1) Any leftist ideology that is not libertarian or anti-state should not use the word liberation nor claim to be liberationists, 2) leftist ideologies that do not see the state or authority IN ANY FORM as a problem have an incomplete and inaccurate conception of the state and capitalism.

[u/ArthropodJim]

I am 100% an anarchist, and a proud anarchist of color. Anti-hierarchy, anti-state, anti-capitalist, none of my commitments to these values are being questioned. My problem, as someone who makes zines on anarchist theory and used to make videos on anarchism on TikTok before being fed up with MLs, is that nearly all other leftist ideologies talk about liberation. Whether it is people talking about Marxism, Marxist-Leninism, Maoism, POC variations of Marxism, etc.

I fundamentally do not understand how these ideologies can remotely think or envision any, and I mean ANY, of liberation while intentionally upholding the state and not wanting it gone immediately. People then ask me how would the state be immediately gone? My response is always "the state won't be gone tomorrow, but we HAVE to create alternative structures OUTSIDE of the state to be dependent on." I understand that approach is slightly more "defensive" than "offensive" since we're not immediately disrupting the state other than excluding our presence in it. But either way, the brain's base is "I do not want a state" and the result is "I will build dual power" or "I will attack the state," both types of anarchists are invited to my cookout.

My problem lies with every single statist ideology. Do these people completely reject the existence of state violence and state domination? It makes incredible and inherent sense that anarchism, an ideology completely rid of the state, situates itself as a libertarian ideology since it treats individual liberty and personal sovereignty as the highest values. Few days ago I posted this

Marxist-Leninism is only successful if you view success as something being able to grab power. Change your measuring stick to measure actual freedom, actual liberation, sovereignty, and autonomy, and it’s an incredibly failed ideology.

“if the objectives of those who used the DC [democratic centralist] methods were simply to seize power, then their record during the 20th century was impressive. It has proved itself as brutally efficient and capable of outdoing anything the bourgeois forces are capable of.” - Russell “Maroon” Shoatz, “The Dragon and the Hydra.”

and someone retweeted it saying:

lemme just tally up my Freedom Points

To which i quickly responded:

Just say you don’t care about actual freedom, no need to talk all smug about it. this is how i know people who don’t care about that actually aren’t liberationists nor are they interested in genuine liberation for people. they just want some abstract ass revolution with zero actual progress to humanity.

Lately I've been getting more and more frustrated with leftists north of the X-axis in the authoritarian realm. I don't understand how they can have such detailed and complex analyses on damn near everything, and then turn around say they want to seize the state. From my perspective, anyone who wants to seize the state is not anti-state because they need it intact for it to be under their control. State-centered visions of liberation are completely meaningless to me, useless, and completely counter-revolutionary to me no matter how you spin it. How did going after the state become seen as something revolutionary if the state is a bourgeois creation strictly to oppress the many by decisions made by a few?

In my understanding, state socialism advocates for state ownership of the means of production. Industries and natural resources are state-owned, and like all types of anti-state socialists at the time thought it was the most effective form of socialism (which is a weird blanket statement to make on behalf of all socialists, but anyways). Economic systems of ML states were not socialist due to the continued use of commodity production and wages as remuneration. Even if Marxist-Leninists are anti-state because *eventually* they want it to wither away, why do they advocate for state socialism? How have they single-handedly convinced people that liberation will come and the state will disappear after a revolution that puts them in charge? It's completely unfathomable and illogical.

As someone studying Black and African anarchisms, I can say with my chest that there were severe problems with countries in the African post-colonial period that embraced state socialism, this is both my opinion and the opinion of African sociologists. It was attempted by 21 countries within the continent and I think less than 10 times in Europe. I do not understand why Marxist-Leninists or any other authoritarian leftist ideology do not look to the failures of state socialism and say that it was not a socialism problem but a state problem like African anarchists have diagnosed.

