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Comment by jongjong | Hacker News Reader

I can attest to the fact that anarchists are probably the most discriminated group in existence. Even a faint whiff of anarchism or the idea of reducing or decentralizing state or corporate power is a very bad career move.

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Ya it leads to a lot of power struggle and killing, of course it has stigma. This was news back when Hobbes published Leviathan. There’s a reason the US is a safe place for the majority of its citizens for hundreds of years and not for the parts where there’s gangs or in Mexico where there’s cartels contesting power.

What is anarchist about cartels?

I think they are anarchist in that they have a loose structure without formal laws. I think they inflict reputational damage to the concept of anarchy. Violent gangs are exactly what people are afraid of when they think of anarchy.

I think in reality, if there was pervasive anarchy for everyone without any overarching state, there would be more opportunities and incentives for deal-making between gangs and violence would trend towards zero.

Currently, it's illegal to make deals with gangs and they're almost 100% made up of people with criminal tendencies since honest people don't want to be associated with gangs. If every social group was a gang and there was no state, then people would have a strong incentive to join a gang for protection/support and so there would be a lot of good, honest people inside those gangs and this composition would make the gangs less violent.

A cartel or gang that manages to hold power while dispensing with the routine use of violence (or "trend towards zero" to use your term) is just... a state. Of course it's a state in its most primitive and tyrannical form, since it has no institutional history of self-regulating its own use of power like most modern states do.

Good point. Though when people think of a state, they tend to expect clear geographical boundaries. I guess when we're advocating for anarchy, we're advocating for multiple voluntary, competing, potentially geographically overlapping states.

I guess with this terminology, it sounds a lot more appealing than 'gangs' so I'm fully in favor.

The problem with geographically overlapping states is that they will always be incented to be violent towards each other, to some extent. At least, that's what we see in practice in gang dynamics. You can have overlapping organizations, perhaps politically connoted in some sense, whithin the context of some minimal "night watchman" state that regulates the use of violence and provides shared security against outside threats - and to some extent, our modern societies look a bit like that.

In such a context isn't the word 'tribe' more adequate than 'gang'?

1. Cartels have strong hierarchies, imposed by violence, a system which would be roundly opposed by most anarchists.

2. But more importantly, most anarchists are not just against hierarchies. They are positively for society or the group to have features likes mutual aid, worker rights, democratic or consensus based decision making, etc. All of these are missing from cartels.

> cartels contesting power

Drug cartels are not run along anarchist lines.

I think you have a misunderstanding of the basic concepts here.

How will your anarchism dictate how a cartel will be organized? Through anarchism, you can't enforce everyone to be anarchic. You will lose your independence because other people will form larger groups to increase their power and achieve their aims by coercing you.

What stops a cartel from taking over in an anarchist society? I never understood how anarchists will prevent crime lords and military leaders from seizing power. They certainly didn't stop that from happening in the past.

As it should be…we don’t want delusional people dreaming of a utopian society that actually becomes lawless and violent when implemented.

The Anarchist rebellion in Spain for instance was not only instantly crushed by all sides (Fascist, communists, liberal democracies) but it has been written out of history too. You hardly ever learn about it, except if you read Anarchist books.

One thing anarchist societies do not seem to be particularly effective at is war. Spain proved that they can do the rest though.

If the militia had been armed properly, maybe it could have done better. But we probably need a global revolution or solidarity to take place since smaller local revolutions can be crushed by larger powers.

They seem to actually be very efficient per capita, it's mostly that anarchism never really was more popular than other "radical" ideologies like Marxism-Leninism or fascism. It was almost always less popular than those even where it was popular.

Orwell: Homage to Catalonia ?

The anarchist rebellion was the only anti-Franco side that managed to win some battles, it's demise happened because liberals and Stalinists preferred to betray anarchists and then get steamrolled by Franco.

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