Thread 511404413

Ask yourself this: Is there anything more important than freedom? Were fake securities and conveniences ever worth it? Was the boot down your neck ever worth it?
Organizations are the real evil. In an ideal world any attempt at forming a government would be taken as a hostility towards innocent and taken down quickly.
Good people don't need rules and evil people will bend rules anyway.
I'm just saying.

Wasn't Anarchy originally created to destroy the Monarchy

panty > stocking

>>511404413 (OP)
Can anarchy be sustained, though?
When evil people form a gang to terrorize good people aren't they essentially a government, specifically a military dictatorship?

>>511404413 (OP)
>In an ideal world any attempt at forming a government would be taken as a hostility towards innocent and taken down quickly.
You are delusional.

Anarchy is a transient system.
Anarchy's chances fast into autocracy forged by strongmen or people that knows how to manipulate people and tools for their cause.

Anarchy would never work.

>>511404413 (OP)
Fair point, were aanarchy not so weak as to lose to anyone who decides to organise.

From anarchy feudalism.

>>511404603
When the US government’s system of elected leaders was first proposed, people balked. Thomas Paine was asked “won’t the President just declare himself king? What stops him from doing that; he commands the military”

And even now it’s a fair question, right? What does stop the President from declaring himself King For Life? It happens in all sorts of nominal “democracies” in Africa. The only line of defense we have is the Constitution says he can’t do that. But that’s just a piece of paper. The paper won’t get up out of its case in the National Archives and do some deposing. So what stops a President from becoming a dictator?

The answer to that question is the same as the answer to the question “if society is stateless, what stops the biggest gang from taking over?”

>>511404893
>“if society is stateless, what stops the biggest gang from taking over?”
Nothing as far as I can tell.
Society certainly isn't stateless now and if it became so I doubt it'd remain so for long.

>>511405125
Nice reading comprehension

>>511405572
Do you have a point you'd care to make non sarcastically?

>>511405710
Yes, and I made it. And you didn’t read it.

My point was to get you to seriously consider the question “what stops the US President from declaring himself king for life?”

>>511405923
My answer to that would be that the threat of civil war serves to motivate the US President to not take drastic actions.
This obviously doesn't imply that we live in a stateless society, though; quite the opposite.

>>511406180
No, but the point is the same. The President doesn’t declare himself king for life because it wouldn’t work. There aren’t enough people to recognize the legitimacy of his claim to authority. He would be treated as a criminal. The military he ostensibly commands is broadly more loyal to the notional idea of the government than to the man in charge of it. He doesn’t declare himself king for life because being king for life requires a sufficient number of people to act like it’s actually true.

It’s the same core logic that protects a stateless society. If the society WANTS to be stateless (meaning, it hasn’t just been thrown into disarray by its state collapsing, the people are actually done with the idea of government at a moral level) then it will be, because nobody will take the “biggest gang” seriously. They’ll never be more than just a gang, that eventually get killed.

Power requires legitimacy to be sustainable.

>>511404590
wrong

Do not listen to this nonsense anon.
We need rules to function as a society.

>>511406512
Even if you have a broadly libertarian society, the most basic function of any government is to protect its people.
So if you have a military formed for the sole purpose of keeping military dictatorships or "big gangs" from taking power that constitutes a government in my eyes.

>>511406779
Why do people need "protection" from gangs again? People can defend themselves, you know.
This is anarchy we are talking about not nanny state where fat people rule other fat people.

>>511406872
Not every individual can defend himself, particularly not when he's ganged up on, which is why gangs form in the first place.

>>511406779
>So if you have a military formed for the sole purpose of keeping military dictatorships or "big gangs" from taking power
Do we have a military formed for the sole purpose of keeping the President from declaring himself king for life? Is there some special standing Constitutional Defense Force with a Special Term Limits Unit that swoops in to make sure the President gtfos the White House at the end of his elected term?

You don’t need a standing army vested specifically with the authority to “protect statelessness”. You would, of course, probably have people with guns. Some of them would probably even enforce rules for a living, if I were to guess. But so what? The Brinks armored truck driver has a gun on his waist but I don’t consider him a federal agent.

>>511407021
>You don’t need a standing army vested specifically with the authority to “protect statelessness”.
That has absolutely nothing to do with what I said. Maybe I didn't explain myself clearly enough.
My point is that a military (or gang BTW but military sounds more legitimate) exists to protect people from foreign rule, regardless of whatever rule or lack of rules those same people operate under currently.

