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106-644: Alternative Libertaire, now UCL, identifies with various tendencies within the libertarian socialist current of anarchism including anarcho-communism and anarcho-syndicalism . It was also a member of the International Libertarian Solidarity network. The organization identifies with the revolutionary workers' movement drawn from the split in the First International (the International Workingmens' Association ) in 1872. This

212-484: A decentralised model of self-governance , envisioning free association based on co-operative or participatory economics . Some libertarian socialists see such systems as complementary to statism , while others hold them to be an alternative to the state . Libertarian socialists tend to reject the view that political institutions such as the state represent an inherently good, or even neutral, power. Some libertarian socialists, such as Peter Kropotkin , consider

318-590: A free and equal society, aiming to transform work and everyday life . Broadly defined, libertarian socialism encapsulates any political ideology that favours workers' control of the means of production and the replacement of capitalism with a system of cooperative economics , or common ownership . Libertarian socialists tend to see the working class as agents of social revolution , reject representative democracy and electoralism , and advocate for self-organisation and direct action as means to engage in class conflict . Libertarian socialism has

424-616: A grassroots and direct democratic approach to socialism , rejecting parliamentarism and bureaucracy respectively. Libertarian socialists advocate the empowerment of individuals to control their own lives and encourage them to voluntarily cooperate with each other, rather than allow themselves to be controlled by a state. Libertarian socialists therefore uphold civil liberties such as freedom of choice , freedom of expression and freedom of thought . In contrast to authoritarian forms of socialism , libertarian socialism rejects state ownership and centralisation . Instead it upholds

530-400: A physical end . Sadi Carnot (1796–1832) and Rudolf Clausius (1822–1888) discovered the second law of thermodynamics in the 19th century. It states that total entropy , sometimes understood as disorder, will always increase over time in an isolated system . This means that a system cannot spontaneously increase its order without an external relationship that decreases order elsewhere in

636-1697: A plutocratic class and that "society is governed by those who own it". Chomsky holds that government, while not benign, can at least be held accountable, while corporate power is neither benign nor accountable. Though he holds the abolition of the state to be desirable, Chomsky considers the abolition of capitalism to be of greater urgency. Self-organisation Collective intelligence Collective action Self-organized criticality Herd mentality Phase transition Agent-based modelling Synchronization Ant colony optimization Particle swarm optimization Swarm behaviour Social network analysis Small-world networks Centrality Motifs Graph theory Scaling Robustness Systems biology Dynamic networks Evolutionary computation Genetic algorithms Genetic programming Artificial life Machine learning Evolutionary developmental biology Artificial intelligence Evolutionary robotics Reaction–diffusion systems Partial differential equations Dissipative structures Percolation Cellular automata Spatial ecology Self-replication Conversation theory Entropy Feedback Goal-oriented Homeostasis Information theory Operationalization Second-order cybernetics Self-reference System dynamics Systems science Systems thinking Sensemaking Variety Ordinary differential equations Phase space Attractors Population dynamics Chaos Multistability Bifurcation Rational choice theory Bounded rationality Self-organization , also called spontaneous order in

742-430: A social revolution . Libertarian socialists reject private property , as they consider capitalist property relations to be incompatible with freedom . Instead, libertarian socialism upholds individual self-ownership , as well as the collective ownership of the means of production . In the place of capitalism, libertarian socialists favour an economic system based on workers' control of production, advocating for

848-723: A "comprehensive libertarian socialist theory and practice". Libertarian socialist activism became focused on achieving practical reforms and theoretical developments centred around common "core values" such as economic democracy , economic justice and sustainable development , without building a coherent critique of capitalism. Activists from the 1970s and 1980s influenced by libertarian socialism did not advance coherent alternatives to markets and central planning, and had no reformist campaign. Eventually, Hahnel argues, they turned to traditional single-issue campaigns and abandoned their "big picture" libertarian socialist approach. These movements were somewhat successful in achieving their goals:

954-678: A "libertarian socialist alternative to the colonially established state boundaries in the Middle East." Various sources have drawn parallels between the Rojava Revolution and the Zapatista uprising of 1994 or the Spanish Revolution of 1936 , and noted the influence of libertarian socialist Murray Bookchin, specifically his concept of libertarian municipalism , on the revolution. Libertarian socialist ideas have influenced some currents of

1060-505: A "self-organizing system of voluntary co-operation", in regards to the spontaneous order of the free market economy. Neo-classical economists hold that imposing central planning usually makes the self-organized economic system less efficient. On the other end of the spectrum, economists consider that market failures are so significant that self-organization produces bad results and that the state should direct production and pricing. Most economists adopt an intermediate position and recommend

1166-525: A New Unionist leader, was one of the first British syndicalists). The Socialist League was dominated by anarchists by the 1890s. The Common Wealth Party was inspired by Christian socialism as well as libertarian socialism. Others in the tradition of the ILP and described as libertarian socialists included G. D. H. Cole (the founder of guild socialism and influenced by Morris), George Orwell , Michael Foot , Raymond Williams , and Tony Benn . Another

