Note to self, get biggest guns, most people with guns, dominate society, set up theocracy with me as godhead, assemble harem, make sure sure court jesters are committed ideologues who thought reinventing feudalism was smart.
I mean, really? Thugs don’t work together? That’s basically the history of humanity in the absence of a state, it’s what knighthood and aristocracies were. Thugs, working together to the bare chaotic minimum required to keep the peasants in line.
Edit: How are you going to get the guns? Remember we're imagining an anarchy, where you can't get guns by taking over the military (there isn't any) or the government (there isn't any). You would have to either make them yourself (a productive endeavor, which thugs don't do--see below) or trade for them (which means you would have to have something worth trading, which again requires productive endeavor) or steal them (but how are you going to steal them when you don't have any weapons to begin with, but the people who make the weapons by productive endeavors do?).
Unless your anarchist society has the tech to make all existing guns and weapons evaporate then they’ll be for the taking. If not, without a government my buddies and I can get a warehouse full of CNC machines and mill assault rifles until the go out of fashion. With no oversight, no need for secrecy, weapons are easy to make. Hell, I’d be shocked if quite a few people here couldn’t make their own nuclear pile if no one was there to stop them, and work their way back to nuclear weapons. Even barring that, again, many people here on HN have the information in their heads to make napalm, explosives, and a variety of poisons including nerve agents. The reason they don’t is sanity, society, and international controls. Take that away and it would be trivial to gas your annoying neighbors.
Also, haven’t we already established that thugs can work together? See: all of human history. They just need aligned goals for however long it takes to crush dissent, then turn on each other. Even the Middle Ages has craftsmen and smiths, and they were essentially owned by thugs who used them like a resource.
Basically, as I said in response to another poster downthread, you are imagining an anarchy as just like our society, but with government and governmental law enforcement suddenly removed.
Unless you’re just entertaining a fantasy with no basis in reality and our lives, I’m thinking of anarchy at some time in the future, which means guns, bombs, aircraft carriers, ICBM’s already exist and can’t be wished away. If you propose a gradual turnover then you need every government and member of those governments to agree, sat which point you don’t actually need anarchy anymore, because you’ve already united the world. If you can conjure an anarchistic future not base on absolute fantasy, which doesn’t turn out horribly I’d be amazed.