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?
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.