Anarchism...pros and cons

"If men were angels, no government would be necessary."
-James Madison

I was thinking about topics we haven't seriously dicussed yet, and I don't think we've ever discussed the pros and cons of Anarchism. Something fun, something different, to talk about.

Most people confuse Anarchism with the advocation of use of force/violence to undermine a government, but that is not always the case.

Generally, it means support for a stateless society, without existence of any government (or any equivalent institution/power/authority/domination: capitalism, globalization, organized religion, militarism, nationalism, war, class, racial superiority, patriarchy).

They are not all the same. There is Individualist anarchism, Collectivist anarchism, Pacifist anarachism, Christian anarchism, Green anarchism, Syndicalist anarchism, Primitivist anarchism, Marxist anarchism, really really free market anarchism, etc.

They hold in common that government is harmful, unnecessary, and undesirable. Anarchists may believe a spontaneous order will arise even without government, may favor co-operatives or a gift economy, etc.

Many feel anarchism is too utopian, and that's where I fall. We need government. Maybe one day we will no longer need government, but that day itself would be a utopian dream. As long as there is scarcity and mortality, as long as there are vital functions that individuals cannot do by themselves, there will be need of government.

To start off discussion, what do you think of Anarchism? And what do you think is the definition and fundamental purpose of Government?

 

I think you mean nihilism, don't you?

 

No?

Anarchism is an idealistic belief that there should be no government.

Nihilism is belief in nothing.

How are they similar?

 

I think Rick from 'the Young Ones' kinda killed anarchism as something trendy to subsribe to. Anarchists will always leave me with an image of spotty, smelly, dishevelled, angry, green left weekly selling students who all wind up joining the public service because nobody else will employ them.

Government to me is the backbone of the social contract concept - we give up some of our freedoms in return for stability and social order, which allows the seeds of economic opportunity to grow, which ultimately rewards us with prosperity and happiness. Government provides predictability, we know the boundaries and consequences of our actions and so we are able to predict how others within society will act in a given social situation, transaction, endeavour etc. I am a believer in Thomas Hobbes when he states that human life would be "nasty, brutish, and short" without political authority.

Anarchism is very much like communism in that it tries very hard to conjure up an ideal of humanity, a noble ideal that we are able to live together in peace, harmony and mutual co-operation without the need for social coercion or a rule of law. I guess anarchism may well work very small agricultural/market garden type communities, but even then when you look at the Israeli Kibbutz (a working model of small scale communism/anarchism) they ultimately adopted a model of differential wages/responsibility simply because human beings want to be rewarded for their efforts. Where a group of people take on a greater responsibility in the society, they expect a greater reward or a say in how things should be run. As soon as that happens, you have a goverment, you have stratification, you have division, you have 'us' versus 'them'. Every human society is characterised in this way, despite our efforts to the contrary.

 

Don't forget that humans are irrational creatures. Even if you theoretically can organize some kind of mutually dependent plan or organization by which everyone would benefit, anyone who decides to take advantage of the situation will screw it up for everyone else.

Such a ideology for communism or anarchy within a large society is just doomed to failure.

 

Yeah, it seems doomed to fail.

Besides a few hunter-gatherer societies that still exist, and brief periods of revolution and civil war in some countries like Spain and Russia, has there ever been a place that has put anarchism into practice?

 

According to thefreedictionary.com
an·ar·chism (nr-kzm)
n.
1. The theory or doctrine that all forms of government are oppressive and undesirable and should be abolished.
2. Active resistance and terrorism against the state, as used by some anarchists.
3. Rejection of all forms of coercive control and authority

I prefer to go with the LITERAL meaning of the word.

Without Rulers

I like the idea of a state that has no "Rulers" only administrators who must follow the same laws as everyone else. No new laws to be written.
This is a Science fiction board and this idea has been brought up in Science Fiction several times.
I just don't see it happening in the real world.

 

Human beings have always had 'rulers' and will always have them. The shift from premodern to modern is simply characterized by the nature of that 'rule', namely, from tribal, clan, monarchy, nobility, aristocracy, to representative democracy. Even now, 'coercion' is the backbone of civil society. All you need to do is look at what happens when the institutions of law and order, ie, the police, go away for a few days. You get riots, murders, robberies, vandalism and chaos. The threat of state action is what keeps civil society civil.

 

Anarchism = an anachronism.

 

I think you are being too generalized, Police, and the justice system are not rulers, they enforce the existing law. Just as many acts of riot and murder have happend when the police were in full operation, as when they were not.

I don't want to live in a Democracy, because the majority might be wrong.

I'd like a "A republic, (if you can keep it)"

 

I'm not saying they are 'rulers' I'm saying that they are the 'pointy' edge of government, the 'coercive' factor. I'm also not suggesting that riots, violence and robberies only occur when the police are absent, but I am suggesting that based upon past events, widespread, large scale rioting seems inevitable when there is a breakdown in government authority.

What do you think would happen in LA for example if the police went on strike for a week? In 'The God Delusion, Dawkins recounts the events of the 1969 Montreal riots when the police went on strike. Within hours there were major riots, looting, firebombing, assaults and robberies adding up to millions of dollars in damage.

We pay taxes and obey the laws because if we don't ultimately we can be deprived of our liberty. We don't pay taxes and obey the laws because we are loving, mutually co-operative beings who want what is best for our fellow man. It's coersion, pure and simple.

 

Rules and restrictions are neccessary to prevent chaos.

Humans ae greedy, they take what they are able to from whoever is not strong enough to stop them. Without laws anyone could freely steal anyone else's property or commit murder,rape, terrorism and any other crime towards others people.

Yes many governments are too restrictive, but for most the beauty of democracy is that we can simply get rid of a government that isn't doing the right thing for the people of a nation.
Citizens of a dictatorship do not have such freedom of choice.

