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Quite literally impossible to implement. Same as true “Libertarianism”. Can’t actually exist.
Look at it this way. You and your neighbours want no government. No taxes. No laws. No “authority” telling you what to do and how to do it. Great!
What happens when the road needs to be fixed? Do you fix just the road in front of your house? Or do you negotiate with your neighbours for you all to pay a fair share to get the entire road done? Congratulations…you just invented government.
So now the road is getting done, but the people doing the work really don’t want to deal with every individual for every particular decision. It’s a much better idea to elect one person to do the communicating. Congratulations…you just invented civics and beaurocracy
This person that you all agreed to handle all of this stuff doesn’t have time anymore to support himself or his family because he’s dealing with your shit, so he demands that each of you pay an amount to keep in able to feed himself while he administrates your “anarchic society.” Congratulations…you just invented taxes
Replace “roads” with literally anything else in a community and the end result is the same. Both Libertarians and Anarchists are fucking morons.
There are already people living this lifestyle, unfortunately one only has the choice if you have lots of money.
Lots of money? Do you actually know any anarchists? Living in communal squat houses and dumpster diving for food is the lifestyle that comes to mind for me.
Technically the whole world runs on pure anarchism. No rules, only those created by local groups. With agreements between some of the groups. Most of it enforced by violence.
Laws only exist because most people believe in them. For the rest they are enforced with violence. I believe that anarchy would result in a similar system. Most people would behave but some would not. To protect everyone eventually some kind of police and laws would form again.
I think it’s one gun away from a dictatorship.
For power to be safely devolved to the people there need to be resilient structures in place to prevent a bad actor from simply wresting control by force.
Also, I think that while it solves societal issues well for the most personal of personal liberties it fails to properly add in protections from the liberties of others that may be imposed on you… i.e. a spouse trying to escape an abusive relationship will find sparse services to support them.
Lastly, I like trains. Trains don’t happen in a reasonable time-frame without a strong centralized government. In the UK a coop recently opened a new train line… I think it took them 30+ years.
In the absence of other power structures (political, legal, religious, economic, etc) whoever has the means and willingness to do violence will exert their will over others. Unstructured societies always devolve into might makes right.
There is a difference between Anomie and anarchy
Just because there are no leaders/rulers, doesn’t mean there are no social rules or morale values.
A law doesn’t keep one from doing bad stuff.
Else we wouldn’t have murderers.But society must grow and develop. At the current state anarchy probably wouldn’t work…
a law doesn’t keep one from doing bad stuff
that’s true, they need to be enforced somehow…
Unstructured societies always devolve into might makes right.
you can’t prove this
Theoretically maybe, but empirically, humanity was completely unstructured at the beginning and currently not a single anarchist society exists. Why do you think everyone transformed into various kinds of nation-states eventually? Because nation-states were exceptionally good at filling that “power vacuum”. To overpower nation-states, something at least comparable is needed. Transnational corporations/syndicates/unions, something like that.
humanity was completely unstructured at the beginning
can you cite this?
currently not a single anarchist society exists.
that’s a lie
Which ones? There are few places on Earth that are not under practical control of a formal government and legal system, and most of those places are either unpopulated or controlled by various local power brokers.
exarcheia and anabaptist sects come directly to mind, but you’ve just excluded them for some reason. it seems like no-true Scotsman to me.
It seems like a pretty good reason to exclude them, considering the criticism being discuss was specifically that they would inevitably decay in to a “might makes right” situation. Communities existing in a situation where police and courts would prevent someone from taking over by force disqualifies them from disproving this hypothesis.
there simply isn’t evidence of some casual mechanism by anarchist societies must decay. their hypothesis can’t be proven. I didn’t even know how it could be tested.
In the context of previous message I meant anarchist society comparable to state, at least very small state. Not just a club of shared interests with members living their lives in regular nation-states. Do you have any examples in mind?
they’re going to say rojava lol
anarchist society comparable to state
a what?!
I think that if humanity can manage to survive long enough, anarchism is inevitable.
It’s essentially the adult stage of human society - the point at which humans collectively and consistently, rather than just individually and situationally, can be trusted to generally do the right thing simply because it’s the right thing and therefore the most reasonable thing to do.
For the time being and the foreseeable future though, humanity is nowhere even close to that. Through the course of history, human society has managed to advance to about the equivalent of adolescence. There’s still a long way to go.