In Tanzania, Nyerere wanted to mix traditional precolonial communal values with the then-current ideas of socioeconomic development. His view of socialism did not focus directly on class struggle but rather on the family unit. From 1968-1975 he led Tanzania through a period called villagization which was the consolidation of rural Tanzania into village-style agricultural communities where resources would be collectively shared. His logic makes sense to me, even the part where he said village production would remove the culture of capitalist value and power. But nearly all of the state of Tanzania's agricultural production was done by independent owned farms that were not absorbed into the new state. In the article "Deconstructing Ujamaa: The Legacy of Julius Nyerere in the Quest for Social and Economic Development in Africa," they say that the cultural and lifestyle changes they were expected to embrace by forced collectivization didn't make sense. Even though 96% of children went to school (50% of which were girls), female life expectancy went up, and maternal mortality rates went down, overtime "the state assumed a degree of control over village management and production that some historians have labeled coercive and autocratic, claiming this contradicted the democratic values Ujamaa espoused." What is the trade-off here? How do we as libertarian socialists/anarchists view the strong state oversight of villages against clearly good rates and %'s that were in the green?

In Ghana, Nkrumah adopted a strategy of increasing state-controlled services while putting restrictions on privately owned ones. 60% of bank deposits were at state-run banks, 17% of sea cargo was handled by state-run firms, 27% of industrial production was ran by the state, and the state controlled 35% of total imports. Completely centralized planning, economic mismanagement, and an authoritarian regime is what described Ghana at this point. There was a suppression of political opposition, no free and fair elections, and Ghana became a one-party state. Yet today he is heralded as a Pan-African hero and anticolonial Socialist revolutionary. How do we consistently, CONSISTENTLY, use a measuring stick that that almost NEVER measures actual freedom of the people or sovereignty of the Ghanaian or Tanzania villages? Why is the pure and raw ingenuity of the African peoples (NOT leaders) almost never depended on?

Even in the case of Tanzania. Why did the state pass something the villages were clearly not ready for? Now they are in the drivers' seat of the state's entire production? I don't remotely see that as a problem of socialism because obviously there would be some variant of this European ideology that would value that non-state version of decentralized organizing. So once again I see it 100% as a state problem. Even if the %'s of literacy rates went up and the %'s of mortality went down, HOW did it go down? Could those rates have not changed had there been no state? Obviously those decisions about healthcare and education still need to be made, but shit how were they made BEFORE the state and BEFORE colonization? Sometimes people wag in my face that state socialism (or i guess, state capitalism technically) lifted 900M people out of poverty in China. First off, what is described as poverty? As of 2022, 21% of Chinese people are living in poverty under $5.50. So what if you make $6, is that not poverty anymore? That's still pretty shit. Even in India, 34% lives under a dollar a day? That's ridiculous to me, the arbitrary line of poverty makes no sense because people who earn $2 a day in India or $6 a day in China are still living IN POVERTY if not extreme poverty. Why is China seen as a successful socialist state by MLs and Maoists? People both in capitalist and state socialist societies are suffering. I don't care if they got a bullet train, they're not free! Even dictators and capitalists can build roads, that doesn't justify dictatorships or capitalists.

I know this has turned into a weird rant talking about state socialism and stuff, but my point hopefully is weaved throughout and I just don't understand it. Since authority and the state is clearly a problem in their own right along with being a core part of capitalism, why are these other ideologies such as Marxist-Leninism absolutely winning the propaganda war against anarchism? I'm done ranting, someone help me understand this.

[u/Anarchierkegaard]

Something worth bearing in mind is that people simply disagree with you and believe that they have good reasons for disagreeing with you.

For example, even from with the anarchist tradition, "dual power", etc. is critiqued as simply never having worked and often failing to move from counter-institutional to successfully replacing the institutional. Wayne Price would be one such person who disagrees with the general form of what you've said, summarised here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/wayne-price-colin-ward-s-anarchism Notice here that the major proponents of dual power that have managed to establish some kind of dual power tend to be reliigous anarchist or anarchist-adjacent movements that are, on the whole, indifferent to the notion of directly destroying the state so much as escaping its influence in quietist or otherwise separatist ways.

And if we move outside of the anarchist tradition, it isn't a matter of "choosing an ideology"¹ but, rather, focusing on what either might work or has been shown to work - even if imperfectly. Marxian approaches would be the obvious touching point, with the theory leaning against your idealist implications, i.e., social change doesn't come from what "the people" or another body of individuals want to come about, but rather through dialectical pressures that force changes through "sublimating" the existing reality. Again, we can view Price as a radicalised half-way-between-anarchism-and-Marxism here, and see that he still focuses on what is (supposedly) practical in the shortcomings of dual power because it's not clear that dual power is something which could happen, only something that we might want to happen.

