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I call this the "you and what army" problem: if you look around the room and you don't see the State, l'Etat, c'est vous.

Council mutualism is not only practical, it's practiced, but it's practiced by Hutterites.

Can it be done without Anabaptist convictions? I don't see any reason why not. Has it? Not with that level of success, no.

The you and what army problem being obvious, inescapable, and inherent, political anarchism will, insofar as it plays a role at all, continue to be a way that people more inherently l'Etat c'est moi about it seize power, often jailing and killing the anarchist leaders (the anarcharchs, if you will) in the process.

> It was in Le Guin's novel "The Dispossessed" that I first read a convincing account of such a society

It's been a minute, but _was_ The Dispossessed a convincing account of such a society? From what I remember, the protagonist encounters academic gate-keepers who effectively control who gets to do teaching and research or what gets communicated to the main planet, centralized systems choose things as personal as what you're named, resources (food) are distributed unequally and untransparently (Shivek is surprised when the big university cafeteria has more/better food?). Coercive hierarchies still develop, but they're cloaked in the dogma of anarchism.

I read this as showing that even if you can isolate to an extreme (by being on a resource-poor moon), and have a language and education system which tries to suppress concepts of ownership, and a population goes through the shared trauma of fighting to feed themselves, people will still find a way to limit each other's freedom, and exercise power, and accumulate or control resources.

On your last sentence I like saying this as follows "Humanity still hasn't found a way to deal with people that don't mind a large piece of a small pie"

It wasn't perfect anarchism, by any means. Apparently Le Guin was well aware of how anarchism and human nature would tend to conflict, and she described only an "ambiguous utopia".

> since without government, there's nobody to stop somebody from starting one.

IMO, this is not the actual problem with the practicality of anarchism.

The problem with anarchism is that the absence of government will recreate the problems which motivate the creation of government, just as excessive government creates the motivation for abolition of government.

Particularly, retaliatory (including lethal) violence—not merely proximate individual and mutual self-defense, but individual and mutual action aimed at preventing future threats from past malefactors, is the common anarchist solution to the problem of perceived-as-unjustified use of force (what, in the context of government, would be “crime”).

But we have plenty of experience with that approach ib areas with no accepted government, weak government, or disinterested government, and what tends to happen is that differences of opinion over whether the initial violence was unjustified (or even if it factually occurred) or the retaliation disproportional (and thus itself unjustified violence) devolve into cyclical violence, the relief for which is establishment of a mechanism for settling disputes about justification and thus either legitimizing or delegitimizing and authorizing corrective responses to force, creating the monopoly on legitimate use of force which, whether called a government or not, defines the state.

> I heard (of course) of anarchism a long time ago, but I always wrote it off as impractical: since without government, there's nobody to stop somebody from starting one.

Without knightly orders there is nobody stopping people from forming knightly orders.

>I think now that anarchism is practical, at least for a population of committed anarchists, and in the absence of hostile external forces.

I too classify all my physics problems as 'spherical cows in a vacuum', but unless you've ignored Twitter your entire life you should realize powerful forces of propaganda exist that ensure that this will never exist. Threats exist in the form of ruthless humans that will ally with the corruptible and greedy to consolidate power to the point of acting with wonton violence. These people use ideas of nationalism and shared identity (cooperation) along with propaganda that militarizes the group against common enemies, generally being other groups that have resources they can take.

In general having a 'stable' society with wealth can be an inoculation against this human behavior of falling for propaganda, but again, it requires stability against the environment, against disease, against economic swings, against competing ideas. Anarchist societies just seem to handwave these issues away.

Economic swings can be explained very easily. A currency where the circulation velocity isn't stable can have booms or busts from an increase or decrease of the circulation velocity. In practice the problem is that the circulation velocity is going down too much, to which the response so far has always been to increase the money supply rather than the velocity.

Can totally relate! The Dispossessed was another seminal book for me.

> Anarchism argues that no centralized government is necessary for people to lead happy, just and equitable lives.

How does this work when one is a minority in a prejudiced society? This concern has always hindered me from thinking of anarchism as viable.

One of the core ideas of anarchism is that everyone is an equal. In other words, anarchism presupposes lack of significant prejudice.

> In other words, anarchism presupposes lack of significant prejudice.

That seems to put it in "fun thought experiment" territory.

Or "conditional probability" territory. Of the people who would choose to espouse a philosophy of treating everyone as equal, it is unlikely to find someone significantly prejudiced.

Espousing ideology isn’t the same as believing it or living it. The moment the threat of the state recedes, and sometimes before, anarchist violence turns inwards; race, sex, and gender expression are just as suitable as status markers for anarchists as anyone else.

https://archive.org/details/BetrayalACriticalAnalysisOfRapeC...

