Political Memes

How a society can function without a government?

Reading what you wrote as an answer to this question, it sounds like you're just an advocate for true direct democracy. I mean that's fine, but the point is that what you're advocating for isn't true anarchy. You're still in favor of a central authority, just one that's structured differently. Now direct democracy does have it's strengths and drawbacks, and we can discuss the merits of that later, but for now I want to focus on a particular concept, and that's the idea of entirely voluntary governance.

The idea of an entirely voluntary government sounds very appealing, however, I think it's one of those ideas that sounds better than it actually is. Let's think about it from a fundamental level, in order for something to be voluntary, there needs to be a person with free will making consensual decisions. However, consent is an inherently subjective concept and thus the standard for who can consent will always be arbitrary... and if that's the case who gets to decide the standard? This is something that has to be established at the very start.

Well who can consent? Can children consent? Where is the cutoff, and who decides it? If a community is split on whether or not 16 year olds can consent, do the 16 year olds get a vote in this discussion or are they sidelined? What if they don't like the decision, can children disassociate and join other groups that say they can consent or not? How about disabled people, can they consent or do they not get a vote? Do they perhaps have someone else be their representative and make decisions on their behalf? But if that's the case, and decision making can be outsourced for kids and the disabled, can consenting adults also outsource this power? Let's suppose people want to have a representative, is that allowed or is individual participation mandatory? If it's mandatory then who is enforcing this rule?

I hope you catch what I'm trying to demonstrate here. This is a concept that's vague, and its implementation is rather complicated.

How would the economy function?

Economics is definitely not your forte lol

You're trying to combine standard market capitalism with the Marixst resource distribution... but these two ideas contradict each other. Marxist socialism requires a strong, central, and authoritarian government in order to seize and collectivize all the means of production, property, wealth, and resources and then to centrally plan every single aspect of the economy to properly distribute the resources from ability to need. However, market capitalism is literally the opposite. It requires government to allow the markets to have some autonomy so they can function independently. Capitalist economies are decentralized and unplanned, and resource distribution is done through the markets on the basis of supply and demand. You can't combine the two.

It seem your idea of economics is not based in reality. This isn't the 1500s, our modern economies aren't based on a bunch of framers and craftsmen who open up little shops to sell their labor and crafts. A carpenter building a house? Lol. Do you understand just how much labor goes into building a modern house? Not to mention that there are things that require way more labor, way more resources, and insane global supply chains to produce like cars, planes, and smartphones. These are not things that you can build without strong multinational corporate structures, and you can't get them trade them through bartering.

Also, you think things like administration, banks, and mines aren't necessary? Lmao, you can't be serious. I'll just say this, capitalism is a system that favors efficiency above all else for better or for worse, and it's really good at it. Everything that industry that exists and every product you see on sale exists because there are people out there who buy them. The demand exists, and so the companies provide. Things like banks provide value to the economy as they fill a niche, and that's the reason why they exist.

How would justice be enforced?

Bring society to a point where everybody ideally agrees to prevent injustice? What does that even mean? The point you're talking about is an ideal, it's literally a fantasy by definition. How can you possibly govern a society when your concept of justice hinges on the realization of something imaginary? Is an anarchist society just going to remain lawless until this ideal point?

The enforcement part is equally ridiculous. You can only enforce laws once everybody has agreed to the punishments? Why would any criminal or wannabe criminal ever agree to implementing any punishments against themselves? Good faith? Lmao, if criminals were operating in good faith then they wouldn't be criminals. I think you understand the absurdity of this notion, which is why you acknowledged that prisons and authority might make a come back in an anarchist society... but if that's the case then doesn't that defeat the whole point of the anarchy experiment?

How would you deal with people who reject this idea and want to reestablish a central authority?

Ah ha! Finally stumbled you good, didn't I? I think this is the core issue with anarchy and I think it's an inherently flawed ideology. Everything you said here relies on good faith whether it's governance, economics, law, justice, or self defense. However, we don't live in an ideal world, we live in a flawed world, and in our flawed world good faith is a rather scarce resource. There are a lot of people in our society who are greedy, egotistical, selfish, jealous, hateful, evil, violent, and contrarian. We'll always have murders, pedos, rapists, bigots, thieves, morons, frauds, and zealots. These are people who exploit the good faith of others for their personal benefit at the expense of others.

In a normal society, these bad faith actors are either deterred by the entity that has monopoly on violence or they're squashed by it. However, in an anarchist society, there is no monopoly on violence and so bad faith actors have no filters and are set loose. These people have no issue with violence or forcing others to do what they want, and so they will use violence to enforce their standards on to normal people and onto each other. Because each group or individual will have their own values, morals, and ideals there will be a competition of violence on who gets to enforce their standard. This type of chaos, disorder, instability, and violence is the reason why anarchy mostly exists as a fun thought exercise rather than a practical, viable ideology.

Thanks again for this final question which, i’m happy to admit, resets the debate and will, i hope, show that every flaw i listed were only relative to our previous discussion.

It's all good.