Nothing wrong with classes in functional programming though. Just return a new instance of the class from your method, rather than mutating an existing instance.
Javascript:
I heard you like mutating class data so I’m mutating the data you can put in your class data, dawg.
JavaScript: a language for mutants.
To be fair to JavaScript (I feel gross just saying that), it does have the ability to do some more functional-like programming as well. For example, many of its more recent array methods like filter, map, and reduce are pure functions.
Right, I think the two aren’t as different as they appear. You can think of a closure as an object with just one method.
If OO programming is fundamentally about objects sending messages to each other, then there are many ways to approach that. Some of those ways are totally compatible with functional programming.
The legacy of C++ has dominated what OOP is “supposed” to be, but it doesn’t have to work like that.
Classes are just another way to define an object. Heck even Lisp has objects!
wow, there are some really steaming takes on anarchism in the comments here.
Real State of Exception Hours
Do anarchists think anarchy will result in a system with no classes?
Yes, because anarchism is against all hierarchies and the class system is a form of hierarchy. Instead, decisions should me made collectively, for example in councils open for everyone
So, do the anarchists not think that capitalism will just prevail and bring along with it the classes of the haves and have nots? Anarchy won’t solve the problem of wealth inequality, will it? I have genuinely never understood this aspect of anarchism.
Anarchism is opposition to power hierarchies, specifically non-consensual or coercive ones. Wealth inequality without safety networks is a coercive power hierarchy, and so needs to be fought. Capitalism as a whole is almost always incompatible with anarchy, at least in the way we tend to do it now. In a system with strong social safety networks the choice to work for someone can actually be a choice, and so some schools of thought would view it as compatible.
Others view exclusive ownership of property as someone asserting power over someone else’s ability to use said property, and therefore wrong. Needless to say, abolition of private property is not compatible with capitalism.Capitalism as a whole is almost always incompatible with anarchy, at least in the way we tend to do it now.
That last part is really important. Many anarchists, socialists, and whatnot recognize that capitalism can be fine. It’s just that humans really suck at doing capitalism, we keep doing pseudo-feudalism instead
I actually really like this analysis
We’re gonna beat up the capitalists
You don’t think the capitalists would have the resources to defend themselves?
Hoarding resources will be banned. If you start doing it, we’ll beat you up before you can get enough to hire a private army. Also, only the most corrupt people would go work as a private soldier, because everyone’s needs are met so there’s no poverty to drive people to do bad things. You’d have to promise private security a lot of money to betray their nation for basically no reason.
So this anarchy is a self contained commune where nobody is allowed in that doesn’t agree with the rules. And if somebody breaks the rules, they must leave. This sums it up? It can’t apply to a country because that would never work. But to a small village, sure.
Also, hopefully the people outside the village don’t find ways of fucking with them (such as redirecting waterways that affect the downstream village).
Yes, my understanding is that Anarchists want to break down governments into smaller and smaller bits in order to allow for more and more direct democracy and cooperation.
How would you reach consensus between hundreds of millions of people?
Look, I am sympathetic to the cause behind anarchism but it doesn’t work because it insists on ignoring biological realities. We need to look no further than our ape cousins to see how some hierarchical structure is inherent to our society. Only through the existence of a state can we reduce hierarchy and increase equality.
A stateless society wouldn’t last 10 minutes before establishing a state.
When a monkey hoards all the bananas, the other monkeys kill him and share the bananas. Anarchy is natural.
If might makes right a state will end up forming anyways. A populist commune is still a state. Anarchy is not possible in any sense of what one might describe as a functional society. As soon as there’s a society a state will form.
But that’s also not how chimpanzee society works anyways, since mostly it’s an alpha challenged by a younger stronger chimp who takes their place and makes sure everyone else follows the rules. They even have something like a police force.
It’s a government, but it isn’t necessarily a state. Regardless, Anarchists aren’t against all forms of government. The media’s version of total chaos is not what Anarchists are trying to create.
Here’s some more information if you want it: https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/sectionA.html#seca1
This is why I like to distinguish between Anarchy (Chaos) and Anarchism (Not Chaos, but no Hierarchies.)
Isn’t anarchy just against imposed hierarchy? Most anarchists I’ve met are okay with heirarchies that form naturally, and believe those hierarchies to be enough for society to function, hence why they call themselves anarchists, not minarchists.