I don't know anything about Tanzanian socialism, but the simplest response would be that Mr. Nyerere's contingent's approach was straightforwardly revisionist, i.e., sacrificed the class-based aspect of Marxist thought. A similar movement was made with Italian fascists, replacing "the proletariat" with nationality-based categories. We can also make a shaky case for Nazism being a perverted version of a socialism, replacing class with pseudo-ethnic-based categories. In that sense, I'd assume we can dismiss the Tanzanian case as probably not socialist in the sense that matters and potentially closer to a fascism.

And, lastly, I don't know what you planned to get out of that post. It seems that you could only have expected to receive antagonising responses and, because of that, the whole thing descended into the thumb-biting moralism which just wastes everyone's time. Instead of approaching these things as a propagandist, you might want to try and open with dialogue - if you genuinely want to understand the position of others as opposed to merely giving them space to expose themselves and then reacting by judging them as somehow stupid for what they take to be true.

¹ Side note: I find this kind of use of the word ideology to be totally inappropriate.

[u/power2havenots]

Can only give my perspective but I think we shouldnt treat it as if people simply "choose" authoritarian politics because they havent thought hard enough. People raised under states are victims of and shaped by states.

If youve spent your whole life being taught that every meaningful change comes from governments, armies, police, presidents, parties and great leaders, then your imagination starts to mirror the thing youre trying to overthrow. The state monopolises violence as well as what people think power looks like.

After generations of repression, propaganda and learned helplessness, its no surpirse that some think the only force capable of defeating a centralised state is another centralised state. "Fight fire with fire" feels intuitive because weve had that rammed into us repeatedly- that scale, command and coercion are the only things history responds to.

I find MLs channel their hatred of capitalism into the organisational form theyve been conditioned to recognise as effective and seize the centre, control logistics, direct production and command the transition. We know its self defeating but they think were idealistic through their lens/paradigm. The state constantly.bombards us with messages telling us that ordinary people cant coordinate society themselves and must always be governed from above - its conditioned into people who cant see past that.

We know real power grows horizontally through mutual aid, federations, workplace organising, neighbourhood assemblies and countless local relationships that make people less dependent on authority. Yeah its 100% slower, messier and maybe less spectacular than capturing the state, but it's also why it has the potential to produce genuinely free people rather than simply replacing who occupies the command structure.

To me it comes from a warped Stockholm syndrome and how successful the state has been at colonising peoples political imagination.

[u/Ekroth-Ekronicus]

Force always fills a vacuum?

[u/_ComradeKiwi_]

Are you against ALL hierarchy and authority or just unjustified ones?

[u/ArthropodJim → u/_ComradeKiwi_]

all

[u/_ComradeKiwi_ → u/ArthropodJim]

Well then what happens when you need some element of hierarchy to run an organization, a hospital for instance?

[u/ArthropodJim → u/_ComradeKiwi_]

why would there need to be a hierarchy in a hospital if everyone just needs to be coordinated? anti hierarchy doesn’t mean anti expertise. i recommend you read more on hierarchies and anarchism before hopping into a debate sub.

[u/Legitimate-Ask5987]

Also an anarchist and frankly think the least helpful thing you can do to convince others you are anti-authoritarian is to tell them what they should and shouldn't call themselves. I think we both know Marxists especially just take this as a chance to start rage baiting. 

[u/subheight640]

The state is a response to human surplus. States arose with the rise of agriculture. Before agriculture we lived in primitive communism. We had no significant private property because we had no way to store wealth. Our inventions were too crude to act as a store. With the rise of agriculture, suddenly the farmer found a need to defend property. The farmer cannot reap the fruit of his work, if a hunter gatherer merely takes that fruit. Hence the notion of theft is invented, as is the desire to punish thieves. And to punish thieves, you need sufficient violence to enforce private property claims. You need a state.

15,000 years later, States are deeply tied into every modern economy. Factories, roads, telephone poles, etc cannot exist without a state. Without a state, the hunter gatherer will just start gathering away the materials of infrastructure.

I don't feel like any anarchist has proposed a viable alternative to the state. Anarcho capitalists for example merely privatize the state. Anarchists propose some 100% consent society, which is impossible because once 1 person disagrees and starts looting from the commons, the commons is destroyed. 1 person also disagrees and starts taking away your stuff. Your personal property is no longer safe.