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1272-456: A contest which lasted for over fifty years. Libertarian socialism proved attractive to British writers such as Edward Carpenter , Oscar Wilde , and William Morris , the latter of whom developed a kind of libertarian socialism based in a strong critique of civilisation , which he aimed to overthrow and replace with what he called a "beautiful society". Morris drove the development of impossibilism , which became increasingly concerned with

1378-420: A determinate end under the direction of a higher agent, whatever is done by nature must needs be traced back to God, as to its first cause. So also whatever is done voluntarily must also be traced back to some higher cause other than human reason or will, since these can change or fail; for all things that are changeable and capable of defect must be traced back to an immovable and self-necessary first principle, as

1484-533: A key step in nano and universal assembly . By contrast, the four concurrently connected galvanometers of W. Ross Ashby 's Homeostat hunt , when perturbed, to converge on one of many possible stable states. Ashby used his state counting measure of variety to describe stable states and produced the " Good Regulator " theorem which requires internal models for self-organized endurance and stability (e.g. Nyquist stability criterion ). Warren McCulloch proposed "Redundancy of Potential Command" as characteristic of

1590-584: A libertarian socialist is Robin Cook . American economist Robin Hahnel claimed that libertarian socialists "were by far the worst underachievers among 20th century anti-capitalists ." He contrasted libertarian socialist failings with those of social democracy , arguing that while the latter had abandoned their principles of economic democracy and justice in favour of reformism , the former had proved incapable of sustaining anti-capitalist uprisings and largely ignored

1696-404: A mixture of market economy and command economy characteristics (sometimes called a mixed economy ). When applied to economics, the concept of self-organization can quickly become ideologically imbued. Enabling others to "learn how to learn" is often taken to mean instructing them how to submit to being taught. Self-organised learning (SOL) denies that "the expert knows best" or that there

1802-468: A natural product as this every part is thought as owing its presence to the agency of all the remaining parts, and also as existing for the sake of the others and of the whole, that is as an instrument, or organ... The part must be an organ producing the other parts—each, consequently, reciprocally producing the others... Only under these conditions and upon these terms can such a product be an organized and self-organized being, and, as such, be called

1908-539: A number of democratic socialists , including some prominent members of the British Labour Party . The Socialist League was formed in 1885 by William Morris and others critical of the authoritarian socialism of the Social Democratic Federation . It was involved in the new unionism , the rank-and-file union militancy of the 1880s–1890s, which anticipated syndicalism in some key ways ( Tom Mann ,

2014-491: A revival during the 1960s, when it was reconstituted as part of the nascent New Left . This revival occurred largely unconsciously, as new leftists were often unaware of their libertarian socialist predecessors. The concepts of grassroots democracy , workers' control , solidarity and autonomy were thus reinvented by the new generation. They also picked up the principles of decentralisation , participatory democracy and mutual aid . These libertarian socialist themes drove

2120-614: A self-organizing process within a complex system by restricting local interactions between the system components, rather than following an explicit control mechanism or a global design blueprint. The desired outcomes, such as increases in the resultant internal structure and/or functionality, are achieved by combining task-independent global objectives with task-dependent constraints on local interactions. The many self-organizing phenomena in physics include phase transitions and spontaneous symmetry breaking such as spontaneous magnetization and crystal growth in classical physics , and

2226-424: A significant current of anarchism and explicitly identified as libertarian socialist. Anarcho-syndicalist Gaston Leval explained: "We therefore foresee a Society in which all activities will be coordinated, a structure that has, at the same time, sufficient flexibility to permit the greatest possible autonomy for social life, or for the life of each enterprise, and enough cohesiveness to prevent all disorder. [...] In

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2332-520: A standard capability. In the 1990s Gordon Pask argued that von Foerster's H and Hmax were not independent, but interacted via countably infinite recursive concurrent spin processes which he called concepts. His strict definition of concept "a procedure to bring about a relation" permitted his theorem "Like concepts repel, unlike concepts attract" to state a general spin-based principle of self-organization. His edict, an exclusion principle, "There are No Doppelgangers " means no two concepts can be

2438-441: A system can lead to an increase in its organization has a long history. The ancient atomists such as Democritus and Lucretius believed that a designing intelligence is unnecessary to create order in nature, arguing that given enough time and space and matter, order emerges by itself. The philosopher René Descartes presents self-organization hypothetically in the fifth part of his 1637 Discourse on Method . He elaborated on

2544-409: A system of cooperative economics , or common ownership . They also advocate for workers' self-management , as they consider workers able to cooperate productively without supervisors , whether appointed by employers or by the state. They also tend to see free trade as inevitably resulting in the redistribution of income and wealth from workers to their corporate employers. They advocate for

2650-700: A tendency by the anti-authoritarian faction of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA), during their conflict with the Marxist faction . Libertarian socialism quickly spread throughout Europe and the American continent, reaching its height during the early stages of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and particularly during the Spanish Revolution of 1936 . Its defeat during these revolutions led to its brief decline, before its principles were resurrected by