I have never heard the term minarchist. Many anarchists say, we need structures against the building of hierarchies, like avoiding knowledge hierarchies by doing skillshares.
Natural authorities are a different topic. I think Kropotkin was an example of a leader who was accepted because everyone agreed with him. Once he said something people didn’t like, they rejected him as a leader. You can call this a hierarchy if you like. I wouldn’t because he couldn’t coerce his followers but this is pure terminology.
There is a huge difference between how things should work and how they will though. Without any system of enforcement, I would call it nothing but wishful thinking.
In fairness, democracy was a kind of wishful thinking too, which is why I would propose a new form of monarchy instead: https://arendjr.nl/blog/2025/02/new-monarchy/
Kings are bad
@lugal @danc4498 Anarchism is against specifically unjust hierarchies, it can permit certain ones to exist within individual communities should the community find it justified, but still strongly favours not having any where possible.
There are a group of anarchists who would still believe in the idea of an adult > child hierarchy as they struggle to imagine an alternative world without it.
Anarchism thus becomes meaningless as anyone who defends certain hierarchies obviously does so because they believe they are just. Literally everyone on earth is against “unjust hierarchies” at least in their own personal evaluation of said hierarchies. People who support capitalism do so because they believe the exploitative systems it engenders are justifiable and will usually immediately tell you what those justifications are. Sure, you and I might not agree with their argument, but that’s not the point. To say your ideology is to oppose “unjust hierarchies” is to not say anything at all, because even the capitalist, hell, even the fascist would probably agree that they oppose “unjust hierarchies” because in their minds the hierarchies they promote are indeed justified by whatever twisted logic they have in their head.
Telling me you oppose “unjust hierarchies” thus tells me nothing about what you actually believe, it does not tell me anything at all. It is as vague as saying “I oppose bad things.” It’s a meaningless statement on its own without clarifying what is meant by “bad” in this case. Similarly, “I oppose unjust hierarchies” is meaningless statement without clarifying what qualifies “just” and “unjust,” and once you tell me that, it would make more sense you label you based on your answer to that question. Anarchism thus becomes a meaningless word that tells me nothing about you. For example, you might tell me one unjust hierarchy you want to abolish is prison. It would make more sense for me to call you a prison abolitionist than an anarchist since that term at least carries meaning, and there are plenty of prison abolitionists who don’t identify as anarchist.
Parents have natural bootmaker authority and if you want to be a good parent then you realise that the kids also have it: They, or maybe better put their genome, know how they need to be raised, and try to teach you, as well as (with increasing age) seek out the exact bootmakers that seem sensible. Worst thing you can do as a parent is to think that learning is a one-way street.
I honestly hate the concept of “bootmaker authority”, because it’s exactly the same wrong conflation that Engels makes. Not every inequality is a form of authority. Expertise is not authority, it is expertise.
Authority is the socially-recognised power to dominate. Getting a bootmaker to advise on or perform bootmaking tasks is not domination. The bootmaker can’t hold you at gunpoint and command you to wear a certain kind of boot, nobody would allow that. There aren’t bootmaking cops.
Like what exactly does the bootmaker’s “authority” entail in this theory? Giving consent does not confer authority. Authority operates regardless of consent, that’s what makes it bad.
Knowledge is power, thus with a knowledge gap we have a power gap. As a bootmaker’s apprentice, my capacity to judge whether or not I’m getting taught proper technique is limited, I can alleviate that disparity by consulting more than one bootmaker, but ultimately that gap won’t vanish until I, myself, have mastered the craft.
Authority is the socially-recognised power to dominate.
…unnatural authority. Natural authority aka the bootmaker’s does not require social recognition. The bootmaker knows more than the apprentice no matter what society thinks, the imbalance is not socially caused.
If you don’t want to call it authority, fine, but saying “as bad as Engels” is going too far IMO. While bootmaker’s authority does not rely on (wider) social recognition it is still a thing that happens in a social relationship, and not in the relationship of a worker to their alarm clock or whatnot. Though arguably in the modern world that line is also blurring, see technological paternalism, OTOH it’s just a reification of the relationship between the producer and consumer of a technology. It’s an unavoidable (unless you’re a primitivist) side-effect of increased division of labour in a technologically advancing society.
