Blake, you seem to be saying that anarchy isn’t inherently wrong but that it wouldn’t be sustainable and that there would be a tendency for society to drift to an authoritarian state. Am I right in assuming you think it would be a bad idea to do a sort of reset and establish anarchy because all the possible forms of authoritarianism are worse than the ones we have now and there is no guarantee we would get even our current system back?
Because it eventually results in the current state of society. Which anarchists, by and large, are not entirely fond of.
In a more short term prospect, it’s counterproductive because the guy getting robbed is going to come back at Mr. Knife with friends and knives of their own. Or at the very least warn every other player that Mr. Knife has, in fact, a knife that he’s willing to use to rob people and as such should be kicked from the game.
Yes, I know the tragedy of the commons. But this is what I’m talking about: your fishermen asked the state to butt in, because each of them individually thought “why, I’m concerned that salmon is dwindling and don’t want to overfish them, but *those *jerks are going to put us all out of business for short term gains and I can’t trust them to be as sensible as me”.
This assumption that the other guy is going to fuck you is the problem, and it’s really hard to get rid of… because people operating on this assumption, which is most everyone right now, really *do *want to fuck you over first.
[QUOTE=Blake]
And how could that ever possibly happen?
Have you ever watched two young children play? Without any education or indoctrination whatsoever both children will be just *waiting *for the first opportunity to fuck the other. Children are inherently and instinctively selfish little fucks, as are all juvenile mammals. They can’t be otherwise.
[/QUOTE]
It’s a good thing anarchist self-governing communes aren’t made up of young children acting on instinct, then.
Hey, I never said it was perfect.
That being said, no need for mind control when the whole thing is voluntary. If you love authoritarian government so much, why don’t you just move across the border of my sovereign autarkic anarchist island paradise ? 
Anarchy is inherently bad, because it would cause the deaths of billions of people. That meets my definition of bad.
Under a system with no government, nobody can be prevented from doing whatever they want. That includes fraud and theft. With unlimited scope for fraud, even if only by one person in a million, you can’t have a stock market. You can’t maintain any sort of intellectual property, hence almost no research and development. The only property that anybody will bother to acquire will be what they can physically control. Real estate and tools may not devalue, but stocks, shares, loans or intellectual property will be worthless.
The subsequent economic collapse will lead to most people on Earth dying of starvation in very short order. This isn’t the result of some alternative form of government springing up, it’s the result of anarchy of any form. Would you bother to invest in shares when the only safeguard against outright fraud is the goodwill of every single person on the planet?
Yes, the inevitable rise of a military dictatorship from any form of anarchy would be a terrible thing, but in terms of suffering and death, it would probably be preferable to what would happen if anarchy were magically maintained. Essentially, any government at all is preferable to no government because once you have rulers, they have an incentive to protect what they rule, in a state of anarchy nobody can have any investment in anything beyond what they can physically guard.
It’s a good thing that nobody ever suggested that anarchist self-governing communes are made up of young children acting on instinct, then.
There is a need for mind control for the reason already pointed out. Simply saying that it will be universally volountary doesn’t address the issue that it can only ever be universally volountary if the society doesn’t contain any free-willed humans.
Yes, that is what would happen. All the conmen and gangsters and violent criminals would flee Anarchia and its utterly defenceless citizens, and move across the border where an authoritarian government has invested billions in a law enforcement system. :smack:
The guy with the knife is not an anarchist, in fact he doesn’t give a fuck what far reaching consequences his actions cause.
You assume every potential victim has the same connections, mr knife wielder will be very good at noticing which ones do and which ones do not.
Kicked from the game? Is that a euphemism for death? What game I thought we’re talking about a society here. So unless mr knife agrees to go back to peaceful living you can either kill him or imprison him.
It’s not a euphemism for anything - I was merely thinking in terms of games theory.
Actually there’s the third option of simply escorting him to the border, but yes. And ? Why would an anarchistic commune be unable to do either ? More to the point perhaps, how is that any different from the way authoritarian governments deal with the Mr. Knifes of the world ?
[QUOTE=Blake]
There is a need for mind control for the reason already pointed out. Simply saying that it will be universally volountary doesn’t address the issue that it can only ever be universally volountary if the society doesn’t contain any free-willed humans.