2756-455: A time, even the American anarcho-capitalist theorist Murray Rothbard attempted to make common cause with libertarian socialists, but later shifted away from socialism and towards right-wing populism . Many libertarian socialists of this period were particularly influenced by the analysis of Cornelius Castoriadis and his group Socialisme ou Barbarie . This new generation included the non-vanguardist Marxist organisation Facing Reality ,

2862-559: A well-organised society, all of these things must be systematically accomplished by means of parallel federations, vertically united at the highest levels, constituting one vast organism in which all economic functions will be performed in solidarity with all others and that will permanently preserve the necessary cohesion". Significant thinkers in the anarchist tradition who are described as libertarian socialist include Colin Ward . A broad scope of economic and political philosophies that draw on

2968-404: Is a method of distributing funding for scientific research . In this system, each researcher is allocated an equal amount of funding, and is required to anonymously allocate a fraction of their funds to the research of others. Proponents of SOFA argue that it would result in similar distribution of funding as the present grant system, but with less overhead. In 2016, a test pilot of SOFA began in

3074-415: Is an example of the related concept of emergence . Self-organization relies on four basic ingredients: The cybernetician William Ross Ashby formulated the original principle of self-organization in 1947. It states that any deterministic dynamic system automatically evolves towards a state of equilibrium that can be described in terms of an attractor in a basin of surrounding states. Once there,

3180-446: Is contrasted from other forms of socialism by its rejection of state ownership and from other forms of libertarianism by its rejection of private property . Broadly defined, it includes schools of both anarchism and Marxism , as well as other tendencies that oppose the state and capitalism . With its roots in the Age of Enlightenment , libertarian socialism was first constituted as

3286-469: Is ever "the one best method", insisting instead on "the construction of personally significant, relevant and viable meaning" to be tested experientially by the learner. This may be collaborative, and more rewarding personally. It is seen as a lifelong process, not limited to specific learning environments (home, school, university) or under the control of authorities such as parents and professors. It needs to be tested, and intermittently revised, through

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3392-453: Is facilitated by random perturbations ("noise") that let the system explore a variety of states in its state space. This increases the chance that the system will arrive into the basin of a "strong" or "deep" attractor, from which it then quickly enters the attractor itself. The biophysicist Henri Atlan developed this concept by proposing the principle of " complexity from noise" ( French : le principe de complexité par le bruit ) first in

3498-484: Is former Labour Party minister Peter Hain , who has written in support of libertarian socialism, identifying an axis involving a "bottom-up vision of socialism, with anarchists at the revolutionary end and democratic socialists [such as himself] at its reformist end" as opposed to the axis of state socialism with Marxist–Leninists at the revolutionary end and social democrats at the reformist end. Another recent mainstream Labour politician who has been described as

3604-544: Is realized in the physics of non-equilibrium processes , and in chemical reactions , where it is often characterized as self-assembly . The concept has proven useful in biology, from the molecular to the ecosystem level. Cited examples of self-organizing behaviour also appear in the literature of many other disciplines, both in the natural sciences and in the social sciences (such as economics or anthropology ). Self-organization has also been observed in mathematical systems such as cellular automata . Self-organization

3710-471: Is there a mathematical necessity for it. There is no "clash of doctrines." Only Prigogine and a few colleagues hold to these speculations which, in spite of their efforts, continue to live in the twilight zone of scientific credibility. In theology , Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) in his Summa Theologica assumes a teleological created universe in rejecting the idea that something can be a self-sufficient cause of its own organization: Since nature works for

3816-530: The 1917 Revolution , in which libertarian socialists played a leading role, the Bolsheviks changed tack and adopted elements of the libertarian socialist programme in their appeals to the workers. But by 1919, the new Bolshevik government had come to view the libertarian socialists as a threat to their power and moved to eliminate their influence. Libertarian socialist organisations were banned and many of their members were arrested, deported to Siberia or executed by

3922-461: The Cheka . The Revolutions of 1917–1923 ended in defeat for the libertarian socialists, with either the social democrats, the Bolsheviks or nationalists rising to power. Libertarian socialists responded by reevaluating their positions, emphasising mass organisation over intellectual vanguardism and revolutionary spontaneity over substitutionism . They also came to conceive the " dictatorship of

4028-470: The New Left and new social movements of the late 20th century. While its key principles of decentralisation , workers' control and mutual aid are generally shared across the many schools of libertarian socialism, differences have emerged over the questions of revolutionary spontaneity , reformism , and whether to prioritise the abolition of the state or of capitalism. Libertarian socialism strives for

4134-401: The New Left , new social movements and contemporary anarchism , have been listed among the other wings of libertarian socialism. The currents of classical anarchism that developed in the 19th century were committed to autonomy and freedom, decentralization, opposing hierarchy, and opposing the vanguardism of authoritarian socialism . In the 20th century, social anarchism emerged as

