Any Anarchists Here?

[WildCat]

early hunter-gatherer communities and the early agricultural communities were peaceful and productive.

All the evidence available says otherwise. It was a brutal existence, always on the edge of famine and war.

 

[WildCat]

pre colmbian america knew far more times of peace than of war.

There were no times of peace in pre-Columbian America.

I suppose the first group that made it here was peaceful, having no one to make war with. But that changed very quickly.

The UW-Milwaukee palisade excavations identified three palisade building stages, each marked by a distinctive type of bastion incorporated into their construction. The super-positioning of the palisade lines indicates that the bastions underwent a series of changes from the earliest round bastions to square bastions with back walls and finally to square bastions that lacked back walls. The UW-Milwaukee palisade excavations provide some clues into the social milieu that may have contributed to he palisade construction at Cahokia. In one instance, a square bastion of the second palisade line cut through a burned domestic structure. Numerous artifacts and pottery fragments lay scattered on the floor of the house, many of which appear to have been left where they were last used.

Two interpretations have been offered to explain why a palisade line would have been placed through a domestic structure. One view is that the house was abandoned quickly and burned down to make way for palisade construction, perhaps in a hasty attempt to complete the palisade to stave off outside attack. A second view holds that palisade construction, like other public works at Cahokia, was unimpeded by residences or other structures that were already standing, a notion Fowler has referred to as "prehistoric urban renewal." Both interpretations provide a glimpse of the social dynamics behind palisade construction at Cahokia - either that threats to the community from the outside were a real concern, or the ruling elite who presumably oversaw the construction of the palisade, possessed the power to displace individuals dwellings or even neighborhoods to ensure that the project progressed.

http://www4.uwm.edu/archlab/cahokia/palisade.cfm

Why would peaceful pre-Columbian civilizations need a palisade around their city bikerdruid? Could it be they weren't actually peaceful?

 

[WildCat]

And how would you know that, since they have strictly no written history?

Not true... the Maya, for example, left a lot of written history. Most was destroyed by the Spanish, but what has survived paints a picture of near-constant war, famine, and political intrigue.

 

[WildCat]

Er, no. Given that no hunter-gatherer society today lives in "cooperative, consensus-governed communities," the idea that that's how we lived 10,000 years ago is at best unsupported and more likely complete fantasy.

Hunter-gatherer societies have very strict hierarchies.

Even chimpanzee groups have heirarchies.

 

[Virus]

Neither was the tribal unit "consensus based". None of them are. They are lead by an unelected patriarch, the concept of individualism is non-existent and conformity to the group is strictly enforced. Gender roles are strictly segregated. Rationalism is nonexistent and superstitions are rife.

Thank god we've liberated ourselves from that primitive existence.

 

[Galteeth]

1.Really? The first sentence begins with a tautology? Is this a serious response?


(left-anarchist notion of being against hierarchy is not coherent)
2. Why not?



3. Sure they do - if there is a body of people coming together around a proposed goal or rule, then even without an enforcement method, you have government. That people are consenting does not negate government. Indeed, you'll find people consenting to live in communities all across the US and no one calls those towns/cities/communities anarchy.

1. I elaborated on my definition in another post, and no, defining something is not a tautology.

2. Because they don't define hierarchy well. Any form of specialized labor or any social interaction is going to involve something that could be called hierarchy.

3. That's because if someone doesn't consent to the rules, they are forced to.

 

[INRM]

Why Anarchism Isn't Workable

It creates a huge power-vaccuum that is bound to be either filled somehow, or the whole thing will either fall apart or somebody will eventually fill that vaccuum. Since nobody really wants to be lead, this will really require a very manipulative, clever, and of course ruthless person to achieve those ends: Essentially, anarchy breeds survival of the fittest; unfortunately those who are the most fit are also utterly ruthless, cruel, and stunningly manipulative power-hungry monsters who only care about attaining and imposing absolute control over others. It is quite counter intuitive but anarchy can breed the most extreme dictatorships imaginable

 

[Galteeth]

Why Anarchism Isn't Workable

It creates a huge power-vaccuum that is bound to be either filled somehow, or the whole thing will either fall apart or somebody will eventually fill that vaccuum. Since nobody really wants to be lead, this will really require a very manipulative, clever, and of course ruthless person to achieve those ends: Essentially, anarchy breeds survival of the fittest; unfortunately those who are the most fit are also utterly ruthless, cruel, and stunningly manipulative power-hungry monsters who only care about attaining and imposing absolute control over others. It is quite counter intuitive but anarchy can breed the most extreme dictatorships imaginable

Did you read any of my posts?

 

[WildCat]

Did you read any of my posts?

It seems you are spending a lot of time telling us what anarchy isn't, but you have yet to define what it is.

Once you define what you think it is I'll tell you why either it cannot work or isn't really anarchism.

 

[Galteeth]

It seems you are spending a lot of time telling us what anarchy isn't, but you have yet to define what it is.