A minority in a prejudiced society is always fucked, but especially fucked in a democracy. Democracy is literally legitimization of force against the minority, by virtue of vote. Even the constitution, which supposedly protects minority rights, can be amended to remove those rights by a prejudiced majority.

IMO the prejudiced minority has the best chance when they can make it as painful as possible for the majority to harm them. That is, to disable the state's law as much as possible from being wielded against non-aggressor minorities.

>How does this work when one is a minority in a prejudiced society?

In practice in places like Northern Syria, which much of is essentially devoid of strong government, Syriac Christians banded together with machine guns and literally kill anyone who comes to aggress against them. Sure, Assad / the Kurds (who are their allies) / other majority around them could fuck them up if they like, but it's not worth the trouble.

> A minority in a prejudiced society is always fucked, but especially fucked in a democracy.

The history of genocides and ethnic cleansing, plenty of which happened historically and recently outside democracies, disagrees.

No one is disagreeing that governments are the biggest perpetuator of killing in the past 100 years. Government is responsible for far more killing than by non-government actors. Using your interesting logic, one would disagree with the existence of government if one were trying to minimize these deaths. Is this your argument in support of anarchism?

There are complaints that an anarchist society wouldn't be perfect, as though any perfection can be found in any of the well-over 100 governments run on the principle of capitalism plus government authority. Not even the capitalist ideal is respected (freedom to use your private property however you like), since it would cause so many problems in practice.

The history of the supposed poster child of "democracy" w.r.t. its handling of the native peoples inhabiting its territory disagrees with your disagreement.

In what universe can there exist a society not subject to external forces?

In the dreamland libertarians seem to live in.

At least to the point that the society is left to itself without being invaded. That was the issue for the anarchist experiment in 1930s Spain, it was shut down by fascists and Soviet-aligned communists. Would it have survived if left to itself? I guess we'll never know.

I find the general unwillingness to experiment with alternative models of society, whether they are libertarianism, or anarchism, or whatever, quite disappointing. A few "special economic zones" doesn't seem like too much to ask for.

Instead, we just replicate the same old model, which these days is a mixture of capitalism and government authority. The government authority supposedly either suppresses the worst outcomes of capitalism, or is a source of corruption and abuse in itself. Now we have well over 100 such governments around the world, with varying degrees of success for the majority of their populations, and I'm not sure we are really learning anything.

Yeah, if everyone was like me, I bet AnCap would work (very different from most-common versions of anarchism, and in my view, the only non-morally-repugnant one - but still impractical). Heck I bet if you could clone some saints old-school communism would work just fine :)

The main problem is how a society can work without such restrictions...

Anarcho-capitalism is nothing like the communist anarchism that Kropotkin was writing about. There's no pretence at equality, you've basically just replaced government repression with private repression by the wealthy.

It's a choice of economic system, not morality. There's nothing immoral about making all work voluntary and eliminating private property, it's just a different system with different expectations.

The rule about property in communist anarchism would be something like: it's yours for as long as you are using it, but once you no longer need it, somebody else can take it to use (or repurpose the materials).

You are comparing an idealized version of one system with reality-fied version of another; the an-cap that Rothbard was describing doesn't have much private repression by the wealthy. Idealized to idealized, they are all great. FWIW in reality, I think both will quickly evolve into control by gangs, then larger gangs/cartels; then either the latter will gradually develop manners and it will become something like feudalism, or if there's a strong contender + some symbol to rally around like religion or the old state itself, mafia state. Source: pretty much every place with central government that cannot reliably enforce law, from the remnants of Western Roman Empire to China 100 years ago to Russia 25 years ago to, it appears, modern Mexico or South Africa. And they still have/had some governance going on, at least. I don't think less governance will suddenly reverse the direction they were/are heading in.

Actually capitalism wouldn't work even if you could clone yourself assuming you play by the rules instead of using your cooperation with yourself to ignore them.

Why not? I don't mean literally clone, I mean if everyone had my level of commitment and aversion to initiating violence. Communism/anarchism wouldn't work cause I'm lazy, I would take all I need as long as I can, but work on socially-useful projects that do not interest me as little as I could get away with. But capitalism would work just fine.

> However, this may be incorrect, but it does require a population that is always willing to fight against the formation of a government

It's kind of akin to the paradox of tolerance. A tolerant society cannot remain so unless it remains vigilant against intolerance, and likewise a stateless society cannot remain so unless it remains vigilant against the state. Both sorts of vigilance are possible; the question is whether or not they're practical (and my hope is that the answer to both is "yes").