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civil society
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this post was submitted on 10 May 2024
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As much as I agree that “civilized society” spouted by right-wingers is awfully damn far from it it seems kinda weird to act like anarchy would bring about a structured society.
All large groups who don’t want to end up falling into disparate groups led by the nearest psychopath and trauma-fueled meat-heads are going to need structure. Yes, capitalism and the right in general have failed but that doesn’t mean government is bad(or even difficult).
Anarchism isn't the absence of structure but the absence of hierarchy. The most basic idea of anarchist decision making is a council free for everyone to join that tries to find consensus.
This isn't exactly what the comic portrays though. If you're thinking of "anarchy" as being the absence of government, it isn't anarchy itself that would lead to a structured society, it's the intentional efforts of people to build a society sans government that is structured on things other than property and institutional violence.
The idea of government does not require property and institutional violence. If that’s where we’re starting from then there’s not going to be much of a conversation to be had.
Why not? It sounds like you have a specific idea of what these words mean to you, but if those are very different from what people identifying as anarchists are talking about, it doesn't seem like there is much point objecting on the basis of your preferred definitions, that's basically just a strawman argument.
That’s not anarchy, that’s just wanting a different system of government but expecting it to come with dramatic fanfare and the naive trust that good people will fill the power vacuums. It takes work, and that’s hard, but that’s the only way it’s going to work.
And you’re right, why do we allow it? We could vote for better people, obviously, but we don’t. Many people have been working on this problem for a long time.
We will always fall back to a government system of some kind. You can tear down the current one and pretend that the job will be done or you can actually work to make the stupid thing work.
Anarchism is a diverse political movement with many strains of thought and centuries of theory and attempts to implement it. Lemmy isn’t going to teach you nearly as much about it as Peter Kropotkin or any of the anarchist led organizations and movements out there. We aren’t naive idealists, we run organizations much more frequently than state communists actually. We fight fascists. We’re probably actually the healthiest far left movement when it comes to actually doing shit in America. You just don’t see it because it’s easy to miss that a good giveaway or a books to prisoners program or a bike co-op is anarchist.