> “We don’t think the city should exist; we are only limited by our capacity and our imaginations,” says PARC.
Cities are the most efficient way we've discovered to live as humans. They're less wasteful, they consolidate resources, etc.
> “Don’t get us wrong, we believe that many of these services are crucial for society, like healthcare, education, and maintained roadways, but we believe that the way to achieve access for all is by deconstructing the state and capitalism, as well as other coercive hierarchies that exist in our society. It is this driving philosophy that motivates our actions, not only to fix the potholes, but to take power back from the state, into the hands of the people.”
Centralization and urban living were invented thousands of years ago and has made these services possible and more efficient over time.
In context, they clearly are referring to the municipal government when they say the city shouldn't exist, not to the physical collection of people and infrastructure.
All the services they say they want are provided by the municipal government. How are they going to provide all the services of the government without the government?
That is always the question asked. They would argue that things could be voluntarily self organized, instead of structured in coercive heirarchies.
In other words, they would say that people who are capable of being doctors should provide medical care, and organize themselves in a way to make sure that care gets provided sensibly. When potholes need fixing the community should meet and figure out how to get it done. They believe we can do all of these things with out needing an organized state that gets to dictate anything, money to incentivize, or police as coercive enforcement.
I'm sure I'm butchering it a bit. It might not be quite that simple, but it's along those lines.
And yes, it's idealistic as hell. That said, I know a lot of anarchist activists and damn, do those guys know how to get shit done.
Not really. In countless rural societies, throughout the world and through history, it's been commonplace for people to help each other with building their homes, making dirt roads and small bridges, making food and many other tasks - without charging each other for money or bartering.
Essentially a small village can work much like a very large family and people would use money almost only when interacting with strangers in a different village.
Sure, there are a lot of social processes that work in smallish communes where people mostly know each other. But that doesn't scale - the relationships break down above the Dunbar limit and become substantially different as you don't even know most of the people. The processes and motivation that work in a 50 people community will not work the same way in a 5000 people community; in the first case people might behave as if they're all a big family with shared interests, in the latter case they will not.
The fact that X works in a small village should not be considered as evidence that X would plausibly work in a mid-sized town. For homo sapiens and groups of them, scale matters a lot.
That can work for small communities, but you wouldn't ever be able to accomplish large scale tasks with that limited scale of organization. And not just big buildings and bridges (which one could argue are unnecessary), but projects like research in medicine and agriculture which benefit everyone, but require a large centralization of resources, leadership, and lots of time to create. That doesn't seem like something that could emerge from a anarchist society.
> you wouldn't ever be able to accomplish large scale tasks
I never said that model is meant to be applied at large scale.
> projects like research in medicine
You could have chosen an example like building a dam. In many countries academia works in a highly decentralized fashion and is less money-driven than other fields. Also see FLOSS.
> doesn't seem like something that could emerge from a anarchist society
Not from a handful of individuals. However anarchism does not reject large and complex organizations (on the contrary):
> ... and bridges (which one could argue are unnecessary)
I'm pretty sure you're referring to the Bridge to Nowhere [1] here (~$400M), but one could argue for a number of public works projects that are unnecessary, stupid, or the cause of recurring large expenditures.
Chicago, built on a swamp, still constantly has flooding issues. The Deep Tunnel project [2] is currently at > $4B, and still can't handle a relatively common spring storm without dumping sewage into either Lake Michigan or the Illinois-Michigan Sanitation Canal. Not to mention the other regional estuaries that get polluted by overflows such as the Des Plaines River or the Salt Creek (which just happens to run by the Chicago area's premier zoo: Brookfield).
Also, Washington DC, also built on a swamp (literal, not the figurative "drain the swamp"). Not sure what measures the city takes to prevent/handle flooding. Also potential hurricane target.
New Orleans, built below sea level...right next to the sea, and also a prime target for hurricanes, the worst in recent memory being Katrina. Response to that? Rebuild. Should have been relocate. First search from Google I found says costs from the recovery on that were ~$108B [3] (I don't know the accuracy of this - first time I've ever visited the site). I don't know how much the Army Corps of Engineers has spent rebuilding the dikes & levies that failed after Katrina, but I'd put money down that it is far beyond the $400M spent on the "Bridge to Nowhere".
