Add new comment

By this time there were formal procedures but no way to use them against him. This carried on until his followers burnt-out, his projects imploded and he fucked off. I've also seen bullshit in intentional communities, with middle-class control-freaks making false accusations and starting rumour-mills against people they fall out with. This happens in the more rulesy places; the others just seem to get the odd asshole who constantly starts conflicts, never really resolves them, infuriates/burns-out everyone else and eventually fucks off.

I also think theres two different kinds of situations, but in contrast to other commentators I think they're hard to tell apart, and they don't hinge on the seriousness of the issue. Among most kinds of people, conflicts can be resolved to some degree by meeting needs, resolving causes of grievances and carrying on. Often people either split into different sub-scenes, compromise, or restrict their cooperation to stuff they agree on. It's rarer to get a full "transformation" where both appreciate each other's positions, though it happens. What makes things more complicated is that there's certain kinds of people who are particularly prone to power-play and manipulation, and are very good at disguising the sources of conflict, confabulating, spinning discourses to their own advantage, and manipulating others into taking their side. At root I think what's going on is they have real grievances directed towards some past person or situation, which get transferred endlessly to new situations and are insoluble because no possible resolution reaches the root grievance; they are also operating through a persona, so no matter how NVC-ish they are, they never show their real selves/needs. The grievances/conflicts involve the persona attempting to establish power; this again is felt as compensation for some past wounding, but is never enough (so there are grounds for compassion with them, but not on the basis of their posited grievances which are always "strategic"). Because of these roots, the conflicts aren't soluble using conflict resolution and these people tend to burn down the projects they're involved in and eventually fuck off, leaving a wasteland. They're chameleons, so it's very hard to tell their bullshit from actual grievances, needs, etc; they will adapt to whatever the prevailing sources of status are (do-ocracy, ultra-radicalism, street cred, fighting prowess, oppression olympics, pacifism, etc). They're the most obvious candidates for banishment in anarchist scenes but also the most likely to try banishing someone. Formal meetings and procedures help these types because they can focus the manipulation on particular times and places. Strong rules or norms against banishing, or high thresholds for doing so, along with informal processes where there isn't a "decision" as such, make things harder for them. Other people in the scene having the confidence and courage to stand up to them, makes things harder. If there's procedures then the various norms of due process, consensus/direct democracy, standards of proof and so on reduce their ability to manipulate procedures (I think this is why these kinds of things have evolved within formal institutions, which also don't want this kind of slash-and-burn warlordism), though often their strategy is to raise the conflict level and burn-out adversaries rather than to actually win a "decision". I suspect there's simple ways to deal with these types, their power dissipates when people see through them and they aren't able to manipulate, at which point they usually fuck off. If they don't, then their ability to exploit or hurt people dissipates because people see through it. They're thus fairly well-checked in persistent small-scale communities with high levels of intimate knowledge of one another. Sadly this doesn't apply either to anarchist scenes or to intentional communities in their current form.