How would an anarchist society avoid recreating government?

[MrDibble]

Sure :rolleyes: No-one ever became an anarchist because they’ve seen the worst of what hierarchical states have to offer, nooo. They’re all “malcontents and n’er-do-wells”, right you are, Mr VictorianAnachronistLingo Rover

[Kobal2]

@MrDibble

Sure :rolleyes: No-one ever became an anarchist because they’ve seen the worst of what hierarchical states have to offer, nooo. They’re all “malcontents and n’er-do-wells”, right you are, Mr VictorianAnachronistLingo Rover

I think you might have been wooshed.
Hardcore libertarians like **Rover **and anarchists have more in common than they’d like to begrudgingly admit sotto vocce. Then again, it’s Rand Rover speaking, so who the hell knows.

[Untoward_Parable]

Another thread about anarchism that doesn’t understand the concept, wonderful.

1. Anarchism is a form of government.

2. There are laws in Anarchism.

3. Nothing about Anarchism prevents problems from being solved on any scale that can be solved now.

In Anarchism authority must justify itself to exist with a high burden of proof. You don’t get to arrest people that aren’t threatening the security and safety of others. You don’t get to bomb people because you think they’re up to something. You don’t get to make big decisions without the agreement of the people affected. You don’t get to monopolize resources or technologies.

Mostly Anarchism is not a settled system because it’s barely existed. There are a lot of unknowns and trying to create an exact schematic for how it should work in fine detail would be a design for failure. However what most people think of when they think of Anarchism has nothing to do with what has actually been proposed and imagined for it as an organizational structure.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@erislover

Since I do not have such evidence either, I am attempting to settle for the next best thing: what evidence do I have about that which distinguishes successful states from unsuccessful ones? If I notice some qualities, can these qualities exist without the trappings of the state?

:smack: Now I see what you’re suggesting. Sorry for my obtuseness earlier. You’re right–it’s a valid approach to the question.

That said, the traits generaly held by states that last a significant length of time (let’s say, 50 years without a revolution?) are worth looking at. I’m almost certain that we’d be looking at a clear power structure in which certain people have a privileged use of violence, and others have a diminished right to use violence. Are there states in which that’s not true?

Edit: successful states may also be examined in the context of the other organizational structures around them. What could succeed for a state (or other social oranizational structure) 10,000 years ago would probably not succeed today, given different technologies and ideas about how the world works.

[erislover]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

Now I see what you’re suggesting. Sorry for my obtuseness earlier.

Yay.

I’m almost certain that we’d be looking at a clear power structure in which certain people have a privileged use of violence, and others have a diminished right to use violence. Are there states in which that’s not true?

I think there is universal agreement on two points. One, a sedentary lifestyle was only enabled by increased food production, which enabled a warrior class; two, the clear power structure which has executive power over a warrior class is the defining characteristic of a state. So a state is impossible without a warrior class; is a warrior class possible without becoming a state? (Rephrase of a rhetorical question I asked earlier in response to a question about whether anarchy could mount a reasonable defense against a state military.) Sure, it never happened that way historically, but that’s not really an argument. Early societies also didn’t have complex financial instruments and video games.

Edit: successful states may also be examined in the context of the other organizational structures around them. What could succeed for a state (or other social oranizational structure) 10,000 years ago would probably not succeed today, given different technologies and ideas about how the world works.

Yes, definitely. Neighboring societies are like the climate.

[Lumpy]

@erislover

So a state is impossible without a warrior class;

In practice it’s turned out that way; but at least at the beginning the founders of the United States had high hopes for not having a “warrior class”. The ideal they pursued was to have little or no standing army, relying on mustering armed citizens into a militia when needed. And this being before the development of professional constabularies, civil law was mostly enforced by elected sheriffs, who if they needed extra help might deputize a “posse comitatus”. The Founders would have regarded today’s huge civil and military armed services as a prescription for dictatorship.

[horhay_achoa]

@Trinopus

I must politely dissent from this. I don’t think that any thoughtful statist demands that the anarchic society arise magically overnight.

We (both sides) often use that phrasing as a simplified short-cut. “If such a society magically arose tomorrow…” But we all know that it would take time to found and to form, and that, if it did “magically” arise, it would arise with a history back-formed. It’s just a way of saying, “If we suddenly made contact with an undiscovered anarchic society in a lost city in the Himalayas” or Barsoom, or whatever. It isn’t part of the actual debate.

