I went back and forth between putting this thread here and in IMHO. The latter still feels more appropriate to me, because I have no thesis to defend or propound here; I’m interested in hearing what attraction the philosophy of anarchism has for people, not arguing against it. But if the thread has any legs a debate will surely break out, and I’d rather not squelch that or see it squelched by a moderator.
Anyway, let me put my questions out there for any self-professessed anarchists on the board. First, when you use the term anarchism, what do you mean? What are the fundamental principles of the philosophy in your view? What attracts you to it? What weaknesses do you see in it, if any?
Again: I intend to be open-shuttered and passive in this discussion. Someone may take y’all to task, but it won’t be me.
First, I don’t identify as an anarchist, but I think I can see the appeal; I just think it’s too much work for the incremental freedom, as compared to, say, libertarianism.
I take anarchism in its literal sense, no government: i.e. no central organized force at any level that has the ability to compel obedience to rules. Rules could be developed and followed voluntarily if everyone agrees they are useful (e.g. traffic lights). The sanctions for non-followers would have to be strictly civil; perhaps the owners of the roads would enforce them by fines and refusing to let you use them if you didn’t follow those rules. That’s just one tiny example of the way things might work in an anarchic society.
I think this is a very complex question, and it’s easy to get bogged down in the details of how it would work.
The appeal for most serious anarchists, as I hinted above, is probably the sense of freedom, that no-one can force you to do anything. You stand and fall by your own efforts, and so does everyone else. You aren’t required to prop up those who won’t make the effort (or those who can’t). You spend your time and energy on activities that you value, not that were chosen for you.
As I hinted in the 2nd paragraph, when your infrastructure is in the hands of private owners, the actual case can be a lot more strict and restrictive than what we have now. Frankly, I think anarchy would only have a prayer of being a stable system in a small enclosed area where there is little or no risk of outside invasion, and where wrong-doing is easier to deal with. I’m thinking of “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” type of conditions. Ursula LeGuin also had an anarchic society based on the moon, if memory serves. Or maybe that’s what I’m thinking of instead of Heinlein.
Roddy
You’re describing anarcho-capitalism. It’s bad enough that those guys stole the term “libertarian,” at least we can leave the term “anarchism” to those in the original anarchist tradition. In actual anarchism, there is no private property, or perhaps a much more limited version of it than currently exists. There are different ideas of how such a society would function such as mutualism, syndicalism, or communism.
There’s a very detailed FAQ here. It originally started out as an explanation of why anarcho-capitalists aren’t actually anarchists, and gradually became a complete FAQ. But a lot of the stuff in there is decidedly skewed towards explaining that distinction.
In brief, I would like to see a society where both the State and Capitalism is abolished, and replaced by voluntary, non-hierarchical associations. How we implement that is a complicated subject, but I think the best example of Anarchy in Action is the 1936 Spanish Revolution:
The shtick I got from the 1970s - 1980s anarchist writers was that the philosophy was about hierarchy as opposed to government per se. At any rate, it permitted adherents to oppose both big government and most of the private sector: Paul Samuelson quipped that they opposed one institution too many.
Actually though, anarchism is arguably more about posturing in practice than policy, as shown by the hand-waiving about the Spanish revolution. That said, there are anarchist tinged cooperatives that have operated with at least some success.
I think I’m riffing off of Colin Ward but I’m not sure. At any rate, in an age of Fox News methinks this fringy stuff is too far outside the Overton window to take seriously.
Anarchy is great, if you happen to be the baddest sonuvabitch around. Until somebody or several somebodies badder than you shows up, kicks your ass, and takes your stuff. Then it would kinda suck.
Well, anarchist thought tends to assume that people would be inclined toward cooperation if private property were abolished. Certainly, there have been pre-capitalistic societies that have existed without turning into a string of badasses kicking each others’ asses. I don’t know if that sort of basis for society can be scaled up to modern life, but I don’t think it’s quite so easily dismissed. (And then there are a few anarcho-primitivists who’d rather us ditch all of post-agricultural technology altogether.)
I can see small scale cooperation…say on the level of local militia groups…but a world of pure anarchy is going to be a violent place, where the options are mostly get tough or get dead.
Which ones advanced beyond subsistence farming, if that? Name one civilization that didn’t go through a phase of “badass kicking asses”?
Keep in mind that recent archeological evidence indicates that our pre-agraian ancestors had a higher mortality rate due to people killing each other than we ever see in the “civilized” world.
Classic anarchism is too collectivist for my taste. I’m not sure what you’d call little or no compulsory government along with a respect for individualism- libertarianism? Too many competing concepts vying for the same name.
I also don’t understand the emphasis on abolishing “Capitalism”. Arguably Capitalism is simply unfettered economic freedom. The most extreme antithesis of Capitalism we’ve actually seen enacted so far is communist collectivism, and that doesn’t look like anything I’d call freedom. Is what anti-capitalists object to the role of the state in enforcing contracts and property rights?
Persuasion and the good example that is being set by the Anarchists communities would be the first line of defense. Outsiders would be able to see how happy the new society is and compare it with their own.
But I’m not naive. There are people in this world who have no qualms about initiating violence against others. If the Anarchists are attacked, they may have to defend themselves. Guns and other explosives may be involved. Volunteers will form militias to protect themselves and their communities, since conscription would violate our principles of voluntarism.