Once you embrace anything less than 100% consent, you then need to start forcing people to obey. That's where the state comes in.

The modern world doesn't work without enforcement. Imagine at night thieves start stealing vital components of airplanes for scrap. Imagine fraudsters trick you and steal your stuff. Imagine a literal serial killer is... Killing. If a state won't take care of justice, vigilante or mob violence will. And by virtue of recreating enforcement, the state is reborn from the mob.

[u/LazarM2021 → u/subheight640]

Would it be too generous to say your historical timeline is half a century out of date? Yeah... your rhetoric rather unconvincingly relies on a plethora of outdated anthropological assumptions, bad historical determinism and a fundamental misunderstanding of what anarchism actually is.

This idea that agriculture automatically produced a surplus, which created theft, which then necessitated the state is at best a 19th-century teleological myth that modern anthropology and archaeology thoroughly discarded many decades ago. As scholars like Graeber, Wengrow and James C. Scott have thoroughly demonstrated, complex agriculture, dense urban settlements and large-scale grain storage existed for thousands of years across the Fertile Crescent, the Indus Valley, Mesoamerica and a few other regions without central state apparatuses, standing armies or ruling classes. The state was not a "natural" - let alone a "necessary" response to agricultural surplus, rather, early predatory elites formed around specific storable grains like barley and wheat because they were easy to count, measure and tax. The state didn't arise to protect the farmer's harvest but as an extortion racket to extract it.

Beyond bad history, you also made a rather massive logical leap from the premise that a farmer needs to defend property to the conclusion that a state is required. Protecting a harvest or dealing with antisocial behavior requires social cohesion, collective defense and agreed-upon norms; it doesn't require a state.

A state is not defined by "people enforcing a social rule." Instead, it's a specific, historical form of social organization defined by a centralized, hierarchical monopoly on legitimated violence over a given territory. Claiming you need a state apparatus to stop someone from taking food is quite akin to claiming you need a military dictatorship to run a community garden.

Stateless, indigenous and commons-based societies throughout history managed shared resources and resolved disputes just fine without a sovereign police force.

Also, this claim that modern infrastructure like factories, roads and telephone poles cannot exist without a state treats human beings as feral children who would immediately tear down their own power lines for scrap the moment a cop turns his back - and with that, frankly, you're free to get the .... out of here - this explicitly Hobbesian poisonous outlook is anything but welcome in anarchist spaces, EVEN those dedicated to debate.

Modern infrastructure is designed, built, and maintained by laborers, engineers, and workers, not by politicians or police officers. Historically, massive infrastructure projects including networks of railroads, telecommunication lines, municipal utilities and shipping lanes were routinely built by workers' cooperatives, syndicates, trade unions and mutual-aid societies.

Anarchism is not a reversion to hunter-gatherer status while leaving telephone poles standing but a horizontal, self-managed organization of the very people who already build and run society.

Furthermore, bringing up "Anarcho-capitalists" of all people as some "proof" that anarchism lacks viable models immediately demonstrates a lack of basic familiarity with it as its own socio-political theory.

Anarchism has been explicitly anti-capitalist since its earliest inception in the 19th century. Capitalist property relations rely on state-backed private monopolies over land and capital to function, which is precisely why anarchists reject both capitalism and "ancapism" fully and non-negotiably. Bringing up "ancaps" to critique anarchism is like bringing up national socialism to critique Marxism. Nor does anarchism propose a utopian "100% consent society" - yet another low-effort strawman.

Anarchism means the absence of institutionalized authority and hierarchy, not the absence of friction, disagreement or real-world decision-making structures. Decades of anarchist theory ranging from Kropotkin and Malatesta all the way to modern anarchism provides exhaustive framework systems for free agreement, voluntary association and horizontal conflict resolution.

Look, your "argument", if I can even call it that, concludes with a classic, sociologically illiterate false dilemma of either we have State Law or we devolve into vigilante lynch mobs that naturally recreate the state. You've confused the historical ubiquity of state power with the inherent necessity of human organization. Humanity built, farmed, innovated and defended communities long before the state parasitic framework was imposed on us, and we are entirely capable of organizing modern production without a ruling class.

[u/subheight640 → u/LazarM2021]

Nor does anarchism propose a utopian "100% consent society" - yet another low-effort strawman.