Point is, the Federal government is there to help all citizens, those in small & large communities/cities alike. Infrastructure projects cost money, period. They're actually cheaper in rural areas due to cheaper local labor, sometimes material, and usually (but not always) less corruption and cronyism (road repairs around Chicago are generally of very poor quality, do not last long and are poorly planned - e.g. in Cook County, a road will often be repaired one week, and then promptly torn up the next to replace a sewer/water/gas main).
You actually don't need leaders. I've been part of plenty of leaderless flat heirarchies that self organized pretty damned well. People just stepped up to do things that needed doing. The problem isn't that people can't function with out leaders. The issue is more that, those sorts of flat heirarchies don't tend to scale well.
But that doesn't necessarily mean they couldn't, if we put some effort and education into training people how to operate in them better. I'm less skeptical of the idea that we could operate in self organized non-heirarchies than I am of the idea that would could do away with the money and all formal organizations.
The idea that we could do everything by informal agreement just seems really unstable to me. Like you'd never quite know what the rules were and like they could change at any moment.
> When potholes need fixing the community should meet and figure out how to get it done.
OK.
> They believe we can do all of these things with out needing an organized state
Well, see, we met and decided that that's how we're going to get things done. It happens at the time a town decides to incorporate. How does it decide to do that? Usually by a referendum passing among the town's voters.
They are provided by the government now, but do they have to be? An anarchist would say "no".
Much as been written about the organization of anti-capitalist anarchist societies. One work on that is An Anarchist FAQ[1], but beware that like any other political group - an especially on the left - there will certainly be other anarchists decrying that text as nonsense and false anarchism and such.
“There can be no ethical services provided by the government because they are facilitated through the power of the gun,” writes PARC, presumably while flipping the bird like in the top photo. “Don’t get us wrong, we believe that many of these services are crucial for society, like healthcare, education, and maintained roadways, but we believe that the way to achieve access for all is by deconstructing the state and capitalism, as well as other coercive hierarchies that exist in our society. It is this driving philosophy that motivates our actions, not only to fix the potholes, but to take power back from the state, into the hands of the people.”
Sure, but in most cases anarchism is 'bash the fash' with 'fascist' being defined as 'anyone we don't like' including unarmed people. Fists or makeshift weapons are typically used as they can't be traced.
It's odd: anarchists openly justify violence in defense from 'fascism', whereas fascism is correctly defined as obtaining and maintaining power through violence, without seeing the irony.
Are you sure it's "most cases", or just the ones you hear about in the news? How many do you know personally? Beware of the availability bias.
As an anecdote, I live near a left-wing anarchist group called the Center of Libertarian Culture, and I can assure you they're all pacific people.
It's odd: anarchists openly justify violence in defense from 'fascism', whereas fascism is correctly defined as obtaining and maintaining power through violence, without seeing the irony.
There's no irony; anarchists don't want to obtain and maintain power, just to prevent others from doing so.
I know a couple, from tech, who are anarchists: I'm friends with one of them despite them being very damaged people. Both are openly violent towards anyone right of Bernie Sanders and one other told me, with a serious face, they wanted to stab everyone in the pool at a tech conference I attended.
By beating the shit out of people you're obtaining power for yourself. Modern anarchism is fascism, masking itself as the opposite.
Yes, I know. Hence explicitly mentioning 'self described anarchists' in the thread. The people in the article are also self described anarchists. You're arguing very successfully against a straw man.
Because every anarchist I've known personally, met online, or read about shares their same ideals of moral superiority through violence.
Saying 'violent thugs don't represent the original priciples of anarchism' is missing the point, in the same way that people who say 'real communism hasn't been tried' and ignore the 100M dead people.
Some of those academics smash people's skulls with bike locks. People who are mild mannered often enjoy violence when they think they can't be identified.
