this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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Anarchy just shifts the problem from “people with the most money bully the people with less” to “people with the most guns bully the people with less”.
Did we read the same praxis?
What problems are there in: “Everyone should be armed! Money is theft!”?
Guns are not the only deterrent to intolerance, btw. We use bolt cutters too.
So, I have a question: how did kings and governments get the monopoly on violence?
Anarchism doesn't really have a great answer to that question, and frankly I really dont think it needs one. It's reckons that people who understand the freedoms they have will fight to maintain them, and it understands those ideas within the context of now, rather than trying to thread a shakey narrative through all of history. If you want men from 100 years ago to answer all your questions today then Marxism is probably closer to what you want
Doubtless you can find Anarchist arguing about that question, its a good question. But at its core Anarchism is a more of a philosophy rather than an ideology. Its a collection of tools that one can employ to solve problems and win concessions from authority.
That said if you want to see some of said argument, The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow gives some nice answers. And does so whilst trying to build on the up to date evidence about what life was like that long ago.
Ah makes sense, thank you for that great answer (:
So in the root it relies on a belief that “good” people are in the majority and that our current structure gives an outsized amount of power to “bad” people?
Yea it basically requires that you are either a bad actor pretending this is true, or a basement dweller who choses to believe this is true. They have no idea the kind of assholes you meet traversing society, or they are the assholes. The 5 million people in Manhattan are just not going to live peacefully without law and order. Be fun to watch tho.
Yes, but it's not like we spent the last 200 years hoping for that to happen on its own. In the very beginning the idea was "let's assassinate the king the rest will sort itself", nope, it doesn't, the king is in people's heads.
A word you'll hear used quite often nowadays in theoretical Anarchist circles is "prefiguration", building the new in the shell of the old, in particular building horizontal modes of organisation. When you see something being organised hierarchically, say, a workplace, and you have an idea on how to organise it horizontally (e.g. a cooperative), then do so. And be good at it.
The idea is that thus, hierarchical realism can be fought: That idea that people have in their head that to organise something, someone has to be in charge, call the shots, order people around, be able to exert authority over others, force others. The more people are part of those kinds of structures, the more obvious it will become that horizontal modes of organisation are also possible on larger levels, and people will work towards creating those. The avalanche needs to be built from the bottom up, as weird as that sounds.
In short: I can't tell you what's over the horizon, but I can give you a compass and say "Here, that direction, doesn't that look promising? Let's take a first step!".
...and meta side-note we're on lemmy. As everyone can just spin up their own instance (or happily join an instance with admins who admin instead of try to rule over their users) and the instances interact horizontally it's quite anarchic in principle. Evidently, it also works. That it was written by tankies is just extra irony on top, showing how little they understand their pet enemy.