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Comment by elgfare | Hacker News Reader

This was interesting, I learned something.

The problem with anarchy is that everyone must be a good anarchist for it to work. Our current society is also dependent on most people being good anarchists, but it's also more resilient against non-anarchists.

Also, removing state power structures will not remove all power structures. There will still be people with lots of material or social capital providing them with power.

My hunch is that in absence of laws and power structures most people will miss a social contract and will miss people telling them what to do. Basically it's less taxing on our minds.

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Anarchism would also remove private property, and for it to work people would have to organize in ways to minimize social capital.

How do you do that though? There would of course be no enforcable private property, but ownership would not disappear as a (albeit nebulous) concept.

Anarchism would mandate worker ownership of production, in the principle that ownership only ever derives from use. So factories and the like would be cooperatively owned, which makes it very very difficult for one individual to amass seriously outsized amounts of material resources. Combined with monetary policy that increases the velocity of money, the issue is fixed.

As for personal property, under the principle that you've worked for and use your personal property and that it doesn't result in a master/slave relation, it would be intact.

> Anarchism would mandate worker ownership of production

Legitimately curious: How do you mandate anything in an anarchy?

Mandate in this case is used in the abstract: in the absence of any system to recognise and enforce private property rights, and in the face of a society that sees coercion and aggression as pretty much the only things that are wholly and totally unacceptable, they cease to exist because they only exist in the first case through the state or other means of threatening force to enforce it.

It would be more precise to say that worker control in anarchism is a consequence of dismantling the system that enforces property rights.

Thanks. That feels like weird chain of causality. All the bad stuff only disappears when the systems protecting us from them are removed.

Because it just so happens that this system didn't happen in order to protect us, but just uses that argument to perpetuate itself.

Nobody is suggesting removing the systems that are actually protecting us. The argument is that a lot of the structures are not protecting us, but perpetuating oppression, and that if we invert the power pyramid, and power is only delegated by consent to the extent it is exercised in a manner that minimises oppression, then we're left with what people actually consent to be subjected to.

Using strong social norms and consensus. If the social norm is that hierarchy is not acceptable unless absolutely unavoidable, then a direct consequence is that the workplace must be organized cooperatively to follow that base.

I see. That's a big IF though if you ask me.

But is it? If an anarchist society was to come to existence wouldn't it be necessary beforethen for it to be largely accepted?

And also, there are currently existing societies where that dynamic works, so I'm not sure it's that unrealistic.

> If an anarchist society was to come to existence wouldn't it be necessary beforethen for it to be largely accepted?

I guess so. THAT's the the big IF in that case :-).

> And also, there are currently existing societies where that dynamic works, so I'm not sure it's that unrealistic.

Really? Which societies?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anarchist_communitie...

How would anarchism prevent tribes, warlords, organizations, armies and countries to form? If you leave people to do whatever they want that is what they do, as can be seen all throughout humanities history.

A system which doesn't prevent people from doing that isn't a system, instead you'll get the first despot who is charismatic enough to unite the people.

Anarchism does not prevent tribes, warlords, organizations, or armies - it is the absence of such constructs.

If anyone is truly interested in applied anarchism, look to Somalia [0] and try to make a difference there. It's not all bad [1] [2], but I think there are many vastly superior alternatives.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Somalia_(1991%E2%80...

[1] https://www.independent.org/pdf/working_papers/64_somalia.pd...

[2] https://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=1861

Somalia really isn't a good example of anarchy, there was still tons of hierarchies. Anarchists aren't libertarians, they're not content to just topple the state, you still need to form anarchist governments and institutions. Otherwise that's just anomie

> you still need to form anarchist governments and institutions

???

> Anarchy is the state of a society being freely constituted without authorities or a governing body.

So what would happen to farming? Same like in Simbabwe? People were encouraged to take over farms, but somehow these people choose not to be productive; Simbabwe went from beiing the Cornchamber of Africa to famine.

Native Americans had no concept of land ownership. It's one of the reasons why they famously would sell land for a few beads, they had no concept of what they were actually doing.

The point is that it's possible to do. It doesn't mean we should, but it is possible.

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