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Any Anarchists Here?

Anarchy sounds cool, but in practice would be totally retarded. Case in point: Mogadishu.
 
Another case in point; the Montreal Police Strike in 1969.

From Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate;

As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 A.M. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 A.M. the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order.
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To answer your question Wildcat, Anarchists believe the government and "capitalism" makes people do crime and when they are overthrown society will be more peaceful. The few crimes that remain will be dealt with by citizens arrests and ad-hoc courts.

Personally I question premise A, premise B and premise C and prefer a professional police force and judicial system. Anarchists, like other ideologies want the benefits of liberal democracy and mixed markets without the liberal democracy and mixed market. When the answer they are really looking for is liberal democracy and mixed markets, and it always was the answer as Kropotkin began to realize later in life.
 
WildCat said:
Any anarchist here want to try to answer this question? Because we do know that there are creepy people who rape children.
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If you feel this is a problem, in an anarchist society you are welcome to do whatever you want about it. There's no government to stop you. And there's no rule that only the government may use force in non-emergency situations.

Here's a tip though -- you probably want to get the majority of decent people on your side. Otherwise, it may look like you're the aggressor and you may face a forceful response. So you may wish to consider making your evidence public, holding a trial and inviting the alleged rapist to attend, and so on. People might even be willing to accept you compelling the alleged rapist to attend his trial.

Since this is an obvious problem and one likely to repeat itself, likely an anarchist society would establish organized ways to handle such matters. There are lots of anarchist writings on different ways to handle this problem, and it's very hard to predict what way will be the best. (Just as if we only had government-run grocery stores and restaurants, nobody could have predicted Starbucks or Costco.)

One system some anarchocapitalists predict might happen is protection through insurance companies. If the rapist has insurance against whatever you plan to do, the insurance company may have hired a security company to protect him. So you might want to go to his insurance company first to convince them that this is not unjustified aggression. They might have a list of private courts whose verdicts they're willing to accept, so that might be an option.

Or society might handle force an entirely different way. It's hard to predict.

It also may be that in an anarchist society, there is no effective redress against some things we consider crimes simply because nobody is willing to expend their own resources to stop them. For example, in an anarchist society, if you want to make smoking pot illegal, you're going to have to find someone (and probably pay them) to stop people from smoking pot. You can't commandeer the machinery of state to do it.

This may mean that an anarchist society allows too much conduct that you would prefer it prohibited. But I think it's well established that almost every government ultimately criminalizes much more conduct that most reasonable people think it should. There is no way to create a utopia so far as we know.

Crimes will only be stopped when someone, or some organization, is willing to expend its own resources to stop it. People will only be imprisoned when some private group is willing to keep them imprisoned.
 
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Virus said:
What's the first step?
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Gradually reducing the size of government and allowing more and more government functions that can't be eliminated to be performed by private organizations. The ideal mechanism would find a path where each step provides benefits that outweigh the pain it will undoubtedly cause.

Personally, I think this plan would work for awhile, but I doubt you'd ever get to the point where it seemed sensible to end the government's national security and criminal lawmaking functions. But then again, if we didn't have a free market society, you could easily imagine how it might be inconceivable for private organizations to provide and operate farms, grocery stores and restaurants to feed hundreds of millions of people, and yet they do. Still, I think the obvious problems with things like private control over nuclear weapons cannot be hand-waved away. (I suppose to some extent the same could be said for the problems with State control over nuclear weapons.)

I'm basically a minarchist, so obviously I'll agree with the anarchists where their positions are the same as those of minarchists. It's entirely possible that if we ever established a minarchy, it might seem obvious that we can eliminate government entirely. But I very much doubt it. Minarchists and anarchocapitalists basically disagree over how far that road will take us.
 
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JoelKatz said:
If you feel this is a problem, in an anarchist society you are welcome to do whatever you want about it. There's no government to stop you. And there's no rule that only the government may use force in non-emergency situations.