>>511407270
I KIIIIIND of buy this argument but not really. And I could sit here and talk about the concept of a militia and all that, and also ask “what country would come and try to lay claim to a stateless society? To what end?” But Russia also annexed Donbas, a territory that has functionally no economic, military, or strategic significance. So I guess yeah, sometimes states just be annexing territories.

Maybe that means the program for statelessness needs to be a global one. Maybe not. I’m not sure. But again, I’d ask you a question like
>if the US decided tomorrow that it was going to annex Canada, what could Canada’s military possibly do to prevent it?
The answer is “nothing” but nobody is afraid that this outcome will happen.

I guess my point is, you’re holding a hypothetical society to far more exacting standards than you hold most modern real societies. Yes, it COULD fail. It could be overtaken from within or without by a sufficiently well-organized system of structural violence, subjugate the multitudes, and we’d be right back where we started. It’s hardly guaranteed but it’s also certainly possible. All forms of government have failed; anarchies, monarchies, theocracies, democracies. But what sort of argument against a thing is “but if we try, it might not work”? If you hate your job, do you not go look for a new job because you might also hate that job too?

>>511404413 (OP)
he speaks about anarchy but cleary defend Turan if he benefits him

>>511408141
Anarchy isn't a form of government, it's a lack of government, and I don't think this is just pedantry.
Anyway, I think your idea of anarchy might be what I called a broadly libertarian society, like one that has what you might call a gang or military or militia or whatever to protect it but which is otherwise basically lawless.

>>511404413 (OP)
Ok Marx now how do we realistically achieve it sustainably

>>511404413 (OP)
I visit this board when there are no /biz/ threads and I must say you are very awesome OP. Check out "The Market For Liberty" if you havent read it yet. It outlines how a society without government would work from the economic side. Because if you think about it, the government is a business itself, that should offer you "protection". However it is forced upon you, just like a criminal forces his "protection" upon you for money. If the governments are so great, why do they force you to pay them, threatning you with violence? Because if government services were optional like every others business in the world, the governments would crumble, because in a free market without gov opression, badly run businesses (like governments) crumble.

>>511404413 (OP)
Anarchy is not possible. If you got rid of the government, someone would just make another one.

>>511408441
>Anarchy isn't a form of government, it's a lack of government
It’s a quirk of our language that the idea of the state (as in, an organization with a territorial monopoly on the legitimized use of violence) is fundamentally tied to the idea of social structure. To the point that “law and order” go together like lettuce and tomato, and “anarchy” is a synonym for “chaos”.

So, what do you mean by “government”? If you mean
>a series of rules and procedures by which people organize and agree upon the rules of daily social life
Then yes, anarchism is a system of government. It just isn’t a state. But if by government you mean “a state”, then no, obviously it does not. Still it’s worth bearing in mind that anarchism, as proposed by almost everyone who takes the ideology seriously (Max Stirner can fuck off), is never presumed to be a system of ethics-free lawlessness. The presumption is that a system of ethics can exist which stands in opposition to the use of coercive force, and in such strength that EVEN a government is recognized as illegitimate because it, too, is a kind of coercive force, no matter what it claims to exercise that force in the service of.

>>511408878
Yes by government I mean a state, because an entirely consensual government makes no sense according to my understanding of the term. I know some might refer to things like liturgical government but I would call that pedantic.
I would say that a military protecting against hostile takeover is the most basic function of government and defines it.

>>511409175
Which, okay. If you cede the point that a voluntary association is not equivalent to a state, then you kind of answer your own question. Because, in principle, can a voluntary association of people not defend their community from hostile outsiders? Does the decision need to be made
>once we do this, we let these guys with the guns tell us all what to do forever
I don’t think so. Certainly such a fighting force is going to be less capable and organized in many respects but that doesn’t mean it can’t get the job done. The Viet Cong certainly did.

>>511409361
Well as I've said at least twice already I think you can have a broadly libertarian society with a government. Fulfilling the most basic function of government doesn't mean that government has to be totalitarian at all.

>>511409593
But does it even have to be “a government”? You’re kind of saying two things here. On the one hand you’re saying “voluntary association does not meet the criteria for a government”, on the other hand you’re saying “mounting a defense against hostile outsiders is the minimum definition of a government”. Which one is the definition we’re using? Why the implicit assumption that if an area can defend itself against hostile foreign forces, it must necessarily be under the protection of a mandatory violence-based system of exploitation?