[/QUOTE]
Considering voluntary self-governed anarchist communes actually exist in the real world, work just fine and do not involve any amount of mind control (although heavy use of marijuana seems to be the norm :p), I find this argument somewhat dubious.
Why would the citizens of Anarchia be utterly defenceless, exactly ? Check it out, man. We’ve got tactical smart missiles, phase plasma pulse rifles, RPGs. We got sonic, electronic ball breakers. We got nukes, we got knives, we got sharp sticks.
If another may answer… I very much agree with your first sentence: I think that anarchy is intrinsically unstable, and would morph (within seconds!) into some other form of authority. Not necessarily authoritarian: it might morph into a representative system.
I sort of agree with your second sentence… But not absolutely. An “established” anarchy might devolve into an enlightened monarchy, for instance, which, even if authoritarian, isn’t necessarily horrid. But it’s the “no guarantee” clause that gets me: the anarchy might just as easily devolve into Pol Pot’s tyranny. It’s wholly unpredictable. We might get enlightened philosopher kings…or we might get Nehemiah Scudder.
The “Weak Fukuyama Principle” has some historical support. Over time, as nations get big and rich and educated, there is some gravitation toward representative democracies. In the long run, after any number of decades of utter hell, we’d probably re-invent a parliamentary system of representation and basic civil rights.
But we have that now! Why burn it to the ground, and wait through who-knows-what, just to regain it?
I’m not convinced anarchy is even theoretically possible, if you simply define it as lack of a social contract. It would fall apart at a plain denotative level the second two people develop an implicit contract of “you steal my stuff and you’ll be sorry.”
The only reason these work is they are self selected groups of individuals with an almost religious devotion to making it work, AND in the end they are still backed up by the government of the place the commune is located in.
Oh. Well then obviously it can’t count as a functioning society, then.
Wait a minute…
Err… no, no they aren’t, not usually, no. Quite the opposite, in fact.
That wasn’t really my sentence as such. I was asking Blake if he thought that. A chaotic free for all without any institutions would be a hell on Earth. When anarchists suggest anarchy, critics think Fallout 3 and it probably would be if it meant just throwing out everything without putting some alternatives in place first.
Aye but there’s never any guarantees you can really trust when it comes to the biggest issues like the future of society. There are lots of ways an anarchist society can be arranged. I tend to believe in markets and money for example so my ideal is what’s known as mutualism. There are others which I think would be inclined to fail or at least not thrive. Anarcho-primitivism for example. No offense intended to the anarcho-primitives of course. Part of the feature set of a successful arrangement would be mechanisms that prevent regression to a monarchical, feudal or capitalist state.
Well, decades of hell will leave us with some messed up people. I shudder to think what sort of system would be devised by a society where nearly everybody has PTSD. It’s kind of the way I think of a weak young man after his first couple months alone in an American maximum security jail. I guess he won’t be thinking of how life could be better for everyone if they would engage in mutual aid and resist hierarchical power structures. He might just be wishing one of the gang bosses would take him under his wing the way many people insist we need a state to protect us from the even worse guys than the state.
Agreed. Burning it all down is a shit idea. We can repurpose a lot of what there is now but we need to get the alternatives in place first. Cooperatives that can feed, house and provide work for people rather than corporations and landlords being the obvious option. Councils and federations of councils that can take over the work of elected officials and bureaucrats.
Anarchy isn’t an unattainable utopia. There are resilient anarchist communities all over the world offering the people in them a better alternative than anything else available. If we keep replacing the structures provided by capitalists and the state, the whole structure gets hollowed out with the state remaining as a thin eggshell in many cases.
Theory is great, but it needs to be put into practice to produce a functional society.
Because there is no mechanism for doing so.
Anarchism means that everybody has an equal ability to imprison everybody else. Criminals can imprison anybody who threatens their criminal activities, and there is no intrinsic mechanism to stop them doing so. Kidnap and slavery cannot be illegal under an anarchist system, because once you have an organization that sets a policy kidnapping illegal and an organisation that enforces that policy, you have a government.
Your only recourse against criminals is for the victims, as you put it “come back at Mr. Knife with friends and knives of their own”. That is simply mob justice: a vigilante lynch mob armed with knives. Whichever group has the most friends prepared to risk their lives in a knife fight is going to decide what is acceptable. Simple as that.
In governed societies, the state uses it s coercive powers to ensure that it always has more people prepared to take up arms than any criminal gang. But your anarchist society can not do that. Nobody is going to risk their lives in order that someone that they have never met can kill someone who did something that is neither illegal nor immoral and you can’t coerce people into helping. You can’t try to psychologically motivate people into dealing with criminals by appealing to concepts such as justice, because whoever does that motivating is setting social policy and declaring which acts are just and what the punishment should be. That person is a ruler and the people who help him are a government.
This is the whole problem with anarchism. By definition everybody has to be free to do whatever they like, with no threat from any entity that sets or enforces social policy. As soon as any group sets and enforces it is a government.
So you really do have to rely on uncoordinated groups of people with a common interest to try to imprison criminals. But in the real world, criminals will find it far easier to recruit help than working people. Criminals are self selected: people who are unable or unwilling to fight and kill aren’t going to choose to become criminals, so on average criminals will always be better fighters and killers. Victims in contrast are deliberately selected by criminals. Criminals don’t rob the Hell’s Angels headquarters, they rob the old people’s homes. IOW criminals always shave the advantage of picking whre the fight takes place and against whom. Criminals don’t need to work, so they can train to fight, which working people can not do. Someone who has nothing stands to gain by joining a criminal gang, so almost any poor young person is likely to be on the side trying to imprison or steal from workers. In contrast a working woman with a family is not going to get into a knife fight against a well trained gang of criminals just to avenge a robbery from a complete stranger.
And this just goes on and on. Criminal gangs will always win under your system where whoever has the most knives gets to do what he wants. You need to tell us how you intend to redress that imbalance. In the real world governments redress it by setting social policy that actually proscribes behaviours such as theft, so people who commit theft know that they will get punished if caught. That proscription is backed up by a government that uses it coercive powers to ensure that it always has more and better armed fighters through the use of a standing army paid for by taxes. But an anarchist society can’t set social policies and enforce them, because that is the very definition of a government. And it sure can’t coerce people into paying taxes. However criminal gangs can set social policy and they can coerce people into paying taxes.
So how is your anarchist society going to go about imprisoning Al Capone, for example?
Can you name this self-governed anarchist commune that has never had any recourse to using the police, using any publicly funded roads, using public health systems and so forth? Because I find that very hard to believe.
It’s very easy to set up a commune that has total economic exchange with the outside world and total protection of the US army and US justice system. Such a commune could function under any system of government at, including the “sitting on my arse doing nothing and begging to make money” system which many of them have used. That does not make those communes examples of societies that work just fine under that system. They are societies that are parasitic on the wider nation.
For example, what is stopping a gang of bikers from entering these communes and raping all the women, for example? Oh, that’s right. That would be a crime, and you can bet your balls the commune members would report such a crime to the police. What is to stop the child of a commune member rejecting the rules of the commune and selling off all the land? Oh, that’s right, the US courts enforce the title deeds. And so on and so forth.
It’s all very nice saying that these are functional anarchic communes, but they are not in any sense. They rely entirely for their existence on the US court system and, ultimately, the US army. If you believe otherwise, then why don’t the people in Somalia who want peace simply set up these communes. In there they would then be immune to the war going on around them
The criminals have all those things too. They must do. You can’t have a social policy that forbids them from owning them.
Oops, my apologies.
Ooh, someone else who says “Aye!” 
And, to be sure, nobody has yet devised a system that is both protective of individual rights and yet robust enough to withstand all assaults by the organized forces of evil. Representative systems come pretty close.
I guess I’m just stuck with it as a “truism” or a matter of faith: divided power seems to work fairly well, but I just can’t make myself believe in a working system that isn’t based upon power.
I guess it is the question of those protective mechanisms that inspired the thread to begin with. What can possibly be strong enough to resist the temptation to unbalanced power…and yet also be wise enough not to use that very strength?
I adore free markets…but only once they have a few regulations on top of 'em, to keep 'em from being inhuman.
Of all the things you’d think humans ought to be able to agree on without a need for governments and regulations, it would be “don’t pollute.” Don’t pee in the drinking water! And yet, that’s exactly what we do without there being strongly enforced laws against it.
Alas, I only see Homeowners’ Associations and their grotesque desire to enforce the most intrusive possible regulations. (And I dread street gangs.)
Well… Forgive me… I can’t make myself believe this. I think it is a beautiful testament to human goodness that people like you do believe it, and I wish that I could belong to a species that could accomplish such things.
I won’t say “You’re wrong.” But, alas, I’m stuck on “I don’t see it, myself.”
I’m sorry but no a commune composed of one generation of self selected believers is not a society, like I said it only works because everyone WANTS it to.
And yes they are, if a biker gang attacks the commune you are seriously telling me the inhabitants will not make any effort to contact law enforcement?
Also, one of the earliest and classical Game Theory exercises was the “Hawks and Doves” game, which showed the vulnerability of systems to predation.
The origin of civilization itself: we can’t oppose raiders, bandits, and pillagers with non-violence. And once we’ve started planting fields for food, we can’t even run away. The only functioning defense is force, which means professional soldiers. And since we don’t want them to become our overlords, we devise systems of laws to keep them from becoming predators.
Personally, I think that “divided government” is the single best thing humanity has ever invented.* It gives as many as possible of the advantages that people would like to receive from anarchism – civil rights, rational laws, a government that protects and benefits us – and yet still offers a fair-to-middling chance of not being tyrannical.
The fact that this fails every so often, and that there are tyrants is not, I think, a condemnation of government per se. Just a nasty reminder that bad guys are damned persistent.
*(Cheese is also way up there on that list!)
Nonsense. Or only true for your very narrow understanding/definition of anarchism, which boils down to “because I said so”.
More nonsense. First, because criminaling *is *work, and unpleasant dangerous work at that. Second, because most educated people are not violent criminals, nor want to be, nor would be if they could just get away with it. Third, because antisocial types don’t exactly play well together, sort of by definition.
You’re neglecting the equally self-selected group of people who are willing to fight to protect the community. Which, all other things being equal, will likely be more numerous than those who are willing to fight just to destroy it.
Don’t believe me ? Log onto any MMORPG. There’s not one iota of government there, and yet mobs of vigilantes will spontaneously form up the minute some asshole sets up shop to kill weakling newbies over and over for the lulz. Criminals are always the minority.
You do realize that it’s capitalist society that gave rise to Capone in the first place, right ?
Freetown Christiania seems to be doing just fine, thank you very much. Granted, they’re probably food-dependant on account of sitting in the middle of Copenhagen. But then, I don’t really see how roads, hospitals and so forth absolutely depend on an authoritarian government to exist.
Actually, Christiania did have a biker problem for a time, when outside gangs tried to muscle in on the MJ trade. Dunno how they sorted it out, but they don’t any more. Nor do they rely on the Copenhagen police to enforce their 9 laws.
The citizen of Christiania will be puzzled to hear this
Because they’re by and large uneducated, live on a subsistence farming level (if that) and wouldn’t know a self-governing democracy from a hole in the ground ?
More “because I said so” nonsense. Christiania bans guns and bulletproof vests. Christiania is a self-determined anarchist commune. Ergo, anarchist communes can have social policies banning gun ownership, by mutual consent.
Blows the mind, I know. They must not be real Scots.
And you keep missing the obvious oxymoron there. It’s like saying “well the only reason Einstein was a great scientist is because he was extraordinarily smart and highly educated”. How is a congregation of people setting out to make their own idea of a better society work not a society ? It’s really not a trick question.
Its like saying a guy camping out in the middle of central park is on his own in the wilderness because he has decided to live only off what he can forage and catch, why he could even be attacked and he has sworn he won’t call for police.
It really is way different than if he was actually in the middle of the wilderness with no possible hope of assistance or way to call for it, and absolutely no hope of law enforcement protection.
Anarchism wasn’t Kropotkin’s philosophy (in the sense I’m reading here, of him being its founder). It wasn’t any one person’s, and if you wanted to make a case that it had one, Proudhon is a much better candidate - he was the first person to call himself an anarchist.
You have never used this definition once.
I do know this, and don’t care, because it is not relevant to the discussion.
I have made no such mistake and I believe my posts on the matter accepted my debate opponents’ use of the word “government” rather than imposing my own ideas about government on the thread.
I have argued exactly the opposite and my posts in this thread stand testament to that.
No, you haven’t demonstrated anything.
I have already said that if this is your standard, you win. It is a really stupid standard, but you are welcome to use it. If you use it, anarchy is of course impossible. I have not once in this thread disagreed on this point. Admitting such ideas trivially “disprove” the possibility of anarchy was in fact how I entered the thread.
Non sequitur, much ?