Please no links to verbose gobbly gook about self organizing spontaneous communities and such, I’ve had enough such links that explain in 20K words absolutely nothing about anarchist society except that its awesome.
So lets say we have an anarchist community, now lets say Bob the sociopath decides he enjoys raiding homes and killing and raping. The community comes together because Bob has to be dealt with, together they work out a system of guards and decide that if Bob is sighted again he needs to be shot on sight.
:smack:Did government just get accidentally recreated? Oh no!
I’m sure that example is blindingly ignorant and stupid, but I can’t fathom how exactly a anarchist society could last for long without government being recreated in some form.
It is not blindingly ignorant or stupid, but one of the classic criticisms of anarchism. Of course, there are many anarchist schools of thought, and not all of them are so hard-line as to be inconsistent with limited self-organization of government-like institutions.
I honestly don’t see the difference, in my hypothetical example the community has decided to take collective action to defend against, and if need be use force against an aggressor. That sounds very much like a government to me, unless you have a very limited definition of government.
I have seen references to a community and people voluntarily subjecting themselves to private courts and police in anarchist societies, what happens when someone decides not to abide by the private courts or police?
The many varied flavors of anarchism is confusing in itself, often I have no clue what someone is advocating.
There have been plenty of ungoverned but stable communities through human history. Such communities find ways to deal with the kind of threat described in the OP without slippery sloping their way to anything like what we’d call government.
This alone is a rather government-like function. You’ll need some scheme whereby guards are qualified, scheduled and their performance monitored (no sleeping on watch). Those not qualified to take their turn will probably be asked/required to help defray the cost of the guards, which starts to look like taxes. Etc.
I’m not trying to be an ass but it really does seem to be a matter of semantics.
Even if there are no legislated laws and law enforcement in the modern sense, if the community collectively agrees and collectively puts forward funds or resources to pay a mercenary to defend the community and drive away bandits and other threats that does seem to be governed.
Of course it is. Why don’t you define the term “government” so that we have an objective criterion for testing whether your example meets it? Because right now it’s just looking like you’re making a circular argument, where you assume the absence of a government, but then arbitrarily interpret whatever it is the community decides to do as government action.
Many philosophers and political theorists have come up with various definitions of “state” and “government”. Depending on whose definition you choose, your example community’s organization may or may not constitute one (though I strongly suspect that under most definitions, it does not).
Under a Marxian view of government, for example, the people in your example have not constituted a state, since one of its defining features is that it is a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms (where “class” doesn’t mean any arbitrary group of people, but rather a group of people who share the same relation to the ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth). The action taken by the people in your example seems to have nothing to do with class antagonism, but rather with the containment of a psychotic individual.
I would call a government collective agreements and decisions by a community of reasonable size, and the execution of their decisions. It seems to fit with the dictionary definition which is:
I mean in the example I gave they would be exercising violent action against an individual(not without justification but still) which is only acceptable because it has been collectively decided.
My purpose here is not to mock anarchists BTW, I just fell like I’m not getting something. If someone says in a self organizing community there is no need for oppressive laws and government, just don’t try to kill random people for the thrill or the community will get together and put you down or chain you up in a basement, sounds like laws and a governing body to me.
All the HG societies that I am familiar with had some sort of mandatory initiation ceremony that people had to go through before they could obtain the benefits of living in society. That ceremony involved, in addition to various forms of torture and deprivation, various promises to obey the laws of the gods, as interpreted by the society’s elders. That included promises to accept one’s rigidly defined role in society, and accept and admister various punishments for transgressing those laws, punishments that routinely involved ritualistic combat and mutilation. Anyone who refused the initiation ceremony was either banished (as in the case of Australian Aborigines) or forced to live forever as a child, as in the case of several New Guinean and North American groups.
That is the standard for HG societies. As far as I know it it the universal standard. And it is as far form anarchism as it is possible to imagine.
Can you actually name one of these HG societies that didn’t have rigidly defined rules and laws, handed down by designated elders, enforced by punishment meted out by designated members of society and with a rigid system of privileges only available to those willing to undergo initiation? Because I can’t think of any, and I’m not exactly ignorant of this subject.
The stateless character of preagricultural, “primitive communist” societies was first explored in detail by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, to which I suppose I could refer you as a starting point. Naturally much additional anthropological evidence has been gathered since then, some of which has served to strengthen Engels’ theories and some to undermine them. One aspect which, as far as I know, has withstood scrutiny is the equality in property relations enjoyed by members of such societies, which can be observed even in contemporary (albeit vanishingly rare) Stone Age groups; see for example Mark Nathan Cohen’s analysis of modern bushmen in The Food Crisis in Prehistory (Yale University Press, 1977). This equality meant an absence of classes, and by implication the absence of a state or government in the sense I had been using the term. Of course, YMMV depending on your definition of “state”.
In that case, your scenario exemplifies a government. However, in my experience the people calling themselves anarchists don’t use such a broad definition of the term.
HGs have a home territory, that they defend violently against any other groups.
The only people allowed to live int hat territory and use its resources are people who have undertaken an initiation.
The form of that initiation is handed down by Elders, and it incorporates all sorts of laws that have to be followed, mandatory duties.
The laws also regulate property ownership. Women, for example, can not usually own spears or bows or other hunting implements, men can not own cookware. The law also says that some people can use certain parcels of land within the territory and other people can not. SO, for example, shamans can fish in certain lakes and others can not, only women can gather food in certain valleys and so forth.
The law outlines complex punishments for not following those laws or undertaking one’s duties satisfactorily.
But according to you this isn’t a government because it is somehow “statelesss”. Sure, there is a rigidly defined and violently defended home territory that only some people can live in, but you choose to claim that this is not a state, and since it isn’t a state, then there can not be a government. And there is equality in property relations. Sure, only initiated people can even own property, and only certain people can own certain property. But that’s somehow declared to be “egalitarian”, and since it is egalitarian, there can not be any government.
All this is simply begging the question. The premises that HG society are stateless and egalitarian have no basis in relaity, yet they are the sole basis for your claim that HGs societies, with their complex, multiple layers of laws and punishments overseen by Elders, is not a form of government, and a very rigid and complex one at that.
There is nothing even vaguely anarchic about HG societies. They are rigid, regimented and force conformity to a degree that the modern western mind cannot even imagine.
In the view of my more libertarian friends, every person is (or should be) responsible for their own defense. if people don’t want Bob raiding, raping and pillaging, then they should shoot him when he gets to their door. This is essentially the “polite society” argument that gun advocates use. Problems like Bob would not exist if everyone was armed and willing to shoot him.
I personally hate this view since it assumes that all problems can be handled by an individual and that the individual would only use his guns for personal defense. What if Bob controls a band of forty bandits? How is any individual or household going to fight him? It makes all those Heston-esque tough guy posturings look a bit ridiculous.
It may be hard to tell at what point mutual interest becomes de facto government. But it seems that if a village got a posse together to hunt down and kill Bob, that would not be government per se, but a one-time community action to solve a specific problem.
Bolding mine. I don’t understand what you mean by government, then, because nothing about the term government implies the existence of classes. Could you clarify? As I understand it, class are matter of scale more than anything. Further, you could argue that the strong gendered division of labour in H-G societies constitutes classes, albeit relatively egalitarian ones in small-scale groups.