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this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
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For example by positioning themselves along a river and demanding payment from anyone who draws water.
Or by crafting weapons and demand payment from anyone who doesn't pay.
Or seek control through other threats, like poisoning food.
Really, the possibilities are endless...
An anarchist society doesn't mean that the people of that society can't defend themselves in nonviolent and violent ways.
Furthermore: why would those "dissidents" even start such behavior?
Edit (addendum): Seriously: Do you really think that over 150 years of anarchist theory didn't think of those scenarios and how to prevent them?
plenty of bad actors doing evil suff today for a big variety of reasons. i think its safe to assume they will be there, even if they are not so numerous?
whats the theory on how to deal with this stuff?
Without private property, there isn't much ingentive to be malicious in the first place.
And as I've said: a community can defend itself without the need of command and control hierarchy.
Example solutions for the examples given above:
Since these assholes live in a community, diplomacy to sanction those people until they cut that shit out. But he concept of payment isn't really a thing in a "fully anarchist" society, since those would for example run on gift economies, rendering the concept of payment a bit useless.
Crafting weapons example: Same thing. But if diplomacy doesn't work, the weapons would have to be taken by force (i.e. by a voluntary, democratically controlled militia).
The food stuff: I'm again asking "why?". But in general: let's say that people can't stop the "evil" people from being a dick by sanctions or force: People just move away. That's how humanity did it back in hunter-gatherer times. I think it was this video which explained it quite well (but I might confuse it with another one)
how is such a thing like the aforementioned militias be organized?
assuming my country turns anarchist, how will we defend against imperialist nations? we cant just move a country over because someone else wanted what was in there.
What about things like rape or sexist crimes in general? What about crimes motivated by racism, ableism or a clashing of ideologies?
The only thing anarchists have to say about these things are a vague "the communities will handle it themselves" which sounds an awful lot like police again to me.
Just this time the police doesn't have to follow laws at all and it's basically my neighbours who will make up their own rules. This is a thought that runs shivers down my spine and not because of happiness.
If you claim that anything that resembles an answer to crimes is a "police", then you're talkino about something different than everyone else. The police as it exists today is there to fight class tensions and keep the current order of things.
Do youeknow how many cases of rape cases currently lead to a conviction? Compare that to convictions of people stealing food or not being able to pay their rent.
Crime will always exist. Currently, the way of preventing crime is by individualistic punishment, taking people away from the community they're in and the fear of the aforementioned. That is not the only way to "fight" crime. Handling crime as an injury of the community and focusing on healing that wound as a community is IMHO a way more effective way that enablino bullies to get a power high.
The police make up the law as they go all the time. Ever heard of "the blue wall of silence"? They cover for each other when someone steps out of line, because to them, group cohesion is more important than playing by the rules.
You seem to not understand what bottom-up decision making is.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what police does. Neither does it make the laws, nor is it responsible for convicting rapists.
Like when people were burning witches? Or what's happening right now in multiple countries which do not have police where all disputes are "solved" by clan-violence and vigilantes on the streets?
Why do you believe, when your neighbours form their little vigilante groups, that they will help you when someone rapes you? What if the rapist is a friend of them or even someone from that group? What if they believe it's okay to rape specific people or under specific circumstances?
Why did people burn witches? Maybe because someone in a position of power was in search of a scapegoat to blame because their position was threatened?
Very non-hierarchical structures you're describing here. /s
I'm not proposing "neighbors form[ing] little vigilante groups, so... Idk? 🤷
Anarchist theory almost exclusively talks about political motivated crime they propose will stop when the state and all it's structures are abolished.
Non-political crime they mostly only brush over and suggest the communities will handle it themselves.
So no, they don't have a concept of how people are supposed to protect themselve from crimes that aren't politically motivated.
That's because you can't over-generalize these things without gausing great injustice in the process.
The communities on a ground level know best how to handle crimes in the community. If you want laws encompassing everyone in every facet of life: go read a bible or something.
You are advocating for exactly that to happen. Many bible communities would rejoice in anarchy bevause then they can enforce all their fucked up rules again and kids who are born into these communities.... Well, tough luck I guess. Your community on the ground level decided it's okay to burn people as witches who have red hair.
Lol no. Absolutely not! Anarchists would be 100% against these kinds of structures, so they wouldn't be allowed to exist.
You haven't actually read any anarchist theory, have you? This is a fucking joke.
In the real world practice of small-scale egalitarian societies, these people either get killed, or the group packs up and goes somewhere else. That's how humanity lived for the hundreds of thousands of years before we invented agriculture.
How we translate that into a contemporary agricultural context where private property and control of resources is a real force is beyond me, but I do think that we have to try.