That is an interesting assertion, but I don't think it is a good way of convincing people to see things your way. The more I hear the message that anarchists and anti-fascists are the real fascists, the less receptive I am to the viewpoint. It's similar to the repetitive promotion of the idea that civil rights activists are the real racists. There is the message you are sending with the argument itself, and then there is the meta-message you are sending by making the argument. The former can be fairly logical, and yet be undermined by the latter.
1. People who use violence to obtain power are fascists. All fascists suck, whether left or right. The only person saying right wing fascists aren't real fascists is you, while making a very poor straw man argument.
2. Civil rights activists aren't primarily known for violence. Anarchists are.
3. Saying their actions have nothing to do with the principles of fascism is like staring at a wall of human skulls in Cambodia and saying this has nothing to do with the principles of socialism: you're missing the point.
> People who use violence to obtain power are fascists.
So, the American Revolutionaries were fascists?
Fascists, even in the lose sense theat doesn't refer tons particular historical Italian political group, are a much narrower label.
> All fascists suck, whether left or right.
There are left wing tyrants (tyrants, while broader than fascists, are still narrower than you have attempted to paint fascists), but they aren't fascists.
But anarchists aren't that, either (some of the subelements of the antifa movement, particularly the Maoist ones, might be inclined in theat direction, but Maoists and anarchists, even anarchocommunists, aren't the same thing.)
> Civil rights activists aren't primarily known for violence. Anarchists are.
During the period of major activity, most anti-estsblishment groups are tarred with the violence of their most extreme subcomponents (which may actually be provocateurs) or even the most extreme groups with similar objections, even if they are outside the main group. This was absolutely the case with the civil rights movement.
> Saying their actions have nothing to do with the principles of fascism
They have nothing to do with the defining characteristics of fascism, either. The only association is that fascism is broadly accepted as a negative label and you wish to brand anarchists negatively.
People are defined by their actions not by their own propaganda.
Civil rights activists fight against power systems, revolutionaries fought for representation: anarchists are violent thugs who pretend to be activists to justify violence towards anyone who doesn't share their ideology.
Understanding the obvious discrepancy between the words of anarchists and their actions is important part of being politically mature.
Anarchists already have a negative label: edgy people who pretend to be brave by wearing a mask and beating people / phone boxes because there's something wrong in their lives. If you don't believe that fine, trying to convince you of anything would be like trying to convince any other (moon landing / flat earth / building 7) conspiracy theorist. Enjoy your early twenties.
I think that when you draw a distinction between civil rights activists and anarchists, you are using hindsight. These days everybody claims MLK was a peaceful giant who was on their side all along. Republicans say he was a Republican, libertarians say he was a libertarian, anarchists say he was an anarchist, etc. But before he had become a safe historical figure, he was held responsible for violence and very seriously accused of being a communist/anarchist by those in the government and on the right who thought those categories were the worst thing possible to be. So one must be skeptical of such name calling today.
Left of center people attack libertarians these days using parallel rhetoric, identifying them as equivalent to the worst right wing types and responsible for everything about capitalism that can be criticized (e.g. the body count from everything bad). Are you on the same page, or do you reject that as invalid nonsense? Do you agree libertarians are fascists too?
Have you ever noticed how ubiquitous the fasces is in Washington, DC, on statues (e.g. Lincoln) and things? That doesn't make our government fascist to be sure, but it's about as good an argument as the one you are making about other people.
I don't think it's a misrepresentation at all, especially if you consider the anti-Fa movement. anti-Fa is ironically using very fascist tactics in their protest of fascism.
That's what I was thinking when I said "beware of the news bias". Regardless of what one thinks of specific actions of the Antifa movement, it's not necessarily true that those represent even Antifa members as a whole, and it's completely specious to assume they represent anarchists as a whole. Antifa is not even an anarchist-only movement.
All the anarchists I’ve met think citizens will spontaneously combust^W form committees, chosen by their peers using the Australian method, and those committees will cause work to happen by raising funds from interested peers. Like Mad Max, but with smiles.