Here's a tip though -- you probably want to get the majority of decent people on your side. Otherwise, it may look like you're the aggressor and you may face a forceful response. So you may wish to consider making your evidence public, holding a trial and inviting the alleged rapist to attend, and so on. People might even be willing to accept you compelling the alleged rapist to attend his trial.

Since this is an obvious problem and one likely to repeat itself, likely an anarchist society would establish organized ways to handle such matters. There are lots of anarchist writings on different ways to handle this problem, and it's very hard to predict what way will be the best. (Just as if we only had government-run grocery stores and restaurants, nobody could have predicted Starbucks or McDonald's.)

One system some anarchocapitalists predict might happen is protection through insurance companies. If the rapist has insurance against whatever you plan to do, the insurance company may have hired a security company to protect him. So you might want to go to his insurance company first to convince them that this is not unjustified aggression. They might have a list of private courts whose verdicts they're willing to accept, so that might be an option.

Or society might handle force an entirely different way. It's hard to predict.

It also may be that in an anarchist society, there is no effective redress against some things we consider crimes simply because nobody is willing to expend their own resources to stop them. For example, in an anarchist society, if you want to make smoking pot illegal, you're going to have to find someone (and probably pay them) to stop people from smoking pot. You can't commandeer the machinery of state to do it.

This may mean that an anarchist society allows too much conduct that you would prefer it prohibited. But I think it's well established that almost every government ultimately criminalizes much more conduct that most reasonable people think it should. There is no way to create a utopia so far as we know.

Crimes will only be stopped when someone, or some organization, is willing to expend its own resources to stop it. People will only be imprisoned when some private group is willing to keep them imprisoned.
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Too much moonbattery there to comment on, but I lol'd at the idea of insurance companies in an anarchist society!
 
WildCat said:
Too much moonbattery there to comment on, but I lol'd at the idea of insurance companies in an anarchist society!
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I think you have some idea of what anarchists advocate that is not the same as what actual anarchists actually advocate. See, for example, the Wikipedia article on 'Anarcho-capitalism' to see the type of anarchy advocated by people like Murray Rothbard or the article on 'Social anarchism' to see the type of anarchy advocated by people like Murray Bookchin or 'Anarchosyndicalism' as advocated by Rudolf Rocker.

I'm most familiar with anarchocapitalism, which is completely consistent with the idea of insurance companies and private defense organizations. Again, all that is required for it to be anarchism is the absence of organizations granted a monopoly on the socially-legitimate use of force in a geographic region.

Just as atheism is defined by the absence of a very common trait (belief in god), so anarchism is defined by the absence of a very common trait (belief in the appropriateness of monopoly governments). However, what you put back in (if anything) once that trait is gone can vary widely. Just as all you can say about two atheists is that they agree they shouldn't believe in god, all you can say about two anarchists is that they agree there should be no regional monopolies on the non-emergency use of force.
 
JoelKatz said:
I think you have some idea of what anarchists advocate that is not the same as what actual anarchists actually advocate.
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That's because the "actual anarchists" you mention aren't actually anarchists. They're communists, or libertarians, etc but they aren't anarchists.

You could never have an insurance company without a government.
 
WildCat said:
That's because the "actual anarchists" you mention aren't actually anarchists. They're communists, or libertarians, etc but they aren't anarchists.
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I think I was pretty clear what I mean by an 'anarchist'. I've met anarchocapitalists who, at least as far as I could tell, did seem to advocate a system that was free of governments.

You could never have an insurance company without a government.
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I agree that this is so, but that is because you and I are not anarchocapitalists. Obviously, anarchocapitalists would argue that you can.

They would probably agree that in some respects they would differ from the insurance companies we have today, but the basic idea would be the same. They would be organizations that you pay a small, fixed amount of money to and if you suffered an improbable, but large, loss, they would pay some part of your damages from that loss. They may also act to minimize the chances of that loss occurring.

