An anarchist would tell you that anarchism is the only tue form of democracy.
Unfortunately is does rely too much on the good nature of people and ignores man’s natural hierachial tendencies.
A system with small autarchic villages would have no defence against a well armed band of robbers. They would need to organise to put up a defence --> the birth of a hierarchical structure or become ‘enslaved’ by the band = a hierarchical structure.
In a bigger society, what members of the community would do the tracking down of robbers? Would the same people be doing it on a regular basis? That would constitute a police force. Who would defend against gangs of robbers? Wouldn’t that be an army?
There’s just no escaping it. Any society must have some system to protect its members from bad apples. Be they from the outside (an army) or from inside the community (laws and enforcers). The bigger the society the bigger and more hierarchical these institutions will be. But in essence no society can do without.
But doesn’t Libertarianism give more room for exploitation?As it tries to do away with structures hampering the free reign of buisiness. And what protection does anarchy give from anyform of exploitation?
I’m not fully up-to-date on the structural niceties of the various anarchist philosphies (because there are many varieties of anrachism including communist and environmental), but yes I too believe that you soon find the need to return to a statist system.
Here’s a website on anarchosyndicalism, like most anarchist websites it has the major flaw of being rhetoric-heavy but very thin on practical ideas on subjects such as law and order:
The “idealized” form of anarchy is like a bunch of friends camping in the woods. No one is really “in charge”. People may temporarily take on leadership roles based on their skills or knowledge (lets build a fire, pitch the tents, etc) and everyone more or less follows the conventions of society (I don’t bash someones head wit a rock to get out of chopping wood).
The reality is that such a system is not practical for more than a handfull of people. I for one do not wish a return to an agrarian society.
People forget that many of the benefits we enjoy as workers were fought for by communists and anarchists. For example, the fight to have an 8 hour workday was spearheaded by anarchists:
http://www.wealth4freedom.com/truth/1/Haymarket.htm
So it is inaccurate to say that anarchists are hopeless idealists whose system would never work in the modern industrial world. The capitalist ideal of exploiting workers until they die is also hopelessly utopian. It had a brief expression in the Nazi work/death camps.
Concision is the better part of valor, and besides, Latro has his Kalshnikov jammed up my nose so it is hard to write. Even more besides,they are not meaningless assertions and small-minded irrelevant jabs, they are fractionally distilled pearls of wisdom.
No, I think Priceguy pegged it.
Regards,
Shodan
Anarchy is not easy to explain to people who are brain-washed by the system. The only comparison I can think of is the Iraqi people who have lived under the yoke of dictatorship so long that they may have problems even envisioning what a democracy is like.
People who live under the yoke of democracy likewise have difficulty envisioning what anarchy is like. There are essentially three ways of governing and each leads naturally to the next:
Dictatorship —> Democracy ----> Anarchy
Anarchy is the end. The final result. It is not merely desirable, it is inevitable. It is what we are heading towards. However before anarchy can prevail we need to get rid of all the dictatorships in the world and we need to establish democracy in every single country in the world. Only then can we begin the journey to the next, and final, stage.
People sometimes compare anarchy to communism. This is an insult to anarchy. Anarchy would not dirty it’s feet with such concepts. Likewise anarchy is not libertarianism, it’s not socialism, it’s not anything else - it’s anarchy.
It’s the purest form of “government”. It is pristine, perfect. It has been tried in the past (Barcelona, Paris) and it worked perfectly well until it was put down by outside fascist forces. It is, in fact, the only form of “government” that has ever worked properly.
The attitude displayed by Priceguy comes as no surprise to anarchism. This is the attitude that comes from brain-washing by the system. All systems seek to preserve themselves and therefore they try to make you think that theirs is the only system that can work.
Only when humankind has progressed to the correct stage can anarchism be implemented but have no fear, we will know when we are at that stage. Once we are there, anarchy will emerge - like a phoenix.
Those days are nearer than you think. As Roger says, God is an anarchist.
By the way, everybody listens dreamily to Imagine by John Lennon. It went to Number 1 in the UK, it gets played all over the place.
But nobody seems to realise that it’s an anarchist anthem…
Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can
Imagine no religion, a brotherhood of man
etc etc…
Is anyone else hearing Molotov saying “History is an inevitable process”? Because I sure am.
Anyone who claims to know the inevitable march of history has been buying into someone else’s rhetoric a bit too much.
I said this in my ‘Practical Libertarian’ thread several months ago.
There is something within human beings that makes us form societies. Those societies establish groups ‘norms’ and attempt to enforce them. These attempts can come in the form of shunning, expulsion from the group, or our more familiar laws.
No large scale society has ever passed up this opportunity to tell it’s members what they should and should not do. THAT appears to be an inevitable result of humans bonding together in groups with some similarities…i.e. ‘societies’.
To assume that an anarchical system would hold together after it passes the point where each member knows each other member denies history. As soon as one group member can justifiably proclaim one member ‘self’ and another ‘other’ then anarchy breaks down and laws begin to be ‘enforced’.
While I actually wouldn’t object to an ‘ideal’ anarchical system (I once gave a job interviewer a heart attack defining such)(No, I didn’t get the job) I don’t see any means by which one would remain stable. Different groups would form and then government of some form would result.