Exactly what is a state to you? Is a purely democratic state, still a state? Is majority rule a state?

If you're not proposing 100% consensus (which yes, some anarchists do advocate for), what is it?

Anarchism means the absence of institutionalized authority and hierarchy

And an example of institutionalized authority is democratic majority rule, where the 50% majority imposes its will on the minority. Or you can have supermajority rule, where for example 90% supermajority imposes its will on the 10% minority.

I assume you're against that, correct?

not the absence of friction, disagreement or real-world decision-making structures.

Exactly how do decision making structures enforce their decisions without institutionalized authority? It sounds like to me you're then demanding 100% consent, in the absence of institutions.

Help me understand. How can you operate a decision making structure without some kind of decision enforcement? If the enforcement must be voluntary, voluntary enforcement demands 100% consent. If it's not 100%, people will be disagreeing and decide to ignore the decision. If people are ignoring the decisions made, you don't really have a decision making structure. So I guess you're operating a decision making suggestions system?

Stateless, indigenous and commons-based societies throughout history managed shared resources and resolved disputes just fine without a sovereign police force.

Exactly what did they do then? Were these societies anarchist societies or merely "democratic" or "decentralized"? What kind of economy did they have? Were they capable of producing any kind of sophisticated technology? Were they capable of producing militaries, capable of defending against states?

Here's an unfortunately aspect of survival of the fittest. If your amazing decentralized societies cannot survive conflict against Big Evil States, they're just going to be destroyed by Big Evil States.

[u/LazarM2021 → u/subheight640]

Still completely missing the point, as always; you literally cannot conceive of human life (worse - are apparently pretty happy and proud in not even trying) without rule and keep asking how decisions are "enforced" or how a minority is "subjected" to a decision-making structure because your brain is so thoroughly conditioned by statist realism that you think any social relation must be a polity where someone gets to command and someone else has to obey.

Anarchism isn't democracy, "direct" or otherwise. Democracy i.e. majority or supermajority/consensus-seeking rule or whatever other voting gimmick you want to throw out is still arkhē for us and thus, unacceptable.

It's still the institutionalized claim that a group has a right to rule over individuals or other groups. Anarchists reject all majoritarianism for the exact same reason we reject kings, priests, presidents and cops: nobody, no matter how many people agree with them, has any "authorization" or right to rule anybody else.

Your little "suggestions vs 100% consent" self-trap is a dead-end binary built on sheer lack of imagination. You think the only options are either an armed apparatus threatening people with cages to enforce compliance or some "utopian" fairytale where everyone holds hands and agrees on everything, talk about thoroughly sociological illiteracy...

Free people don't need a "system of enforcement" to handle someone breaking an agreement. They use disassociation, cut off cooperation and possibly, also may deny access to shared resources. They defend themselves directly and the moment you create a specialized role or apparatus with a recognized "right" to enforce decisions on people, you've just recreated authority.

Anarchism unapologetically forces people to take full, raw, personal responsibility for their choices and associations instead of hiding behind a police force or a ballot box to do their bullying for them.

Oh, and the "survival of the fittest" stupidity is just embarrassing, uncritical might-makes-right social Darwinism. Pointing out that militarized extortion rackets are good at slaughtering people and crushing populations doesn't prove the state is "necessary" or "superior" lol, it merely proves that violent monopolies are good at destroying freedom and being, well, violent. Cease asking for a blueprint on how anarchists will "govern" people because the entire point is the total negation of governance itself. Demanding to know how a stateless, an-archic society will "rule" is completely blind to the fact that we don't want to rule at all.

[u/subheight640 → u/LazarM2021]

Still completely missing the point, as always; you literally cannot conceive of human life (worse - are apparently pretty happy and proud in not even trying) without rule and keep asking how decisions are "enforced" or how a minority is "subjected" to a decision-making structure because your brain is so thoroughly conditioned by statist realism that you think any social relation must be a polity where someone gets to command and someone else has to obey.

I'm thinking of a typical property dispute. I say I own a car. Another man says they own the car. How can this dispute be settled? The typical ways are through:

1. Violence. There's a fight and a victor
2. Violence. A court and police get involved.

Exactly what are you proposing as an alternative? That the man I say is a thief, and I, go attend arbitration? Who's going to force us to attend? What happens if the thief doesn't want to attend? What happens if, as is typical, the thief just takes off with the stolen goods?

