this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
610 points (91.7% liked)
Political Memes
5520 readers
1776 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
An anarchist's idea of anarchy is never really the simple definition of anarchy that most people know.
From what I've read, the simplest way to put it is not the abolition of rules, but the abolition of any state mechanism that's separate from the population or that could enforce rules without the broad consensus of the people.
For instance, most anarchist philosopers still argue for a form of government, but they always try to integrate it with the people as much as possible through things such as council democracies.
Well that's not "the purge" obviously, but every description of Anarchy just sounds like it's recreating a high school government (complete with cliques and everything). At any anarchist commune, the popular people are elected to the council. That's how popularity works.
First world countries already have representative democracies. People are getting what they vote for. The problem is: people are stupid and shortsighted. That problem would be worse if you remove the institutions we've built up.
To a degree, I agree, and that's why I'm not an anarchist. I do, however, believe that most of the reforms we need for our democracies are similar to the goals of anarchism, and therefore anarchists can be good to read critically for inspiration.
A more delegate inspired model of representative democracy with more accountability to their electorate, STV and proportional representation so that the government more closely aligns with the population, worker cooperatives and unions so that the population has a broader say in the economy. These are all things I believe we need and feel in line with the spirit of anarchism.
We do not have functional representative democracies. The material and economic reality of the current system leaves what little democratic practices we have vulnerable to manipulation. There is a power imbalance between our democratic systems of power and the purely economic power structures, resulting in the former being dominated by the latter.
What anarchists envision is not simply the removal of the current powerful institutions, but the replacement of them with alternative democratic institutions. For democracy to survive and function it must be the dominant power structure in a society.