4240-482: The RNA world . It was shown that the underlying order-generating processes of self-organization in the non-biological systems and in replicating RNA are basically similar. In his 1995 conference paper "Cosmology as a problem in critical phenomena" Lee Smolin said that several cosmological objects or phenomena, such as spiral galaxies , galaxy formation processes in general, early structure formation , quantum gravity and

4346-550: The Socialist Party of Great Britain , Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Korsch Anton Pannekoek , Roland Holst , Hermann Gorter , Sylvia Pankhurst , Antonio Gramsci , Grego Lukacs , Socialisme ou Barbarie, Henri Simon , Echanges et Mouvements and Paul Mattick as significant Marxian libertarian socialists. There was a strong left-libertarian current in the British labour movement and the term "libertarian socialist" has been applied to

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4452-515: The Spanish Regional Federation of the IWA , debated and refined proposals for the construction of a libertarian socialist society. Over several decades, resolutions from these congresses formed the basis of a specific program on a range of issues, from the structure of communes and the post-revolutionary economy to libertarian cultural and artistic initiatives. These proposals were published in

4558-643: The anti-austerity and new municipalist movements, such as Ada Colau 's Barcelona en Comú party, in which they ally with democratic socialists . In Chile , there have been several libertarian socialist movements active since the 2010s in groups including Libertarian Left and the Broad Front (FA). Gabriel Boric founded Social Convergence in 2018, bringing together the Autonomist Movement , Libertarian Left and other libertarian socialist groups. Boric, who describes himself as libertarian socialist,

4664-454: The anti-globalization movement . In this period, many librertarian socialists, such as Murray Bookchin, Cornelius Castoriadis, Andre Gorz , Ivan Illich , E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams , were committed to " in rethinking what socialism might come to mean in an age of ecological limit". According to Robin Hahnel, new social movements continued the New Left's tendency of failing to develop

4770-644: The authoritarian personality were also rediscovered by the New Left, who developed his programme for individual self-governance into a libertarian system of education used by the Summerhill School . Drawing on the Freudo-Marxist conception of civilisation as "organised domination", Herbert Marcuse developed a critique of alienation in modern Western societies, concluding that creativity and political dissent had been undermined by social repression . Meanwhile, Lewis Mumford published denunciations of

4876-510: The bureaucratisation and moderation of the socialist movement, leading to the establishment of the Socialist Party of Great Britain . By the early 20th century, libertarian socialists had gained a leading influence over the left-wing in the Netherlands , France and Italy and went on to play major roles in the Mexican and Russian Revolutions . In India, the libertarian socialist tradition

4982-488: The class reductionism prevalent in traditional forms of libertarian socialism, proving intersectional oppressions other than class also demanded attention. Through the new social movements, libertarian socialism developed an awareness of different aspects of oppression, beyond class analysis. Libertarian socialism again received a revival of interest in the wake of the fall of communism and concurrent rise of neoliberalism . It proved particularly attractive to people from

5088-518: The common ownership of the mir . Their agitation for land reform in the Russian countryside culminated with the establishment of rural soviets during the 1905 Revolution . Anarchists also organised among the urban proletariat , forming clandestine factory committees that proved more attractive to revolution-minded workers than the more reformist trade unions favoured by the Bolsheviks . During

5194-482: The large scale structure of the universe might be the result of or have involved certain degree of self-organization. He argues that self-organized systems are often critical systems , with structure spreading out in space and time over every available scale, as shown for example by Per Bak and his collaborators. Therefore, because the distribution of matter in the universe is more or less scale invariant over many orders of magnitude, ideas and strategies developed in

5300-988: The laser , superconductivity and Bose–Einstein condensation in quantum physics . Self-organization is found in self-organized criticality in dynamical systems , in tribology , in spin foam systems, and in loop quantum gravity , in plasma , in river basins and deltas, in dendritic solidification (snow flakes), in capillary imbibition and in turbulent structure. Self-organization in chemistry includes drying-induced self-assembly, molecular self-assembly , reaction–diffusion systems and oscillating reactions , autocatalytic networks, liquid crystals , grid complexes , colloidal crystals , self-assembled monolayers , micelles , microphase separation of block copolymers , and Langmuir–Blodgett films . Self-organization in biology can be observed in spontaneous folding of proteins and other biomacromolecules, self-assembly of lipid bilayer membranes, pattern formation and morphogenesis in developmental biology ,

5406-558: The military-industrial complex and Paul Goodman advocated for decentralisation. In the process, the new generation of Marxists gravitated towards libertarian tendencies, sometimes closely resembling anarchism. Following on from Marcuse, Daniel Cohn-Bendit , E. P. Thompson , Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall all adopted forms of "libertarian Marxism", opposed to the bureaucracy and parliamentarism of statist tendencies. A specific and explicit libertarian socialist tendency also began to emerge. While some more libertarian Marxists adopted

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5512-430: The social sciences , is a process where some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system . The process can be spontaneous when sufficient energy is available, not needing control by any external agent. It is often triggered by seemingly random fluctuations , amplified by positive feedback . The resulting organization is wholly decentralized, distributed over all