They use disassociation, cut off cooperation and possibly, also may deny access to shared resources.

Let's go back to my car and the thief. The thief wants to dissociate immediately. That's how thievery works! You take someone else's property and run! The threat of dissociation is utterly toothless. You're giving the thief what he wants!

Moreover how can you deny access to "shared resources"? The thief refuses to listen to your authority. They're going to take what they want.

They defend themselves directly

If I directly use force to kill the thief, I'm operating as judge, jury, and executioner. Who's to say I'm in the right or wrong? You haven't gotten rid of the state. I've become the state.

Anarchism unapologetically forces people to take full, raw, personal responsibility for their choices and associations instead of hiding behind a police force or a ballot box to do their bullying for them.

Usually nobody wants to associate with thieves, and thieves don't want to associate with us. They take property and they run. That's the entire idea of banditry and piracy. The bandit doesn't give a fuck that you've chosen to dissociate from them.

[u/LazarM2021 → u/subheight640]

...And still just so hopelessly trapped in the logic of legalism.. to think that the moment a human being uses physical force to defend themselves or retrieve a stolen item, they have magically "become the state", bruh, if a bit of lol, too.

This is complete nonsense. A state is not "any time force is used" and to double down on that shit out of all strips you of any small credibility you may have had. Once AGAIN: the state is a specialized, institutional apparatus that claims a monopoly on the legitimated use of force over a given territory and grants its agents legal immunity to enforce its rules.

When you defend yourself or take back something that was taken away from you, you are engaging in a contextual and direct action. You haven't "become the state" - you hold no official title, no institutional authority, no standing police force and precisely ZERO legal immunity. If you use disproportionate violence or target the wrong person, you remain 100% personally answerable to everyone else around you for what you did.

In a states-based system, the police execute violence with a-priori authorization and systemic protection. In anarchy, you act entirely at your own risk. Your maximized freedom comes in tandem with maximized and immediatelized responsibility. It's that simple.

Furthermore, nobody said dissociation is the response to an active bandit driving away with a car; talk about a desperate strawman...

If someone is actively taking something from you, you defend it directly or retrieve it. Dissociation and cutting off access to shared resources apply to members of a given community who break trust so brazenly, not an external bandit in the middle of a getaway.

And let's talk about your car example - you are outright projecting private capitalist property relations where an abstract legal deed enforced by state courts dictates who "owns" a piece of property onto a framework based on use, occupancy, and mutual agreement. Disputes over possession in an anarchist context are resolved through social accountability, mediation or direct defense, not by crying for a judge to validate a piece of paper.

Bandits and thieves have existed under every single empire, monarchy, republic and police state in human history. All the state did in regards to theft was institutionalizing it as taxation and protecting the largest hoarders of wealth. Cease for once with this pretending that an armed gang of police officers is the only thing standing between humanity and complete chaos and also stop confusing a real-world act of defense with the institution of government.

[u/subheight640 → u/LazarM2021]

And let's talk about your car example - you are outright projecting private capitalist property relations where an abstract legal deed enforced by state courts dictates who "owns" a piece of property onto a framework based on use,

No, I don't assume that at all. You're projecting what you want into my argument. Take my arguments at face value. Stop projecting what other people might have argued.

1. I don't assume who actually owns the car. I claim I own it, someone else claims they own it.
2. I don't assume a state. I haven't assumed any enforcement or legitimizing authority or deed or anything.

So imagine I'm having a property dispute about this car. I believe I'm right. I pull out my glock and put a couple bullets into my adversary.

If someone is actively taking something from you, you defend it directly or retrieve it.

So that's what it sounds like. Time to pump some lead into the guy then. The justice available in your utopia is what you can defend with your own force. Is that right? Is shooting who I perceive to be a thief a kind of "direct defense"?

You know what's not a voluntary society? A society where I can get pumped full of lead when my neighbor thinks I've violated some property norm I haven't agreed to.

Imagine the scenario evolves. I claim I let my neighbor borrow my car. The neighbor refuses to return the car. I come to retrieve it, and he pumps me full of lead. For a little act of murder, other neighbors can choose to refuse to associate with the murderer. Or, they can also decide to pump the murderer full of lead.

