i know that i have brought up this topic before, but in light of new users and my increased knowledge ofAnarchy i wanted to bring it up again. For those of you who do not know what the political ideal of anarchism is, we believe that hierarchy (government, religious authorities, enforcment police ect.) is not only unnessacary, but gross and opressive. We believe that society can organize into a connected system of communes, unions, and other organized co-op groups working under a mutal aid style society. We believe that hierarchy not only does not achieve its vision of order and peace, but rather causes the exact opposite. If you want a full work up on what we advocate please visit infoshop.org and go to the anarchist FAQS. Im horrible at starting threads, so this may seem a little trollish but my goal is to start a converstaion debating the pros and cons of anarchy.
I think that creating an anarchist state would essentially be the same as just starting a state with a very limited government. If there ever was a way to start a true anarchy (say, if we colonized a new planet or a group of people moved to some uninhabited island), it would quickly develop into a limited government, as people agreed to work together to create a common set of rules to prevent aggression, theft, fraud, etc. for their personal safety. Gradually, the people would begin to develop a small handful of tasks (courts, military, police) which are best provided by working together (aka by a government), and I believe you would end with a very limited government state. Depending on a couple factors such as what the technology is at the time, there may be some public goods that will agreed to be provided by a government via taxation like roads or water/electric/gas utilities. Now the question is whether it is possible to strip existing governments down to this size or whether some special event is needed to establish anarchy from which the limited government (or minarchist) state would develop from.
Anarchist theory is an irrelevancy for the bemusement of navel-gazing adolescents with no real grip on human nature, politics, history or organization. It's worth is mainly as a source of fashionable symbols for the tee-shirts of young malcontents who will forget all about it once they are no longer fed and housed by their parents.
Hierarchy is abhorrent only when force and coercion are its means of establishment and maintenance (as in the case of 'governments'). Thus, the problem of the State's monopoly on violence cannot be solved without an explicit recognition and condemnation of that violence, so that we don't just end up continuing the echo-chamber trend of history where fundamental cause and effect relationships are never even addressed. The State, like God, is a symptom of a dissociation with reality that afflicts the vast majority of humanity. I understand that for many, that statement lands me squarely and forever me in the category of tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy freaks, but I think there is a very strong case to be made for the perspective that the State, like slavery, or the subjugation of woman, is just another one of those things humanity will look back on as an epic, incomprehensible horror. Ideally, anarchism is not about supplanting or overthrowing existing forms of social organization, it the concern with a recovery of the innate humanity of the individual. Society as such, is the sum total of individuals. For this reason, the cancer that anarchist's speak of cannot be said to be the State, but rather the role that the State plays along with many other sociological factors in what is artificially imposed on each new generation of infants. In the same way that religions must ruthlessly indoctrinate the young lest superstition die off in a single generation, so too must states ruthlessly indoctrinate the young in order to keep its coercive hierarchy machine rolling along. The extent that both religion and State must go in order to inculcate in children the mental habits conducive to their continued existence is the exact same extent that they rest on a foundation of complete and utter nonsense. So what are these mental habits, and how are they inculcated? The most pertinent of these mental afflictions is the indoctrination into the language of hierarchy. Human nature gets blamed for a lot of the crazy shit that we read about in the morning newspaper about drunken, out of control teens, or greedy capitalist scoundrels, and terrorist bombers. But really, the only sensible thing to be said about human nature is that 'humans adapt'. So the next question we have to ask, is how the hell are humans adapting to society in such away that they end up doing such things as causing a global financial crash? The simple answer, as I said, as part of the net of associated mental habits, is the indoctrination into the language of hierarchy. Not all hierarchy is a bad thing of course. The best person for any given job should rightfully have the authority of that position and be well compensated for it. I have no trouble deferring advice over my care of my teeth to my dentist, for example. So long as our relationship is mutually voluntary I would have no reason for thinking that while I'm in the dentist's chair that we are 'equal'. One person in this situation has a acquired vast amount of relevant skill and knowledge and I am more than happy being hopelessly obedient to it. No, the problem with the language of hierarchy begins in the home, and continues rather forcefully in state indoctrination warehouses ("public schools"). You might note, that in both cases, the relationship of the child to the authority is involuntary, and as any free market analyst will point out, quality and voluntarism are inextricably interlinked. Unfortunately, too many parents take their role for granted and coast along the blind inertia of their own history, without adhering to Socrates' two-thousand year old warning and unconsciously using their kids to manage their own anxieties. So the kids internalize the mode of being a prop in other peoples lives and never are allowed to become fully human... and then, they go school! The institutionalization of authoritarian philosophy is evil for the precise fact that it has a vested interest, no matter how remotely contemplated by its principle administrators, for ensuring incompetency and dependence in its subjects. Modern schools are completely totalitarian. They are funded through force, and children are forced by law, or parental chastisement, to attend. In these institutions, a child's preferences are almost completely debased at the behest of schedules, curriculum, an endless parade of worksheets, an incubator atmosphere, and sacrifice to institutional mandate. They are bullied and manipulated by state employed teachers into doing things for 'grades',or just to avoid getting berated or drugged. The net effect is a lifelong aimlessness for many children who have never had a reciprocal relationship with an adult when it really mattered, they've had their lives micromanaged by bureaucrats so mercilessly that it doesn't seem strange to them when they step out into a world where you have to pay "taxes" to some random strangers who call themselves the "government" for the right to exist, or to "own" property. additionally, the command and control hierarchy that they step into in the warehouse or the office isn't worth a seconds thought. After all, they've internalized the processing that happens when you spend your entire youth at the bottom of a pyramid, and had slave morality drilled into you since birth. They don't notice that their favorite television show is either glorifying meekness and shallowness or is thinly veiled police propaganda. So, in proposing a reformation of societal organization my focus is on those factors which engender the ridiculousness and horror of modern life. While its true many social issues would be better taken care of in a stateless society (education being the major one), the argument from effect doesn't work because no-one can truly predict what the future will look like, stateless or not. One need only to research the effects of child abuse to understand why it is so difficult to get people to see the state for what it is. Typically, child abuse victims are completely oblivious to the facts of reality, they continually recreate their trauma over and over again without even knowing it, and their entire social circle is equally oblivious to the reality. It begs the question, if people can be so oblivious to the obvious facts of whats going on in their personal life, than its not too much a stretch to see why the reality of the State, that it is really just a ridiculous over powerful cult that uses terrorism, both foreign and domestic, as the sole means of achieving its ends, is such a rigorously brutal process to even begin taking seriously. But it is the truth as I understand it. edit: I figured since no one had responded I could get away with tweaking this. I felt I could restructure my argument to hold it together much better than where it was.
