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Any Anarchists Here?

Puppycow said:
The main problem I see with anarchy is that it's an inherently unstable state. If you ever have it, it won't last. If you don't have a government, a gang of thugs will take over and become a de facto government.
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The situation between state governments right now is effectively anarchy, since they have no 'super government' to moderate their disputes or interdict when they use force against each other. This seems to be a fairly stable state with 'one world government' folks being considered the nutters.

I don't think it's completely implausible to imagine that it could be possible for people to interact with each other the way governments do today. Most people, just like most governments, just want to go on about their business and peaceably trade and interact with others. Some want to be bullies or takeover the world, but various affiliations between the more honest ones hold the more aggressive ones in check.

Though I can't imagine how you could make it work, I don't think it's so immediately obvious that there might not be some way to make it work stably. Everyone has a mutual interest in peaceful cooperation and everyone has a mutual interest in no group (at least that doesn't include them) getting too terribly strong.

The biggest problem is that even if you can imagine a stable anarchic human civilization, can you imagine any conceivable way to get to such a civilization, other than super-powerful aliens plucking it down?

Even if you don't think it would necessarily be stable over the very long term, governments really aren't either. It may well be that no human civilization is stable over the long-term, so this isn't specifically a disadvantage of an anarchic society. It may also be that governments inevitably become more totalitarian until they too either degenerate into horror and misery or are replaced.
 
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bikerdruid said:
ah...you are describing a return to capitalist fascism, like we have now.
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Which is (one reason) why anarchism doesn't work. As has been pointed out a number of times, it's not stable, because someone with the capacity to enforce his will on his neighbors can't be trusted not to exercise that capacity.
 
bikerdruid said:
ah...you are describing a return to capitalist fascism, like we have now.
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Yes, only with even worse distribution of power. Or do you think that corporations and the super-rich would somehow end up with less power under anarchy than they have now?
 
phantomb said:
Yes, only with even worse distribution of power. Or do you think that corporations and the super-rich would somehow end up with less power under anarchy than they have now?
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the super rich can do as they like...
but all companies, all corporatios will be owned and managed by the workers.
under anarchism, you can not own the house that someone else lives in, or the company where they work.
no bosses, no landlords...
 
bikerdruid said:
the super rich can do as they like...
but all companies, all corporatios will be owned and managed by the workers.
under anarchism, you can not own the house that someone else lives in, or the company where they work.
no bosses, no landlords...
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and how will you enforce this?
 
bikerdruid said:
the super rich can do as they like...
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Yes, but with far more ease than they can today. In our society there are lots of terrible things the super-rich are unable to do, as decided and enforced by the collective. The system by which we vote on these things is imperfect and open to a degree of corruption, sure, but at least it's something.

bikerdruid said:
but all companies, all corporatios will be owned and managed by the workers.
under anarchism, you can not own the house that someone else lives in, or the company where they work.
no bosses, no landlords...
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. . . until someone who has a lot of money and property decides to use it to start up a company that functions like big corporations do today. It outcompetes all the worker-run companies because it can disregard safety, the environment, and worker rights, and if anyone tries to stop it, it hires people to shoot them with guns.
 
bikerdruid said:
but all companies, all corporatios will be owned and managed by the workers
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How the hell do you create a "corporation" in anarchy? How do you track "ownership" of an abstraction like a company, when you can't even track ownership of a physical good like land and keep squatters from taking it?
 
WildCat said:
No.

Not even close.
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If you don't think so, then maybe you mean something different by 'anarchy' from what anarchists mean. There is no central world government that adjudicates disputes or enforces rules between world governments. Such International laws as there are are formed by mutual agreement and enforced by whichever countries feel like enforcing them when they do. There is no single entity with sufficient force to suppress or regulate unlawful conduct. There is no agreement held in place by force that a particular set of rules, procedures, or agents will handle breaches or aggressions among members.

Generally, this is what anarchists mean by anarchy. There is no one entity with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. There is no set of rules that is effectively coercively imposed on all. Entities use force against each other as they individually see the need and each entity is expected to self-regulate by the others. Some are considered rogue, and the others don't like this but have no legal mechanism with overwhelming force to address it and so generally resort to only protecting their own interests. And so on.
 
bikerdruid said:
and the current 'system' does?:rolleyes:
go back to the koolaid.
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The current system most of us live under, centralized, formalized and departmentalized states with a strong monopoly on violence, is capable of giving us wealth, technology, physical wellbeing and security beyond what people were even capable of dreaming about two thousand years ago.

There has never been any comparable anarchistic society that has achieved anything even remotely similar. The majority of all anarchistic societies, if not all of them, have only existed for a couple of years before sane people grew tired of their ********. They mainly consists of dirt poor farmers and people with professions and roles that depend on non-anarchistic states and societies for their education, resources and survival.

I'd love to see any positive, well documented and self-reliant example of an anarchistic society that has a living standard comparable of what people had around 200 years ago, but something like that doesn't and most likely wont exist.
 
JoelKatz said:
The situation between state governments right now is effectively anarchy, since they have no 'super government' to moderate their disputes or interdict when they use force against each other.
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You mean that the state of the world where the stronger and bigger states metaphorically gang-rape and enslave the smaller states and peoples just because they have precious resources, a good chunk of land or just because they look funny is supposed to be a GOOD example of a possible anarchistic society?
 
Arcade22 said:
I'd love to see any positive, well documented and self-reliant example of an anarchistic society that has a living standard comparable of what people had around 200 years ago, but something like that doesn't and most likely wont exist.
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if no one ever dreamed and worked toward a better world, we woulkd still be shivering in caves.
a better world will not happen on it's own.
 
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