Don't the anarchists think they have ways to check both state and government power, while promoting human welfare? (I'm unfortunately unfamiliar with anarchist philosophy, so I don't know what their proposals are.)
The practical side is substantially harder - the anarchist-communal version of the world requires a citizenry committed to their community, phobic to bigness, and willing to assert that something that is not in the interest of the commons is not allowed to happen. Again, this ignores the practical question - balances of innovation vs unknown potential costs, etc - but the bigger practical concern is building an actual durable social contract that people will uphold and enforce over time, even when that means giving up personal glory.
This was basically the state of most societal groups in the pre-modern era - by and large, most people's day-to-day existence was within local community groups that had a lot of say over what they allowed within their sphere of influence - but the modern world creates the ability to concentrate power in ways which are harder for a smaller group of individuals to combat. A teenager with an AK-47 would've mowed through a squadron of Roman soldiers like they weren't there, and the mechanization of industry allows for more rapid consolidation of wealth than prior means, which renders the whole affair much harder to keep in hand.
But if the US (same applies to other countries) became an anarchy today, then entities like Goldman Sachs and Constellis (formerly Blackwater) are going to fare much better than most. So a naive "burn it all down" anarchy doesn't seem an answer.
UPDATE: I remembered Noam Chomsky is sometimes called an anarcho-syndicalist but never looked up what meant. Turns out that is exactly the kind of "anarchism" that answers my question. (New concept to me, so not sure in what sense this might be called anarchism. No central government?)
Oh, hey, the first text I picked from the Anarchist Library answers the question in my previous comment! https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alex-stefanescu-rela...
> A revolution would be necessary to topple a political regime. But, if your starting point is the rejection of authority, if you don’t need “permission”, you don’t need the revolution either. Anarchy starts not with a bang, but with a whimper — not with an announcement on public television that it is the time to dismantle hierarchies, but with our collective work to slowly build something on the lack of the hierarchies themselves.
I'm not sure I understand the rest of this document, but this bit seems straightforward.
Those anarchists who didn't do that, were just never politically or socially relevant. So they can write nice pamphlets all they like about what 'real anarchism' actually is.
> we need a bad guy who wants to destroy society
Anarchist and Communists very much wanted a fundamentally different society, one so different that its essentially impossible to get there without destroying the existing one first.
They still want it.
> one so different that its essentially impossible to get there without destroying the existing one first.
Everything else they say is demagogy, in the end, all they are good for is fomenting strife and wars. After the bloodshed, these fools and their fantasies are quickly disposed of, the little tools they are.
I only have a superficial understanding of these ideas; but it seems to me that a good idea, whatever the ideology behind it, is worth implementing. And "we should make sure everyone gets fed by looking after each other" is a pretty good idea, so it shouldn't matter that it's technically "anarchy".
> For example, mutual aid networks
That in reality have never even come close to achieving much more then mutual aid. That such action could be wide ranging enough to replace the state is nothing more then fantasy.
The closest thing to that is Muslim Brotherhood doing aid, but that is with a clear component of military power as well.
> but even Friedrich Engels
Why would you say 'even'. Engles is not in any way shape or form qualified to make such statements. In his times non of these ideas had been tested. And said different things at different times for different people. Engels specifically publicly called out mass death would happen.
In the real world it has never happened and there is no indication that it would ever happen.
I say "even" because afaik Marxists don't seek to destroy the state: they believe the destruction of the state is inevitable (dialectics!), and seek instead to win battles in the class war – my "even" applied to the "withering away of the state" idea, not to Friedrich Engels himself. (I'm not familiar with all of his ideas.) Marxism–Leninism is the "the Bolsheviks were right all along" belief system, but is quite different to classic Marxism.
In the real world I don't think we'll ever have a group, region, or territory governed by any pure ideology, so I agree that a state of anarchy, or a classic communist society, would never happen in real life. That doesn't mean it's worthless to think about the ideas, any more than it's worthless to talk about uniform point masses on a frictionless inclined plane.
The most prominent contemporary example is the Zapatista territories. To a lesser extent, arguably also Rojava, although "libertarian market socialism" would probably be a more accurate label for that.
Even Rothbard wrote a pamphlet, I think he later disendorsed, justifying the breakup of any entity that contributes to war or state violence. I dont need to look up Goldman Sachs but I reckon I could justify them being in that box.
>anarchism
Anarchy the leftist tendency is the removal of Hierarchy. It can be debated into how you categorise that, but ultimately they all want corporations gone.
Its the right wing anarchists that are solely focused on the government
The problem from a left anarchist standpoint isn't (just) "CEO is boss, having boss bad" its that there's a group of people with special treatment everyone else is not subject to.
You might disagree with that view, and probably do. I am just familiar enough with their ideas to relay and explain them.
I'd say that the most well-developed concrete platform in this sense is Murray Bookchin's "libertarian municipalism", although that is arguably too organized to be properly referred to as anarchism (Bookchin himself, although he used to be an anarchist, dropped the label eventually). But, even so, it's much closer to an anarchist utopia than any state-centric model. And it actually has some practical successes on the ground in Rojava, although the jury is still out on whether it can hold long term.