>>511404413 (OP)
I doubt it's ideal in any way whatsoever, but it probably beats whatever we currently have.

>>511409786
>mandatory
Only in the sense that it's mandatory that any invaders comply with the defense force's commands.
>violence-based
Depends on if you want to call self-defense with deadly force violence, I generally wouldn't but to be fair that can sometimes be tricky
>system of exploitation
I don't know where you're getting that from at all

>>511410107
I guess what I’m asking is, why does that not count as anarchism? Here’s the train of thought as I follow it

>anarchism won’t work because hostile foreign powers will take it over
“an anarchist society is not defenseless, it is possible for voluntary associations to mount a self defense force”
>yeah but if you have a self defense force, that’s a government, it’s not anarchism anymore
“okay, if that’s how you want to use the term ‘government’. Anarchists don’t care, they only care that society is voluntary and non-hierarchical, they aren’t opposed to it being organized.”

What are we talking about here? You keep belaboring the point that an anarchist society needs [x function currently performed by the state], and when you’re told “no anarchist denies that, it just needs to be provided in a different way than the way the state provides it”, you just restate the original point that society needs a state because it needs [x] and [x] is provided by the state.

>>511410616
Enforcing rules or lack of rules within a territory is what makes a government. The structure of its military or how it recruits is irrelevant.

>>511411029
See previous:
>“okay, if that’s how you want to use the term ‘government’. Anarchists don’t care, they only care that society is voluntary and non-hierarchical, they aren’t opposed to it being organized.”

If you want to define “government” as “the organized enforcing of basic rules of human society”, then anarchism is just a different system of government. It’s not a state, it’s not a hierarchically organized territorial monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive violence. But it’s a “government”. I’m fine with that, I’m not allergic to the word. I frankly think a much healthier way of understanding anarchism is as
>simultaneous mutually overlapping governments, where you choose which one you like most for different things, or maybe get together with some like-minded dudes and make your own
Since most people think of “government” as a kind of social organization anyway. If what it means to govern is to get together with other people and reach a consensus on those matters that affect you all, so that you can act in accordance with some larger plan, of course anarchism is government, or “has” government, or whatever. Because of course people are going to do that. You couldn’t stop them from doing that, even if you wanted to, which you wouldn’t.

>>511404413 (OP)
The biggest problem with anarchy is that it only lasts an incredibly short time. True anarchy only lasts a fairly short time before gangs form and then you live under tyranny until it takes on a more official structure.

Anyone that seriously advocates for anarchy should just flat-out say they want violent tyranny because actual anarchy is little more than a brief transitional period before someone else comes into power.

If you seriously advocate for anarchy, you probably can't even comprehend planning something more than a few years in advance, and think that a decade of anarchy might as well be a lifetime.

>>511411411
>enforcing
That implies coercion, and in my book anarchy can't be coercive. Governments enforce rules via their monopoly on legitimate violence.

>>511404413 (OP)
>Anime girls acting like whores used to be a quirky funny thing but now everyone has whore fatigue so the joke doesn't land

>>511411662
>Governments enforce rules via their monopoly on legitimate violence
But is that the only way for rules to be enforced? This is the point I disputed way up at the start of this conversation.

Because the modern government IS a system of organized coercive violence, it's easy to work under the assumption that it has to be, that this is the only possible way of arranging things. But that isn't so. Because if you follow the chain of command all the way up, what do you find?

>Constitution

In almost every country left in the world, it's not a man or lineage or household at the top of the pyramid, it's a document. Some statement of abstract principles which ties the whole thing together. That document cannot pick up a gun and start blasting when things don't go according to its dictates. At the end of the day, all structures of power are grounded in the same thing: belief in their legitimacy. It is belief which makes all of this possible. If abstract rules, and the belief in the legitimacy of those rules, can keep the entire structure of coercive violence in check, then how can you argue that enforcing rules requires a superior structure of violence?

How can you argue that there is no law without police/military, if they themselves are bound by the law, and not an endlessly regressing system of higher police/military? It's not turtles all the way up, anon. It stops somewhere. To lazily invoke popular culture to prove the point,
>power resides wherever men believe it resides
It's not the violence that perpetuates the social structure. It's the social structure that perpetuates the violence.