The brutal repression of anarchist communes is incredible. During the 1868 Paris commune, France and Prussia were fighting the aptly named Franco-Prussian war. The troops from both sides got together to bloodily wipe out the communards. Likewise during the Spanish Civil War, the fascists and the communists got together to wipe out the anarchists. Thats when Orwell was thrown in jail; he wrote about it in Homage to Catalonia.
Maybe trying it on land with a prior claim and tons of soldiers isn’t the swiftest idea on earth.
Just a thought.
BTW, can anyone guess how surreal it is to read and post to this thread while listening to Abbott & Costello’s ‘Who’s On First’?
Maybe we should lump Totalitatianism, Theocracy, Anarchy, Fuedalism and Communism under one form of government and call it Anachronism?
There are two opposite forces at work. One is towards communalism and the other is toward individualism. IMHO, communism is at one extreme and anarchy is at the other. Neither extreme is workable.
As a society progresses it can afford to devote less resources to necessary items. A small aggrarian community has to devote most of its resources to growing food. There is less freedom for individuality because an individual not pulling his weight doesn’t eat. A more advanced society like a Western democracy can shift more to the ‘individualism’ side of the spectrum. We still have to work at something but a large portion of resources can be devoted to non-necesessary tasks like art or making Beanie-babies. We have greater freedom because we have more choice over what we do.
I imagine that the ultimate evolution of society wouldn’t be “Anarchy” since there will always be some need of law enforcement and conflict resolution. It would be a kind of socialist welfare state where most mundane tasks are automated by self-contained machines and people spend most of their time pursuing art, intellectual pursuits or recreation or nothing at all if they choose. Such a system would require a level of production where being “wealthy” lost all meaning since everyone has the freedom to work on whatever they want (or nothing) and society can produce more than a person could ever consume.
Jojo, may I point something to you?
“All systems seek to preserve themselves and therefore they try to make you think that theirs is the only system that can work.”
But in the previous paragraph you said:
“(Anarchy)It’s the purest form of “government”. It is pristine, perfect. It has been tried in the past (Barcelona, Paris) and it worked perfectly well until it was put down by outside fascist forces. It is, in fact, the only form of “government” that has ever worked properly.”
Wouldn´t be nice if you make a cognitive review of your conceptions?
I have to say that the phrase “People who live under the yoke of democracy” is quite puzzling too.
msmith537 got it right with the camp analogy, Anarchy can´t work on large societies; and I´m not much confident that social evolution would one day lead to a merry land of joy where everyone is a nice and responsible person, it just can´t happen, unless you do psycological screening of the popuation to ejem… discard the potentially troublesome elements; and that wouldn´t fit very well with Anarchist principles.
Does anyone else hear echoes of Leo Tolstoy?
Anyway, in my opinion, it is clear that anarchy wouldn’t be sustainable. The obnoxiously vast majority of ancient civilizations had heiarchical systems of government. Some were dictatorships in various forms. Some were limited democracies, like in Greece. There were clans in Britannia. Tribes in North America. Any great civilizations that were anarchies? No.
Empirically, for societies to progress, anarchy simply doesn’t work.
“Distilled pearls of wisdom”? Please.
Meaningless assertion.
Cite?
Meaningless assertion.
Meaningless assertion.
Meaningless assertion.
Small-minded irrelevant jab. Has no pertinence to the subject matter.
Roger_Mexico, Whereas rhetoric like this may score points in whatever schoolyard you usually do your debating in, it doesn’t work here. It only serves to lower the other posters’ respect for you and make them unwilling to listen to any points you’re actually making. Try making an intelligent, coherent argument rather than dispensing these, as you call them, “distilled pearls of wisdom”.
I always thought the communards were, as the name implies, communists.
In 1871 the Germans did not join the French to fight the communards, they stopped the fight so the French army could come in and restore order.
As Orwell describes in “Homage to Catalonia” (good book, btw) there was a slow infiltration and take-over by the Stalinist into the hotch-potch of various communist and anarchist units. The P.O.U.M. (Orwell’s international brigade IIRC) was eventually disbanded. Again, I don’t recall any case where the fascists joined with the communists to fight other groups.
Anarchy is an ideal. The function of government should be to lead to anarchy. In theory, an anarchist group could have a police force and a military.
[paraphrased appeal to authority]
The goverment that governs best governs the least.
[/paraphrased appeal to authority]
…and maybe a Department of Transportation to fix the roads, and maybe a Sanatation Dept. And we will probably need a Dept of Justice if we have a police force to figure out exactly what they should be policing.
See the problem is that people don’t want a lack of government. It all sounds nice until that corporation lays you off, your landlord wont repair your appartment or a contractor rips you off. Then all of a sudden, everyone wants someone to step in and set things right (not to mention fix the roads and take the trash away).
Government isn’t inherently evil. It is a system. A machine if you will, designed to run the complex interation between millions of people. Problem is that as in all machines, the pieces that don’t fit right get chewed up and spit out. If all the peices just did what they wanted whenever they wanted, the machine wouldn’t work at all and society would collapse.
The other problem is that people don’t like being cogs in a machine. People like to be in control of their lives and pursue their individuality.