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by luckylion 2118 days ago
What would the anarchist alternative be, provided everybody still needs to eat. Let's keep money as a simple placeholder for value. If the reasonable people wouldn't open the clubs, how would they make money? Okay, their landlords are reasonable as well, and don't charge rent. And their grocery store gives them food for free?

How would they determine who is so reasonable they get the reason-treatment of free food even if they provide no value themselves (no parties in their club etc).

A lot of anarchism sounds like some magical communism, where everything just works out, there's no conflict whatsoever and the (in communist countries) usually authoritarian governments wouldn't be required. If only one would let the people be free, they'd be happy, sharing, caring and all around nice people by themselves.

I get the fundamental appeal, I'm sure it can work in very small, very homogeneous groups (like a religious sect, or maybe a tribal group that has not or only been recently contacted). But at scale, and in the real world, it sounds naive.

1 comments

To me it seems that you seem to be imagining anarchy only within the context of the current state of reality with the sole difference of anarchy being set to ‘true’. I think a world in which anarchy were dominant would be structured quite differently and involve humans with fundamentally nonviolent dispositions. My belief is that this is possible.
Anarchy means that the law of the strongest rules. Not sure why you think that this is somehow aligned with non-violence.
That's the opposite of anarchy. An-arch-y means a situation without fixed power structures.
You can't prevent bad guys from forming their own power structure without some form of power structure.
> the law of the strongest rule

Not so different to today then, is it?

Are resources still scarce in an anarchist society? Then you will still have conflict. And changing fundamental biology is probably possible, but neither a quick thing nor an easy one.

"Humans will be biologically different once we live in a new society" gets filed under magic in my opinion. Communists tend to use that as an explanation as well, and it didn't happen, and not for lack of trying or lack of commitment, I believe.

I understand most anarchists favor very localized constructs in general, what's your take why we aren't seeing a lot of anarchist communities? Is it that there would still be "the state" in the world that surrounds them, collecting federal taxes and stopping them from governing themselves, giving themselves the kinds of laws they want etc?