this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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Because we had to live with shit in the streets for thousands of years before the invention of a strong government.
Look at what corporations (made up of people) do with the slightest deregulation.
People are, in general, awful.
There's shit in the streets right now in many large cities due to the failures of the state. The gilded age and industrial revolution spawned numerous public health crises under the watch of governments. The planet is being burned alive due to failures of the state. The solution is more state? Are you sure about that?
How do you propose you regulate corporations or any sort of industry? You want to make sure you food is handled sanitarily, no? You want to ensure your drinking water is being cleaned correctly, right? You want to know if new medications have downsides or are at least effective at what they're purported to do. You want to make sure bridges and tunnels are engineered correctly. Etc. etc.
Yes, government is not perfect. Yes, there are things that get past regulation all the time, but just imagine how much worse it would be with zero regulations. That's the kind of society you're arguing for. You literally cannot have more than a dozen people living together without some sort of social governance. Even tribal communities have some type of government in its most basic form.
Encourage and support the current unionization efforts. Stoke radicalism in the working masses, collectivize the means of production in a horizontal and egalitarian fashion. Abolish corporations so that there's no corporations to manage. Allow the people who are already ensuring you have clean water to continue ensuring you have clean water. Allow the people who already study and test medications to continue to study and test medications. Allow the people who already engineer and maintain infrastructure to continue to maintain infrastructure. Standard anarcho-syndicalist stuff.
For civic management form neighborhood councils that are federated with adjacent communities, repeating this process to cover as much area as possible. Make collective decisions via direct democracy, utilizing revocable delegates to manage specific tasks and coordinate efforts on a large scale. Operate on a hybrid library/gift economy internally and engage in trade with outsiders (if money is still a thing). Distribute housing, food, and medicine freely, based on need and not the ability to pay. Facilitate relationships of freedom and mutual trust in your community. Do your part and trust memebers in your community to do the same. Standard communalist stuff.
That sounds good in theory, but incentivization is a real problem for numerous communities, particularly less urban ones. Attracting doctors, engineers, etc is much more difficult when you have a smaller pool of people even capable enough to perform those tasks to pull from. Currently this is done through money/profit, but even that isn't enough in some areas (see how the agricultural industry is currently struggling to attract veterinarians to rural communities).
I'm not fully disagreeing with you, by the way. In a perfect world, that sounds great. It just feels like a huge world of, "if X people do Y thing, it'll all work out just fine." Taking that step requires a huge leap of faith by hundreds of millions of people, and hoping no sizable group rises up to eventually usurp the whole delicate transition process.
It sounds good in practice too. The Zapatistas and Rojava have been putting systems like these in practice for quite some time now. Compared to their neighbors, they're doing pretty well for themselves. These systems work, have worked, and are likely to continue to work. These systems aren't for a perfect world, theyre systems to make the world better. My comment isn't a comprehensive or even prescriptive list of things we need to do to establish anarchy. They're examples of methods that have been used to great effectiveness and may carry insights and knowledge for people/communities to apply to their contexts in ways that make sense to them.
It shouldn't be a leap of faith, it should be a careful and calculated effort put forth by those who want to work for it. You may not totally disagree with me, but I wholeheartedly disagree with the characterization that anarchy is unrealistic. It's been done before and it's being done now
I guess the biggest issue I see is how do you handle global trade? Right now, tons of materials we need for even manufacturing highly advanced products and other materials requires a complex web of international trade. How do smaller communities hope to be part of that without sliding back to the pre-digital age? I know there are folks who probably don't see that as a bad thing, but I definitely do, as I enjoy having access to modern technology and services (not to mention, I work in IT, so my job kind of depends on it).
I can only speak for myself and my beliefs, but trade would be done in a manner where one community is capable of producing more than half of their needs within the community first. The workplaces in a community has unions represents them to meet with unions from other communities so they can coordinate production and trade for the mutual benefit of both communities.
imbisbibal hamd
No.
No we didn't.
We did not live with shit in the streets without government. Even the earliest known sites for long term near human habitatation had sanitation at least to the point of handling waste away from living areas. It's really exclusively the British and British controlled India that had problems with this. Nearly every other known society in history has sensible sanitation. Indoor plumbing is older than monotheism for ducks sake.
It wasn't British. All of Europe was known for dumping their waste in the public street. Britain did not bring that to India. It was already traditional.
Sanitation in Rome was stones placed in the middle of the road so you could cross the street without stepping in human waste.
Sanitation in Rome was open sewer lines yes, that had constantly flowing water that removed waste in the gutter. Also closed sewer lines nes that removed waste from people's houses. Depending on the era you want to try to claim this in. At no point were people just throwing waste into the street and leaving it there. That was just an English thing.
And a French thing too
Who do you think works in governments?
"Government is terrible, I trust people!"
or
"People are terrible, I trust government!"
Both hamstrung by the fact that people are what make up a government.
A corporation might be made up out of people, but it is also a vertical power structure that gives the people at the top the ability to benefit from being awful, at everyone else’s expense.
People are awful when they have the ability to be awful while benefiting themself and are able to get away with it.
And to say people are generally awful completely ignores the societal strictures imposed on us that reward horrible people.