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Anarchism can never even exist, let alone work, because it defines itself in a fundamentally nonsensical way. It distinguishes itself on the principle of 'non-coerciveness'. But coercion is written into the fact of physical scarcity: if someone wants that food, then someone else cannot have it. Any organisational notion that does not represent that scarcity as constraint on behaviour is useless. It simply fails to address the problem. What anarchism then does is to confuse and obscure this, or just wish it away. The motif of 'decentralised organisation' is a contradiction in terms: there cannot be structure without some constraint. If every local grouping is always free to decide the rules, then there are no rules. If everyone is free at every transaction to invent their own money, then there is no money. Plus, everyone making up new rules will not scale. (And no, people will not just naturally, magically, happen to agree.) Organisation is essentially hierarchical in its basic one-to-many informational form: there must be some single pattern followed by multiple elements. What anarchism could sensibly propose instead is more sophisticated democracy: ie, better forms of feedback from participants to rule generation. We cannot avoid rules/structure, but we could more responsively, iteratively, steer the the construction of them. |
It's a bit ironic to say anarchism works because people have been interested in it for centuries if not more and yet it has clearly never worked. And then people always bring up something or other "oh, these people were anarchists for 2 and a half months in Spain in 1926, see it works!"
Another glaring inconsistency with anarchism is that if you are unwilling to use coercion or organized force, then how do you defend yourself against another group who will and wants to take you over? You'll just get obliterated and then be forced into their version of non anarchism. And then the nit picking starts "you can defend yourself" yeah but if you haven't been actively cultivating an organized defense force you're going to lose and maintaining an organized defense force involves all sorts of coercion and hierarchies.
No point even writing this stuff, it's not the kind of thing you'll ever convince anyone of who doesn't want to here it but organized anarchism is just such a preposterous idea that it's hard not to.