[yes, we got a new Andrewism video for Labour Day!]
“Anarchism - a political philosophy and practice that opposes ALL hierarchies along with their ‘justifying’ dogmas and proposes the unending pursuit of anarchy, where free association, self determination, and mutual aid form the basis of our society.”
Right? I mean, it all sounds great in theory except we know that people are opportunists and eventually will see a situation they can exploit that undermines the system.
It’s the basic problem that as soon as someone starts a gang that is willing to violate the social contracts that motivate good behavior in an anarchy system the anarchy system doesn’t have any mechanism ready to defend itself and has to rely on people being spontaneously able to band together and violate the tenants they are trying to uphold by organizing into a violent hierarchical organization capable of fighting back.
During the Ukrainian Revolution, there were all sorts of gangs that emerged that killed Jews and stuff. What did anarchists do? They killed those pogromists in turn. Under conditions of anarchy, there is no state that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence to punish those who break the “social contract.” Rather, there is a plurality of violence that various groups can inflict on offenders. If you fuck around, you will find out.
Is this a violent sort of life? Not really. It’s not as if Indigenous or pre-state peoples live in violence all the time. Sure, violence did happen, so what?, violence happens all the time under state societies too. The difference is that without a state, people cannot call on a higher power to coerce so they have to rely on each other to keep each other safe. Besides, the people doing the raping, stealing, and killing in state societies are precisely the people protected by privilege and the state. Under conditions of anarchy, such privileges mean very little.
I’m very tired and should not be up right now, so sorry if this isn’t super coherent or very well explained, but bear with me.
I do lean very libertarian/anarchist, but possibly my biggest issue with the concept is that you are now assuming that the people who would be targets of the violence would be the ones doing all that.
Having a monopoly on violence is bad, but on the other hand, the alternative sounds like vigilantism, which often leads to witch hunts. I’ll bring up a practical example to explain myself better:
There’s a streamer on Kick, whose name I won’t mention, who streams himself going after (alleged) child abusers. Recently (yesterday I think) he and other people were confronting a supposed child abuser (they just called him a pedo, but I assume they meant child abuser; otherwise how would they know he’s a pedo?) but they never showed any evidence of it. He was an old man. At one point a random stranger approached them to figure out what was going on, and they told him the old man was a child abuser. As a response, the stranger punched the old man, who fell backwards and hit the back of his head on pavement. He ended up laying unconscious in a large pool of blood. Rumours say he’s probably dead, which doesn’t seem far-fetched given the details.
In a lot of ways, having a monopoly on violence that is subject to hierarchies is quite bad, but the upside is that there is generally a due process where evidence needs to be presented, which will lead someone to be put in prison and not murdered - in most societies I know of. This can also be adjusted through laws and regulations. If someone practices vigilantism and murders someone like that, they themselves are subject to that law and might be put in prison. The vast majority of situations don’t end up with police killing someone; but knocking someone out (or just down) can very easily end up with someone dying from hitting their head on a hard surface.
Basically, what I fear that a completely anarchical society would fall into a spiral of vigilantism, where people kill each other because someone somewhere said they are guilty of something and most people are incapable of evaluating the situation properly and conducting a proper investigation, and will immediately resort to violence. This becomes even more worrying when you consider that me saying that about the old man situation will make some feel justified in using violence against me, because in their head: “that guy was a pedo, and he’s defending him, so he must be a pedo, so he also deserves to die”.
Hope that made some sense, and sorry I’m replying to this 4 days later.
I think you’re fundamentally misunderstanding that social relationships to harm are fundamentally changed under conditions of anarchy. I apologize for the misunderstanding as writing on obscure forums doesn’t exactly encourage me to write with vigor.
Of course there would be a plurality of violence under conditions of anarchy, but this does not fundamentally mean the rule of vigilantism. Right now, people have been dealing with harm without the state for generations. These are found in criminalized communities like Black and Indigenous people, people who use drugs, people who engage in sex work, etc. These people develop mechanisms by which to deal with harm without the state and oftentimes without engaging in vigilantism. For these people, vigilantism is not a court of first resort but a last resort. Vigilantism puts a target on their back from the state. Instead, they talk it out, develop safety plans, plan boycotts and bans, etc.
Rather than thinking of justice in anarchic terms as vigilantism, think of it in terms of people dealing with harm and conflict in healthy ways.
Read on black army.
I think you have a point and a decentralized system will only stay decentralized if it has practices and norms that actively combat the natural development of hierarchies. This is generally what we see in non-hierarchical forager societies which are generally the most successful examples we know of at putting these principles into practice. But at least historically, these societies have not been as successful at combatting hierarchical violence by outsiders. For this reason I think a larger real world anarchistic society cannot necessarily pursue maximum human freedom without considering economic efficiency, organized self-defense, etc. How to develop such institutions and practices without hierarchy is a largely unsolved question, and it may be necessary to learn by trial and error.