Anarchist idiots

[CapnAwesome]

Although I like your post and I think that most people on here have no idea the longer history of anarchist movements (President McKinley was killed by a polish anarchist) you are putting a very rosy lens on the history and the intellectual tradition of anarchy. It's important to note that the anarchist movement in Spain also fell apart and was crushed by the fascists. A large part of that, it could be argued, is because anarchism doesn't work. The anarchist army was, surprise surprise, poorly organized. This is exactly what every anarchist society would end up as, a poorly organized mess where many basic functions didn't get performed. The Spanish anarchist movement actually serves as a good example of this. The army that they had fighting against Franco performed very poorly, partly because of the lack of organization. I think they is another key flaw with any anarchist movement, eventually a strong state will come along and destroy it, because a military can never operate under anarchist principles

[Napoléon]

Wanna hate on anarchists ... that's fine. Go suck some donkey dick, Hillary and her bankster friends will have a great laugh when thinking about how gullible you are

You sound like an incredibly unbiased individual.

[Cato]

So for me, anarchism represents an ethical position, a moral system, as opposed to a political theory or schematic for a utopian society (many anarchists reject the idea of utopianism). It's something that says authoritarianism is not self-justifying. Whether we're talking about our personal relationships (like the relationship between men and women) or our institutional relationships (boss worker, cop citizen, government bureaucrat and citizen, etc.), we first seek to identify unjustifiable incidents of authoritarianism, and then challenge them (usually through different forms of activism and direct action).

I accept and use anarchist and libertarian principles in this vain, but only as a compass for maximizing liberty. I agree with both Hobbes' and Mill's assessments and their basis that a functional society must constrain absolute liberty, but only to the extent that the rights of individuals are protected and that the common good is maximized and interference from other individuals or the state is minimized. By common good I mean the Enlightenment principle and not its more modern incarnation of wholesale egalitarianism.

[JuliaL]

There is a simple problem here.

Anarchy is unstable.

It will always need someone to enforce it.
Otherwise society will fall into some other, more organized, form.

Diligent enforcers of anarchy are conflicted in their motives.

[Cato]

There is a simple problem here.

Anarchy is unstable.

It will always need someone to enforce it.
Otherwise society will fall into some other, more organized, form.

Diligent enforcers of anarchy are conflicted in their motives.

Indeed. This is why it would never practically work. Anarchy relies on the notion that citizens all behave as rational cooperative moral actors all the time. History is quite clear that this impossible. The lack of an enforced conflict resolution scheme makes an actual anarchist society impossible. As soon as one person decides not to abide by an arbitrated settlement, the game's over.

[nihilistcat]

I understand this thread is a critique of right wing anarchism (which masquerades as "libertarianism" in the United States), but while I love Mill, I have to respectfully disagree with the idea that a state is absolutely necessary for civil society. Although, I'm not saying it's not necessary, I'm saying there's really no good evidence either way. My intuition tells me that it would be chaotic and maybe even disastrous, but after spending five years studying biology, I know better than to overly rely on intuition for something so speculative and untested.

I mean, can anyone here provide a historical example of a society organized around anarchist principles (left or right)? The only good example I'm aware of is left wing anarchists in the Catalonia region of Spain during the Spanish Civil War (1933-36), who were eventually defeated by Franco (who was aligned with the axis powers ... Germany & Italy). And they did in fact have a somewhat well functioning society without a formal state (labor unions organized the society around a theory called anarcho-syndicalism). Granted, those were special circumstances, and I'm not sure if it provides a good example (wartime tends to build high levels of solidarity, and so I have no idea how anarchism would perform under peacetime conditions, although I suspect that degree of solidarity would be difficult to maintain for long periods of time).

I also think Hobbes may have exaggerated somewhat, and I'm not sure if Nietzsche's "will to power" is a basal human instinct, or if it's merely a symptom of other innate features of human nature (such as our desire for social acceptance, our desire for love and sex, our need for security, our survival instinct, and so on). So it may be possible to form a society along egalitarian principles without a formal state ... although I would think it requires a well educated population; and one that's very intentional about making it work (which may be sort of a pipe dream in itself). On the other hand, the very small examples of anarchism in history tend to be overly romanticized by left wing anarchists, so who knows?

But I agree with Cato in terms of the ethics of anarchism, and how it should inform our pursuit of liberty. Left wing anarchists tend to govern themselves using consensus (simply stated, everyone has to agree on everything). If anyone here participated in Occupy Wall Street, you'll know that's a very tenuous proposition (the general assemblies I sat through, in many cases at least, were just a disaster). But nonetheless, there's some small functional examples even today (the Kurds in Kobani and other parts of northern Syria run their society along anarchist and feminist principles, which IMO is a wonderful divergence from everything else we see in the middle east, and it's very functional, although again they're in a fight against a brutal enemy, ISIS, and before that it was Turkey, so can this function in peacetime, I have no idea)?

I like evidence more than the speculation of philosophers. We have no good evidence either way. So I would say that a more level perspective might to be to entertain the idea from an academic/theoretical perspective (as intellectuals like Noam Chomsky do), but also acknowledge that it's a very difficult and tenuous proposition. I guess if some billionaire with an anarchist fetish wants to test the idea and buy up a bunch of property and invite anarchists to be lab rats, I'd be real interested in studying the outcome.

For me, I think it would be great to just get back to FDR style social democracy & get rid of all the corruption (and I'm not necessarily opposed to bringing back the guillotine for one particular head, George bubba Bush)