This article was posted shortly before the election but everything in there is still true and seeing his appointees perhaps worse than predicted.
This article was posted shortly before the election but everything in there is still true and seeing his appointees perhaps worse than predicted.
excuse my ignorance, but ive always wondered this about anarchism: Seems to me that people gather and organize themselves to reach common goals. How can these organizations not become governments? is that actually possible?
I think like any other political or philosophical view, this is one of those things where you will get one unique answer per each anarchist you ask.
Speaking personally, I think philosophies should be used as tools, and as the best tool for a job.
To me, anarchism means disregarding established authority and working together to achieve whatever a goal is. Ideally cooperatively. Some groups will perform well at this and some will not. Some will perform better under a more traditional organized structure.
I don’t want to subjugate people with anarchist dogma. I want to help people learn to trust themselves and to cooperate. And I want to get better at it myself.
I see, so you see it not an actual state we may achieve, but rather the negation of present authorities and systems.
That is my take.
The delusion of grandeur I might suffer would be something like people foster such a strong culture of cooperation and mutual aid that state government operations and programs become obsolete.
That’s a north star. Something to aim for as a concept. But of course we won’t ever land a rocket ship on the actual North Star.
By avoiding hierarchy. So it’s like how a poker game has a bunch of players, but nobody is the boss of poker. And if somebody starts cheating, you either expel them or form a new group.
The hard part is scaling this up to billions of people.
So as long as an organization is truly democratic, it can be considered anarchist?
For example, if one person likes to make coca cola but as a side effect he pollutes a river that the rest of the group wants to keep clean. The group may decide democratically to force him to not make coca cola. I would call this a goverment-like organization, even though it does not need to have a leader to fulfill its goal.
I would consider that anarchist iff it’s not hierarchical, yes.
A lot of what is commonly called anarchism isn’t a complete lack of government. It’s more like removing the capitalist system and wealthy elite. Then not having large governments, make stuff like the town council the highest form of government.
I’m not 100% sure how that translates to modern mass infrastructure and global trade but those are the basic ideas as best as I can see.