I think many anarchocapitalists envision companies of various types doing the things that governments presently do. They envision private courts, private police forces, and so on. Some believe that insurance companies will tie all this together and some don't. Anarchocapitalists generally do agree that they cannot predict how the societies they advocate would actually function, must as you couldn't have predicted Starbucks or Virgin Atlantic in the absence of a quasi-free market.

In my experience, they generally feel that they need only point out a few ways it could possibly work and that's sufficient to meet their burden of proof. (I disagree. I can point out a way a Monarchy could possibly work -- a benevolent dictator who only does good -- and I don't think that meets my burden of proof to establish that a Monarchy is a desirable social order. You have to at least show that a desirable outcome is likely and quasi-stable, not just possible.)
 
JoelKatz said:
If you feel this is a problem, in an anarchist society you are welcome to do whatever you want about it. There's no government to stop you. And there's no rule that only the government may use force in non-emergency situations.

Here's a tip though -- you probably want to get the majority of decent people on your side. Otherwise, it may look like you're the aggressor and you may face a forceful response. So you may wish to consider making your evidence public, holding a trial and inviting the alleged rapist to attend, and so on. People might even be willing to accept you compelling the alleged rapist to attend his trial.

Since this is an obvious problem and one likely to repeat itself, likely an anarchist society would establish organized ways to handle such matters. There are lots of anarchist writings on different ways to handle this problem, and it's very hard to predict what way will be the best. (Just as if we only had government-run grocery stores and restaurants, nobody could have predicted Starbucks or Costco.)

One system some anarchocapitalists predict might happen is protection through insurance companies. If the rapist has insurance against whatever you plan to do, the insurance company may have hired a security company to protect him. So you might want to go to his insurance company first to convince them that this is not unjustified aggression. They might have a list of private courts whose verdicts they're willing to accept, so that might be an option.
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I've heard that yarn from anarchocapitalists before. So what happens when the aggressor is rich and well liked in the community and the victim is a poor loner? Is a private justice system really going to find someone guilty if they can afford to bribe everyone involved and have their own private army to get in the way of the private police taking them in?

So anarchists in a given community would create organized ways to deal with problems like an individual raping people. So basically, the people would agree on behaviours they don't like and then organize in order to pay a private legal system of private courts and presumably private police and private jails to stop people from engaging in these behaviours. Which looks a hell of a lot like our current system, except that the super rich would basically be immune to it and above it. Why is this a good idea?
 
JoelKatz said:
I think many anarchocapitalists envision companies of various types doing the things that governments presently do. They envision private courts, private police forces, and so on.
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Surely our current system, however corrupt you may believe it to be, is better than that?

Surely almost anything is better than that?

Because that isn't anarchism. That's mob rule.
 
I wouldn't like to live in an anarchocapitalist society. It sounds like the former Eastern Bloc countries where the black marketers took over after the collapse of communism.

Question for the left-anarchists. After you've answered Wildcat on what to do with rapists. Can you get Xbox 360, PS3, iPhones and the latest Hollywood blockbusters under anarchism?
 
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phantomb said:
I've heard that yarn from anarchocapitalists before. So what happens when the aggressor is rich and well liked in the community and the victim is a poor loner? Is a private justice system really going to find someone guilty if they can afford to bribe everyone involved and have their own private army to get in the way of the private police taking them in?
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There is no known solution to that problem. We have that same problem in our society. The difference is that in our society, he only has to bribe one government and there is no independent check.

So anarchists in a given community would create organized ways to deal with problems like an individual raping people. So basically, the people would agree on behaviours they don't like and then organize in order to pay a private legal system of private courts and presumably private police and private jails to stop people from engaging in these behaviours. Which looks a hell of a lot like our current system, except that the super rich would basically be immune to it and above it. Why is this a good idea?
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The difference is that no single organization would have a monopoly on the use of force so that superior organizations could rise above inferior ones. There would be no machinery of state for the super-rich to commandeer, as they do in our society.

I may not be making the best arguments here, it's hard to defend something you don't believe in.
 
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