This is a complex question difficult to answer in a comment. I also see others who call themselves anarchist say it’s about smaller governing units and isn’t without law. I disagree.
Anarchism is about not having rulers, at any level, whether that’s a country or an HOA. It’s about being free from coerced decisions (therefore democracy is inherently non-anarchist – because those who didn’t win the vote will be coerced). But this doesn’t mean that it’s chaos. Order does not require authority or coercion, it only requires people who want to work together and make decisions together.
I’m of the opinion that actual sustainable anarcho-communism isn’t something that can work with 8 billion people on Earth (no that does not mean I want to genocide anyone), it’s not something we should expect to attain while retaining all the hallmarks of our current world, e.g. massive population, cars, skyscrapers, air travel for pleasure, and cities with tens of millions of people.
Our current population level is pathological - Earth will fail with numbers in this range regardless of whether we can create enough nitrogen fertilizer or build enough houses. Our numbers grew so large because greedy people realized they could use authority and tools like capitalism to extract the wealth of others, and the more others the more wealth.
For those that disagree, view a human population growth over 1000 years and tell me that’s sustainable. The methods that can work in 2023 with 8 billion people and what methods that are actually tenable for a sustainable human population are not necessarily the same (anarchism/anarcho-communism IMHO could not function on a scale as grand as we are now - and that’s not a flaw of anarchism, it’s a problem with our numbers).
Also, I don’t think anarcho-communism is something we could move into quickly, it would require at like a generation of cultural change. All of us have been born and raised in an exploitative system and can hardly imagine a world where exploitation was not the norm (thus your question) and if it were dropped on us it would quickly devolve into chaos and warlords.
IMHO, we get to anarchism not via revolution, but by evolving culturally to where we no longer need a state.
My brother lent me “The History of Everything” and it’s appealing, but in the end i couldn’t go along with it because a) it billed itself as an academic work but was a polemic and b) the privilege of the authors screamed across every page, as much as they stated that they weren’t.
IMO, anarchism fails to confront the fact that there are malignant psychopathic in the world. As much as they claim not to fall into the Noble Savage trap, that was the essence of the book.
There will always be exploitative people, and assuming that a Return to Nature (regardless of the many other benefits to sustainability that I in no way want to impugn) will eliminate that is, in my view, somewhat naive.
This is a complex question difficult to answer in a comment. I also see others who call themselves anarchist say it’s about smaller governing units and isn’t without law. I disagree.
Anarchism is about not having rulers, at any level, whether that’s a country or an HOA. It’s about being free from coerced decisions (therefore democracy is inherently non-anarchist – because those who didn’t win the vote will be coerced). But this doesn’t mean that it’s chaos. Order does not require authority or coercion, it only requires people who want to work together and make decisions together.
I’m of the opinion that actual sustainable anarcho-communism isn’t something that can work with 8 billion people on Earth (no that does not mean I want to genocide anyone), it’s not something we should expect to attain while retaining all the hallmarks of our current world, e.g. massive population, cars, skyscrapers, air travel for pleasure, and cities with tens of millions of people.
Our current population level is pathological - Earth will fail with numbers in this range regardless of whether we can create enough nitrogen fertilizer or build enough houses. Our numbers grew so large because greedy people realized they could use authority and tools like capitalism to extract the wealth of others, and the more others the more wealth.
For those that disagree, view a human population growth over 1000 years and tell me that’s sustainable. The methods that can work in 2023 with 8 billion people and what methods that are actually tenable for a sustainable human population are not necessarily the same (anarchism/anarcho-communism IMHO could not function on a scale as grand as we are now - and that’s not a flaw of anarchism, it’s a problem with our numbers).
Also, I don’t think anarcho-communism is something we could move into quickly, it would require at like a generation of cultural change. All of us have been born and raised in an exploitative system and can hardly imagine a world where exploitation was not the norm (thus your question) and if it were dropped on us it would quickly devolve into chaos and warlords.
IMHO, we get to anarchism not via revolution, but by evolving culturally to where we no longer need a state.
I recommend reading Kropotkin and David Graeber.
My brother lent me “The History of Everything” and it’s appealing, but in the end i couldn’t go along with it because a) it billed itself as an academic work but was a polemic and b) the privilege of the authors screamed across every page, as much as they stated that they weren’t.
IMO, anarchism fails to confront the fact that there are malignant psychopathic in the world. As much as they claim not to fall into the Noble Savage trap, that was the essence of the book.
There will always be exploitative people, and assuming that a Return to Nature (regardless of the many other benefits to sustainability that I in no way want to impugn) will eliminate that is, in my view, somewhat naive.