Committees in anarchism are more like the PTA, band boosters, rotary club, or your HOA--everything that has no statutory authority, and no power to tax. They form whenever someone thinks it might be even worse to not have one, everyone hates attending the meetings, and they are almost entirely dependent on one to five people devoting too much of their own energy to holding it all together. There might be a contract in place, and it might mandate that dues be paid.
In lieu of mandatory dues, they will always be strapped for cash and either begging for donations or coming up with annoying fundraiser ideas. They might fork, and one or both parts of the fork will fail, because some of the critical support went to the other part of the fork.
And some of them will actually be more like organized crime families or street gangs than the PTA.
In other words, anarchy is happening right now, and you can see how it works right now. A bunch of crazies devoted to renegade pothole repair is a perfect example. They come together because of potholes. They fix potholes. People pay attention to them as long as they care about potholes. When the pothole problem is fixed, everyone forgets they ever existed, then stop paying attention and giving money. They either drift away to find something else to do, or become the lonely, ignored crusaders against potholes that people remember hearing about that one time, but had no idea they were still around and still fixing potholes.
It doesn't scale, though. Anarchy can only exist at the local level because governments tackle many of the big problems and force people to pay for the solutions with taxes. Imagine if your city government operated like the mafia (Chicago!), or if your state government operated like a giant PTA meeting. It might get as far as agreeing to set a budget of $500 for the spring graduation party before removing someone from the gallery for shouting about invading foreign armies, and would still be answering stupid questions about the dress code for service dogs when the soldiers started dragging everyone out.
Mr. Humungus (a reasonable feller) is president of the Juicetakers Committee, Toecutter vice president, Feral Kid as secretary, Gyropilot as treasurer, and someone that looks exactly like your Mom covered in warpaint as the member-at-large. The president has advanced a proposal that you just walk away and give us your juice. We took a vote, and it passed unanimously. We are also selling cookie dough as part of our fall fundraiser. So give us the juice, and please buy some cookies on your way out into the desert.
They are currently providing one of the services that the municipal government is expected to provide. Presumably, they would like to expand that and provide the rest using the same volunteer model.
Yeah, it absolutely stuns me these people who dream up of a better world have apparently zero historical insight into how human societies have organized themselves.
"We are going to offer all the services the state offers now but only better" is the silliest argument ever. You run into the exactly same resource and distribution problems as the government has, and you are going to start instituting the same sort of structures sooner or later.
Hierarchical systems are not enforced on people by malificient power hungry lords. Humans self organize into hierarchical system. If you are planning this "total-decentralization" you better have a plan on how to negate this natural "follow-the-leader" instinct most people have.
The second is the historical example. The only time anarchists come to power is in time of great trouble. Mainly because the dominant political force has fallen, and everything is in chaos. Another political force has risen sooner or later, only to install hierarchical power structures. With great misery to most involved.
Yeah. I find it weird that when people dream up the "best" social structure, it's often explained by a simple overarching philosophy. How convenient would it be that the entire complexity of human society can be ideally governed by a small set of principles?
It's always "only capitalism" or "only communism" or "no money" or "no government" or etc etc.
It seems pretty obvious to me that the optimal solution isn't based purely on some philosophical idea about how things 'should' be (whatever 'should' even means!), but instead would be a pragmatic, adaptive solution based on what actually happens and works on a case-by-case basis.
It would be a patchy, ugly system, compared to the perfect elegant algorithm people want. And indeed that's kind of what we have. We just gotta keep patching and amending. There are a lot of existing problems, but we have the framework for fixing them, and no doubt it is a difficult process. But to insist that the solution is to start over is naive and dismissive of the generations of sacrifice made to get to this point.
It's frustrating when people argue that all evil is because of capitalism, or that capitalism is purely good. Can't we just acknowledge that there are good and bad aspects of all systems, and work to boost the good parts and improve or attenuate the bad parts? And work in the good parts of other "competing" systems too? Yes, things don't have to be 100% pure capitalism or not. Hybrid solutions exist! That's basically what is happening, I just wish people would stop arguing by simplifying everything into some catchy moral gimmick.
