Why I Am An Anarchist
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In any case, he doesn't answer the central question that arguing for anarchy inevitably provokes: once we take away the power monopoly of government, what's to stop someone from seizing power by force and being far worse than any government that preceded them?
The problem with the Hitler example is that that's pretty much exactly what Hitler did. Weimar Germany was far from a model of sane government; it felt powerless after the war, it was crippled economically and it lacked real leadership. The spirit of nationalism that had made Germany such a powerful force before WWI had been broken by its defeat, and Hitler took power by stepping in to fill the void that it left.
In other words, the Hitler example is exactly what a sane government prevents. The problem there wasn't the fact that there was a government in power; it was that there wasn't one. Anarchy was the problem, not the solution.
The argument is akin to "beef can give you food poisoning, so we should eradicate all cows".
Everyone hates paying taxes... But anarchy? Come on. The fabric of the society that has advanced so far in the last 300 years is built on, at the very least, property rights and stability
Umm, the strong will out even with govt. In fact, govt will enforce the will of the strong.
Consider how eminent domain works in the US. One of the seminal cases in the US involved GM wanting to build a plant where a bunch of poor people lived. The local govt took the land under eminent domain and basically gave it to GM. (It's the "poletown" case if you're looking for cites.)
Yes, you get to vote, but as they say, democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting over what to have for dinner.
Those aren't the only possibilities. (And relatively incorrupt is optimistic. It isn't consistently corrupt.)
Consider the sudan (no functioning govt) with zimbabwe (malevolent govt). It's not obvious that the sudan is worse.
Also, remember that the effective genocides have had govt backing.
Or "beef can give you food poisoning, we shouldn't eat beef". Actually, it sounds like he is saying "beef always eventually leads to poisoning" so I don't know if your analogy holds up at all.
Anarchy doesn't mean no authority, it just means the least amount of justifiable authority. People always associate Anarchy with chaos and lawlessness, which is not correct.
We will never see an anarchy society in our lifetime, though. This is more an exercise in idealism. e.g. the only type of political system that is ethically justifiable is anarchy.
And an anarchist would suggest that that's exactly why the problems that we have have manifested today.
Anarchism is something that's hard to have an actual discussion on. The word has too much baggage. Anarchists are viewed as utopians, there's been a lot of inter-faction arguing, and politics are frankly boring. The modern anarchist movement hasn't been able to connect their message to anything that's relevant. As much as I dislike CrimeThinc, they make a really good points in "Your Politics are Boring as Fuck"[1].
Even if you don't think that ridding the world of rulers is a good thing, fundamentally, anarchism's message of truly caring for people still holds value. Groups like Food Not Bombs, Homes not Jails, and many cooperative organizations do a lot of good in the world. You might be surprised to find that even the Black Bloc isn't just a bunch of kids breaking things, though this is endlessly debated every time the G20 comes to town.
What is the message? I usually just hear unfocused discontent. Saying "Grrr evil government" makes for a fun sense of solidarity and good conversation as you try to screw that cute girl from your collective. It doesn't, however, lead many people to thinking up scalable alternatives to government.
It seems to me that "Anarchism is something that's hard to have an actual discussion on" because most anarchists are either focused on (1) a perpetual oppositional stance to government (fun for them, but what's there to discuss?) or (2) creating or helping a small community. The second category is laudible but still offers almost nothing in the way of big-picture political solutions.
> I usually just hear unfocused discontent.
Yeah, this is the exact problem I'm talking about. It's absolutely true, there's a lot of that going around. A large part of the 'why' is that if you're an anarchist, you probably care about politics a lot. And you feel like you have answers. And then you see things like the absolute robbery of the American people via the bank bailout, and the most you see... is some harsh words. Nobody's even upset. A single dollar lost is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. It's easy to become angry when you have very strong feelings, feel that you have answers, and then are totally ignored by most people, while you watch them make the exact mistakes you were trying to warn them about.
Not that any of that is an excuse; it's exactly why anarchism has continued to be marginalized. It's something that we'll have to collectively get over in order to move forward, and frankly, I'm not sure if it'll happen any time soon.
> thinking up scalable alternatives to government.
I think that one of the conclusion that you come to if you follow the anarchist line of thinking is that there is no _scalable_ alternative to government. Once you start building huge communities, the human element of humans is lost. To use the same saying twice in one post, one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic; humans simply can't care for large numbers of other humans. Their humanity disappears. So the only way to move forward is to build a decentralized network of smaller communities, rather than yet bigger ones. The British empire fell because it was growing too large; the American one is following suit. I don't think, for example, nationalized health care can possibly work at the levels of population that America currently has. We're not only significantly larger, but much more spread out, which makes it even harder to care about what happens to those crazy people on the other coast.
