A few problems Anarchists fail to realizesteemCreated with Sketch.

in #anarchy7 years ago (edited)

crown-304903_1280.jpg

I had a long debate on my last posts, where I described how Anarchism could practically be inserted into society, and not all these ideological fantasies that are nearly impossible to accomplish.

I have been thinking about this a lot, but it looks like other's haven't so they come with circlejerk arguments that I have already considered, and most likely rejected. See it doesn't matter what fantasies people believe in, if we want this to work, it has to be practically possible, otherwise it doesn't matter. So we have to throw away fantasies, and focus on real achievable goals.

Let me list you a few problems:

  • NAP = Ok it's a nice concept, but it's literally impossible to achieve. Because somewhere, sometime you will have a conflict, that will escalate, and it will drag most people into it. So a government will be formed eventually. It's impossible to avoid.

  • Self Defense = It's a nice concept to imagine everyone defending themselves, however most people are unwilling or incapable to do it, so you need to delegate this to trained professionals.

  • Swarm Defense= It's a nice concept to imagine that everyone defending their own property would come together against an organized threat, voluntarily, but it doesn't happen. Hitler literally invaded cities with 10,000-20,000 troops, whereas the cities had a population of 1,000,000-5,000,000. Even if everyone would have picked up a bat or a knife, they could have driven out the Nazis. If every city would have done that, Hitler would have been defeated in 1 week. Instead of this they just hid in the basement, cowardly. So human psychology tells us that people are rather cowards, even in the face of a deadly enemy.

  • Private Army = It's a nice concept to think about a society, post government, where everyone will just hire his own army to defend his property. However the richest guy in the area will have the biggest army. So he will become the local aristocrat. The aristocrats then will come together and elect a king. And then instead of having an anarchist society, we cycle back into feudalism. Well done.


And these are just the few examples we have here. It's literally impossible to have freedom without a form of collective restraint. The problem is that people are centralizing power by default, with or without government. So without a form restraint, we can't stop a tyrant assuming total power.

So what we need is Socialism, yes, Political Socialism. Socialism in the sense that we need to redistribute the political power, away from the tyrant, and back into the people's hands.

Of course we should keep Capitalism as an economic theory, so we should have:

  • Political Socialism & Economic Capitalism

Because in my view, economic power is not a threat, if it doesn't carry political power with it. So redistributing money is not necessary, and obviously, it's immoral, and detrimental to society.

You can't tax geniuses and subsidize idiots. But you have to "tax" tyrants and "subsidize" individuals.


So political power has to be decentralized as much as possible to prohibit a tyrant assuming total power. But having a billionaire without political power is not really a threat. Wealth inequality is not a problem, unless it carries political inequality.

And wealth inequality gaps would not be so great anyway if not for the political centralization. There would not be starving people nor totally impoverished people, if not for the wars and the general government tyranny we see around us.

So this is how I would envision anarchism in practice:

  • Political decentralization & Economic Liberty

This also implies some basic tiny taxes just so that we can protect this system, that guarantees decentralization of political power:

  • So I advocated a tiny property tax, or even a flat yearly fee, that's all

No income tax, no social security tax, no sales tax, nothing more, just a flat yearly fee or something similar, just enough to fund the decentralized machine. Of course many anarchists got angry " how dare I advocate for taxation". But you don't get it! This is the only way we can have liberty, if we don't set up a system like this, then inevitably we will have feudalism again.

Humans will inevitably centralize political power, unless there is a clear decentralized platform, like a direct democracy to directly stop this. We don't want our anarchist society to turn into feudalism and monarchy, that is the last thing we want.

So the "lack of a system" mentality is not valid, it will always lead to feudalism. So anarchism itself has to be a system, but a system of decentralization of political power.



So this is not communism, communism implies socialized economy as well. We know that can't work, because you can't tax geniuses and can't subsidize idiots. But this is a 50% - 50% compromise between capitalism and the left. To make everyone happy.

I don't think there is any other way we can achieve freedom. Anything more is already tyranny, and anything less will be tyranny. So freedom is in the middle of 2 tyrannical forces: aristocracy & collectivism.


Furthermore, thankfully this is already happening. Cryprocurrency is exactly this, you have private property in forms of private keys, that is unalienable. But you have a direct democracy on the network side, as individual nodes vote on policy.

And it works: Steemit, Bitcoin, Dash, Monero, Synereo, you name it.... All of them are essentially this kind of social experiment.

So nature already favors this theory, by letting cryptocurrencies become a reality. So we anarchists also need to embrace this phenomena, ideologically and intellectually. This is how balance can be achieved in society.