I agree with your skepticism regarding people who express a lot of certainty about what will work, and what will happen in extreme and untested circumstances.
However, I strongly disagree that principles and morality aren’t essential. This is because when figuring out, as you say, ‘what works best’, there is no single definition of ‘best’. In fact, as a general rule, there’s thousands of competing ones. Principles are how you do a reasonable job of making consistent decisions towards meaningful change.
In addition to a system working well, it also needs to be understood to be working well by the people that live in it. If some definition of a ‘best’ metric was delivered by a Kafkaesque convoluted system that people found confusing, one which works well-enough on simple principles might be preferable.
I agree. I didn't mean to imply that principles aren't important - surely there must be some metric to judge progress against. Principles should hold in a generalized, zoomed-out view of a society. But in practice, there are numerous exceptions and edge cases. Like, "maximize freedom" is generally a good rule but not always.
I feel like the principles we come up with are just rough approximations of what we intuitively know but can't elegantly express. The true moral principle for society is probably a monstrous concatenation of if-else statements. If the zoom-out view of society still follows the principles, then I think that ought to be sufficient for its citizens' concerns about the society's effectiveness and direction.
> I just wish people would stop arguing by simplifying everything into some catchy moral gimmick.
Things work well enough that we can afford the luxury of chasing a feeling of moral superiority. Under worse conditions, most people don't have time for that.
> You run into the exactly same resource and distribution problems as the government has, and you are going to start instituting the same sort of structures sooner or later.
Yes. Volunteers fixing potholes seems fine.
But when about when a bridge needs replacing? I want to know that someone is following standard engineering and construction practices and that they're accountable to do so. I don't want to learn about Jimmy's Artisinal Welding by plunging to my death.
Actually there are a lot of problems that anarchists wouldn't run into that the government does. Political corruption - collusion between state and corporations with welfare for the wealthy and prisons and environmental destruction for the poor. Overspending on the military and on wars. A bloated and inefficient healthcare system run more for the benefit of insurance companies than for those requiring medical attention. Etcetera etcetera.
There's also no good reason to believe that anarchists wouldn't follow standard engineering and construction practices. Look at open source software, there's no state in control of practices there yet engineers tend to do just fine. In fact, there are plenty of examples where people cut corners on safety procedures within a capitalist society in order that they can get a competitive advantage in the market. I'd say the incentives of capitalism are more detrimental to good bridges than those of anarchism.
> Actually there are a lot of problems that anarchists wouldn't run into that the government does. Political corruption - collusion between state and corporations with welfare for the wealthy
I don't know why you think that a different organizational scheme would prevent corruption.
If you're going to build a bridge, somebody has to do the work. Everybody else is going to pay them somehow. And if you're going to pick someone to do the work, somebody has to choose. It's untenable to have every decision made by all people, so everyone will delegate, say, construction hiring decisions, to someone.
Now the Construction Hiring Decider can pick who gets paid to work. Who will he/she choose? Will it be based on skill, personal connections, ethnic bias - or maybe kickbacks?
You can't run any large group without delegating some responsibilities. As soon as anybody has any decision-making power delegated to them, they can misuse it. There is no system that can totally prevent that. And the more structures of accountability and shared decision-making you build to safeguard power, the more it looks like a democratic government.
I don't know why you think pay comes into this. Anarchists generally don't believe in a market economy.
You do raise good points but anarchists are not all juvenile and naive as many think and, seeing as anarchism has been around for >100 years, people have thought of these issues before you. Decision-making definitely has to be delegated to people sometimes and the manner in which this is done is important. Usually anarchists emphasise frequent rotation and possibility for immediate recall in order that no one may abuse their power.
I think of it as being similar to how science is funded by national agencies. There is a big pool of resources and it gets dispersed among researchers according to some process. That process usually involves nominating a team of scientists in the relevant field to judge where the resources would be best spent. Everyone ultimately has the same goal of advancing research most effectively and so they usually make the best choices possible. The panel is different every year so there it's hard to have collusion going on. Academia definitely has its problems with entrenched hierarchies of course but those come about for different reasons.
