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Comment by Kalium | Hacker News Reader

Experiments show that anarchocommunism works... in small groups, in larger, non-anarchocommunist contexts.

Which is to say it doesn't scale. At all. Rendering it pretty useless at the kind of scale its adherents postulate it at.

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Experiments merely show that anarchocommunism attracts violence seeking to preserve authority. That is nothing new. Violence has always been the root of hierarchy. Whether it is the abolition of hierarchy or contention between old and new hierarchy, violence has always been the preferred cure and preventive.

Anarchism need not be seen merely as a state of a society. Anarchism can also be seen as a means, a method of collaborating with people. One can see anarchism everywhere in daily life and in struggles that are not specifically for the abolition of states. The root of the many anarchist political ideologies is the thought that a human being is best when she freely associates with her human beings and acts in collaboration with the world. As a method of being, it is useful even to people who care not to get involved in the grand affairs of the world.

Like many ideas and vegetables, the root of anarchism is perhaps its most useful bit.

If your form of government, or I guess in anarchocommunisms case form of non-government, can't protect and perpetuate itself then it isn't a very good system at all. It seems like that you are saying that anarchocommunisms failures aren't legitimate because they were stopped with violence and treachery. To a lot of people it seems like the entire point of a government is to organize ourselves into some form of hierarchy to protect ourselves against violence and treachery so anarchocommunism having not being able to do this is its ultimate failure.

First, it's a misconception that anarchists are against governance. They're against the "state," a hierarchical form of government. They didn't have difficulty organizing for defense/violence--in fact, a common criticism of the Spanish anarchist movement was the appropriation of farm land by force. The failure was due to the coordinated efforts of both capitalist democracies and authoritarian communists to impede their efforts at maintaining their society. Most importantly, IIRC, steel shipments from the US were halted, which reduced their fighting ability.

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