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this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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Memes of Production
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Because anarchism only works when everyone is perfectly rational and cooperative. Maybe you are, but many people aren't. The decisions those people make should be controlled: starting fires for fun, dumping waste into drinking water, etc.
That’s consensus you are talking about, and it is indeed a myth, at scale.
Every consensus run organization I have seen chokes up at some point due to a failure of psychology. Statistically, something like more than 10% of the population are guaranteed to be a problem for cohesion, for various reasons. Many are just contrarians and self-identifying as an outsider requires social sabotage. Some are cruel, stupid, or violent. Many are “dark triad” and dangerously deceptive.
So any functional and sustainable system has to acknowledge that fact and plan around never having consensus. There are many approaches to this, and anarchism can work without everyone in lockstep, and still get things done and maintain principles.
Your statement suggests you think that anarchism is hands-off laissez-faire, it’s the opposite. Self governance is DIY and thus constant maintenance of rules and arrangements and goals, and solving problems mutually. An endless hands-on meeting, at least until we are able to automate such things.
See, self-governance involves mutual self-defense, and violence by poison is a mutual problem which requires a lot of coordination to solve, so people will be motivated to get it resolved quickly; dumping might be a very dangerous decision. Anarchism doesn’t let you be a lone wolf, you have to deal with groups of equals and mutual dependence everywhere you go.
I've got some very bad news for you about the intransigence of human beings.
Intransigence is an annoying problem. An obstacle, not an invalidation.
Obstacles must be confronted, or the path will remain impassable.
Yeah... I guess it's just a bigger topic than I have time to tackle right now.
Enforcement would range from relentless requests to stop, and maybe blockade of some kinds, to sanction and exclusion. Self defence rules would be well agreed upon and might be physical. There is always a limit where coercion is necessary, anarchists just want it waaaay over there.
Justice discussions are harder than most, but we have a lot of rights documents to draw from.
Exclusion from a well organized community you live in or next to would make life very challenging.
Identifying dark triad individuals and redirecting them to other non-destructive tasks would help a lot.
It kinda just sounds like reinventing government piecemeal though. You get that, right? That's why I abandoned anarchism. It either requires that you ignore the complications of material reality in favor of vague ideology, or bit by bit you wind up creating a system which doesn't really look like anarchism anymore.
Anarchism isn't really a coherent societal system. It's an ideal by which you measure how "over there" the coercion is.
You may have been told that anarchism is no government, because ideology keeps us believing that government requires a ruling class, that social hierarchies are necessary.
But it is more government, ironically. It just doesn't rely on persisting structural hierarchies. This means that DiY self-governance is a lot of work, with little room for lone wolves.
I think that a functional sustainable anarchy that can defend itself and maintain a reasonable amount of compromise without losing its essence will require a whole lot of sociopolitical automation to support all that autonomy.
No, not really, I've perused anarchist literature. I didn't have to be told anything.
You're right though, DIY self governance is a lot of work. And the more people you interact with, the less you believe that a significant portion of people are willing to put in that work. They will offload that effort onto others in the vast majority of cases. Representative democracies provide a framework to do so. Eliminating representative democracy doesn't suddenly imbue the average person with the will to engage locally to fill the void, it just makes them more likely to offload that effort to whoever has the will to become a demagogue (i.e. charismatic assholes). It devolves into "anarcho"-capitalism.
I'm not against the principles of anarchism, to the contrary I see it as the desirable end goal. I just don't think it's a useful contemporary framework, I don't think we're getting there in our lifetime (barring some kind of transhumanist functional immortality that breaks the timeframe of "lifetime"). The sociopolitical automation you seek isn't just going to pop up in a power vacuum, it's going to require a long, incremental process. As Agent K said, "A person is smart, people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals".
Society progresses in generational steps. You don't steer it like a speedboat, you steer it like an aircraft carrier. Unfortunately we don't get to be the anarchic generation, the best we can do is nudge society in that general direction, and raise children to carry on the Work.
In my opinion anarchists limits the power a single person can wield in way that lets every person a roughly equal amount of power and influence on the world. So while bad actors would be able to do shitty things, they only have the power of one person and not the power of say, a big corporation, billions of dollars or politcal office with nearly unlimited decision making power to do shitty things. And from what we can see innour current world, bad actors are attracted to positions of powers as much as moths are attracted to electrical light.
And tbh, your examples of problems are on much lower scale than for example wars and climate change. I would rather deal with those decently petty problems instead, wouldnt you?
Except the majority of people will cede their share of the power to those who promise short-term gains. In theory, if people were perfectly rational, they would understand the full scope of their actions and act accordingly. They aren't, though, so they don't. They just wanna watch TV and play video games and let someone else worry about complicated stuff.
All power ultimately comes down to monopolization of coercion. People will be violent and vindictive. People will pollute if their personal benefit exceeds their personal consequences. They will offload those worries onto someone else, and bad actors will fill that void in a heartbeat. You don't move forward by pretending people will spontaneously fill that gap of their own volition, you move forward by curating a system that makes the better choice the easy choice long enough to make the easy choice the right choice.