Once you define what you think it is I'll tell you why either it cannot work or isn't really anarchism.

Basically, a society where people do not force their will on others through the threat of violence.

 

[JoelKatz]

Once you define what you think it is I'll tell you why either it cannot work or isn't really anarchism.

I think the usual definition is that 'anarchy' is a society with no government. Government is understood to be an entity or organization that, for a particular geographic region, is understood to have a monopoly on the socially legitimate use of even non-emergency force in that region.

That is, an 'anarchy' is a society in which no organization is legally privileged to do what no other organization can do. For example, I cannot setup my own "competing government" to do exactly what my local government does if I think I can do it better. Our social organization grants my local government a regional monopoly on the socially-legitimate use of force. An anarchist society would have no such monopolies. (Or, if it did, would understand them to be illegitimate usurpers.)

 

[JoelKatz]

Basically, a society where people do not force their will on others through the threat of violence.

I have met many anarchists and I don't know of any that would accept such a definition. For one thing, it's the desired end result of almost any form of society rational people advocate -- you might as well say "it's one where everyone is happy and it only rains gumdrops".

The other is that it really doesn't make sense. If my neighbor really likes my flat screen television and is thinking of stealing it, shouldn't the threat of violence be in place to keep him from doing so? Until we replace men by angels, we have to design a society such that it's hard to profit from cheating and stealing, and the only known effective mechanism for doing so is the threat of a violent response.

 

[WildCat]

Basically, a society where people do not force their will on others through the threat of violence.

So what happens when the creep down the block decides to start raping the kids?

 

[portlandatheist]

Seems to me like anarchism is a tautology. Anarchists live in peaceful egalitarian communities and when anything at all goes wrong, it is because somebody was not being anarchist and slipping into another way society organizes itself and in this regard, anarchy is by definition perfect and cannot be blamed as a failed system to organize society because all violence or unfairness can be blamed on something else.

 

[Virus]

So what happens when the creep down the block decides to start raping the kids?

Here's one attempt at an answer;



The short answer is that they don't really have an answer to that.

My question for the anarchists: Given that liberalism has an answer to crime, and that this answer is put into practice and works, how can anarchists expect to be taken seriously? Isn't the anarchist view on crime just a vague, wish-washy promise of magic beans?

 

[phantomb]

Since nobody really wants to be lead, this will really require a very manipulative, clever, and of course ruthless person to achieve those ends

I don't think that's true. People very much want to be lead by strong, charismatic authority figures. So much the better if those leaders can offer them something like economic prosperity and point to an enemy like "people who don't support my leadership" or even "those guys over there".

 

[JoelKatz]

My question for the anarchists: Given that liberalism has an answer to crime, and that this answer is put into practice and works, how can anarchists expect to be taken seriously? Isn't the anarchist view on crime just a vague, wish-washy promise of magic beans?

That's why most anarchists would not suggest abolishing a criminal justice system as the first step. They would argue that as a society moved in the directions they suggest, we'd have less crime, less need for a criminal justice system, and that we could eventually abolish it.

Most anarchists do not oppose various means of dealing with crime, so long as they don't involve picking one organization and giving it the exclusive ability to right wrongs. As I argued earlier, a good analogy is the system that keeps nations at least somewhat in check. There is no 'world government' with the sole right to act against rogue nations. Countries do so when they individually wish or need to and form loose organizations without regional monopolies (such as the United Nations) when their interests align against a rogue.

It is certainly fair to point out that this organization only barely works. But then anarchists will argue that it doesn't work as well as anarchism would because it's composed of governments rather than men or free associations. (The obvious rebuttal would be that it only works as well as it does for that reason.) Also, anarchists will point out that governments have a mixed record of handling crime as well, often creating and facilitating quite a bit of it. Most anarchists do not claim they have a recipe for a utopia, only for something better.

 

[Galteeth]

Seems to me like anarchism is a tautology. Anarchists live in peaceful egalitarian communities and when anything at all goes wrong, it is because somebody was not being anarchist and slipping into another way society organizes itself and in this regard, anarchy is by definition perfect and cannot be blamed as a failed system to organize society because all violence or unfairness can be blamed on something else.

I'd say that's fair. A different way of putting it is that two wrongs don't make a right. I.e. as another poster pointed out, what I'm talking about is an ideal shared by most people. But they find ways of not acting in accordance with that ideal, find a rationale for it (perhaps that it's impossible), but then create the conditions which make it impossible.
And I don't have a problem with self-defense by the way. But yeah, people steal, sue, kill, rape, call the cops, etc. And I don't do these things because I'm an anarchist. It doesn't matter if anarchy never happens. I'll stick with my moral beliefs.

 

[WildCat]

So what happens when the creep down the block decides to start raping the kids?

Any anarchist here want to try to answer this question? Because we do know that there are creepy people who rape children.

 

[dudalb]

Just more proof why Anarchism has no real following outside of College Campasus and few isolated communes....