 

I'm not sure there are many pros to anarchism.

I'd support a minarchist republican society made up of mutual aid societies and insurance contracts but not a completely stateless society.

Those generally don't last.

 

False. That assumes there was ever a time in human history that it was viable. There wasn't.

 

Playing devil's advocate... wouldn't they argue that a person/community would either become self-defending or hire someone with more training to defend them?

Also, for example, Confucius spoke of laws in a society being a symptom of the problem and not a solution. He believed social norms and pressures, community vs social ostracism, rituals and manners, common courtesy and education, could eliminate the need for laws.

 

We have better trained people to defend us, they're called the armed forces.

Education has hardly stopped people from breaking rules has it?
Almost everyone knows what is right & wrong, they freely choose to do wrong because they think they can get away with it.

With no laws to punish them, they will get away with it.

 

The problem with that devil's advocate position Ghost, is that a civil society can only exist when the people themselves are enlightened, reasonable, and are virtuous. That position assumes that.

The founders of our nation discovered during the confederation period, with 13 separate republics with mostly unitary governments, that the people themselves weren't as enlightened or virtuous as they had hoped. So they pushed for a federal constitution as a result.

And I don't think we are any more virtuous or reasonable than the people of that time.

More scientifically enlightened yes, but not enough for social ostracism and hidden social order to completely take over and govern human behaviour absent the state.

We still need the state. It's just a matter of how much.

edit

Here's an example of a pseudo-minarchist society within the Ivory Coast. Duty-free shopping, volunteer schooling, no taxes, etc. Ivory rebels have minimal state zone

 

That's what Confucius believed (though I am summarizing), that a moral education and a prevalence of courteous rituals would make every person into a noble person, resulting in a society without need of laws.

Lao-tzu (Taoism) also discouraged the use of government/force/law, seeking harmony and a return to nature.

One thing I do agree with them on is that Laws do tend to be a symptom of the problem, not really a solution. THey usually don't treat the root causes, and they only exist because there is a problem. If there was no problem, there would be no need for a law to address it.

I agree, although I would say that our environment/condition/society is what brings out the worst of us. But still, unless fundamentals about our environment/condition/society change, there will be need of government.

What do you think should be the line between a citizen and the state, between an individual and socety? Is that line static, or flexible? Is it clear-cut, or does it have a lot of fuzzy gray space?

 

I remember having an argument with an anarchist back in university. It was the most unintentionally funny argument I've ever had in my life. His position was that if you removed the means to commit violence and all incentive to commit violence, people wouldn't be violent. If you removed all incentive to cheat, people wouldn't cheat. Etc, etc, etc. My response was somewhere along the lines of "Even if you COULD create this society you want - I doubt that you could, but lets assume for a second you can - it wouldn't last. Because before too long, someone who doesn't subscribe to your views is going to come along with guns, and then you're ******." His response was along the lines of "If they came, they'd want to join us." Two completely different mind-sets.

 

The only way you could do that would be to force firms, companies, individuals to internalize their costs fully instead of allowing negative external costs picked up by the U.S. taxpayer. But the forcing would require some enforcement group or organization.

That would likely require a state, however small. So, not true anarchy.

 

Jean-Luc Picard: "Money doesn't exist in the 24th Century"

Lily: "No money? You mean you don't get paid!?"

Jean-Luc Picard: "The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves"


Such a thought is interesting. But can a society where people simply give actually exist?

 

Apropos: when I was leafing through Kolakowski for the Communism-thread, I came upon his discussion about Utopianism (seeing as Communism draws heavily upon that tradition of thought). He noted that most Utopians argue that the present state of society is "unnatural" and "contradictory to the true nature of human" (regardless of what era they happen to be referring to). When doing this, they tend to fail to address why this contradictory state was accepted by society in the first place. Maybe they're just mistaken about what the "true human nature" actually is...

 

I would tend to agree with you on this. It's not as if human beings emerged from the cave and then discovered the empty pre-fabricated institutions of society waiting for them, which then eternally corrupted them. We humans have socially constructed the society in which we live, we have created the institutions of society and continue to develop them. Society is therefore a manifestation of human nature which is perpetuated by the process of socialization through the institutions of the family and education.

Hell, even this message board is part of the process of socialization. We have stratification right here, we have authority, we have divisions, differential status, rankings, etc etc. We have 'mods' hanging up there on our screens like demi-gods, different colours, different titles, post counts, stars, registration dates -all the things that differentiate us from one another. We automatically ascribe value to these differences. That is human nature, not this warm and fuzzy, wimpy, ideal of equality and universal egalitarianism.

 

On that note, one could also add that in any political discussion about how society should be structured/managed, there is an awful lot of "one size fits all" kind of argumentation going on from all sides involved. Greens and anarchists will emphatically advocate egalitarian solutions, many socialists will be in favour of having big state-centric bureaucracies managing things, libertarians will suggest market based solutions for everything, and some conservatives will make the argument that there are always free-riders out there that seek to cheat the system and so security, control and accountabiliy is the best remedy for all problems. The truth, of course, is that each solution is good for some problems we're confronted with, and really bad at addressing other issues.

The real trick is to know when to apply what type of management and realize that the reality is often too nuanced and complex for "one size fits all" recipies. And for those interested in that topic, I warmly recommend Christopher Hood's "The Art of the State", (2000) a fascinating take on public management.

 

Primates, even humans, can be complex social animals. Not quite like herds and not quite like a wolf packs, primate group behavior of course varies widely among different species, but in general we're very good at cooperative behavior. Nevertheless, dominance hierarchies are deeply ingrained in most primate species. Even in small social groups with very loose and informal social interaction, there's usually an alpha male.