5618-554: The 15th century. The Levante , where collective self-management of irrigation was commonplace, became the hotbed of anarchist collectivisation. Building on this traditional collectivism , from 1876, the Spanish libertarian socialist movement grew through sustained agitation and the establishment of alternative institutions that culminated in the Spanish Revolution. During this period, a series of workers' congresses, first convoked by

5724-400: The 1972 book L'organisation biologique et la théorie de l'information and then in the 1979 book Entre le cristal et la fumée . The physicist and chemist Ilya Prigogine formulated a similar principle as "order through fluctuations" or "order out of chaos". It is applied in the method of simulated annealing for problem solving and machine learning . The idea that the dynamics of

5830-513: The Animal and the Machine (1961). Self-organization was associated with general systems theory in the 1960s, but did not become commonplace in the scientific literature until physicists Hermann Haken et al. and complex systems researchers adopted it in a greater picture from cosmology Erich Jantsch , chemistry with dissipative system , biology and sociology as autopoiesis to system thinking in

5936-768: The British libertarian socialist group Solidarity , and the Australian councilists of the Self-Management Group. Some of this new generation of libertarian socialists also joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), swelling the old union's numbers, organising agricultural workers and launching a new journal, The Rebel Worker . This libertarian socialist milieu, with their criticisms of democratic centralism and trade unionism , and their advocacy of workers' self-management and council democracy , went on to inspire

6042-645: The CGT or in SUD (sometimes in the CNT), in the fight against unemployment, for the right to housing , in the environmental movement and in the fight against patriarchy. Alternative Libertaire endeavours to link these conflicts in today’s society with the perspective of a break with capitalism and the state. Libertarian socialist Libertarian socialism is an anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist political current that emphasises self-governance and workers' self-management . It

6148-584: The French situationists and Italian autonomists . Of the figures in the New Left, the American linguist Noam Chomsky became the most prominent spokesperson for libertarian socialism. Inspired by the humanism of Bertrand Russell , the individualism of Wilhelm von Humboldt and the syndicalism of Rudolf Rocker , Chomsky championed a libertarian socialism that upheld individual liberty and self-ownership . Chomsky has been outspoken advocate of anti-authoritarianism , opposing limits on individual freedoms by

6254-547: The Mexican state, in 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) rose up against the government, enabling the formation of a self-governing autonomous territory in the Mexican state of Chiapas . The Zapatistas have roundly rejected political sectarianism and ideological doctrine , including the state socialist model of seizing state power, with spokesman Subcomandante Marcos famously declaring "I shit on all

6360-586: The Netherlands. Heinz Pagels , in a 1985 review of Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers 's book Order Out of Chaos in Physics Today , appeals to authority: Most scientists would agree with the critical view expressed in Problems of Biological Physics (Springer Verlag, 1981) by the biophysicist L. A. Blumenfeld, when he wrote: "The meaningful macroscopic ordering of biological structure does not arise due to

6466-432: The New Left failed to form a coherent ideological program or establish lasting support to carry forward the momentum of the late 1960s, resulting in many dropping out of activism altogether. A minority from the New Left continued their radical activism within the new social movements of the 1970s and 1980s, becoming involved in second-wave feminism , the gay liberation movement , environmental movement and eventually

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6572-626: The anarchist-controlled areas of the Spanish Republic, and the anarchist militias displayed the strongest military discipline, liberals and Communists alike blamed the " sectarian " libertarian socialists for the defeat of the Republic in the Spanish Civil War . These charges have been disputed by contemporary libertarian socialists, such as Robin Hahnel and Noam Chomsky , who have accused such claims of lacking substantial evidence. Following

6678-924: The anti-authoritarian aspects of Marxism have been described as "Libertarian Marxism", a tendency which emphasises autonomy , federalism and direct democracy . Wayne Price identified it most closely with the tendency of autonomist Marxism and identified libertarian characteristics within council communism , the Johnson–Forest Tendency , the Socialisme ou Barbarie group and the Situationist International , contrasting them with orthodox Marxism , social democracy , and Marxism–Leninism . Michael Löwy and Olivier Besancenot have identified Rosa Luxemburg , Walter Benjamin , André Breton and Daniel Guérin as prominent figures of libertarian Marxism. Ojeili identifies William Morris , Daniel De Leon ,

6784-503: The basis for the new economy. According to Gaston Leval , the CNT established an agrarian federation in the Levante that encompassed 78% of Spain's most arable land . The regional federation was populated by 1,650,000 people, 40% of whom lived on the region's 900 agrarian collectives, which were self-organised by peasant unions. Although industrial and agricultural production was at its highest in

6890-564: The components of the system. As such, the organization is typically robust and able to survive or self-repair substantial perturbation . Chaos theory discusses self-organization in terms of islands of predictability in a sea of chaotic unpredictability. Self-organization occurs in many physical , chemical , biological , robotic , and cognitive systems. Examples of self-organization include crystallization , thermal convection of fluids, chemical oscillation , animal swarming , neural circuits , and black markets . Self-organization

