this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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Anarchy (as a political philosophy) is about an absence of coercion.
Capitalism is about the supremacy of property rights over all other rights, backed up by the threat of violence against anyone who doesn't play along.
How anyone can think those two concepts are compatible is beyond me.
Every political ideology includes that. What good are rules without enforcement? Just because the enforcers are supposed to be random individuals in some ideologies doesn't mean the threat of violence for not playing along is gone.
Anarchism claims to be different. But yeah, that's a big part of why I see anarchism as a thought experiment and not a serious ideology.
I'm an anarchist, and my take is that anarchism isn't pacifism, and "no coercion" is a bad summary. It's more about the absence of hierarchical coercion and instead distribution of power to all people and communities.
If you're going around burning down houses, your anarchist neighbors are going to use force to take away your matches and gasoline if you don't stop.
Yup, that is my understanding as well. Likewise, if you're going around stealing, and someone happens to think that's bad, they can use force to stop you because there's no state telling them otherwise.
The idea that if there's no state we'd automatically be living in communist utopia where everything is shared and nobody owns anything is flawed on its face. It's certainly possible that there would be groups or tribes of people that choose to live that way, but other tribes would form around the idea that property rights should be protected and build a community around that.
You're very much misrepresenting how anarchism is supposed to work with that "automatically" statement. No one thinks if will happen by itself, there's a whole library on thought on how to go about making it the societal norm, with quite a lot of good points that humanity already largely acted like this for most of its two to three hundred thousand years of existence.
Supposedly, anyways. I suppose paleolithic man might well have been selling mammoth futures and executing debtors in the street.
But I also don't really buy it in a urban society unless that society is largely run by the Culture's Minds.