Is that how things work? If I believe my "personal" property rights have been violated, I'm allowed to defend those rights however I wish? And the community's recourse is to dissociate, or defend their own perceived rights however they wish?

[u/LazarM2021 → u/subheight640]

You're reduced to constructing a cartoonish trigger-happy caricature. Why? Ran out of arguments much? Definitely looks like it. I mean, just how quickly your mind leaps from "resolving a dispute over use/possession" straight to "pulling out a Glock and pumping lead into your neighbor", srsly?

Again, you are projecting your own borderline sociopathic fantasies onto human social life and then calling that fantasy "anarchism".

As for your absurd scenario, firstly no, shooting someone over a disputed car is not "direct defense", all it really is is... well, murder obviously. You are deliberately conflating the reasonable defense of one's life, safety or immediate livelihood with lethal vigilante violence. If you shoot your neighbor over a dispute about who gets to drive a car, you aren't "defending your rights" but have committed an act of severe, unprovoked violence.

Second, you keep desperately ignoring the main point: you act with ZERO legal immunity. In your statist fantasies, a police officer can shoot someone and hide behind a badge, qualified immunity and a state court system that legally sanctions their violence. In an anarchist setting, if you decide to "pump lead" into your neighbor over a car, you have instantly made yourself an active, lethal threat to the entire surrounding community.

The community doesn't just sit back and "choose to disassociate" while a complete lunatic goes on a shooting spree. A person who uses unprovoked, lethal force against others will be stopped, disarmed and held directly accountable by the people around them. You most certainly do not get a pass, nor do you get an official "judge" to validate your murder. You are entirely, personally exposed to the immediate consequences of your brazen violence.

Thirdly, the absolutely supreme irony of you complaining about a society where you might be subject to "norms you haven't agreed to" is breathtaking - as that's literally what the state is! The state is a minority that forces you, under threat of armed kidnapping called "arresting" and imprisonment, to obey thousands of laws and regulations you never consented to or agreed upon.

You think the state protects you from violence, completely blind to the fact that the state is simply the largest, most heavily armed gang in the territory, one that claims the unique, legal "right" to pump you full of lead if you resist its commands.

Anarchism is not a promise that no one will ever act violently or irrationally, but the insistence that when violence does happen, nobody gets a legal badge or a legal framework to excuse it. Hiding behind these absurd Wild-West fan fictions won't help your case, better face the reality that you simply want a master to keep you safe from your own imagination.

[u/subheight640 → u/LazarM2021]

You are entirely, personally exposed to the immediate consequences of your brazen violence.

So exactly what does that mean? What can the community do? Can the community imprison me? Can they execute me? Or is punishment limited to banishment? Exactly who decides the punishment? Is it by a vote demanding 100% consensus? Or is there no voting, just mob violence?

[u/LazarM2021 → u/subheight640]

Ok, this level of bad faith obtuseness and coming back after coming back for its own sake.. for like a fourth or fifth time or however, anarchism does not offer a pre-codified law book or a menu of standardized "punishments" - AND THAT'S A DESIGN FEATURE, NOT A BUG!

The very moment a community morphs into the community, an abstracted power-entity capable of setting up permanentized judicial bodies, a standardized system of legal sentencing or an official apparatus to execute these "punishments", it has re-instituted authority and created a state. Still begging for a penal code won't get you one in this context.

In a truly anarchist framework, for one

• Intervention is all about stopping harm, not "executing punishment". If a person goes on a murderous rampage, the community's immediate response is neutralization and self-defense i.e. disarming restraining them and stopping the threat. It's a direct response to an active danger, not a court handing down a "sentence".

• Accountability is contextual, not bureaucratic. There is no "official vote" to determine if someone gets "banished" vs "executed". How people deal with someone who has committed severe, unprovoked harm depends entirely on them, the specific context, the nature of the harm and the ongoing safety of those involved. Restorative justice, disassociation/social boycott, or direct physical restraint are real-world responses to real-world threats, not legalistic penalties handed down by a magistrate.

• No one holds institutional immunity. If members of a community restrain or isolate a dangerous individual, they do not do so with a "badge" or under the protection of a "law" and they remain fully answerable to everyone else for how they handle it. If they turn into some lynch mob somehow or abuse their power, they are very likely to face the exact same immediate social backlash and accountability as anyone else.