It's impossible to make a perfect system but it's clear we could do better. Anarchists just want to dilute unjust power structures as much as possible. There are examples of organisations that are successfully run like this so it's not like these are utopian ideas.
> There's also no good reason to believe that anarchists wouldn't follow standard engineering and construction practices.
There's also then no accountability for when it fails. Not that we have that now, necessarily, in software "engineering", but in other engineering disciplines, we do.
A licensed engineer can lose their license (a huge professional blow) and be potentially civilly and/or criminally held liable for designs they signed off on that fail or violate appropriate ethical standards of their governing body, e.g. IEEE for electrical engineers.
Well, really, they'll choose a few qualified people from amongst themselves to hold the builders to account, because the whole town can't be asked show up to inspect their work every Tuesday.
Eventually they might even make it official by referring to those people as a "government".
People used to do lots of things that they don't do anymore. When we look at history, whom do we admire? Those who "dreamed" enough to make improvements, or those who said "slavery, that's just human nature"?
The first problem is that it's not obvious to me what the benefit of an anarchistic society would be.
The best rule of figuring out fair playing rules in a society is thinking you are someone else, and what would you like to happen in their shoes. Once you find something that seems more or less fair for all parties it's a good sign it's not obviously bad.
Slavery almost immediately fails this test.
For example, it's not obvious to me how anarchistic societies will deal with violence and crime. Mob justice? Public opinion is extremely sensitive to mass paranoia. If we apply the test of "stepping into the shoes of someone else" and imagined myself as the suspect of a crime, I would much rather take the process system of a modern state over mob rule to handle my case.
Could you offer a counter example, from this fairness point of view, where an anarchistic society would outperform the state as implemented by western democracies?
How would an anarchy prevent a powerful and wealthy armaments manufacturer from funding and recruiting mercenaries to do neocolonialist mass murder in oil-rich foreign lands for fun and profit?
As long as its profitable, I can only see there being less constraints in doing so than there is now.
They didn't become wealthy and powerful by spending money. They did so by constructing an elaborate fear-based belief system by which the apparatus of the State could be steered to pay them money, much more money than was ever admitted, directly out of the pockets of those subject to the State. Like a religion, except more violent and less consensual. Note that I'm talking about steering the State, not the electorate. If a truly democratic vote on the topic were held today, the military would be a tenth its current size tomorrow. They don't have to worry about democratic votes; they just need to leave Congress enough plausible deniability about what's really going on.
They love this myth you perpetuate, of stealing foreign oil for fame and profit. As a nation, we have yet to see dollar one for all of our Middle Eastern atrocities dating back to the 1950s. All of this evil and violence has only ever profited the war pigs and their cronies. The rest of us have been stuck with the bill.
This line of thinking reminds me of the drug prohibitionists. "If we stop killing drug dealers, they'll be even wealthier and they'll kill everyone!" No, silly, if drugs could be sold without fear of violence then drug sales would not require violence. Our fifty-year prohibition has created a cohort of thugs who would have to age out of the business, but if we stopped giving them vast sums of money then they could be dealt with like any other violent people.
It sounds like you are positioning anarchy as a reactionary tool of retribution towards the elites, rather than as a better way to govern.
So much packed into one sentence! If you think of anarchism as ever having been suggested as "a better way to govern", please go back to the beginning and try again. It is instead a better way to live. This thing you think we need, we don't actually need. And what "retribution"? Would it be "retribution" to tell "the elites" sorry you can't continue spending trillions of our public dollars bombing innocents for no discernible reason?
Also, I would object to the form of your discourse. You asked for a counterexample, and multiple people have provided those. Please either argue against the counterexamples or concede the point.
A counterexample: I live in Finland, we have no colonialist past or present and our foreign policy is based on not trying to piss anyone too much. We are a parlamentarian democracy, we are among the most egalitarian countries in the world and according to the metrics of a recent UN survey currently 'the happiest'.