Heck I’m myself on the page of “the state is a people, a territory, and organisation”, simply because the classical anarchist definition drifted miles and miles from the dictionary and the lived experience of people in liberal democracies, when you say “abolish the state” they hear “abolish garbage collection”. We can re-do terminology once in a while, it’s a good idea.
I need you to define the word “authority” in that case. I’ve given my definition, so what is yours and how does it differ, please? Because I already addressed the fact that an imbalance doesn’t create a hierarchy, and your description of imbalance does not fit my definition of authority.
Power imbalance doesn’t automatically create the conditions for domination. For that you would need both expertise and monopoly.
And the solution to a misunderstanding isn’t to concede the definition of the word “state” but to educate. The state is any entity that has a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence in a region. That applies regardless of the system of government that rules it.
Your definition isn’t a definition, it’s just a collection of categories that gives no useful information.
We don’t need to be dominated in order to clean up our garbage. And the state is often really bad at collecting garbage, so just teach people that.
Authority is a power imbalance in a social relationship. It does not, in itself, imply domination or monopoly or expertise it happens each time two people are not on eye level regarding something, cannot, for whatever reason, relate to each other as complete equals. If you find yourself having it and are keen on proper praxis then you take on the responsibility to lift the other up as you are capable to do. I think for that reason alone I think it’s important to recognise it as authority, so that we are careful when using it, which, in the end, is unavoidable.
We don’t need to be dominated in order to clean up our garbage. And the state is often really bad at collecting garbage, so just teach people that.
Garbage collection is a non-issue over here, it just works. Couple of neighbouring municipalities own the company and it’s run on an at-cost basis with decent wages. If, suddenly, an anarchist revolution were to happen I’m quite sure the general arrangement would carry over.
…and I took that as an example precisely because (over here) it just works, it’s a baby you wouldn’t want to throw out with the bathwater. I’m reasonably sure that wherever you’re living, you can think of such an example.
Depends on the anarchist. Many would focus on seeking the absence of involuntary power hierarchies. A manager who distributes work and does performance evaluations isn’t intrinsically a problem, it’s when people doing the work can’t say “no, they’re a terrible manager and they’re gone”, or you can’t walk away from the job without risking your well-being.
Anarchists and communists/socialists have a lot of overlap. There’s also overlap with libertarians, except libertarians often focus on coercion from the government and don’t give much regard to economic coercion. An anarchist will often not see much difference between “do this or I hit you” and “do this or starve”: they both are coercive power hierarchies.
Some anarchists are more focused on removing sources of coercion. Others are more focused on creating relief from it. The “tear it down” crowd are more visible, but you see anarchists in the mutual aid and community organization crowds as well.
Protest anonymously, function anonymously.
This one does not spark joy.
All libertarian ideologies (including left and right wing anarchism) are anti-social and primitivist.
It is anti-social because it arises from a hatred of working in a large groups. It’s impossible to have any sort of large-scale institution without having rules that people want to follow, and libertarian ideology arises out of people hating to have to follow rules, i.e. to be a respectable member of society, i.e. they hate society and don’t want to be social. They thus desire very small institutions with limited rules and restrictions. Right-wing libertarians envision a society dominated by small private businesses while left-wing libertarians imagine a society dominated by either small worker-cooperative, communes, or some sort of community council.
Of course, everyone of all ideologies opposes submitting to hierarchies they find unjust, but hatred of submitting to hierarchies at all is just anti-social, as any society will have rules, people who write the rules, people who enforce the rules. It is necessary for any social institution to function. It is part of being an adult and learning to live in a society to learn to obey the rules, such as traffic rules. Sometimes it is annoying or inconvenient, but you do it because you are a respectable member of society and not a rebellious edgelord who makes things harder on everyone else because they don’t obey basic rules.
It is primitivist because some institutions simply only work if they are very large. You cannot have something like NASA that builds rocket ships operated by five people. You are going to always need an enormous institution which will have a ton of people, a lot of different levels of command (“hierarchy”), strict rules for everyone to follow, etc. If you tried to “bust up” something like NASA or SpaceX to be small businesses they simply would lose their ability to build rocket ships at all.