I am not sure if this is very useful. If most statists admit that viable anarchy is not possible now, then why are we having this discussion? But that is the point…anarchy is clearly not possible with how things are today. It will take a series of small changes over an extended period of time before anarchy is able to be considered. Capitalism has its mitts deeply implanted in just about every society and individual alive. Even non-capitalist countries are playing the game, or at least being used by the game. It is going to take a very, very long time to undue the types of values and incentives that capitalism has given rise to.

As a good old-fashioned Hubert Humphrey liberal, I have no objection to “social engineering.” I believe that one of the legitimate functions of education is to try to train people, from early youth, to be better citizens.

On the other hand, this makes me think of the Soviet Union attempting to create a “New Soviet Man,” a socially-engineered citizen that was ready for full communism. I’m not sure… I don’t know how much human nature can be tweaked…

Well, I am not sure I would call it social engineering…at least not how that term is typically used to describe a top down sort of brainwashing. Part of anarchism is giving people the power to do things themselves. I think it is within human potential to restructure society from the bottom up and not the from the top down. I think we are seeing some of these values now…co-ops, credit unions, the buy local movement…all of these things things are steps in the right direction. Anything we can do to strengthen community is a step in the right direction. But, nobody should be forced into it. When people see that being part of a co-op has benefits, they may eventually decide to join themselves. The success of a local currency like Ithaca Hours, can inspire other places to try developing their own local currency, in turn strengthening their community. So, I would say it is less social engineering, and more leading by example.

See? I was typing faster than I was reading. Even if these small steps don’t lead to a dramatic change in society, they’re good ones, and so even a statist has no grave objections to them. I’ll walk a ways down this path with you, even if our steps may separate later!

Sounds good!

I agree…to a degree… Human nature has, I think, already dramatically changed in the industrial age (in the industrialized countries.) Education really does better the individual.

However, I still have concerns regarding rogue individuals, and violent criminality. I think that even the most advanced and humanistic anarchistic society will have a need for a jail…

Maybe…it is hard to know until we get there…

[erislover]

@Lumpy

In practice it’s turned out that way; but at least at the beginning the founders of the United States had high hopes for not having a “warrior class”. The ideal they pursued was to have little or no standing army, relying on mustering armed citizens into a militia when needed. And this being before the development of professional constabularies, civil law was mostly enforced by elected sheriffs, who if they needed extra help might deputize a “posse comitatus”. The Founders would have regarded today’s huge civil and military armed services as a prescription for dictatorship.

Without executive authority over the warrior class, I think most of the participants in this thread would suggest it were anarchy.

[erislover]

@Kobal2

Hardcore libertarians… and anarchists have more in common than they’d like to begrudgingly admit sotto vocce.

Libertarians of that sort are anarchists that lack the courage of their conviction. [/trolling]

[Lumpy]

@erislover

Libertarians of that sort are anarchists that lack the courage of their conviction. [/trolling]

Libertarians are anarchists who don’t have a hate-on for private property or a free market.

Or more seriously, libertarians believe you can have private property and a socially benign free market without a state to enforce property rights.

[BrainGlutton]

I know! An anarchist society can avoid recreating government by . . . recreating goverment! As a LARP! First thing after the Revolution, the leadership cabal should suggest-the-creation of a new LARP, to be played at SF cons and such, called “United States Government,” and anybody who tries to found or revive any organization by that name or even infringing on the creative concept of this thing called “government” gets their ass hauled into court for copyright infr-- . . . wait, this is an anarchist society . . . Back to the drawing board.

[erislover]

I think any time anyone mentions freedom from now on, I’m going to accuse them of being anarchists. After all, any time anarchists mention rules, they’ve suddenly recreated an entire government. :rolleyes:

[Trinopus]

@erislover

. . . any time anarchists mention rules, they’ve suddenly recreated an entire government. . . .

Seriously? Yes.

That’s exactly the problem. If you have rules, and a mechanism for enforcing them, then…that is a government. (Or else you have absolute unanimity, which most of us think is not likely.)

You have never addressed this. You mock it, belittle it, roll your eyes… But you have never actually shown why it isn’t so. Someone mentioned a place with laws against guns. Okay, and one guy says, “Nuts to that” and buys a gun. What now?

[BrainGlutton]

@Lumpy

Libertarians are anarchists who don’t have a hate-on for private property or a free market.

True. Anarchism is a tradition very closely associated with Marxism, and most self-ID’d “anarchists” in history have viewed capital and the state as their conjoint enemies – their class enemies, that is, the Marxist-Leninist parlance/paradigm translates exactly to the anarchist side. Any anarchist revolution is, at least in its intent, a class war.

[erislover]

@Trinopus

You have never addressed this. You mock it, belittle it, roll your eyes… But you have never actually shown why it isn’t so.

I have addressed it at least three times. You’re just not reading what I am writing.

