Part of Anarchy is understanding and accepting that that is a true for all individual life regardless of any laws or guideline.
I feel like this is the crux that I’ve seen people disregarding too often. They know how to make the perfect society, and it only requires everyone else having the same exact ideology and priorities that they do.
That line in particular isn’t an ideology, it’s a fact. Committing murder is illegal, but if I want to, I can still murder someone. More generally, systems can be put into place to prevent behaviour, but anyone can still try to get around them.
(I’m not a full on anarchist since it doesn’t seem practical but I do agree with many of the ideals.)
Every time I see someone advocating for anarchy on Lemmy (which is a lot), it comes down to “well if everyone works together in harmony and also there are no neighboring states with imperialist intentions, then everything will be great!”. If everyone was perfectly altruistic then literally any government form would work - capitalism, communism, even fascism.
Fascism heavily implies one group specificly not being altruistic.
Anarchy is just the trust that we could someday have a society based in kindnes and cooperation. If we could have a try. There are already well working anarchosyndical comunes around the world.
Regardless of semantics, it would “work” if it’s what 100% of the population supported and worked towards. Obviously that’s not the case in reality, but the same applies to anarchism. Anarchism (edit: and fascism, just to be clear) are uniquely vulnerable to bad actors when the reality sets in that not everyone is going to be well intentioned.
Also from a geo-political perspective, anarchism would be exceptionally easy for neighbors with bad intentions (think Russia) to take advantage of.
I don’t understand why people think this is the case, anarchy doesn’t mean we let shit people do shit things. We still fight back, we still kick them out of our communities and we still protect one another. Real world anarchy has a pretty strong history of fighting back and keeping itself safe, the Zapatista still exist, the Spanish anarchists basically just lost a war and that’s not exactly a problem unique to anarchism…
It’s no more vulnerable than other societal structures, it’s significantly less so given the way that corruption is much much hard to get away with given that individual people can’t hold positions of power, only positions of responsibility which may be taken from them at any moment.
Spanish anarchists lost the war because they were disorganized and vulnerable to external pressure (competing political parties like the Communists at the time) which was half my original point.
Zapatistas exist in the single poorest state in Mexico, which is not exactly a ringing endorsement of the “ideal government form” as many here apparently believe.
I’m having too good of a day to argue about this so believe what you will, it’s no skin off my back. But I’ll say that being poor is not the same thing as being crushed by external forces, I never mentioned anything about anarchy making people rich. Anyway, wealth is literally a meaningless metric to those of us who don’t want or believe in money.
The case of the Spanish collectives is a lot more nuanced than that. Regardless, acting as if being disorganised is a result of anarchism is just silly.
Like I said believe what you want but again, there’s no reason anarchy is any less susceptible to external forces than anything else. It’s just about structuring society and giving a shit about people.
Lol the original point in the top level comment, which I was agreeing with, was that this idealized version of anarchism requires everyone to be on the same page, and then you go off on a weird tangent about how true believers don’t want money to be happy? That just proves the original point. Maybe you and your friends don’t care about money, but the vast majority of the world does, and that’s not changing anytime soon. Which explains exactly why anarchism is not a viable government form in the modern world - most people don’t share your ethics, which are required for that government form to function.
hii, please do not let lemmy comments form your understanding of anarchism. it seems that gave you some wrong ideas. anarchists are not naive or idealistic about people and hierarchical structures.
if you want to learn about anarchism, i can recommend a few video essays which might give you a better understanding of anarchism and might answer your criticism.
(full disclosure, i havent watched these videos in a while, and mostly picked them, because i vaguely remember them talking about the topics you mentioned)
all of these videos are by the same person. i think they make some of the best videos about anarchist theory that i know, (and videos are a easy way to get into new things), while also being active on the ground as an anarchist organiser, being able to measure their ideas against their lived reality. i hope you will consider what they have to say
I feel like this is the crux that I’ve seen people disregarding too often. They know how to make the perfect society, and it only requires everyone else having the same exact ideology and priorities that they do.
That line in particular isn’t an ideology, it’s a fact. Committing murder is illegal, but if I want to, I can still murder someone. More generally, systems can be put into place to prevent behaviour, but anyone can still try to get around them.
(I’m not a full on anarchist since it doesn’t seem practical but I do agree with many of the ideals.)
Every time I see someone advocating for anarchy on Lemmy (which is a lot), it comes down to “well if everyone works together in harmony and also there are no neighboring states with imperialist intentions, then everything will be great!”. If everyone was perfectly altruistic then literally any government form would work - capitalism, communism, even fascism.
Fascism heavily implies one group specificly not being altruistic. Anarchy is just the trust that we could someday have a society based in kindnes and cooperation. If we could have a try. There are already well working anarchosyndical comunes around the world.
Regardless of semantics, it would “work” if it’s what 100% of the population supported and worked towards. Obviously that’s not the case in reality, but the same applies to anarchism. Anarchism (edit: and fascism, just to be clear) are uniquely vulnerable to bad actors when the reality sets in that not everyone is going to be well intentioned.
Also from a geo-political perspective, anarchism would be exceptionally easy for neighbors with bad intentions (think Russia) to take advantage of.
I don’t understand why people think this is the case, anarchy doesn’t mean we let shit people do shit things. We still fight back, we still kick them out of our communities and we still protect one another. Real world anarchy has a pretty strong history of fighting back and keeping itself safe, the Zapatista still exist, the Spanish anarchists basically just lost a war and that’s not exactly a problem unique to anarchism…
It’s no more vulnerable than other societal structures, it’s significantly less so given the way that corruption is much much hard to get away with given that individual people can’t hold positions of power, only positions of responsibility which may be taken from them at any moment.
It’s not it “would work if,” it does work.
Spanish anarchists lost the war because they were disorganized and vulnerable to external pressure (competing political parties like the Communists at the time) which was half my original point.
Zapatistas exist in the single poorest state in Mexico, which is not exactly a ringing endorsement of the “ideal government form” as many here apparently believe.
I’m having too good of a day to argue about this so believe what you will, it’s no skin off my back. But I’ll say that being poor is not the same thing as being crushed by external forces, I never mentioned anything about anarchy making people rich. Anyway, wealth is literally a meaningless metric to those of us who don’t want or believe in money.
The case of the Spanish collectives is a lot more nuanced than that. Regardless, acting as if being disorganised is a result of anarchism is just silly.
Like I said believe what you want but again, there’s no reason anarchy is any less susceptible to external forces than anything else. It’s just about structuring society and giving a shit about people.
Lol the original point in the top level comment, which I was agreeing with, was that this idealized version of anarchism requires everyone to be on the same page, and then you go off on a weird tangent about how true believers don’t want money to be happy? That just proves the original point. Maybe you and your friends don’t care about money, but the vast majority of the world does, and that’s not changing anytime soon. Which explains exactly why anarchism is not a viable government form in the modern world - most people don’t share your ethics, which are required for that government form to function.
hii, please do not let lemmy comments form your understanding of anarchism. it seems that gave you some wrong ideas. anarchists are not naive or idealistic about people and hierarchical structures.
if you want to learn about anarchism, i can recommend a few video essays which might give you a better understanding of anarchism and might answer your criticism.
(full disclosure, i havent watched these videos in a while, and mostly picked them, because i vaguely remember them talking about the topics you mentioned)
all of these videos are by the same person. i think they make some of the best videos about anarchist theory that i know, (and videos are a easy way to get into new things), while also being active on the ground as an anarchist organiser, being able to measure their ideas against their lived reality. i hope you will consider what they have to say
take care :3