No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
In the anarchist brigades in the Spanish Civil War soldiers elected their officers democratically. In combat they still had ultimate command authority but afterwards soldiers could replace then if they where disappointed in their decisions.
This is not unlike how pirate ships worked
someone watched that cgp grey video, good boy
A video about pirates? Can I get the name and channel please?
CGP Gray is the channel. I believe they’re referencing this video on Quartermasters, but CGP also has this one on Captains.
Thank you!! I’m gonna watch these when I’m done with work tonight!
Isn't the idea of having an authority at all contrary to the anarchist ideology? Sounds to me like they were more "representative democratic brigades" than anarchistic brigades, since they elected officials that had full control until the next election.
Not really. Anarchists generally recognize the authority of specialists (scientists, doctors, …), they just refute them the right to impose their ideas on individual. It's a little stretch, but officers in an anarchist army would be like specialists, whose authority is not imposed, but freely recognized.
No, the idea of authority is not necessarily contrary to anarchism. You need to first examine the source of that authority's power, the structures which put them into power, and how that power is enforced.
If it's coercive in any way, that is, if you are threatened with violence in some way if you do not comply, then it is indeed counter to anarchism. However, that's not how anarchist brigades in 1930s Spain, the Makhnovshchina, the Korean People's Association in Manchuria, the anarchist brigades during the Russian Civil War, etc worked. First, membership was pretty much always voluntary. If you didn't want to follow an order, you didn't have to and you wouldn't be executed or tried as deserter or whatever like in most traditional armies. If you didn't want to follow an order, it was generally accepted that it was your right to refuse.
Second, there weren't set terms between elections like you might be thinking of within a modern representative democracy. If an elected officer was issuing commands the rest of the soldiers didn't agree with or like, they could be voted out at any moment, including in the middle of battle. This tended to present problems in the Spanish Civil War where the Soviet Union tried to exert complete control over everyone on the anti-fascist side. They'd send in Soviet officers to lead anarchist battalions. As soon as the Soviet gave an order that the rest didn't like, they'd vote him out. When the Soviets refused to give up authority, the entire battalion would disband, steal all their supplies, and reform a few miles away as a "new" battalion and elect their own leader.
They also weren't usually structured like we tend to think of military units with a mass of enlisted and a few detached officers issuing orders. The officers tended to come from the enlisted ranks. The officer position was less of a leader and more of a coordinator. Plans were usually made collaboratively by the whole unit (or those who cared to take part). If the heat of battle when snap decisions needed to be made, the officer tended to be the one who made those decisions, but there was no expectation that anyone who disobeyed would be killed or court-marshalled. People obeyed because they knew the person making the decision, why they were making the decision they made, and that if it was a bad decision they could replace that person.
As far as I understand it, most anarchists are opposed to unjust / unjustified / unnecessary hierarchies. There's many advantages to having managers, team leaders, captains, etc. because it can be helpful to have someone coordinated actions between a larger group.
What anarchists would seek to avoid would be structures where power starts to consolidate around people beyond what's needed. It's good to have a leader for quick decisions in the heat of battle, or other emergency, but that person doesn't need to decide everything outside of battle, because there's time to have a more democratic or consensual decision making process. They also don't need to be given more money, or not be accountable and replaceable by their squad.
The voters have enough guns to challenge their authority.
plus promptness is a necessary sacrifice here. everyone can have their best judgement on whether they should obey first and mutiny later