I would disagree with Blalron and waterj2 that Anarchism is principally a Socialist belief. As has been noted, Libertarianism grew out of it. There are dozens of different schools of belief under the heading of Anarchism and I personally wouldn’t want to claim any one of them as the real movement:
The only consistent part of them all is the belief that people are sufficiently rational to figure out what they want and need to need someone bossing them around. Once you start including economics into it, you’re talking about a sub-section of Anarchism.
And just to state why I think that Anarchism isn’t very good, I’ll quote myself from my blog:
The principal flaw in the theory — so far as I see it — is that it is indeed correct.
Mankind is, indeed, a reasonably rational species. We are able to meet together as individuals and establish the apparatus that our society needs. But more importantly, we were that rational starting way back thousands of years ago. And as such, we realized that hierarchy is a useful tool for the protection of the individual. We aren’t kind and thoughtful creatures, we’re rather greedy and sociopathic ones. Our only protection against the other individuals is by establishing and enforcing some simple rules like that this fruit I grew and harvested for my family is mine. And we’ve discovered that we’d rather elect people that we trust to oversee that the people enforcing those rules aren’t beholden to anyone but all of us — not the richest man in town nor the one who has the most friends.
We do live in an Anarchist world. But through the benefit of one generation passing on their knowledge to the next via spoken and written word, we were able to learn and develop methods of free interaction that work fairly well. Starting the process over from scratch with each individual or family fending for itself would just get a lot of people killed. And in the long run, we’d likely just end up exactly where we are — as has happened with the Communists and all forms of Utopianists. While it may be true that you personally didn’t have the chance to review and determine for yourself whether you agreed with the end-result of mankind’s experiments — you were simply forced by the government and its police to submit to the authority of the government — the road forward is to understand and address all of our experiences, not to cast it all aside with some asinine assumption that we’ll be able to come up with something better if we just force ourselves to start the process all over again.
In the defense of Karl Marx, as an example, he was writing at a time when the introduction of Capitalism into a class-bound society was creating hardship for a large number of people. Where classism may never have been a great thing — for most of history it was likely a fairly innocuous trait of most societies — Capitalism exacerbated the differences, giving the upper classes the motive and power to work the lowest to death. Marx had no way to know that the free market will gradually erode classism and lead to meritocracy. It was fairly reasonable for him to pinpoint the need for a classless society as the solution to the problems he observed. He just didn’t have the experience nor foresight to see that a hierarchical society can be classless.
Marx may have an excuse for being wrong on that point, but the average person of today does not. But as his example shows, where you see a problem in society, if the answer for it that you arrive at calls for destroying everything and starting from scratch, you’re almost certainly wrong. Correctly identifying the problem does not mean that everything in the world must focus itself on correcting that one issue. Millions of potential problems for society have been solved through the millenia. Tossing all of those answers away for the sake of solving the one or two which haven’t yet been patched is silly. Evolve what we have, and you’ll almost certainly be more happy with the result.
In many ways I believe the Kingdom of God can be defined loosely as a anarchy, as there are no hard and fast rules or laws, just people living by loving others, and in that is the way we were suppose to live, the way God designed us to live.
But without love anarchy seems to get into a lot of trouble, so laws are apparently needed, along with punishment and a population that is motivated mainly by fear not to do wrong.
Government that doesn’t depend on a state with an entrenched hierarchy or career politicians. The abolition of private property (note the distinction between private and personal property - your PS3 is fine, your coal mine, not so much).
I favour a semi-Syndicalist, wholly Pacifist flavour of anarchism, with direct democracy as much as possible, and dual power as the means of establishment, but any Left Anarchism has some attraction.
I think Anarcho-capitalism is a blackwashing smokescreen.
Fairness. Internationalism. Class consciousness.
That is doesn’t work in practice, mostly because people are either stupid, ignorant, selfish or fearful, but also because it’s never been allowed to develop as it should.
We’ve had debates about anarchism before, and frankly, I’m not that interested in another debate where all people attack is their own strawman of what anarchism is, or keep bringing up the point that human nature isn’t compatible with anarchism. It gets old, so I’m just posting this to state my stance, but I’m probably not going to extend the debate much beyond that. You can search for my nick and “anarchism”, I don’t think my opinion’s changed much over the years.
Non-hierarchical societies have existed, and could get quite sophisticated, beyond H-Gs and subsistence: Çatalhöyük has no evidence of class stratification, the Mature Harappan phase of the IVC has so far yielded no conclusive evidence of any privileged class of kings, priests or armies. Social stratification was on the personal level, not the class.
Mr. Dibble: I was hoping you’d show up in this thread. Having participated in many threads on Libertarianism, I certainly understand your distaste for debates that quickly degenerate into strawman arguments (Somalia!), but I would be very interested in understanding how you think your idea of an Anarchist society could survive.
In particular, how does your ideal society defend itself against highly organized, belligerent societies intent on subjugating you and/or taking your land and property? If no one owns any land, what happens when a bunch of invaders decide they “own” it, and don’t let any of your society on it?
Also, what do you mean by “dual power”? I’ve not encountered that term before. Is it a term of art in anarchist thought, or just something you personally use to mean something?
Here is the TVTropes Useful Notes page on Political Ideologies, most of which, for some reason, seems to be taken up with discussion of various forms and schools of Anarchism.
They also have a page with the clearest summary I’ve ever read of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism.