Or, in the case of post-Soviet Russia, “protection agencies” of various sorts, ranging from crude racketeers, to vaguely legitimate groups that offer guard and negotiation services.
The groups I mentioned above do ultimately back up any kind of business agreement with violence. Although, at least in this case the violence is somewhat self-limiting – nobody wants to be in a bloody turf war.
Bah, that was supposed to be two quotes from Der Trihs, along with my response to each. Mods, can you fix the formatting? I promise to preview the next time I use any coding…
The reason anarchy is so emotionally appealing to some people is because it is the kind of organization we had back in early hunter-gatherer times. No formal heirarchy, all decision making ad hoc, no permanent roles, and anyone who didn’t like the way their group their group was run was free to leave at any time.
Of course, what anarchists can’t seem to understand is that there are multiple reasons no modern society is run this way, as appealing as it might sound on the surface.
You don’t seriously believe this do you? If you’re born in Mexico and decide to move to the United States, sinister men in dark sunglasses most certainly are going to try to spirit you away back to Mexico. Or were you somehow living in a cave for the entire last month, where every other ad on TV was one politician trying to top the other on just how badly he’d treat such people who try to choose their government?
Anyway, the responses in this thread were largely along the lines of what I expected from people who have done little study of modern anarchist theory. I’m a member of another message board in which anarchists comprise a fair percentage of the population. A little study of economics shifted my beliefs from liberalism to classical liberalism (aka, libertarianism). I tried to resist the inevitable pull of full-on market anarchism, but failed.
Anyway, would anyone be interested in an “Ask the anarchist” thread? I might even be able to convert a couple of the hard core libertarians on here.
Precisely. Or, to put it another way, anarchists are opposed to any formal system of organization that depends on a hierarchy of (some) people over (other) people. That certainly doesn’t preclude organization, any more than being opposed to an official policy of primogeniture means no one can have land, any more than refraining from eating beef makes one a vegetarian.
People participate in anarchies all the time: when you go fishing with your buddies and the 3-6 of you handle the excursion and the boat and the drive to & from etc without establishing a formal pecking order of authority, well, gee, guess what? Does it exist in a vacuum? No. But who said that in order for anarchy to supplant traditional archic authority structures, the only strategy possible is to overthrow all existing governments and then set up a working anarchy? I know I didn’t!
And if you have no trouble seeing how 5 people can go on an anarchic fishing trip, but still can’t see how that would work for 10 billion people and the entirety of the endeavors of the species, well, congratulations, you’ve just discovered the need for structure. Most of us don’t think the “fishing trip” scales upwards very nicely, either, or did you not know that?
The right kind of question, but the typical kind of tone that usually permeates these threads…one which, if you’ll pardon me for singling you out as an example, doesn’t sound to me like someone who is interested in discussing anarchic means of resolving disputes (and making decisions, and so forth and so on), so much as it sounds like someone tossing it forth incredulously as a reason Why Anarchy Can’t Work.
I’m not interested in discussing Why Anarchy Can’t Work.
Anyone willing to completely suspend any inclination to trash the entire endeavor, and focus instead on the particulars of this or that structure / strategy need only say so.
I truly didn’t mean to tick you off with my tone. But it seems that the theory (if I understand it as you described in your post) has some really big problems.
We also may be using alternative definitions of “government.” Whenever there is a third party mediator to disputes, whom all parties agree will guide the outcome of disputes, I call that a government.
Whether this authority is vested in a party (or parties) by tradition (monarchs), brute force (tyrrany), the consent of each individual governed (pure democracy), or by “everyone together” (communitarianism) it is still a government. A thing which governs. A system of rules that binds everyone equally.
In other words, in my mind, A system of rules that binds everyone equally, as well as someone designated to make determinations on how situations fit those rules = goverment.
That would not be an anarchy. The third party “mediator” would be the “decider”, putting that person in a position of power over the other people.
If there is any differentiation between the role played by Person A in this system and Person B in this system, it’s not anarchy.
A systematic decision-making structure need not make any structural hierarchies of people over other people in order to constitute a structure of how decisions are made and of what decisions have, in fact, been made, and how permanently, and who is and who is not under their jurisdiction (if that’s the word for it; it’ll do, for now).
The problem with the “fishing boat” model is not that “when you get more people someone’s gotta be in charge”, but rather “when you get more people, you need a formal arrangement for when people speak and how to determine that a decision has been reached and what it means”.
Oh: and, as any good conservative would tell you — think “decentralization” 
I’m sometimes an anarchist and sometimes a leftist liberal.
Back when I was a theist, I was an anarchist. And they were tied together.
I ditched the theism. The “Gee, God must have a plan to take care of all of us!” had to go, too. All of a sudden, this was the only life I had, and there was no invisible support system making sure the worthy were all safe and cozy. So the anarchism turned to libertarianism which turned to whateverthehellIamism.
It’s the lack of hierarchy that’s the problem for me. Humans are hierarchal primates with a strong tendancy to either lead or follow. In any group of people leaders and followers will tend to emerge. At a certain population, Leader A finds he has a group of followers willing to do whatever the leader has convinced them is best for the group, and they end up attacking Leader B and his followers to take possession of some resource, and boom, nothing has changed at all. Anarchists and libertarians have a lot more faith in their fellow humans than I think history warrants. Certainly more than I do.
Believing in the existence of God or the possibility that society can function without a system of government both require a leap of faith in something that has no proof in the world as we know it. Atheists and non-Anarchists are both people who want to see some evidence before they accept the existence of something.
I’m not going to do Yet Another Thread About Why Anarchy Just Won’t Work™.
For the duration of this thread, please just imagine in response to any post asserting that for some Reason X or Reason Y anarchy Just Couldn’t Work, that I’ve posted a subsequent reply saying that I disagree?
For me it’s like having a theory about how to build an airplane, and instead of folks looking at the design and joining me in thinking about ways that an “airplane” could exist and work, people just keep talking about the reasons why “man will never fly”.
There’s nothing to be gained by joining in that kind of conversation, but I have a hard time leaving such statements unchallenged, so please consider them to be automatically challenged, and I won’t clog up the place with my argumentative posts.
Who decides what the “formal arrangement for when people speak” is?
I’m an anarchist, you’re an anarchist (OK, so you’re not…pretend you are and go along with me a bit…), she’s an anarchist, and that guy over there’s an anarchist.
I invite y’all to come over — I’ve got an idea for how we could implement. You don’t have to come over. If you do come over, you don’t have to agree to participate. I’m going to propose that we start off with my idea, and I say that, like the American Constitution, it’s designed to be amendable from within, and I’m going to ask that y’all try to modify it (as you find useful and appropriate) from within. But of course you may not agree to do that either, and may have some counterproposals for how we play with (or don’t play with) my implementation ideas.
That gal over there may have some of here own ideas about implementation. Maybe we talk for hours about the relative merits of her ideas versus mine. Possibly we decide we’d like to try hers (we can always come back to mine later, or, if hers also has a means of making modifications from within, maybe I can graft some of the best parts of my ideas into her structure). Or maybe we’ll see if we can merge the two concepts beforehand and then try implementation.
There are 300,000,000 people in this country. How are they all going to fit in your house?
You’re doing it again and I’m stupid enough to play along.
:smack:
See post 32
Back in the day when DesertWife and I were active in the Libertarian party, I quipped that the difference between Libertarians and Anarchists seemed to be about $10,000 a year. Adjust to 15 or 20-grand today to allow for inflation.
This sums up almost perfectly what I entered this thread to say.
So your ideas are too poor to be critically examined?
I am not going to sit by and help you dream up rationales for your philosophy. You are the one who wants to uproot society, you tell me why it’ll work, and you tell me why my concerns are unfounded. Don’t clam up and start sulking when people disagree with you and then complain that no one pays your philosophy any respect.
In other words, if anyone offers any criticism I’m taking my ball and going home.
We live in a nation of three hundered million people. I assume you advocate anarchism as a practical real social system. I would like to hear concrete, specific, proposals for the implementation of anarchy in the United States. I would like to hear how heavy industry would operate, if there would be any mechanisms for environmental protection or workplace safety standards. I would like to hear how this anarchist society would deal with non-anarchist countries beyond its borders, particularly in purchasing needed resources like oil and minerals. And yes I would like to hear how anarchy would deal with violent sociopaths and ordinary contract disputes.
Do you really have no answers for these questions? I can’t believe that. You seem like an intelligent person, so you must have some proposals for implementing anarchy in the U.S.A.
All I’ve heard so far is something about inviting a few people to your house and talking about a constitution. I’ve heard nothing from you about its implementation.