6996-403: The concept of self-referentiality has been introduced as a sociological application of self-organization theory by Niklas Luhmann (1984). For Luhmann the elements of a social system are self-producing communications, i.e. a communication produces further communications and hence a social system can reproduce itself as long as there is dynamic communication. For Luhmann, human beings are sensors in

7102-473: The coordination of human movement, eusocial behaviour in insects ( bees , ants , termites ) and mammals , and flocking behaviour in birds and fish. The mathematical biologist Stuart Kauffman and other structuralists have suggested that self-organization may play roles alongside natural selection in three areas of evolutionary biology , namely population dynamics , molecular evolution , and morphogenesis . However, this does not take into account

7208-465: The defeat of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War , libertarian socialism fell into decline. Left-wing politics throughout the world came to be dominated either by social democracy or Marxism-Leninism , which attained power in a number of countries and thus had the means to support their ideological allies. In contrast, Hahnel argues, libertarian socialists were not able to gain influence within

7314-754: The elimination of social and economic inequality through the coercive expropriation of property from the wealthy. The roots of libertarian socialism extend back to the classical radicalism of the early modern period , claiming the English Levellers and the French Encyclopédistes as their intellectual forerunners, and admiring figures of the Age of Enlightenment such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine . According to Mikhail Bakunin and Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis , while authoritarian socialism had its origins in Germany , libertarian socialism

7420-415: The environment of the system. Luhmann developed an evolutionary theory of society and its subsystems, using functional analyses and systems theory. The market economy is sometimes said to be self-organizing. Paul Krugman has written on the role that market self-organization plays in the business cycle in his book The Self Organizing Economy . Friedrich Hayek coined the term catallaxy to describe

7526-497: The essential role of energy in driving biochemical reactions in cells. The systems of reactions in any cell are self-catalyzing , but not simply self-organizing, as they are thermodynamically open systems relying on a continuous input of energy. Self-organization is not an alternative to natural selection, but it constrains what evolution can do and provides mechanisms such as the self-assembly of membranes which evolution then exploits. The evolution of order in living systems and

7632-452: The first place. His explanation leads directly to infinite regress . In short, they [Prigogine and Stengers] maintain that time irreversibility is not derived from a time-independent microworld, but is itself fundamental. The virtue of their idea is that it resolves what they perceive as a "clash of doctrines" about the nature of time in physics . Most physicists would agree that there is neither empirical evidence to support their view, nor

7738-441: The following 1980s ( Santa Fe Institute ) and 1990s ( complex adaptive system ), until our days with the disruptive emerging technologies profounded by a rhizomatic network theory . Around 2008–2009, a concept of guided self-organization started to take shape. This approach aims to regulate self-organization for specific purposes, so that a dynamical system may reach specific attractors or outcomes. The regulation constrains

7844-756: The former Eastern Bloc , who saw it as an alternative both to western capitalism and Marxism-Leninism. Since the end of the Cold War , there have been two major experiments in libertarian socialism: the Zapatista uprising in Mexico and the Rojava Revolution in Syria . In reaction against the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the privatisation of indigenous lands by

7950-427: The further evolution of the system is constrained to remain in the attractor. This constraint implies a form of mutual dependency or coordination between its constituent components or subsystems. In Ashby's terms, each subsystem has adapted to the environment formed by all other subsystems. The cybernetician Heinz von Foerster formulated the principle of " order from noise " in 1960. It notes that self-organization

8056-471: The generation of order in certain non-living systems was proposed to obey a common fundamental principal called “the Darwinian dynamic” that was formulated by first considering how microscopic order is generated in simple non-biological systems that are far from thermodynamic equilibrium . Consideration was then extended to short, replicating RNA molecules assumed to be similar to the earliest forms of life in

8162-448: The goal of reducing their own complexity. Norbert Wiener regarded the automatic serial identification of a black box and its subsequent reproduction as self-organization in cybernetics . The importance of phase locking or the "attraction of frequencies", as he called it, is discussed in the 2nd edition of his Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine . K. Eric Drexler sees self-replication as

8268-479: The growth of the New Left, which by this point was disillusioned by the mainstream social democratic and Marxist-Leninist political groupings, due to the capitalistic tendencies of the former and the rigid authoritarianism of the latter. Sociologist C. Wright Mills , who displayed strong libertarian socialist tendencies in his appeals to the New Left, reformulated Marxism for the modern age in his work on The Power Elite . Wilhelm Reich 's Freudo-Marxist theses on

8374-422: The idea in his unpublished work The World . Immanuel Kant used the term "self-organizing" in his 1790 Critique of Judgment , where he argued that teleology is a meaningful concept only if there exists such an entity whose parts or "organs" are simultaneously ends and means. Such a system of organs must be able to behave as if it has a mind of its own, that is, it is capable of governing itself. In such