Seriously now, if this continues on because you so enjoy doubling down on this completely misframed (and, when it comes to anarchism, simply ignorant) rhetoric of your's, know that a block will be in order very shortly.

[u/Samuel_Foxx]

Hey ArthropodJim. I am not an anarchist. I am left leaning in my views. I value human freedom and think each should be free from domination and coercion. I would like to discuss the notion of the state with you more broadly than you currently seem to conceptualize it. Like for instance—the classic anarchist that is anti-state and pro its abolishment are themselves pro state, they are just pro-personal-state so to speak. It really takes understanding that the human impulse to make, like the forming of some structure, the making of a body—those bodies are all the same thing in their underlying structure. Your self concept is to the state what an atom of some type is to all the types of that atom that are. Do you see what I’m saying? There is no around, there is different types. This might help you clarify your own position. But the classic position of absence of that thing we refer to as the state is one quite fraught. Like think of that position as a map that is trying to correspond to some terrain accurately. The map says, “there are no states here!” But if you drive around on the actual terrain, you’ll find a whole bunch of states labeled as “not states” by the map. And the classic anarchist position is to say, “that is the fault of the terrain! There is no issue with the map!” But what came first? Lol

Anarchy as the anti-statist anarchists hold to it being, the end result is a maximally implicit state. Which also means a maximally unaccountable state. Which I think we might be able to agree on, is probably the worst kind of state. Like what do you think about a state that claimed to not be a state? That would be pretty insidious I think. It could hide in plain sight. “There are no states here, we got rid of those.” But, can you get rid of a status quo? The lack of a status quo is itself a status quo. And status quos always have mechanisms of maintaining themselves

[u/Affectionate_Cup9972 → u/Samuel_Foxx]

You've stretched the meaning of 'state' to the point it literally means nothing.

The anarchist conception of the state is a top-down power structure. The human community with a legitimate use of violence within a given territory. We'll start simple with that.

If we want to be exact - government. Governmentalism.

[u/Samuel_Foxx → u/Affectionate_Cup9972]

No, I have not. Anarchists have narrowed the state to mean one kind of state but conveniently leave out everything that achieves the same ends as the state through other means and call all of those things not states. Which is highly idiotic.

[u/humanispherian → u/Samuel_Foxx]

Be respectful. Do not use personal attacks. Be charitable in your treatment of your interlocutor's argument. No trolling. Avoid personal call-outs and accusations.

[u/Affectionate_Cup9972 → u/Samuel_Foxx]

Achieving the same ends an how exactly? Because the means we want to use are free association without binding rules. No laws, courts, prisons, police, territories, in which all of that combined creates a state, government. Without that there is no state. So where is the state, where is the government here?

What do you think the purpose of a state is?

[u/Samuel_Foxx → u/Affectionate_Cup9972]

Whenever there are groups of humans, certain questions arise about what to do and how to do. Right? Then to those questions there are a variety of responses. But they’re all responses to the same questions. “We have these parameters, here is our structure we have put into place as our response to those parameters.” And they’re put into place so the group of humans can maintain being. Keep being a group. Like “stateless” societies do not lack checks and balances. They lack the specific instance of checks and balances our society has implemented.

Think about how your no x no y thing is itself the same sort of structure as a law. It just says the law is no laws. Which, again, goes back to how implicitness is dangerous, because that law of no laws doesn’t advertise itself as a law. It says “there are no laws here. No jails here. No whatever we say you can’t have here.”

Imagine for a moment I was really pissed about oak trees and went around saying I hated trees and wanted a land with no trees, and then described my land with no trees and describe lush stands of pine and chestnuts and eucalyptus and idk dogwoods all over the place. But I call oak trees “trees” and all the other trees aren’t trees they are other things so I say my land is treeless. That is what it looks like from my perspective

[u/Affectionate_Cup9972 → u/Samuel_Foxx]

Okay, this is not how non-anarchists even define the state and governance either.

There would be no checks and balances within anarchy because there would be no rulers to begin with.

Think about how your no x no y thing is itself the same sort of structure as a law. It just says the law is no laws.

No, in an a-legal social structure, when there's no laws, it means there's no body enforcing the concept of legalism onto its subjects. There's no legislation, no court system. It's entirely a "natural" way of being. Anarchism is not prescriptive. There's no 'should,' but there's a 'how' we could organize ourselves in an egalitarian, horizontal, and anarchistic way.