Are you an anarchist? The answer may surprise you (2000) • Hacker News Board

Re: Are you an anarchist? The answer may surprise you (2000)

#541

Post by djur » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

jlawson wrote: post #530

jokethrowaway wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily enough, as an anarchist, I never heard before that removing the government (or hierarchical use of violence) would remove violence from the world. There are plenty of ideas on how to keep law and order in an anarchic society. I recommend you to read The Machinery of Freedom (by David Friedman) or check out a summary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTYkdEU_B4o TLDR: One way to keep order is having privat…

If you're an anarcho-capitalist, that's cool and interesting, but I think it's quite distinct from the more left-wing forms of anarchism people usually talk about (that revolve around self-organizing democratic cooperatives). I actually like a lot of things about Freidman's work, but I don't think it would actually function. The issue is that at the end of the day it's still just armed gangs living in tension with ea…

Anarcho-capitalism is easier to justify because it doesn't have to answer the question of "what about poverty, exploitation, and abuse?" with anything stronger than "too bad for you". It's a lot harder to explain how you're going to eliminate material and social hierarchies without some form of legal hierarchy, which is why left anarchism tends to exist more as an organizing principle and a tendency within the broader (socialist) left than as an independent political movement.

Re: Are you an anarchist? The answer may surprise you (2000)

#542

Post by luckylion » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

haroldp wrote: post #478

username90 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see private police existing as the main source of violence without the different private police forces waging wars over each other to determine who gets to police what district. I mean, in what way would private police be different from a Mafia?

Ancaps believe that street wars would be notably unprofitable, and competing "rights enforcement agencies" would quickly normalize their relations with one another, in the same way that we don't see Uber and Lyft shooting each other up. > in what way would private police be different from a Mafia? If you didn't like the service you were getting, you could stop paying for it.

> in the same way that we don't see Uber and Lyft shooting each other up

But we don't see them shooting each other up because there's the Leviathan with the big guns telling them not to. We do for example, still see plenty of war between drug cartels, even though the wars are extremely unprofitable. Yet if you win one, you get to control much more space and you're suddenly a lot more profitable than before.

This argument sounds good in theory, but given that we've had wars before in history, it needs some explanation why states and individuals act irrational in that regard all the time, but these new companies would not.

Re: Are you an anarchist? The answer may surprise you (2000)

#543

Post by boomboomsubban » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:12 PM UTC

waihtis wrote: post #519

boomboomsubban wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think there is a group of people inferior to you that need to be ruled.

I think you are confused about what the discussion here concerns.

No. You think that there are some people incapable of living reasonably without force, and that group does not include yourself. Presumably they are the people that are incapable of living reasonably with force.

Re: Are you an anarchist? The answer may surprise you (2000)

#544

Post by marricks » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:13 PM UTC

graeme wrote: post #532

marricks wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it hard to believe you've talked to any real anarchists, or at least listened to them. People like Noam Chomsky deal with that question extremely head on. Below is what I said on another comment... > Absolutely no form of government or system (anarchist 1000% included) will solve the problem of people being selfish or bad, all that anarchists contend (that I have seen) is that when there isn't those built hier…

> is that when there isn't those built hierarchies bad/selfish people don't amass power so everyone else can actually handle them on equal terms But how do you stop a bad person from amassing power in an anarchist system? As a simple example, how would you deal with highway robbers? Those were omnipresent in societies before states gained strength.

I mean, did they rob peasants or the lords of the land with their amassed stolen wealth...?

A community can decide to cast someone out, reprimand them, imprison them, etc. The whole idea of restorative justice can actually exist when a community is able to address it.

Re: Are you an anarchist? The answer may surprise you (2000)

#545

Post by andi999 » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:15 PM UTC

jtolmar wrote: post #508

andi999 wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who makes sure that the authority comes only from the community this authority affects?

Everyone else having similar structures. This is starting to sound less like good-faith questions than it did when it started. Are you trying to poke holes, or are you trying to understand how this is something someone could actually believe would work? Are you asking yourself how your questions are resolved in existing power structures?

I never realised, but I think my trying to understand something works by trying to poke holes.

I generally found the idea of self governance very appealing, and didnt think much about it, since I thought people have figured out some good ideas how to make it work. When I was getting older, I got more doubts. My biggest doubt/worry currently is that these kind of ideas can actually prepare the grounds for (local) genocide. I am trying to figure out if these worries are justified and this concept has to be rejected for the good of minorities, or if the concepts are advanced enough and take human nature into account.