Like I wrote above, I don't really see 'not being anarchistic' as the root cause of whatever ills anarchism is claimed to cure.
Look, if I could choose the psychological characteristics of my species I'd want to live in a communist utopia with actual egalitarianism. But it just does not work. It's been tried with a heavy human toll. Likewise for anarchism. If someone is pedddling a system for you that has no chance of working in the current world we are living in I would really question either the motives or the rationality of the proponent.
This is turning rapidly quite political... I think our main difference is in how we believe a large ensemble of human beings is capable of behaving. We both would like that humankind could live as a huge trusting family. I don't see how that could be possible at the present moment.
I don't perceive anything we've said here as particularly political? (Other than the obvious: arguments for and against anarchism, which is a political concept but doesn't field any candidates.) But since you raise the issue...
One wouldn't expect anyone from Finland, Switzerland, etc. to complain too much about the government. For the time being, these nations have "good" governments. Voters have some effect on national policies, police aren't slaughtering innocents with impunity at home, military isn't doing the same in numerous locations abroad. Please have some sympathy for the majority of humanity! You'll turn into us before we turn into you, if for no other reason than by a reversion to the mean. After all we export our delusions. Some people have seen enough American news to believe that it's an advantage to be on our "side" in an armed conflict.
I have really enjoyed the TV series "Okkupert", and I do sympathize with any nation that borders a schizophrenic totalizing militarist kleptocracy, because the in the long term there will be violence. That's why I sympathize with Mexico.
You seem to know a little about what you're talking about but you should really read further before making the kinds of claims you're making. There is lots of literature on how anarchist societies have dealt with crime and there is no question that they are fairer than modern western societies with their gross wealth inequalities, mass incarceration, racism, colonialism, etc.
Right now, in Kurdish Syria (otherwise known as Rojava), there is a society built on principles that resemble anarchism pretty closely. They have very interesting decision-making processes, resource-management, and systems of justice. They also have pretty much no police as it isn't seen as necessary. There are lots of resources to learn about the details, here's one account I think is pretty good:
I'm living in a western democracy (Finland) with very little inequality, very lenient justice system and no colonialism. Out police is respected and admired. Recently we were gauged as the happiest country in the world (0).
I just don't see how anarco-syndicalism would improve our lot.
With this background, I would search solution to the worlds problems from somewhere else than pitting ananrchism against democratic hierarchy.
I would suggest you look into the current situation on gender equality in kurdish nation before claiming it all together a 'better way'.
Finland may be pretty exceptional but your economy still benefits from western subjugation of people in poorer places. Where do all the parts and raw materials for your electronics companies come from?
One of the major components of the kurdish revolution is gender equality and female liberation, that's why the YPJ units have been so popular in the media...
My favorite recently was the model explained to me where instead of receiving civil services from a single government without a choice, there are multiple corporatist organizations that run business and provide protection/security, a judicial system, enforcers, an executive system, so on and so forth, and you can pick and choose which one you want to be part of, swearing into their system and agreeing to pay your share into their system.
Then it hit me- this form of government already exists, and it is called the Mafia.
Yep. Going further, you will realize that the government is simply the largest mob organization in the region (you can choose among mobsters but you always have to pay the government's tax in addition to that).
> “You run into the exactly same resource and distribution problems as the government has, and you are going to start instituting the same sort of structures sooner or later.”
This is spot on. I think we would have to radically change our species behavioral tendencies before anarchy based societies would ever work like they think they should.
Cities are the most efficient way we've discovered to live as humans. They're less wasteful, they consolidate resources, etc.
> “Don’t get us wrong, we believe that many of these services are crucial for society, like healthcare, education, and maintained roadways, but we believe that the way to achieve access for all is by deconstructing the state and capitalism, as well as other coercive hierarchies that exist in our society. It is this driving philosophy that motivates our actions, not only to fix the potholes, but to take power back from the state, into the hands of the people.”
Centralization and urban living were invented thousands of years ago and has made these services possible and more efficient over time.