[Kobal2]

@Trinopus

You have never addressed this. You mock it, belittle it, roll your eyes… But you have never actually shown why it isn’t so. Someone mentioned a place with laws against guns. Okay, and one guy says, “Nuts to that” and buys a gun. What now?

I would imagine the community points a finger at the board where the rules of the community are posted, then another at the road leading out of Christiania. Believe it or not, a handgun does not grant one the power to hold 600+ people at gunpoint at once, much less force them to let one live among them.

Mostly however the problem simply does not present itself. Existing citizens agree with the rules they created implicitly. Immigrants implicitly think joining the community is more valuable to them than their gun rights. Which leaves tourists and people who come there just to score weed, and neither category has much vested interest in starting some shit.
Ironically, the only people who do regularly bring guns into the community in blatant disregard of the local laws… is the Copenhagen police.

That being said, as **Untoward_Parable **mentioned, anarchism isn’t antithetical with government. It is a form of government. Anarchism is not chaos, and isn’t antithetical to rules and laws either.

[BrainGlutton]

@Kobal2

Believe it or not, a handgun does not grant one the power to hold 600+ people at gunpoint at once . . .

No . . . but it will do for the one guy who actually tries to take it away from you.

[Trinopus]

@Kobal2

I would imagine the community points a finger at the board where the rules of the community are posted, then another at the road leading out of Christiania. Believe it or not, a handgun does not grant one the power to hold 600+ people at gunpoint at once, much less force them to let one live among them.

But the guy doesn’t even need to point the gun. He simply ignores the pointing fingers. Sure, he could get tactical, and shoot the people who are pointing the most emphatically, but, if there are no means of compelling obedience, he can just shrug and continue polishing his gun.

Several people here have said that laws, and the means of enforcing them, are not the same as “a government.” But no one seems to have drawn a completely clear distinction.

You, at least (and thank you!) are the first who has actually described a means of enforcement: the pointing of fingers. I hope you will forgive me for considering it an insufficient means, in the face of intransigence.

The guy says, “Nope. Ain’t leaving.” What next?

I guess a boycott might work; if no one engages with him in any way, he’ll have trouble making ends meet. He’d have to start growing his own food, etc. Passive, non-violent social ostracism has had powerful effects in the past.

But, once more, it requires total unanimity. If even one guy says, “Whoa! I can sell him food! He might be willing to pay a bit more for it!” then the boycott fails. And, once again, how is the boycott enforced without some means?

Mostly however the problem simply does not present itself. Existing citizens agree with the rules they created implicitly. . . .

As has been granted all along, if you have absolute unanimity, then, yes, certainly, this will work. Is this, perhaps, the mechanism? “In true anarchic societies, everyone will implicitly agree to the rules?” It seems contrary to the experience most of us have had of human nature…

That being said, as **Untoward_Parable **mentioned, anarchism isn’t antithetical with government. It is a form of government. Anarchism is not chaos, and isn’t antithetical to rules and laws either.

I suppose so, but I don’t see it. I’d sure like to know more about the actual day-to-day functioning, and how the rules are enforced. Heck, I’d like to know how the rules are created in the first place. Is there a democratic assembly? Or representation? What if there is a lone dissenter? What if there are large numbers of dissenters? How are property disputes settled? How are violent crimes dealt with?

If it is a government, then why does it have its own name. i.e., what makes it specifically not a democracy, or a representative democracy, or a republic, etc.?

And…what are the mechanisms that keep it stable, so that a small group of people do not alter the laws, contradict the intent of the founders, and usurp power? (The question in the OP.)

[BrainGlutton]

@BrainGlutton

True. Anarchism is a tradition very closely associated with Marxism, and most self-ID’d “anarchists” in history have viewed capital and the state as their conjoint enemies – their class enemies, that is, the Marxist-Leninist parlance/paradigm translates exactly to the anarchist side. Any anarchist revolution is, at least in its intent, a class war.

And I’m sure My Favorite Anarchist, Leslie Fish, filk-artist and Wobbly (she showed me her Party/Union card once), would agree wholeheartedly.

[Lumpy]

@BrainGlutton

True. Anarchism is a tradition very closely associated with Marxism, and most self-ID’d “anarchists” in history have viewed capital and the state as their conjoint enemies – their class enemies, that is, the Marxist-Leninist parlance/paradigm translates exactly to the anarchist side. Any anarchist revolution is, at least in its intent, a class war.

To an extent, although by the time of the Russian Revolution the Anarchists and the Bolsheviks were rivals and by the Spanish Civil War were flat-out enemies. Bakunin considered Marx a sell-out.