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Comment by codekansas | Hacker News Reader

I lived in Capitol Hill in Seattle during the formation of CHAZ. Anyone interested in anarchism in America should read up on what happened there because it was effectively a month-long stretch where the Seattle city government just abdicated a few blocks. In that short period of time a local rapper with a bunch of guns started patrolling the streets at night, some kids got shot, some murals got painted, parts of a field got torn up to make a crappy community garden. It was a wild ride. Finally got steamrolled by SPD when another two kids were shot.

Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protes...

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> a local rapper with a bunch of guns started patrolling the streets at night, some kids got shot, some murals got painted, parts of a field got torn up to make a crappy community garden.

I'm sorry if I'm falling victim to the media stereotypes about your country, but this doesn't sound all that different from the regular news that the rest of the world gets about it.

Well, that thing about the community garden was kind of novel, but unlikely to make headlines outside of a neighborhood watch newsletter.

Honestly this gave me a good chuckle. There was a recent rerun on the Freakonomics podcast about American hyperindividualism and how it leads to us having an unusually high rate of violent crime, which is definitely something I saw play out. Like if CHAZ had happened in Japan (which would have been pretty weird from the premise) it probably wouldn’t have ended with a bunch of shootings and turf wars

Militia of random crazy people with guns "owning" a large urban zone is "what you hear usually" ?

You just focus on the gun problem here, not on the overall picture...

> Militia of random crazy people with guns "owning" a large urban zone is "what you hear usually" ?

No. What gave you that impression?

> You just focus on the gun problem here, not on the overall picture...

I know. I have visited a few times. It's a nice place if you can ignore all the murder that is going on...

So, kinda like a very small scale zombie apocalypse? Cool stuff.

I think the big flaw to anarchism is that in a novel situation, people will default to behavior they know. So in this case, people act like they would act in a zombie apocalypse.

If you had anarchism and called it by some other name, it would turn out differently.

The big flaw of anarchism is that it's basically impossible to get it to work inside a capitalist system. Capitalism at its essence is about converting wealth to violence*, and when you can do that it's very easy to override any anarchist organisation by brute force.

Anarchism is notoriously bad at systematic violence because it's basically the one thing it's designed to prevent, so it's very hard to defend against easy access to physical force.

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* In everyday practical capitalism, it rarely goes this far. It's enough to indirectly imply a threat of violence. ("If you don't obey my orders I could give you a bad performance review which might lead to you being fired and you will risk being out of a job long enough to have trouble paying your dues to society for the necessities and then you will either die or be taken by force to jail. So you better do as you're told!")

Zombie apocalypse is the familiar scenario for everyone? I'm not following.

Yeah, everyone imagines that anarchy means apocalypse. And that anarchies mean a Mad Max or Fallout type situation with raiders wearing spikes. Or something from Judge Dredd.

An anarchy is more likely to be like a faraway rural area - neighborhood patrols, more self-subsistence, neighbors cutting your grass, some baking banana bread for everyone, people burning garbage, adulterers getting beat up.

CHAZ leaned into the TV stereotypes, and not the more natural historical ones.

Were there really any anarchy ever in estabilished communities (i.e. ones that were tied to land/infrastructure/location and couldn't just move easily)? I thought that, in every single case, either a hierarchy of power formed internally or they were subjugated to by outside power. I mean, why wouldn't it happen?

Some kids died so some adults could cosplay anarchy for a month. It's really not that cool

All you need to know about CHAZ is that the "local rapper with a bunch of guns" who was presented as the Face of Anarchy turned out to be an AirBnB superhost with several upscale properties across Seattle.

(He also turned out to be engaging in sexual abuse and trafficking, but that's another story.)

Judging by the demands it sounds more socialist though. They don't seem to want less, only different government.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protest#...

lack of law != anarchism. anarchism or voluntaryism is about the right of freedom of association. people chose to live in CHAZ, they weren't forced. disrespect of property rights is unfortunate and i don't condone that... but property owners, like the soccer field owner, could have hired private security. that's a perfectly anarchist response.

Yeah a lot of local businesses did hire private security, but then there were a bunch of random plainclothes dudes with guns walking around, which wasn’t great for business. The soccer field is publicly funded so I guess the city government could have hired private security but I’m not sure the police union would’ve been happy about it

Also this sounds like the “no true Scotsman” thing. Some of the people in the zone were self described anarchists, they were setting up co ops and volunteer medical services, and if it had succeeded (meaning, not been overrun by violent crime) I’m sure people would have pointed to it as a model of anarchist principles in action.

I think you'll find that many (most?) anarchists disagree with the idea of accumulating property (it's where Proudhon starts, after all.)

It also doesn't sound very anarchist to prevent others from using your accumulated property with hired guns. That's the basis of capitalism!

What if someone hired even more private security, and just tore the whole thing down? What if they shook everyone down, took everything and bailed? Is this a 'perfectly anarchist response'?

It's a good response, and it proves that "hiring security" is not anarchist at all. Anarchy is about preventing power concentration, quite the opposite of guarding by force.

Where do you get the power to prevent power concentration?

You agree on rules in which accumulation is impossible, or naturally short-lasting.

That’s anarchocapitalist response.

Ancaps and anarchists have very little to do with each other, actually.

edit: to make it clear, I don’t want to “safeguard” the word anarchism, I don’t really care, I’m not part of that movement. But the anarchists that wrote the original article are part of a movement that take anarchism to mean something, while ancaps make it mean something entirely different.

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