Why I Am An Anarchist

If there was no government, there would be no corporations. A corporation's power is dependent on the social framework a government creates. To give an example of what I mean, modern currencies are fiat, that is, they have value because various governments have declared them to have value. With the collapse of government, one of the chief sources of power for corporations, their immense liquid wealth, would become meaningless.

That's not to say that corporate entities wouldn't be able to adapt and fill the power vacuum, but they wouldn't resemble corporations as we know them today, and they likely wouldn't resemble some of the silly concoctions that you sometimes see in SF (_Venus Incorporated_, etc.)

If I had to sum up what I consider to be the message of anarchism, (and I've only been comfortable calling myself one fairly recently, though I've been studying it for over a year) it would be "The best way to build a society is by empowering individuals through understanding, cooperation, and support."

> I usually just hear unfocused discontent.

Yeah, this is the exact problem I'm talking about. It's absolutely true, there's a lot of that going around. A large part of the 'why' is that if you're an anarchist, you probably care about politics a lot. And you feel like you have answers. And then you see things like the absolute robbery of the American people via the bank bailout, and the most you see... is some harsh words. Nobody's even upset. A single dollar lost is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. It's easy to become angry when you have very strong feelings, feel that you have answers, and then are totally ignored by most people, while you watch them make the exact mistakes you were trying to warn them about.

Not that any of that is an excuse; it's exactly why anarchism has continued to be marginalized. It's something that we'll have to collectively get over in order to move forward, and frankly, I'm not sure if it'll happen any time soon.

> thinking up scalable alternatives to government.

I think that one of the conclusion that you come to if you follow the anarchist line of thinking is that there is no _scalable_ alternative to government. Once you start building huge communities, the human element of humans is lost. To use the same saying twice in one post, one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic; humans simply can't care for large numbers of other humans. Their humanity disappears. So the only way to move forward is to build a decentralized network of smaller communities, rather than yet bigger ones. The British empire fell because it was growing too large; the American one is following suit. I don't think, for example, nationalized health care can possibly work at the levels of population that America currently has. We're not only significantly larger, but much more spread out, which makes it even harder to care about what happens to those crazy people on the other coast.

> fun for them, but what's there to discuss?

It's true, there's not a lot to discuss amongst the rational, educated opponent, but here, where 'socialism' means 'The government takes my money and gives it to the black people,' we have a lot of educating to do. And once you get past the terminology, there are a lot of implementation questions. Since there have been relatively few anarchist societies[1], there are a lot of unanswered questions about how they'd be run. Then again, there's a lot of possible ways that a community could be built, and they're not all mutually exclusive. Just like different states have different laws, there are a lot of options for an anarchist community.

> The second category is laudible but still offers almost nothing in the way of big-picture political solutions.

True. I think that I've already covered that the bigger picture is a smaller picture, though.

1: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_anarc...

I don't know about 1934, but this is what the ballot looked like in 1938. http://danariely.com/2010/10/05/hitler-nudge/

In any case, he doesn't answer the central question that arguing for anarchy inevitably provokes: once we take away the power monopoly of government, what's to stop someone from seizing power by force and being far worse than any government that preceded them?

The problem with the Hitler example is that that's pretty much exactly what Hitler did. Weimar Germany was far from a model of sane government; it felt powerless after the war, it was crippled economically and it lacked real leadership. The spirit of nationalism that had made Germany such a powerful force before WWI had been broken by its defeat, and Hitler took power by stepping in to fill the void that it left.

In other words, the Hitler example is exactly what a sane government prevents. The problem there wasn't the fact that there was a government in power; it was that there wasn't one. Anarchy was the problem, not the solution.

When you say you are an anarchist, what exactly do you believe? For example, do you believe in a police force?

My problem is this. I agree a utopian society is an anarchist society. But it seems to me that the only way anarchy can work is in a world where resources aren't scarce.

As soon as resources become scarce, you have conflict. As soon as you have conflict, you need a way to resolve it fairly.

I just can't understand the "how" of anarchy.

> what exactly do you believe?

This is something that I'm still actively exploring. I only have an understanding from a high level on all of this; the details are quite fuzzy to me.

To give you some background, I'm coming from what's basically the a hardcore right-libertarian place. However, eventually, I've come around to realizing that the world is a bit more complex than "remove the rules and everything will work out." I was only thinking about some of the rules, I had just assumed that capitalism was the way things _had_ to be. The more that I compared my beliefs about capitalism to my former beliefs about religion, the more I came to understand that I believed in those things simply because they were stated to me as fact for a long period of time.

Anyway, what I believe: I don't really believe in a police force, to be totally honest. I've said before that "I'm a middle class white kid from the suburbs, so if I don't like the police, I can only imagine what it must be like for others." I try to avoid as much contact with police as possible, because they only cause more problems. I think that social constructs hold society together much more than the threat of punishment. People respond much better to positive reinforcement than negative. Authority will always be abused.

In general, I believe the world would be a better place if we tried working together rather than fighting. If people actually knew their neighbors and built communities. If more people gave rather than took. I also think that we've been conditioned to be adversarial, and that it can be unlearned, albeit with hard work.

I agree a lot with raganwald: http://raganwald.posterous.com/hello-my-name-is-reginald-and...

I also recognize that we're not living in such a place, and so I try to live in a way that's closest to my ideals, knowing that I'll never get there. My house is run collectively, I try to support organizations that do good, I attempt to help others as much as possible. I think that entrepreneurship is a great path for doing a lot of good for society.

> As soon as you have conflict, you need a way to resolve it fairly.

I think that you underestimate how different an anarchic society would be, and overestimate how scarce goods really are. But in any case, don't think that anarchy means no conflict resolution, as the saying goes, "anarchy means no rulers, not no rules." Anarchists believe in direct democracy, generally speaking. A lot of these kinds of details are the ones that haven't been worked out yet, or would differ from one community to the next.