I do not know if this constitutes bad faith questioning.

Re: Are you an anarchist? The answer may surprise you (2000)

#546

Post by mwcampbell » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:16 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #39

oxymoran wrote: post #11

“Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to.” My anarchist sympathies want this to be true but this is a demonstrably false fairy tale. Just look at how we treat the planet and other living things in the presence of lawful order. Why would you assume that we would act righteously in the absence of law? It is painfully obvious th…

That assumes that the presence of lawful order makes things better, which is sort of the whole question this article is about. You can construct a pretty good argument that, say, absent the structures of "lawful order" around which large corporations grow, fewer people would be driving hours to work each day, drinking water out of plastic bottles, flying across the country on business trips, producing pesticides in B…

But laws also enable rights for minorities, which the majority isn't free to trample over or ignore. To take one example that's particularly close to my heart, laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act can compel corporations to make their products and services accessible even if they'd rather not. I think I and many of my friends wouldn't have nearly as happy and fulfilling lives if not for that.

Re: Are you an anarchist? The answer may surprise you (2000)

#547

Post by boomboomsubban » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:17 PM UTC

stale2002 wrote: post #533

boomboomsubban wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voluntary association, not voluntary donations. People need roads, when this problem is brought up they will be willing to pay for roads. If you are unwilling, you aren't part of the society anymore.

So then that is not voluntarily association. Because presumably, you would be kicking people off of roads, using force, if they refuse to pay the roads tax. That's using force.

It's not a "road tax," if you don't choose to be a part of society, you can't be a part of the society. You are free to leave. The concept of "kicking people out" implies that they have some natural right to be part of that society.

Re: Are you an anarchist? The answer may surprise you (2000)

#548

Post by bostonpete » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:19 PM UTC

drblast wrote: post #538

I think in many ways it's impossible to have this discussion with a U.S. audience. The idea of force and violence being the solution to everything is deeply, deeply ingrained in U,S, culture. Simply suggesting that reason and cooperation can solve some of the problems we in the U.S. attempt to solve with more violence is usually met with the "starship troopers" ideology that violence is the actual source of legitimac…

This comment would've made more sense a decade or so ago. You say you can "never suggest we've gone too far" or "it's impossible to have this discussion with a U.S. audience" but the topics you raise have increasingly been a part of the public discourse in recent years. I agree that it's distressing to see how some people view the world w.r.t. these issues but I don't agree that applies to the whole country, or even the majority at this point.

Re: Are you an anarchist? The answer may surprise you (2000)

#549

Post by crowbahr » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:19 PM UTC

marricks wrote: post #544

graeme wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is that when there isn't those built hierarchies bad/selfish people don't amass power so everyone else can actually handle them on equal terms But how do you stop a bad person from amassing power in an anarchist system? As a simple example, how would you deal with highway robbers? Those were omnipresent in societies before states gained strength.

I mean, did they rob peasants or the lords of the land with their amassed stolen wealth...? A community can decide to cast someone out, reprimand them, imprison them, etc. The whole idea of restorative justice can actually exist when a community is able to address it.

They robbed anyone and everyone.

Some people just give 0 fucks about anyone besides themselves.

Most people give 0 fucks about anyone outside of a moderate group of acquaintances and friends.

Re: Are you an anarchist? The answer may surprise you (2000)

#550

Post by djur » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:19 PM UTC

brbrodude wrote: post #81

oxymoran wrote: post #11

“Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to.” My anarchist sympathies want this to be true but this is a demonstrably false fairy tale. Just look at how we treat the planet and other living things in the presence of lawful order. Why would you assume that we would act righteously in the absence of law? It is painfully obvious th…

This is where I see one of the most striking arguments for anarchist philosophy. That is: It takes, and it took, an immensurable ammount of violence to make the status quo, 'lawful order' is a very shaky concept there. From this perspective it's way clearer that the unbalances and the unlawlessness of a big chunk of the "order" are themselves the sources of so much messed up stuff we have to deal with and try hopeles…

The problem with Chomsky as a resource for anarchism is that 1) his anarchism is sui generis, and he doesn't tend to cite or be in conversation with other anarchist thinkers and 2) his anarchism is utopian, and he doesn't begin to outline a program to accomplish it. In practice he's really more of a social democrat whose vision of anarchism basically resembles a self-organizing social democracy with minimized state coercion.