# How would an anarchist society avoid recreating government?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-an-anarchist-society-avoid-recreating-government/613122>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [February 17, 2012, 10:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-an-anarchist-society-avoid-recreating-government/613122 "2012-02-17T10:42:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 13

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**Author:** ![Untoward\_Parable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/51bf81/32.png) [@Untoward\_Parable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Untoward_Parable)\
**Post date:** [March 1, 2012, 10:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-an-anarchist-society-avoid-recreating-government/613122/241 "2012-03-01T22:02:49Z")

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> [@Lumpy](#):
>
> If only. What actually happens is that since the Revolution has to overthrow the Exploiters, if you vote to retain private property that brands you as one of the bourgeois, and therefore your vote doesn’t count.
> 
> BTW, if it sounds like I keep setting up strawmen I’m sorry, but the whole history of Anarchism/Socialism is one long slippery slope of betrayal of ideals. First, Proudhon advocated that something like mass disobedience on the part of the masses could ignore the state out of existence. Then Bakunin declared that since the exploiting class would never go quietly, that an actual revolution was necessary. Bakunin’s insistence that the Revolution had to come spontaneously from the masses was denied by Marx, who claimed that the masses had to be educated and regimented by a revolutionary cadre, who would decide which beliefs fit Socialism and which didn’t. To win the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks had to found the Soviet Union by killing anyone who opposed the Party, and anyone who disagreed with the Party’s political and ideological goals was automatically marginalized. Then, since in a revolutionary nation ideology equals power, factions played holier-than-thou and eliminated their political rivals by having them purged, ending up with Stalin as the Pope of Soviet Communism.
> 
> It just doesn’t do any good to say “But that’s not Anarchism” when the whole process has happened once already and no one can offer a plausible mechanism how you could avoid repeating it. Oscar Wilde presciently said that “If governments are to be armed with economic power”, “if in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first”.

Not sure how voting to retain private property means your vote doesn’t count. If you don’t win that vote you still got to have your say and your one person one vote like everyone else. If you’re only happy with democracy when you win on your issues it doesn’t sound like you actually like democracy other than for the veneer of legitimacy it provides. (Like most modern leaders in so-called democracies do today. Plenty of mechanisms to prevent an actual reflection of the people’s wishes from happening.)

Socialism in it’s current iterations are little better than more strongly capitalistic societies, both have their wealthy elite preventing the people from making real choices and simply baste their populations in slightly different docility/obedience tonics.

The history of movements proporting to be populist is a frustrating one, but that’s true through all spectra of political movements. Every system has promised to elevate humankind and each has been designed/driven to diminish them instead.

Marx has proven to be a boon to authoritarians all over the world but democracy has rarely if ever been significant in those societies. Call a political/economic system whatever you like but if democracy isn’t present it’s just privileged families pulling strings every time, sometimes with more brutal results than others.

The comforting elixir we bathe in in western societies may seem secure but it comes at a price and is much more tenuous than it seems. In the US people are taught from birth to devalue one another and themselves, to sell themselves and their integrity in worse ways than a prostitute could ever match. We are pushed toward ignorance, stupidity, idolatry, empty distraction and fear constantly by the commercial-social web around us. The platitudes are all hollow and only meant to maintain obedience and confusion. Individualism is probably the most effective and meaningless. In this dawn of transcendent technology the potential for disaster in massive. It doesn’t even require a mistake like nuclear war or global warming to annihilate any state of security we now feel. Artificial intelligence and robotics will eliminate the need for 99.9% of the population of the planet and then most people become only an obstacle for the entrenched elite to dispatch before moving forward into their utopia: The one where they no longer need the genetically similar cattle to feed off of, the cattle that always present a risk to their domination.

I agree that the road forward is difficult and even unlikely. Most probably we are doomed but my thinking will not allow me to settle for the transient luxury of pretending things are ok for now and that a better way should not be strived for.

I would like to mention again that I think the current system vs many potential anarchist models is vastly inferior in efficiency in all but special cases. For one the potential of humanity is being stunted by a short-sighted sequester of information. Proprietary information needed for the current incarnation of capitalism prevent the easy and free flow of relevant knowledge that could be used by interested people all over the world to develop new technologies and follow fewer misguided projects. To encourage innovation without this limitation a system of reward by society to innovators could be adopted that would allow all people access. The economic models of deception (marketing) are causing massive problems in health, education, family, community, environment, government ect.

Elites would prefer efficiency if it didn’t cost them dominance, but when it does they do not care whatsoever for it. Better to be king of a lesser society than just another person in a better one. (In their minds)

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