Sources:
https://pixabay.com


Upvote, ReSteem & bluebutton

Privacy & Safety Online button6

Sort:  

All that anarchists want, is a free market in "government" ! Thats it !

And don't get me wrong, if the entity is a massive blob of inefficiency and tyranny, then secession is the only way (like in the case of the EU, which is a massive bureaucracy that is incapable of anything good).

But in smallers scales, political decentralization is much better.

"Political decentralization" ??? The only object there is is the individual. And every individual is sovereign, no one must enforce their "opinion" on anyone. I speak for myself also, I dont want ANYONE telling me what to do... and just ONE SINGLE person, who do not want to be forced means nobody should

Yes yes, but we need to integrate the individual into society. Unless we will all live on different planets, we need to form some basic rules of interaction with eachother.

And the threat is not from the good guys, but from the bad ones. If everyone were a good person, then this becomes meaningless, but that will never happen.

So as long as bad guys exists, we need to have a way to deal with them, collectively, since you can't really expect a 5 year old little boy walking on the streets to take out 1 huge muscular agressor. It's not practical. It has to be somebody else's job.

So the system should respect individuality as much as possible, but should have a way to deal with threats collectively.

"Society" doesnt exist.
The rules you refer to is ethics. A free market will ostrizize bad guys. They will get kicked from interactions and soon realize that they can get ressources nowhere

Hahaha, I think you are a new anarchist. I used to believe that 3-4 years ago, but now I have wisened up.

You have a lot of things to learn about humans. Don't get me wrong, NAP is a beautiful idea, and we should work towards it, but the more I learn about humans that more I think that it's impossible to achieve.


Then the free market cant ostracize, because I said in my other posts, and I think 1 commenter pointed out also that people will always look out in their own interests.

So yeah if you can buy a shoe 50% off from a wife-beater most people will take that offer. Do you think starving Venezuelans care if they buy food from gangsters or traffikers? Nope. People work in their self interests, tyrants too.

So that is why I was advocating for a decentralized political system. That way we can actively ostracize bad guys, and not leave it to chance.

Dont friggin insult me calling me a "new" anarchist !!... a have numerous articles on the subject on Steemit for starters .. and the n add 150+ youtube podcasts on Anarchism and ethics philosophy for your pleasure (though you prob do not understand the language). You are referring to concepts that does not represent anything in reality. until that is cleared, you cannot understand anarchism

I didn't knew about that, but don't need to be so angered about it.

I am indeed not familiar with your philosophy, so as you are not familiar with mine.

I was assuming most anarchists just want to end the government without considering what would happen afterwards. And that is what I was talking about in these posts.

My solution is a 50-50% compromize between business and direct democracy. I don't know your take on it, could you talk about it? Or show me one of your podcasts that you did on this subject and I will watch it when I have time.

Well thas is feudalism then. Because every "sovereign" land is it's own city state. And we know from history how that turned out (Sparta, Athens, Rome,Brandenburg (Prussia->Hitler) .... you name it).

That is why actual anarchism focuses on rather decentralization instead of secession.

Dont be fooled by the term "government". If people start realizing that the state is just a gun in your face, then its monopoly cannot be upheld. Whatever services the state "offers" now will diverge into competition or disappear if unwanted (like endebting your children)

I understand what you are saying but you haven't read my articles. I was thinking that only a military has a right of monopoly. And even then I advocated for a decentralized military (to avoid obvious military dictatorships).

Everything else would be free to competition in my view.

There is not such thing as a "right". There are various people doing "things" ... no initiation of violence is wanted, so the state is evil. It is very simple !

I disagree, right is a social construct, so of course you won't have your rights imprinted on your DNA, but you have rights in a society, which more or less comes from collectively agreed moral norms.

We would all agree that everyone of us as a right to live. A murderer might not respect that, but most of us will. So that is a right that most of us agree on.

So when I say that a military would have a right to defend our anarchist utopia, that means that we all agree that we need to defend this. It's not an imposition of force if we all or most of us agree on it.

It's called a privilege not a right. If someone comes around that says all "jew must be killed" or " all intellectual" "capitalist" , or whatever, you see what "right to live" those people had.

A right that can be taken away is not a right but a privilege.

I would even go so far as saying that every law that prohibit something takes away a right. Like one day in the past you had the right to drive without a seatbelt (to name a thing but you can name all kind of things) then the next day it was stolen.
Even if they legalize things, they don't give you your right back they give you a privilege, which can be taken away some day in the future.

This is just a view on semantics, of course rights can be stomped on, but that doesn't mean that people don't have a right, as a claim to something.

