Pseudo-Anarchism

[Schrödinger's Cat]

This applies to all forms of anarchist philosophy, including socialist-collectivist, socialist-individualist, primitivist, geoist, and even capitalist. There are a few obvious points that need to be brought up so that they can be dismissed in a debate. Speaking as an anarchist, I don't want to come off too condescending (OIers know I can be), but some remarks are passed off without any consideration for reality.

- Not all public services can be handled by private entities to any significant degree more than the public service itself. Roads, like land, act as a monopoly regardless of the envisioned system. There is also the question of payment. I could easily remove a license plate or chip from my car. The only sideways argument is that people in the immediate area would pay for the roads for use, but 1.) you have an even bigger free rider problem and 2.) the demand is - again - restricted, making prices go up. The best solution for lowering road costs is actually a workers' council - the taxpayers are directly involved, and representatives can't be bought off into subsidization.
- Obviously it depends on the defense agency or association, but no harm should come to someone who espouses a fascist leaning, nor should religious leaders be executed.
- Incarceration of some form will probably be needed
- Anarchism doesn't mean "freedom to do whatever you want." If it's found out an association of adults are raping children, it is not wrong to destroy this association. Conflicts will still arise, albeit on a smaller scale.
- Supply and demand are just as relevant under socialism as they are capitalism, even moreso since investment decisions are made by everyone instead of the top 10%.
- Voluntary hierarchies (that does not mean restricting access without my consent or acknowledgment) are acceptable
- Communal family quarters is a terrible idea
- People gravitate towards associations, not businesses - to protect them.
- Politics (at least, in the manner we see today) would be frivelous under anarchism. A large upset of "rights" would mean people could leave for another group. Sorry, anti-abortion and anti-homosexual actions will be near impossible.
- Anarchism is, in practice and theory, a matter of "choice."
- Public transportation is great and should be improved, but people don't want to give up their cars.
- People will demand for protection outside of gun ownership. That could come from companies or militia.
- Destroying an association with different views is unproductive to a certain degree. As I said, you can't expect people to live peacefully knowing that children down the road are being raped, but you can live peacefully knowing people have a mutualist economy instead of a participatory one. For anarchism to survive most of the human population needs to acknowledge this fact as much as they do the right to breathe, or the right to live, or the right to masturbate.
- Technically "free" socialist, capitalist, communist, feudalist, mutualist, and geolibertarian communities could arise under anarchism. People will gravitate towards what best serves their needs (in my mind a mix of socialist-collectivism, mutualism, and geoism)
- Nothing is perfect. Everything has some element that could compliment it. This is specifically targeted towards purists of any system.
- For primitivists - there is no possible way in hell that most of humanity would volunteer to take such a drastic action.

That's all I could think off. Bring on your unrelenting disagreements.

[IcarusAngel]

I disagree that capitalist and socialist communities could co-exist. It seems if you had such a setup, you would really have two types of systems competing against each other: one based on assumptions that permit forced hierarchy, one based on assumptions that there can be no rulers or leaders of people, no massive 'private property.'

It's almost as if saying there could be a 'free' stalinist community. All capitalist communities are inevitably about force, because if a majority of workers tried to take over a factory, the capitalists would proclaim them radicals or dissidents of the community and have them all arrested - they would be "violating the rules of capitalism," such would happen in Stalinist or Leninist "communities" as well.

Anarchism is indeed about maintaining social order without oppressive hierarchies controlling all the resources. If someone wants to live freely and independently, and they can't, you obviously have a problem. The person is forced to sell themselves into slavery, and you obviously have some kind of leaders or hierarchy. Communities thus must be free, open, and non-hierarchical. If people get out of line, it would be up to the community to deal with them. Any person or persons in charge of standards or specifications would have to be elected democratically.

Of course, if the community slips into capitalism or fascism somehow, it would no longer be anarchistic, and would be overrun by despotism. This is a problem with anarchist theory, there is no outside force, or force of nature, that would prevent a hiererarchy from occurring.

[LSD]

Anarchism is threading the needle made manifest, and if attempted might well prove to be the greatest sociological experiment in human history.

But then great changes so rarely come from the lab.

The problem with anarchism is that it's too fragile -- indeed this could probably be expanded to the entire contemporary "post-capitalist" paradigm in it's entirety. It has lots of great ideas and shiny new gizmos, but if you push it a little too far this way, oir if you lean back a bit much... BOOOM.

And not the fun little boom where you get to reset the game and start all over again, but the much less glorious, much more realistic, booom wherein friends shoot friends and hierarchies spring up all aroung you. If everybody worked really really hard and was trully trully dedicated, some of these anarchist-socialist ideas would have a decent shot of accomplishing something. But people aren't like that, we're only human; and we live messy complicated lives with all sorts of messy complicated problems to solve. And we just don't have the time or the motivation to sit down each day and organize society.

There's a reason the communes failed. There's a story behind the creeking walls of the Israeli Kibbutzim.The twentieth century has been unique in its variety of novel and innovative political developments. We owe it to ourselves not to take too much of that baggage with us, as we move into the future.

Some of it imay well be nescessary, but mostly it's crap. If there's one thing we should have learned after 200 years of whorlwind industrialization it's that things can change in a very short span of time.

[IcarusAngel]

Yes, I agree LSD. I take a much more nuanced approach to anarchism than many anarchist ideologues.

I love the anarchist critiques of capitalism, stalinism, government, and all other tyrannies, and really their expressed outrage at the exploitation of wage labor is some of the best I've ever read, and most clear as well. This is like from the early American anarchists and the anarchists in Europe, such as Proudhon. They had very poignant critiques of the idea that you can own land by "mixing labor with land" and so on. Some very good criticisms of property as well. But they did not do as good of job explaining how anarchist could actually maintain social order or some of the criticisms of anarchism. And, all the attempted syndicalist models prove how tough it can be.

I think democratic-socialism or what have you is probably more "realistic," and only then could anarchism be possible. I'm more of a Bertrand Russell anarchist - I'll read the writings and talk about what the system might be like, but I don't hold out for an anarchist system.