Response to Principles and Predictions @larkenrose

  This is the response to https://steemit.com/statism/@larkenrose/principles-and-predictions 

I’d like to start my answer with the following joke: Once a son asked his father to explain him the difference between theory and practice. The father had difficulties coming up with the generalization, but rather offered an example. 

First, he asked his wife: “Honey, if someone would pay you a million dollars would you have sex with this person?” “Of course!” 

Then he asked the same question his daughter and got the same answer. 

“You see,” he told his son, “Theoretically we have 2 million dollars, but practically we only have 2 whores on hands.” 

The same thing is true when we are talking about anarchism. Theoretically, all that you say is correct, but practically it doesn’t and will never work. Just like your first quoted question when you removed the first part of the statist’s answer. 

Statist: “Sure. You are right. However, those principles will never be put to a test, because if we didn’t have a government there would be violent chaos!” 

In fact, anarchy has happened many times in history. For example, it happened in Russian in 1917. Communists were only a small fraction of different political groups one of which were anarchists. There was even a very charismatic anarchistic leader Nestor Makhno.  

He was against the government and thus embodied this philosophy into life by killing both the left and the right wings politicians. To theorize about what would happen if people wouldn’t become violent animals is the same as theorize on the topic what if people had wings. The answer is quite simple “Because, in this case, you wouldn’t talking about the same species.” 

The layer of decency and civilization in a human being is extremely thin. To see the human nature in its true colors we can remember LA riots during Rodney King trials. What has happen is at the beginning of the riots police was given the order not to interfere. As a result, mass robberies and fires started in the city and the riot also instigated the ethnic warfare between Koreans and blacks. Notice this happened on a relatively small scale. Imagine what will happen if police weren’t standing by and eventually not interfere and stopped the violence. Well, a little excuse in history of the Russian revolution 1917 would have given you this example. It led to mass murder, rapes, destruction of poverty and similar heroic deeds. Anarchists participated in all this destruction in line with all other revolutionary parties. 

“All the world of enforcing we will destroy 

And then, we will build new World, our World 

Whoever was nothing will become everything!” 

On the first part, these guys did splendidly and destroyed everything that there was to destroy. The problem came only arose with the second part of the song. What they have built was a labor camp system that enslaved people much more than the previous government system.  

Perhaps more importantly, when a country loses government it loses its political power in the world of the neighboring countries. The nature of political power is such that there cannot be a political power vacuum. Thus, as soon as the government of one country weakens or disintegrates, the neighboring political powers will advance to seize this power. The pretext here doesn’t matter. The infamous Prussian king Fredrick I used to say “If you have the power to occupy the neighboring country go and do it. Then you can always find lawyers who would prove that it was rightfully yours.” So to conclude, it’s not that anarchistic principles are morally wrong or logically flawed, it’s just they would never apply in real life. 

Just my modest opinion.