Tell me about Anarchism

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Tell me about Anarchism

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Seventh Arrow posted:

Please forgive any inaccuracies in this post, I only know a little bit about the subject.

From what I understand, there's a right-wing strand of anarchism - one that's so anti-government that they believe in no government at all. I believe Milton Friedman's son was a proponent of this. That, however, is not what I'm asking about.

The older and more well-known strain of anarchism is left-leaning and, from what I can tell, its adherents are interested in the same kind of social justice issues that socialists and communists care about. As far as I know, this kind of anarchism doesn't quite believe in no government at all, but instead that there should be local communities voting on larger issues that can affect them. Is this correct? If so, I'm wondering how anarchists can address social justice issues without the larger infrastructure afforded by socialism and communism. Doesn't it take a large government to be able to distribute welfare, social security, housing, education, etc? I'm also interested in how anarchists would plan to implement such a system in a setting like, say, the constitutional republic found in the US.

Thanks in advance for any replies.

you remember Occupy? yeah.

Anarcho-syndicalism and stateless communism kinda predate Marxism, and the idea generally isn't 'no government' (which is p much impossible when multiple people are working together) but a strictly non-heirarchical model of government where there is no aristocracy or political class or distinction between the rulers and the ruled. The basic idea it's (more or less) all founded on is the general strike, a mass grassroots uprising where people just get together and... stop serving their masters, and there's nothing they can loving do about it because the workers do all the actual work.

Since the movement never really made it past Step 1 (and never really recovered from Lenin taking over the Russian Revolution and by extension command of 'legitimate' communism) it's generally a bit less concerned with having a fully realized political system ready to go in advance than it is with the more immediate concerns of what's hosed up about the status quo and how to break away from that so people can figure out a better way of doing things. Sometimes post-revolution government is to be accomplished through direct democracy, sometimes through delegating all policy to cooperative unions, sometimes it's just all tribal social-pressure stuff that assumes agrarian societies of hundreds of people. The throughline on all of it is that it's all chiefly concerned with making sure nobody in particular gets too powerful and starts lording it over everyone else, as a consequence has basically no point of continuity with existing societies, and no model of it that's been attempted has been remotely able to compete with authoritarian nation-states for whom a bunch of independent individuals who all have to agree on what they're doing before they can start doing it look like free dinner.

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Mar 10, 2016

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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Tell me about Anarchism