Anarchy is a political structure where there’s basically no one in charge, right? But wouldn’t that just create a power vacuum that would filled by organized crime, corporations, etc.? Then, after that power vacuum is filled, we’re right back at square one, and someone is in charge.
Are there any political theorists that have come up with a solution to this problem?
This is the best answer. Anarchist societies do not work in practice. They work in theory.
I love the people who say anarchism / communism are utopian and would never work in practice without negative externalities- and then go bootlicking for representative democracy and capitalism
It’s more that they don’t scale well. What works well in a small group of friends will fall apart long before you scale it up even to just a national level, much less all of humanity.
The Zapatistas show that region-scale anarchy can work and remain stable. You need more careful and explicit structures to do things at scale, but the same goes for nation-states, just look at the average state’s legal and regulatory codes. Compared to trying not to break the law in a nation-state, participating in local anarchist organizing committees is child’s play.
We’ve only had the opportunity to apply this at a scale larger than the smallest 30-or-so nations, but in theory systems like sociocracy can nest exponentially, meaning there are applications that are already halfway to a world government.
I am not sure if I would call it Anarchism if it has explicit structures
Maybe you’re using some formal or narrow definition of “structure” but in my experience there are lots of things I would call structures in anarchist theory and practice, from meeting templates to the mental flowcharts of emergency medicine.
I guess we could just choose not to scale? We could go back to the city state model they had in Europe during middle ages and in antiquity.
The only issue is how you would defend yourself militarily. Case in point: there is a reason why these city states eventually became part of the Roman Empire. A city state versus the Roman empire? It’s not a fair fight at all.
To prevent something like this you would need, like, a super NATO full of thousands of nation states, but corporation at that level maybe difficult (NATO is already proving difficult to maintain as is). You could also have a state for the purpose of only having the military, but that could easily slide into a military dictatorship. So it’s tricky.
Jokes aside, the cities model worked because that was the scale a society was able to grow to. Transport was very difficult as was communication. And even in the ancient cities there was a power hierarchy with councils of elders and stuff.
If your idea of not scaling up involves a super NATO of thousands of nation states, you should probably go back to the drawing board.
Yeah, I wasnt trying to present it as feasible
Military? Who would act militarily against a community? How do you figure slums survive? People could act “militarily” against them. Yet they survive and thrive.
would anarchy work better in addition to some other system that does not rely on hierarchy?
What system does not rely on any hierarchy? That is supposed to be Anarchism
maybe something that has semi hierarchy, that can be dismantled on a whim if needed? Have the best from both worlds. Like, anarchy + democrady -> voting system, but politican can be removed at any time by anyone, meaning that they have to actually do good job to keep representing people. Cant even try pleasing everyone and do nothing as that wont help either. Abusers get dealt with in same way as abusers get dealt with in regular anarchy. Though all this relys on humans being even semi rational and decent, which kind of makes it utopistic idea. But it would still work likely better than current only rich get to rule system. And besides, what is the worst that would happen? People vote against their own interests, get apathetic and do nothing?
At worst, nothing at all gets done as no one is in charge of anything, which would still be better situation than current one as at least things wont get worse and if there is some ongoing crisis going on that has to be dealt with, if people still cant get the head out of their arses to deal with it, they have decided to let it happen. Just as we have right now decided to let climate change happen by just pretending to do meaningful things to stop it while in truth just focusing to protect the wealth of the rich.
Every day we have less and less to lose. Any system seems better than what we currently have, though i wonder if soviet union got started with that sentiment. But something has to change because way things currently are are intolerable and by the time that transforms into physical need(like hunger) its too late already because everything is too broken already due to planet not supporting enough life to sustain meaningful civilization.
All layers of decentralization add complexity and inefficiency. Anarchism relies on every human being fully educated on Anarchist theory (never going to happen).
Anarchism is more of a “good samaritan” ideology which can work as a band-aid for people to help each other within a bad system, but it has never become a fully functioning system itself.
we need something else than just democracy, or at least something that would also protect the integrity of democracy from corruption. If we had something like that and it would function reliably well people who want change would at least have something to rally behind instead of just wanting change into “something” that isnt ever really specified and thus wont ever gain any traction.
…that is not what they said at all