8480-518: The importance of political and economic reform . Hahnel consequently suggested that, in the 21st century, libertarian socialists should work together with other anti-capitalist social movements, organize for reform without abandoning anti-capitalist principles and strive to build grassroots institutions of self-management , even if those projects are "imperfect". While most libertarian socialists consider it necessary to combat both economic and political power in tandem, regarding each as fundamental to

8586-457: The increase of certain parameters or a system above their critical values. These structures are built according to program-like complicated architectural structures, the meaningful information created during many billions of years of chemical and biological evolution being used." Life is a consequence of microscopic, not macroscopic, organization. Of course, Blumenfeld does not answer the further question of how those program-like structures emerge in

8692-562: The labour movement. At a time when reformist trade unions were consistently winning concessions, the libertarian socialists' anti-reformist message gained little traction. Their platform of workers' self-management also failed to appeal to industrial workers. Until the 1960s, libertarian socialists were limited mostly to making critiques of authoritarian socialism and capitalism , although Hahnel asserts that these arguments were largely overshadowed by those from neoconservatives and Marxists respectively. Libertarian socialist themes received

8798-422: The monitoring of performance of the survival processes (1), their management by recursive application of regulation (2), homeostatic operational control (3) and development (4) which produce maintenance of identity (5) under environmental perturbation. Focus is prioritized by an alerting "algedonic loop" feedback: a sensitivity to both pain and pleasure produced from under-performance or over-performance relative to

8904-410: The movements for gay and women's rights changed societal outlook on gender oppression ; the anti-racist movement proved it necessary to tackle the social aspects of racialisation ; the anti-imperialist movement reconceived of anti-imperialism outside of economic terms; and the environmentalist movement launched a wave of ecological defense and restoration. Together, Hahnel argues, they broke from

9010-509: The organization of the brain and human nervous system and the necessary condition for self-organization. Heinz von Foerster proposed Redundancy, R =1 −  H / H max , where H is entropy . In essence this states that unused potential communication bandwidth is a measure of self-organization. In the 1970s Stafford Beer considered self-organization necessary for autonomy in persisting and living systems. He applied his viable system model to management. It consists of five parts:

9116-478: The pages of widely distributed libertarian socialist periodicals, such as Solidaridad Obrera and Tierra y Libertad , which each circulated tens of thousands of copies. By the outbreak of the revolution, the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) enjoyed widespread popularity, counting 1.5 million members within its ranks. During the revolution, the means of production were brought under workers' control and worker cooperatives formed

9222-421: The people that tolerates it." Marxists responded to this by insisting on the eventual " withering away of the state ", in which society would transition from dictatorship to anarchy , in an apparent attempt to synthesise authoritarian and libertarian forms of socialism. This put libertarian socialists into direct competition with social democrats and communists for influence over left-wing politics , in

9328-484: The personal experience of the learner. It need not be restricted by either consciousness or language. Fritjof Capra argued that it is poorly recognised within psychology and education. It may be related to cybernetics as it involves a negative feedback control loop, or to systems theory . It can be conducted as a learning conversation or dialogue between learners or within one person. The self-organizing behavior of drivers in traffic flow determines almost all

9434-861: The proletariat " as a form of class power, rather than as the dictatorship of a political party. Many Marxists of the period were attracted to this position, including Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, Antonie Pannekoek in the Netherlands, Sylvia Pankhurst in Britain, György Lukács in Hungary and Antonio Gramsci in Italy. Libertarian socialism reached its apex of popularity with the Spanish Revolution of 1936 , during which libertarian socialists led "the largest and most successful revolution against capitalism to ever take place in any industrial economy ". In Spain, traditional forms of self-management and common ownership dated back to

9540-629: The revolutionary vanguards of this planet." As such, they have commonly been characterised as libertarian socialist, or inspired by libertarian socialism. They have in turn become a source of inspiration for libertarian socialists, including the autonomist Marxists Harry Cleaver and John Holloway , as well as some anarchists. In 2012, the Rojava Revolution established the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES; or "Rojava") to put "libertarian socialist ideas ... into practice", and whose cantons present themselves as

9646-772: The same. After sufficient time, all concepts attract and coalesce as pink noise . The theory applies to all organizationally closed or homeostatic processes that produce enduring and coherent products which evolve, learn and adapt. The self-organizing behaviour of social animals and the self-organization of simple mathematical structures both suggest that self-organization should be expected in human society . Tell-tale signs of self-organization are usually statistical properties shared with self-organizing physical systems. Examples such as critical mass , herd behaviour , groupthink and others, abound in sociology , economics , behavioral finance and anthropology . Spontaneous order can be influenced by arousal . In social theory,

9752-537: The solution is considered as a state of the iterative system, the optimal solution is the selected, converged structure of the system. Self-organizing networks include small-world networks self-stabilization and scale-free networks . These emerge from bottom-up interactions, unlike top-down hierarchical networks within organizations, which are not self-organizing. Cloud computing systems have been argued to be inherently self-organising, but while they have some autonomy, they are not self-managing as they do not have