If you bought a pencil with your hard earned money, and somebody steals it, you still have a right to it, as a claim, even if the thief is stronger and you can't take it back.

Morally speaking you have a right to the pencil, but practically you might not be able to reclaim it.

So this is what I was trying to highlight, a right is a moral construct, and in a moral society, it is relevant.

Think of it this way, the free market will keep economic power is check, since you can't really have monopoly without patents and other government enforced IP crap, or corporate laws.

But you need a decentralized political system to keep political power in check.

  • 2 different restraints for 2 different problems. And then centralization can be stopped.

I think a mistake that both statist and anarchists make is that they tend to believe that most everyone out there thinks and reacts the way that THEY do.

While one who tends towards a statist mindset will think that if government doesn't do X then X would never be accomplished, and anarchists tend towards the notion that just because THEY want freedom from centralized control that EVERYBODY must want that.

The fact that as a a group, overwhelmingly people have been institutionalized for tens of thousands of years even more so in the last 100 with social engineering, mass media programming etc. I think it would take several generations to move toward an even mildly more decentralized or anarchic society. I don't believe for one minute that people in general want or could function in an anarchic society as they exist in their current condition.

I think hierarchies will form. It is seemingly innate in the human condition. However I also think the less there is centralized control and perceived legitimacy of a monarch or priestly class that live by rules and standards different from the peasants the more likely we are to be able to begin to rule ourselves.

The fact that as a a group, overwhelmingly people have been institutionalized for tens of thousands of years even more so in the last 100 with social engineering, mass media programming etc. I think it would take several generations to move toward an even mildly more decentralized or anarchic society.

Not at all. The big secret is that you don't have to actually convince people to become anarchists, that would really take hundreds of thousands of years.

There is a more practical and efficient way to introduce libertarian principles into society, even without people noticing it. You don't have to be trained in libertarian philosophy to just be free.

So the big secret is that humans are visual and practical creatures, theory is only for a small part of society that have big IQ's to understand it. The general masses need PRACTICAL examples of freedom.

Cryptocurrency is a practical example of it. It will draw many many users toward it, even people from remote areas of society who have been living as slaves for all this time, and they will become free even without realizing it.

You have to create projects that actively introduce freedom into society, you don't need to convince people to believe in freedom, you need to make people free even without realizing it.

So yes cryptocurrency could free billions of people, without them even realizing it. But if some tyrant opposes Bitcoin, the masses will quickly realize that the tyrant is wrong, because Bitcoin did actively demonstrate to them that their lives had become better just by using it, no need for intellectual arguments. But the tyrant will have no argument to oppose it. And violence is already considered bad.

This is how you win the propaganda war, with practical items, and not philosophical debates.

I totally agree with you're point that people need to shown in practical terms that a system or lack of one works.
Philosophical debates are fine, but only for those seeking to be challenged. (Most people I've met are not.) Mindsers do need to change in the long term though. I don't discount the mindset of people who for example state that bitcoint "isnt real money" because it isn't backed by a tyrant. They fail to realize that ALL money is a mental construct. I think the issue of decentralization should be fought on as many fronts as possible.
Just 200 years ago it was unimaginable that agriculture could reasonably exist without slavery. Now we have tecnonology that allows a handful of people to plant harvest and manage tens of thousands of acres. The mindset of slavery had to change but also without the practical replacement of slave labor it would have never stuck.
Practical, philosophical, economic, however people can be shown that one man has no intrinsic right to rule over another is fine by me. So long as it happens.

If what 'government' does is so good and necessary, why do they force people to pay for it?

I am not sure what is the goal of your post.

There are many things that people don't know are good for them, but it is. Like having insurance for example, many people don't get insured, and when they get sick and cant work, they go and riot on the streets why the evil capitalists are not taking care of them.

I am not advocating for forcing people to do anything, I just pointed this out as a counter-argument.

What happens to the people who don't pay the 'fee'?

I don't know, they would probably not be covered by the protections. I would like it to be setup as a service rather than a forced payment.

So if you don't pay you don't get the service, but you wont get thrown into a dungeon. But it would be like a collectively organized payment instead of a free market of payment.

(You can't have a free market in defense, it really leads to warring city-states)

That's the crux of it though. If it's voluntary, it's not 'government' and ancaps are fine with it.
If it's involuntary, then it's statism.

welcome to steemit @profitgenerator, am so glad to have your personality in this platform. looking forward to more of your posts.

followed you.

Coin Marketplace

STEEM 0.19
TRX 0.15
JST 0.029
BTC 64349.20
ETH 2673.53
USDT 1.00
SBD 2.83