> fun for them, but what's there to discuss?
It's true, there's not a lot to discuss amongst the rational, educated opponent, but here, where 'socialism' means 'The government takes my money and gives it to the black people,' we have a lot of educating to do. And once you get past the terminology, there are a lot of implementation questions. Since there have been relatively few anarchist societies[1], there are a lot of unanswered questions about how they'd be run. Then again, there's a lot of possible ways that a community could be built, and they're not all mutually exclusive. Just like different states have different laws, there are a lot of options for an anarchist community.
> The second category is laudible but still offers almost nothing in the way of big-picture political solutions.
True. I think that I've already covered that the bigger picture is a smaller picture, though.
1: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_anarc...
My problem is this. I agree a utopian society is an anarchist society. But it seems to me that the only way anarchy can work is in a world where resources aren't scarce.
As soon as resources become scarce, you have conflict. As soon as you have conflict, you need a way to resolve it fairly.
I just can't understand the "how" of anarchy.
This is something that I'm still actively exploring. I only have an understanding from a high level on all of this; the details are quite fuzzy to me.
To give you some background, I'm coming from what's basically the a hardcore right-libertarian place. However, eventually, I've come around to realizing that the world is a bit more complex than "remove the rules and everything will work out." I was only thinking about some of the rules, I had just assumed that capitalism was the way things _had_ to be. The more that I compared my beliefs about capitalism to my former beliefs about religion, the more I came to understand that I believed in those things simply because they were stated to me as fact for a long period of time.
Anyway, what I believe: I don't really believe in a police force, to be totally honest. I've said before that "I'm a middle class white kid from the suburbs, so if I don't like the police, I can only imagine what it must be like for others." I try to avoid as much contact with police as possible, because they only cause more problems. I think that social constructs hold society together much more than the threat of punishment. People respond much better to positive reinforcement than negative. Authority will always be abused.
In general, I believe the world would be a better place if we tried working together rather than fighting. If people actually knew their neighbors and built communities. If more people gave rather than took. I also think that we've been conditioned to be adversarial, and that it can be unlearned, albeit with hard work.
I agree a lot with raganwald: http://raganwald.posterous.com/hello-my-name-is-reginald-and...
I also recognize that we're not living in such a place, and so I try to live in a way that's closest to my ideals, knowing that I'll never get there. My house is run collectively, I try to support organizations that do good, I attempt to help others as much as possible. I think that entrepreneurship is a great path for doing a lot of good for society.
> As soon as you have conflict, you need a way to resolve it fairly.
I think that you underestimate how different an anarchic society would be, and overestimate how scarce goods really are. But in any case, don't think that anarchy means no conflict resolution, as the saying goes, "anarchy means no rulers, not no rules." Anarchists believe in direct democracy, generally speaking. A lot of these kinds of details are the ones that haven't been worked out yet, or would differ from one community to the next.
For example, someone decides to kick your teeth in and steal your wallet. Without police, what's your recourse? Vigilantism? What prevents a rising escalation of retaliatory vigilantism? Hasn't society been down this road, in both micro and macro scenarios, many times before?
I touched upon this a bit; I think that the police don't have as big of a deterrent effect as you'd think. Social structures such as "I don't want to get robbed, so I don't rob others" play a much larger role.
This is a large and complex question, and so I'm going to bow out to the FAQ, which has a pretty in-depth discussion of this topic: http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secI5.html#seci58
TL;DR, most crime wouldn't exist under anarchism, because many crimes simply aren't crimes anymore. There's no incentive for someone to steal my wallet, because a small piece of leather isn't really useful.
> Hasn't society been down this road, in both micro and macro scenarios, many times before?
We have, and we still haven't found a good answer. Are you saying petty theft is nonexistent today? Plenty of people still steal wallets.
Minor fact check: the government has gotten back almost all the money spent on TARP. The current outstanding bill is fifty billion; even that much may drop to nothing by the time the car companies and AIG finish paying off. (Source: last night's All Things Considered.)
Frankly, the war is a bigger issue anyway.
Yeah, but widespread bank failures would have completely wrecked the economy, as in the Great Depression. The people worst hurt would have been the ordinary workers losing their jobs, not the bankers.
A better compromise would have been for the bailout to come with real pain for the banking execs—fines, or blacklisting, or at least compensation caps.
