[foilist13]

Is it possible anywhere in the world right now, to establish an anarchist society?

In any of the modern developed countries could anarchy be voted in? Or could you do it in any of the third world countries?

[Kasu]

Depends on what you mean. Anarchy, a government that suddenly lost all power and now the society has no order, or Anarchism, a system based around collective ownership over the means of production, but without the state to secure it.

Anarchism is not capitalism or by any means the free market.

[foilist13]

have you never heard of Anarcho-Capitalism? That is what i was referring to, but if you would like to use Communism, because that could be thought of as Anarchism, then do so.

[FallenRaptor]

Is it possible anywhere in the world right now, to establish an anarchist society?

I think so, yes. I think it would be crushed if it's on too big of a scale, though.

In any of the modern developed countries could anarchy be voted in?

No. Even if anarchists were elected it would probably be for lower offices and wouldn't have enough power to create Anarchist societies.

have you never heard of Anarcho-Capitalism? That is what i was referring to,

Anarcho-capitalism is one of the most ridiculous and lulziest ideas I've ever heard. If it's even possible to create such an order in modern society, it'll either degenerate to chaos or totalitarianism within a short period of time.

Many anarchists don't consider anarcho-capitalism a legitimate form of anarchism due to the hierarchical nature of capitalist firms.

[foilist13]

Exactly what other forms of anarchy would you suggest?

[FallenRaptor]

I'm not an anarchist but I find the Spanish revolution pretty interesting. You can find out more about it in the other thread.

[HoniSoit]

have you never heard of Anarcho-Capitalism?

It's difficult me to understand the logic that while anarcho-capitalism is strongly opposed to the concentration of power in the form of a state, it would endorse the private/corporate concentration of power. Or perhaps I completely misunderstood anarcho-capitalism?

[Gintonpar]

Is it possible anywhere in the world right now, to establish an anarchist society?

In any of the modern developed countries could anarchy be voted in? Or could you do it in any of the third world countries?

I'm personally not an anarchist of any shade, I'm an orthodox Marxist, but I think the anarchist-ish movements in Chiapas in Mexico are praiseworthy. More likely in third/second world nations imo.

[Kasu]

What about the short-lived one during the spanish civil war? That was a good example of anarcho-communism. Too bad it was crushed by the counter revolutionaries.

[foilist13]

Go read the question i just posted in the Communism forum. It talks about how a Communist society can defend itself. I'd like to hear your answers.

[yourstruly]

you haters are going to have say more than "lulz" about anarcho-capitalism if you want to have any weight in this discussion...there IS a lot of logic behind the idea, it is a morally consistent ideology, and the practical implications are all arguably desirable. I personally don't see an anarcho-capitalist solution to national defense, nor can I imagine it providing a functional response to pandemic diseases, but just about every other function of government strikes me as counter-productive and illegitamate.

sadly, i don't believe any mass group of people will accept anything approaching ancap for a few thousand more years. Whenever something goes wrong, people tend to attribute the problem to a lack of government, try to solve the problem with more regulation, and fail to realize that the centralization in and of itself might be the cause of the problem to begin with. Gradually, as more supply chains stretch across the globe, as more people become more pluralist, and as we presented with an ever-increasing volume of historical examples of government failure, i hope that a future educated populace will be willing to implement a heavily minarchist system. Give it a few millenia.

[FallenRaptor]

you haters are going to have say more than "lulz" about anarcho-capitalism if you want to have any weight in this discussion...

Just for starters:

Practical questions

Objectivists argue that, in a society without a state police force (instead reliant on a system of private security firms) to protect against the initiation of violence and breach of contracts, civil disagreements that lead to violence can be perpetuated by the formation of gangs, creating a fragmented tribal environment of civil wars; and that anarcho-capitalists are too quick to deny the possibility of a constitutionally limited government.

Minarchist and statist critics often argue that the free rider problem makes anarcho-capitalism (and, by extension, any anti-statist political system) fundamentally unworkable in modern societies. They typically argue that there are some vital goods or services — such as civil or military defense, management of common environmental resources, or the provision of public goods such as roads or lighthouses — that cannot be effectively delivered without the backing of a government exercising effective territorial control, and so that abolishing the state as anarcho-capitalists demand will either lead to catastrophe or to the eventual re-establishment of monopoly governments as a necessary means to solving the coordination problems that the abolition of the state created. One counterargument by free market economists, such as Alex Tabarrok, emphasizes the private use of dominant assurance contracts. Some anarcho-capitalists also contend that the "problem" of "public goods" is illusory and its invocation merely misunderstands the potential individual production of such goods. Others, such as David Friedman, point out that problems of market failure are the exception in private markets but the norm in the political markets that control state action. In addition, contemporary anarcho-capitalists state that social ostracism can be an important tool in averting free riders. As such, people who were free riders could find themselves to be socially isolated and denied goods and services as a result of their "free ridership". A need to healthily co-exist with others in society may serve as an effective deterrent against free riders.

Robert Nozick argued in Anarchy, State and Utopia that anarcho-capitalism would inevitably transform into a minarchist state, even without violating any of its own nonaggression principles, through the eventual emergence of a single locally dominant private defense and judicial agency that it is in everyone's interests to align with, because other agencies are unable to effectively compete against the advantages of the agency with majority coverage. Therefore, he felt that, even to the extent that the anarcho-capitalist theory is correct, it results in an unstable system that would not endure in the real world. Similarly, Paul Birch argues that as in the world today, legal disputes involving several jurisdictions and different legal system will be many times more complex and costly to resolve than disputes involving only one legal system. Thus, the largest private protection business in a territory will have lower costs since it will have more internal disputes and will outcompete those private protection business with more external disputes in the territory. In effect, according to Birch, protection business in territory is a natural monopoly.[1]

A criticism of Rothbard's version of anarcho-capitalism, in which certain fundamental natural rights will be followed, is that this, in the absence of a state which guarantee such rights, is merely wishful thinking.[2]

Critics also argue that one can observe private protection organizations in practice in gang wars, where different gangs compete with each other on the same "turf" to "protect" their interests, causing high violence.[3]

Another problem is that of externalities, such as pollution.[4] Rothbard viewed causing polluted air to violate another's airspace as aggression that would likely be dealt with under an anarcho-capitalist legal code. The victim would be entitled to restitution for harm caused by the pollution.[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms ... _questions

[Gintonpar]

you haters are going to have say more than "lulz" about anarcho-capitalism if you want to have any weight in this discussion

A big bit of anarchy involves the removal of heirarchies and interference in the lives and mindset of the individual. However, capital accumulation in a small amount of private hands leads to political power. This then leads to tyranny by those wealthy enough to afford political power, unconstrained by the state.

[Dr House]

By political power I assume you mean unequal power over the use of force, correct?

In that case I agree. It's also worth noting that to the extent infrastructure projects require land expropriation, it may happen anyway in an ancap society. In the Wild West, people were often driven off their lands at gunpoint by railroad tycoons.

[SpiderMonkey]

Anarcho-capitalism requires that the entire population voluntarily adheres to a system of property that likely favours a minority. In a society built on the idea of people always pursuing a narrow conception of self interest, this self-evident contradiction would destabalise a anacap society in short order.

Either some form of state would arise to enforce a permanent property paradigm, or property would collapse and thus capitalism would become impossible.

[Dr House]

Either some form of state would arise to enforce a permanent property paradigm, or property would collapse and thus capitalism would become impossible.

False.

I can think of at least 2 alternatives to state action to defend private property.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_defense_agency

[SpiderMonkey]

Then you've got the property paradigm defined by the most heavily armed. That is anomie, not anarchy.