflicts are negotiated is itself another arena for diversity of thought.
For someone who is a platformist, for example, they might expect to see rigorous debate within anarchist society about what to do with the billionaires but that once a majority has been reached on what needs to happen that the dissenting factions need to fall in line.
A different type of anarchist might find the plurality of communes as a viable option.
It gets super complex and often there's no clear terms for how diversity of thought should be meditated except when it comes to different anarchist tendencies that have a very explicit political structure like with platformism or libertarian municipalism.
Honestly, and this is just speculation and my own anecdotal experiences so don't overstate the importance of what I'm about to say here, but I have found that there's a very strong emphasis on the anti- position or the negative in anarchist circles and this is reflected in how a lot of anarchists focus their criticisms and allow them to be influenced by the prevailing narrative in the media or society.
If you're anti-state it's easy to be anti-USSR, for obvious reasons, but if you're not carefully managing your biases and doing your due diligence then that leaves you very vulnerable to absorbing all of the criticisms of the USSR out there, whether they are accurate or not and whether they are situated within a historical and political context or not.
This is how you end up with MLs accusing anarchists of consuming state-department stenography.
It's easier to go along with the common narrative that the communists nearly caused a nuclear war over the Cuban missile crisis than it is to dig into sources to uncover that the US was actually the primary antagonist throughout all the events leading up to it and during the crisis, for example.
Likewise, it's easy to regress into a default position if you lean too heavily on the negation. If I said "the US committed a war crime by enacting a blockade on Cuba" it's easy to dismiss this because you reject the concept of borders or states and to use that position to avoid engaging in the matter any further and to retreat to the default position by refusing to examine your own preconceptions.
Obviously this isn't the case for all anarchists and it's just a trend that I've observed etc. etc.
Elsewhere in my life I've been known to tease anarchists over this by occasionally obstructing discussions by sort of playing a veto and accusing every side of imposing an unjust hierarchy and doing the whole "both sides are wrong and neither get my support or sympathy" routine. This is done in a tongue-in-cheek way and I play it for outrage (so an example might be about Israel and Palestine and me feigning a principled objection to both sides to stir up mischief with an anarchist) but the kernel of truth in the joke is me gently saying "watch out for this urge and be careful of what it can be used in service of..."
Oh god, this is one of things that turned me away from being an anarchist. The lack of an intellectual rigor and relying on these thought terminating cliches to avoid everything problematic, to avoid everything else on the Left that you didn't necessarily agree with drove me insane.