What is so wrong with anarchy?

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Why can't I have my anarchy, and you keep your statism?

Anarchy is a threat to Statism, if only philosophically.

It's also noisier.

Speaking as a former individualist anarchist, turned former social anarchist, and current anti-Stalinist socialist, I'm going to say that the problems are several. First, propertarian anarchism ignores public goods, collective action problems, common resources, externalities, information asymmetries, and other market failures, as well as exploitation, and so as an economic philosophy fails spectacularly right from the get-go. Second, post-left anarchism is basically just politicized hyper-individualism and lifestylism and fails not only to figure out a revolutionary strategy, but also to present any working theory for labor and production. Third, social anarchism, insofar as it is put into practice and based on pragmatic principles, is most accurately described as socialism from below with the heavy use of euphemisms. No law? Just commonly understood customs that the community can modify as per needs. Sounds sort of like law to me, albeit a sensible law. No cops? Just a worker's militia of willing protectors. Socialists would just call that community control of the police. No state? Well, we've got a nonhierarchical federation of participatory democratic communities whose councils manage common affairs. That's not a state- except it is, according to the liberal conception of what the state is. It's just a state as it ought to be ideally- without the class hierarchy, responsive to people's wishes, etc. It's what Marx called the Rule of the Proletariat and praised the Paris Commune over back when anarchists and socialists were on speaking terms. Insofar as anarchists ever set up working models of anarchism, they did so by enacting structures that individualists and liberals would consider state-like. So, upon realizing that (and facing troubling questions of overcoming bourgeois reactionary violence), I just called myself a socialist and made a day of it.

EJDoyle, I know I must disagree with you overall politically, but I liked your quick analysis of the various forms of anarchism.

True Anarchy does not have an office, phone, mailing address, and does nothing.

I am an Easter Bunnyist, candy once a year works for me.

Fine You be an anarchist within the confines of your house. But when you are out on the street I expect you not to initiate violence, not to pee in public and I expect you to drive on the correct side of the road when you are driving.

ruveyn

Well said.


Best Regards,

Jake

Who said I wanted to initiate violence? All I personally want is personal control over my dwelling and free association. To quote V from V for Venddetta "-All this riot and uproar, V… is this anarchy? Is this the land of Do-as-you-please?
-No, this is only the land of Take-what-you-want. Anarchy means ‘without leaders’; not ‘without order’. With anarchy comes an age of ordung, of true order, which is to say voluntary order. This age of ordung will begin when the mad and incoherent cycle of verwirrung that these bulletins reveal has run its course. This is not anarchy, Eve. This is chaos”.

One of the first things any state does when it's establishing itself is to remove all communal/ anarchic parts of society and replace them with statist alternatives to make people dependent on the state. Anything that in some way removes those dependencies is a danger to the state, which therefore will always seek to destroy any such ventures.

So that's why you can't have anarchy while a state still exists.

They would be euphemisms if they weren't significantly different in the way they are supposed to be different. Just because they fulfill the same purpose doesn't mean they're euphemisms. Yes anarchists propose bottom-up community rules instead of top-down laws, worker's militia instead of police and federations/unions instead of states, but that's the point. Green energy activists propose solar/ wind energy instead of coal/ nuclear energy. LGBT activists propose marriage for any two people regardless of gender. Are those all simply better alternatives for existing things? Yes! But that's the point!

I was going to write a lengthy response to the OP, but I think this about covers it.

And much thanks to Ruveyn for giving me my first good chuckle of the day.

Simple answer: humans are primates with an evolutionary bent towards social hierarchies.

There will always be "leaders" because that's the way we evolved.

It might have been different if we evolved from cats, but we didn't. We came from monkeys. Darn the luck.

Well, save up and start your own business and buy yourself your own apartment. You have your "own piece of earth"

Best Regards,

Jake

Working on that . Just in the mean time that bothers me .

I agree that they're better, but I'd argue that, from the liberal perspective of most classical social philosophy, these things fulfill the ideal purpose of the things they're replacing and are, to a great extent, euphemisms for the ideal functions of the things they replace. So, to me, the language of abolishing the state is misleading and obfuscating when what you're talking about is replacing the model of the state as a top-down, perverse, out-of-touch institution of class rule with the state as a bottom-up, participatory democratic federation. It's misleading to most people, because most people conceive the state as being a collective institution of common affairs- which social anarchists do not seek to abolish, whereas when social anarchists speak of abolishing the state, they are defining the state in a narrower way as an institution of enforcing class rule through the monopoly of violence. Saying you seek to abolish the state while meaning the latter definition will lead people to think you mean the former, leading to painful verbal and mental gymnastics trying to explain the differences in conceptions of the state. I could approach people and say, 'abolish the state', and then they ask what I want to do for public goods, and I could say 'participatory democratic federation', and they could say 'isn't that a state', and then I'd have to go into all sorts of theory. Or, I could say, 'socialism from below and participatory democracy' right off the bat and get down to business.

All of this, of course, being less relevant to OP, who, judging by his Gary Johnson endorsement, is a right or propertarian 'anarchist'.

Do you think that the confusion of what anarchists mean by abolishing the state is caused by their choice of words or by the "anarchy is chaos" view promoted by those in favour of strong states? The second seems to at least have influenced some of the other posts in this thread.

Lack of stability and reason. There is a reason every successful large society has had a government. Large groups of people (like in cities) simply don't hold together very well without law and order.