I recently got sent this page on sociocracy. I noticed it sounded a lot like how I’ve envisioned an anarchist society, as I’ve described here on hexbear. I found it weird that it doesn’t mention anarchism, but perhaps they just are using the term “self governance” to refer to anarchism but not by name (due to its stigmatization). It specifically tried to differentiate consent versus consensus as decision making processes, but honestly I thought consensus already worked how they described consent to work. So if that’s the case, I guess I’m actually a fan of consent decision making, not consensus. I was wondering if any leftists (esp anarchists) on here could vouch for their interpretation and clarify if you find it a feasible and good form of anarchist society.
I’m also wondering how a society that’s purely online would work like this. Like a video game or something that teaches anarchist values by just being like a survival game where cooperation is clearly beneficial but there’s no built in party or guild system, so people form anarchist organizations instead. But I’d be concerned about people forming hierarchies within those organizations anyways, and not allow players to come and go as per free association. That’s perhaps off topic from the first part of this post, but I’d be interested in hearing thoughts on how a game might encourage players, purely through gameplay, to form anarchist organizations.
Oh right, I guess I got caught up in recognizing the similarities that I didn’t really process how different the context is.
Although I suspect someone who likes the idea of organizing and decision making this way must surely agree with at least some of the anarchist principles. I wonder if the peoplr who worked on defining sociocracy had personal history or interest with anarchism, and just “de-politicized” this idea to make it more palatable for those who grew up being told anarchism is bad. A cursory Google search into Gerard Endenburg and sociocracy didn’t turn anything up though.
Interestingly enough, the person who first coined it, Auguste Comte, seems to have wanted it applied to politics though (according to natopedia). It seems he influenced some flavors of anarchism but was not anarchist themselves.