9858-430: The spatiotemporal behavior of traffic, such as traffic breakdown at a highway bottleneck, highway capacity, and the emergence of moving traffic jams. These self-organizing effects are explained by Boris Kerner 's three-phase traffic theory . Order appears spontaneously in the evolution of language as individual and population behaviour interacts with biological evolution. Self-organized funding allocation ( SOFA )

9964-466: The state to be an inherent instrument of landlordism and capitalism, therefore opposing the state with equal intensity as they oppose capitalism. Libertarian socialism views corporate power as an institutional problem, rather than as a result of the influence of certain immoral individuals . It thus opposes capitalism , which it sees as an economic system that upholds greed , the exploitation of labour and coercion , and calls for its overthrow in

10070-545: The state. He has also focused much of his libertarian socialist critique on mass media in the United States , due to its role in the military-industrial complex. While most sections of the New Left expressed a form of libertarian socialism, others were instead being inspired by the Cuban and Chinese Communist Revolutions to embrace forms of authoritarian socialism such as Maoism–Third Worldism . As such, according to Hahnel,

10176-424: The study of self-organized systems could be helpful in tackling certain unsolved problems in cosmology and astrophysics . Phenomena from mathematics and computer science such as cellular automata , random graphs , and some instances of evolutionary computation and artificial life exhibit features of self-organization. In swarm robotics , self-organization is used to produce emergent behavior. In particular

10282-445: The survival of the other, some consider it a priority to combat one or the other first. Some, such as Mikhail Bakunin and Alexander Berkman , considered capitalism to rely on the support and protection of the state. They thus concluded that if the state were to be abolished, capitalism would naturally dissolve in its wake. But others, including Noam Chomsky , believe that the state is only inherently oppressive because of its control by

10388-464: The system (e.g. through consuming the low-entropy energy of a battery and diffusing high-entropy heat). 18th-century thinkers had sought to understand the "universal laws of form" to explain the observed forms of living organisms. This idea became associated with Lamarckism and fell into disrepute until the early 20th century, when D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860–1948) attempted to revive it. The psychiatrist and engineer W. Ross Ashby introduced

10494-567: The term "self-organizing" to contemporary science in 1947. It was taken up by the cyberneticians Heinz von Foerster , Gordon Pask , Stafford Beer ; and von Foerster organized a conference on "The Principles of Self-Organization" at the University of Illinois' Allerton Park in June, 1960 which led to a series of conferences on Self-Organizing Systems. Norbert Wiener took up the idea in the second edition of his Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in

10600-409: The term in order to distinguish themselves from authoritarian socialists, anarchists began calling themselves "libertarian socialist" in order to avoid the negative connotations associated with anarchism. The libertarian socialist Daniel Guérin specifically attempted to synthesise anarchism and Marxism into a single tendency, which inspired the growth of the French libertarian communist movement. For

10706-409: The theory of random graphs has been used as a justification for self-organization as a general principle of complex systems. In the field of multi-agent systems , understanding how to engineer systems that are capable of presenting self-organized behavior is an active research area. Optimization algorithms can be considered self-organizing because they aim to find the optimal solution to a problem. If

10812-591: Was elected president in 2021 . Libertarian socialism encompasses both the libertarian wing of socialism and the socialist wing of libertarianism , including many different schools of thought under its banner. The most commonly cited tendencies of libertarian socialism are anarchist communism , anarcho-syndicalism and council communism . Other Marxist strands of libertarian socialism include Western Marxism , Bordigism and impossibilism . Additionally, utopian socialism , guild socialism , socialist feminism and social ecology , as well as various strands of

10918-461: Was born in France . The modern foundations of libertarian socialism lay in the utopian socialism expounded by Charles Fourier , Robert Owen and Henri de Saint-Simon , who envisioned a democratic socialism guided by communitarianism , moralism and feminism . Libertarian socialism first emerged from the anti-authoritarian faction of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA), after it

11024-561: Was expelled from the organisation by the Marxist faction at the Hague Congress of 1872. The libertarian socialist Mikhail Bakunin had rejected Karl Marx 's calls for a " dictatorship of the proletariat ", as he predicted it would only create a new ruling class , composed of a privileged minority, which would use the state to oppress the working classes. He concluded that: "no dictatorship can have any other aim than to perpetuate itself, and it can only give rise to and instill slavery in

11130-456: Was in opposition to the Marxists , whom Mikhail Bakunin regarded as authoritarian . Alternative Libertaire's practical and ideological background has been summed up by the organisation as continuing from the following groups: Today Alternative Libertaire is developing its political action on two fronts: AL militants are particularly involved in struggles in the workplace and in the unions, in

11236-538: Was represented in the early twentieth century anti-colonial movement by Bhagat Singh . Russian libertarian socialists, including anarchists , populists and left socialist-revolutionaries , led the opposition to the Tsarist autocracy throughout the late-19th century. They created a network of both clandestine and legal organisations throughout Russia, with the aim of overthrowing the Russian nobility and bringing land under

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