DéjÃ* Vu, All Over Again

[ermitonto]

I'm proud to be a radical leftist. Nothing wrong with it at all.

"Anarchists are opposed to violence; everyone knows that. The main plank of anarchism is the removal of violence from human relations. It is life based on freedom of the individual, without the intervention of the gendarme. For this reason we are the enemies of capitalism which depends on the protection of the gendarme to oblige workers to allow themselves to be exploited--or even to remain idle and go hungry when it is not in the interest of the bosses to exploit them. We are therefore enemies of the State which is the coercive violent organization of society." --Errico Malatesta

[tokosan]

ermitonto, in anarchy, i am a little fuzzy.... please explain to me how these things are accomplished in a society with complete freedom.

--Defense from other armies
--police, stopping crime
--feeding the masses
--political stability, being safe from military coup

[ermitonto]

ermitonto, in anarchy, i am a little fuzzy.... please explain to me how these things are accomplished in a society with complete freedom.

--Defense from other armies

Voluntary popular militias. Why does community defense have to be controlled in a centralized, hierarchical manner? Voluntary popular militias show up time and time again throughout history. Take a look at the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Commune of Paris, the Polish resistance in WW2, the ongoing struggle in Chiapas, etc. I don't buy for a minute that people cannot organize themselves in defense if need be.

--police, stopping crime

Again, why can crime only be solved in communities by hierarchical, centralized organizations? If anything the current solutions make things a lot worse. Capitalism and its class inequality breeds unemployment and poverty, which any social psychologist can tell you are the best predictors of crime. And when we do catch somebody committing a crime, what do we do? Send him away for a few years to a university of crime (prison) where social relationships are dominated by violence, and that is expected to rehabilitate the offender somehow.

Here is a good explanation of how crime might be handled by an anarchist society:
http://www.anarchistfaq.de/secI5.html#seci58

--feeding the masses

Capitalism does a very poor job of this. We have much more than enough food to feed everyone in the world right now, yet millions still live in hunger. For instance, every year lots and lots of grain is destroyed deliberately (more grain than could solve the famine crisis in Africa) to inflate prices so some capitalist firms can make more money. Under socialism, the means of production and the means of living would be the common property of everyone, run by federations based on free association, so all that wasted food could actually go to the people it needs to go to.

--political stability, being safe from military coup

Again, voluntary popular anarchist militias, like those which fought valiantly against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War and those in the Ukraine which resisted many foreign armies before being betrayed and crushed by the numerically superior Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution.

Anarchy is not the absence of organization for running society, as many would have you think. It is the rearrangement of that organization in a bottom-up approach rather than having some people at the top telling everyone else what to do. I can't think of a single practical function of the government that could not be handled by institutions based on direct democracy (collective decision-making by the people affected by the decisions) rather than authoritarian hierarchy.