RE: The interesting history they don't teach in schools
April 20, 2015 at 2:17 pm
(This post was last modified: April 20, 2015 at 2:19 pm by nihilistcat.)
I guess the anarchist response would be that anarchism does not equal chaos or lack of organizational structure. For instance, among the Kurds, there are municipal authorities, there is law enforcement, and there are rules. The main distinction is how they make public policy decisions. They strive for as much consensus as possible (they can be classified as a direct democracy, but who uses consensus versus majority rule). They have organized decision making meetings, a voting system, a way for everyone who wishes to be heard on a topic to be heard, etc. And it works very well for those Kurds.
But they are also socialists (which is a feature of left-anarchism). They ascribe to maxims such as 'to each according to his need, from each according to his ability.' In other words, they don't have to worry about their property being stolen, because in a society where all its citizens can simply walk into a store and get what they want for free (they do not use currency in internal transactions), there's simply no incentive to steal.
But they do build roads when they need to, they do build schools, water treatment facilities, electrical power plants, housing, etc. They also staff these facilities. They collect garbage just like any other city (and so on and so forth).
They call ideologies like this "radical" for a reason, most people who have not taken the time to really learn this stuff, literally have no basis from their experiences by which they can understand how a system like this could work. So most people would just write this off without any real analysis (which is unfortunate, because there's a really rich history here that most people never learn about).
But they are also socialists (which is a feature of left-anarchism). They ascribe to maxims such as 'to each according to his need, from each according to his ability.' In other words, they don't have to worry about their property being stolen, because in a society where all its citizens can simply walk into a store and get what they want for free (they do not use currency in internal transactions), there's simply no incentive to steal.
But they do build roads when they need to, they do build schools, water treatment facilities, electrical power plants, housing, etc. They also staff these facilities. They collect garbage just like any other city (and so on and so forth).
They call ideologies like this "radical" for a reason, most people who have not taken the time to really learn this stuff, literally have no basis from their experiences by which they can understand how a system like this could work. So most people would just write this off without any real analysis (which is unfortunate, because there's a really rich history here that most people never learn about).