Frankly, the war is a bigger issue anyway.
Yes.
This dilemma already exists, one examples is welfare. Now you may agree or disagree that welfare is good or bad, but surely there is some degree of welfare that is too much, and it will reach this limit eventually if it already hasn't.
I liked the quote: "...democracy is a terrible form of government, but eight times better than any other." -Winston Churchill
I do not agree that anarchy is the solution, although democracy has it's flaws, it does indeed seem eight times better than anything else... Or at least anything that could practically be done. I think the ideal solution would be to create a very basic set of laws that guarantees individual rights. And make any form of new laws impossible.
But how practical is this idea? The only way I can see it happening is if some rich dude buys an island and puts investment in it to get its economic foundation going. Yes I know crazy idea.
Sealand is an interesting example, some sort of British military base on a platform in the North Sea was claimed and declared an independent country, with little recognition by any established countries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand)
Example: Take down a plane full of people to save a building full of people?
Indeed, not only is strong local governance a good preventative measure against the unlikely military coup, it works for all kinds of things. Want socialized healthcare? No reason your state can't do it. Don't want a national war on drugs? California is about find out if one is actually constitutional.
When you have states with economies that are larger than most countries, there is no reason to be bumping so many responsibilities up to the federal level.
If this was the case, then personal handguns should be made illegal, and assault weapons should be available to all with appropriate training.
Handguns aren't going to do much if the US government decides to ethnically cleanse a state.
Tanks, not so much.
* helicopters
* jet airplanes
* satellites
* artillery
* light armored vehicles
* unmanned drones
etc.
As a side note, I fucking hate HN's formatting.
Secondly, Somalia has done really well without government, depending on who you ask. There are studies that show [2] that it's only after the UN started screwing around and trying to impose a state that it stabilized into smaller, community-level governments. I'm no expert on Somalia, but you also have to recognize that when the institution of a state is recognized as the default condition, even a successful transition to anarchism would be talked about as 'failed.'
1: http://c4ss.org/content/2859
2: http://www.independent.org/publications/working_papers/artic...
> All anarchists recognize that there needs to be significant social change before anarchism could happen
I would go further and point out that there needs to be significant physiological change before some kind of idealized anarchism could happen. Humans - no, primates - organize themselves into groups and leaders emerge. A multitude of small groups tends to lead to resource conflicts and enforced conformance within the groups.
The irony of anarchism is that in almost all dimensions you are more free under a centralized government. Belong to a minority religion or sexuality? Have fun with that one in a society lacking strong laws protecting all individuals. Don't like where you're living? Have fun moving across the country. Got poisoned by a negligent food manufacturer? Too damn bad.
There is always a tension between individuality and collectivity in governments. Like communism is the insane end of the scale for the latter, anarchism is the for former.
> The irony of anarchism is that in almost all dimensions you are more free under a centralized government.
While I agree with your comment in spirit, there's a lot of real-world problems with this. Ask anyone with a minority sexuality if they feel protected by the law. And it's not just 'gay marriage' that I'm talking about, there's communities that are even further marginalized, like the polyamory community. Their lifestyle is explicitly illegal... Basically, all I'm saying is that this idea of equal protection under the law is the exact same as equal protection under anarchism: only an ideal.
> Like communism is the insane end of the scale for the latter, anarchism is the for former.
I've really come to dislike dualisms in politics, because the abstraction is always leaky. Anarchism is still a collectivist political philosophy, though it does focus a lot on the individual...
Agreed - I have no trouble with "here are some ideas from anarchism which might be part of a solution." But "anarchism is the solution" seems like simple extremism to me.
With reference to esr's essay, if the diagnosis is demagoguery, I think education and basic social welfare are a better prescription than anarchism.
Good discussion and interesting points - thanks!
When I read "Market Forces" (scifi) I thought, very entertaining but completely unrealistic. In the absence of government, maybe not.
That's not to say that corporate entities wouldn't be able to adapt and fill the power vacuum, but they wouldn't resemble corporations as we know them today, and they likely wouldn't resemble some of the silly concoctions that you sometimes see in SF (_Venus Incorporated_, etc.)
If a national government decided to let an independent fiat currency be developed by an independent corporation, and all the other corporations, such as banks, agreed to use that fiat currency, that currency would have the same value: you need it to trade for your needs because you get paid in it.
It is not clear why trade could not continue in the absence of the federal government, as all the banks would probably be willing to lend to corporations with good credit, and they would probably continue storing their reserves in those banks.
In other words, I think you assume too many magical steps.