In spite of that, I do identify as an anarchist, but my advocacy is focused on the ideal and the steps humanity as a whole has to take to achieve it. I think it’s plainly obvious that it cannot be implemented, since any mechanism by which it might be inplemented would necessarily violate the very principles that define it. It can only be willingly adopted by each and all (or close enough as makes no meaningful difference), and that point will come whenever (if) it comes.
Even when people will do the right thing in 99.99% of situations, there will still need to be rules.
Just take a look at how game theory works. Anyone exploiting those mechanism in a group even if only one in a thousand, could devastate a society in no time , if it’s naive enough to not have rules and norms for correct behavior, even when they are not usually needed.I do like your thinking though, and I also have dreams of a future society where criminals are not punished but nurtured. Because it must have been awful to have been in a state of mind, to want to do something to hurt others.
I’m not sure it’s possible though. But it is the ideal we should hopefully at some point strive for. But there still needs to be standards or “rules” for when people need help to be readjusted to functioning normally in society, if they get “confused”.
But I still don’t think anarchy will work, because so many things will need to be structured, and societies are getting bigger and more complex, which increases the need for rules to make societies work. So instead of anarchy I think we must expect more rules not fewer.
But probably in the future, many rules will be for machines and not for humans?
Anarchy doesn’t mean no rules, it means no rulers.
OK so how are the rules upheld?
A democracy is a rule by the people who are ruled. What function would make anarchy better?
Who is this ruler that isn’t present? How are rules decided? Who enforces those rules?
The only way I see to perform these functions rationally is by democracy.Democracy (proper democracy) is literally a social contract my dude. Anarchism uses democracy and consensus to make decisions. Are laws the only thing keeping you from not doing things??
Anarchism uses democracy and consensus to make decisions
Genuine question: Is that not a democracy?
It could be? Being a democracy or using democracy as a tool for decision making doesn’t mean it has to happen through government. If you’ve ever made a decision with a friend group via popular vote, does that make you a government? Or did you exercise authority over your friends when they all agreed popular vote was okay to decide where to eat out? I wager neither
And fyi, you’re thinking of a representative democracy, which is rarely ever truly fair, especially considering the scale it’s supposedly applied to.
No, as there are no leaders
In a democracy you give your vote and have no say afterwards.
In an anarchy people need to work out their social rules together.
There could also be Anarchist societies with a police force, that ensures the basic democratically created roles of that society are followed - like protecting people from just more muscle who want to rape or steal from them.
That it’s basically the lefty equivalent to a libertarian. Both of those philosophies seem juvenile to me in a “I don’t want to, and you can’t make me” kind of way. Call me old fashioned, but I like structure as long as it’s not totalitarian. I’m happy to pay taxes as long as they’re going toward the benefit of society. Granted, that largely hasn’t been the case, but I don’t think we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater either.
Recent events have also highlighted how much my taxes actually were going toward the betterment of society (though still not nearly enough), and that I had taken them for granted until they were recently axed/defunded.
You got it. Both anarchist and libertarian systems are what children come up with once they mature just enough to see how governments work.
I think it’s great. We should fucking try it.
Seriously, though, I think it would be nice but it’s going to be impossible unless you can fully get rid of greedy, corrupt, power hungry pieces of shit with zero empathy.
So as long as the the greedy, power-hungry pieces of shit have at least some empathy, we can make it work?
It depends on the definition
The definition is whatever you want the definition to be. Don’t let others force a definition on you.
Responsible anarchism is a good ideal to aim for, but in pure form it’s utopian. Realistic way to get closer to this ideal is shifting to stateless/borderless societies that center around some alternative entities other than geopolitical nation-states.
The end goal of civilization.
Stateless, Egalitarian societies.
I consider myself an anarcho-pragmatist. It would be nice not to have any rulers or an hierarchy. But I also know people well enough to know that unless we defer any decision making to a supercomputer everyone trusts, we’re going to need some form of societal structure.
No one will unanimously trust a computer model. People will try to undermine and destroy it. So, the question would then be, how do you stop that? And suddenly you’re not really talking about anarchy. The computer will need to enforce its existence through violence.
Pls no anarcho capitalism. A good breakdown of the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTN64g9lA2g&t=1
coupled with communism it’s the real shit
Nestor Makhno and his Makhnovists weren’t perfect but I think its probably the closest we’re going to get to seeing a working anarchist society. It seemed like it worked for a short time.
Also note the mutial aid systems that spring up in the wake of some disasters could probably be considered temporary anarchist societies. Rebecca Solenit wrote a book about this but I haven’t gotten a chance to read it yet. A Paradise Built in Hell. I hear its good but I can’t say that with firsthand knowledge
