It’s tempting. The term needs to be “taken back.” These days, when you say the word “anarchist” people think of chaos and violence. Like the Joker from The Dark Knight, who has no other motivation than to see the world burn.
This image does a disservice to the classical anarchists, who want to see a stateless society based upon voluntary non-hierarchical associations.
Nah, it simply shows the logical conclusion of such a philosophy.
A few years ago, some stupid anarchists from up north came to my town, smashed a bunch of windows, and got arrested for it. Everyone local laughed at them.
But do you know who was the mostest furious at them?
The local anarchists.
A big contingent of local anarchists are the equivalent of those Christians who evangelize through being good people. These anarchists want to destroy hierarchies, so they do it by starting community gardens, running worker-owned businesses, and doing other totally legal things that move them toward the society they want. When some assholes from out of town came in and smashed up businesses, the local anarchists treated it the way good Christians treat a visit by Fred Phelps.
Condemning all anarchists because of schmucks like the black flaggers is unfair.
It brands anarchists in a pretty destructive way too.
No. While there are some stoopid people out there sporting shirts with black “A” logos who are violent people or vandals, most intelligent people who subscribe to anarchy as a philosophy believe that anarchy can only be attained by gradually making law enforcement irrelevant and unnecessary. You can’t do that with anything remotely akin to violent revolution, organized or otherwise.
I doubt you can do it at all, and my argument ultimately comes down to plumbing.
Everyone needs plumbing that works. If you have any kind of population density without it, you get cholera. Cholera is fatal and it’s a lot cheaper, easier, and better to prevent than to cure. Plumbing needs to be maintained, and that means two things:
One, you need people who know how plumbing works, and, two, those people must be able to make decisions binding on the rest of the society regarding plumbing. If you don’t have the first part, your society is full of shit and, soon, your drinking water will be, too. This tends to limit participation in the big decisions because, frankly, most people don’t care enough about plumbing to learn how to make the big decisions. Which is a good thing, compared to what happens around the small decisions.
If you don’t have the second part, and the group doesn’t have the ability to make binding decisions, bikeshedding takes hold and nothing gets done, because everyone feels entitled to vote or otherwise influence the project regarding the small decisions. What diameter of pipes do we use? Is hot on the left or right? Are threads clockwise or counter-clockwise? None of these matter, in that every possible direction a small decision can go still leads to a workable system, but you do need to decide something before any pipe can be laid.
So you end up with a plumbing cabal, a group of people who run the plumbing in the society. This is a classic oligarchy, unelected and not entirely accountable to the people affected by its decisions but still holding a certain amount of power. It is an identifiable source of potential coercive authority and, therefore, not anarchic.
Now, apply that to the arcane, bureaucratic business of running the society as a whole. Again, most people don’t want to do that directly all the time. And enough people feel entitled to influence it that, again, you get bikeshedding unless you have someone or some group with veto power. Which isn’t anarchy.
Now, if you define ‘anarchy’ as ‘representative democracy with instant recall’, which I have seen done before, I will be a little disappointed in you.
Indeed. The problems with anarchism simply come down to the fact that there are some things that single people cannot solve on their own. You think plumbing is bad? How about a militia and national defense?
You raise some interesting questions.
For 3 years (1936-1939), Anarchists controlled substantial portions of Spain. I honestly don’t know how they handled the nitty gritty details. It’s a subject I hope to eventually delve into. But from my (admittedly) incomplete overview of the issue, I haven’t read anything about massive cholera epidemics or the Tyranny of the Plumbers.
Sorry Czarcasm, but you could slap together any 10 point plan and the recreational rioters will still recreate. Frankly, it’s a surprise that the mayhem has been mostly limited to one city.
Continuing the hijack on anarchism:
It’s possible to be a realistic anarchist just as it is possible to be a realistic libertarian. Realists seek incremental improvement and there’s nothing conceptually absurd about seeking to advance cooperatives, tool lending libraries or even a progressive tax structure. Anarchist theorists insist that their beef is with hierarchy not government per se.
Hear, hear! Maybe we should limit the occupation to, um, Wall St. (or Liberty Plaza) and have the occasional sit-in elsewhere. Like, for example, Kocherlakota’s office at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve.
I have to disagree with the whole premise of this thread.
Its not that there shouldn’t have been any Highlander sequels, its that they should have been good.