Of course, anarchists don’t mind, they will say, “who cares about rockets? They’re not important.” It reminds me of the old meme that spread around where someone asked anarchists how their tiny communes would be able to organize current massive supply chains in our modern societies and they responded by saying that the supply chain would be reduced to just people growing beans in their backyard and eating it, like a feudal peasant. They won’t even defend that their system could function as well as our modern economy but just says modern marvels of human engineering don’t even matter, because they are ultimately primitivists at heart.
I never understood the popularity of libertarian and anarchist beliefs in programming circles. We would never have entered the Information Age if we had an anarchism or libertarian system. No matter how much they might pretend these are the ideal systems, they don’t even believe it themselves. If a libertarian has a serious medical illness, they are either going to seek medical help at a public hospital or a corporate hospital. Nobody is going to seek medical help at a “hospital small business” ran out of someone’s garage. We all intuitively and implicitly understand that large swathes of economy that we all take advantage of simply cannot feasibly be ran by small organizations, but libertarians are just in denial.
Well, I don’t understand why you think anarchist means no rules.
It means no hierarchy.
It’s even the whole word itself.
An-Archy. Hier-archy.
So your thesis is based on wrong assumptions and is a word salad from my point of view.
You did not read what I wrote, so it is unironic you call it “word salad” when you are not even aware of the words I wrote since you had an emotional response and wrote this reply without actually addressing what I argued. I stated that it is impossible to have an very large institution without strict rules that people follow, and this requires also the enforcement of the rules, and that means a hierarchy as you will have rule-enforcers.
Also, you are insisting your personal definition of anarchism is the one true definition that I am somehow stupid for disagreeing with, yet anyone can just scroll through the same comments on this thread and see there are other people disagreeing with you while also defending anarchism. A lot of anarchists do not believe anarchism means “no hierarchy,” like, seriously, do you unironically believe in entirely abolishing all hierarchies? Do you think a medical doctor should have as much authority on how to treat an injured patient as the janitor of the same hospital? Most anarchists aren’t even “no hierarchy” they are “no unjustified hierarchy.”
The fact you are entirely opposed to hierarchy makes your position even more silly than what I was criticizing.
I never said anything like that. I never said i beleived in anarchy. You just are factually wrong on all counts.
Go read the anarchist philosophers, you’ll see what I mean.
You are still writing word salad by the way… Really … Touch grass, read a book about the subject you want to talk about and come back a changed person!
I wish you well!
You have not made any point at all. Your first reply to me entirely ignored the point of my post which you did not read followed with an attack, I reply pointing out you ignored the whole point of my post and just attacked me without actually respond to it, and now you respond again with literally nothing of substance at all just saying “you’re wrong! touch grass! word salad!”
You have nothing of substance to say, nothing to contribute to the discussion. You are either a complete troll trying to rile me up, or you just have a weird emotional attachment to this topic and felt an emotional need to respond and attack me prior to actually thinking up a coherent thing to criticize me on. Didn’t your momma ever teach you that “if you have nothing positive or constructive to say, don’t say anything at all”? Learn some manners, boy. Blocked.
I don’t feel like I have to discuss with someone who clearly is in bad faith.
Go learn about a subject before talking about it, that’s it. All you said was petulant bullshit. Go read La conquete du pain or something before talking about anarchy, you clearly have no idea what you are talking about and instead are reugitating speudo-intellectual word salad.
If you’re so fragile you feel you need to block me, i have no words for you other than : go touch grass, go read about your subjet and come back a better person.
I wish you well!
Settle down, elon
That’s just a communist thing, not an anarchist-specific thing…
Just like functional programing is about making state explicit, not making it go away.
Overall, both arms are wrong… so they cancel out or something like that.
Hm, i dont think AES amanaged to come close to this.
Anarchists like Baba Makhno came close, but given the circumstance, leader- or classless societies are kinda doomed to fail.
I’m not talking about “AES”, I’m talking about communism. By the definition of “communism = AES” then communism doesn’t abolish class, private property, the value-form, nations, etc.
Anarchism distinguishes itself from communism principally by an inherent opposition to hierarchy, and an opposition to many of the organisational forms that communists may advocate for or participate in, eg communist parties, councils, and any kind of structure that could constitute a hierarchy. And anarchists are inherently opposed to centralisation, and so on.
