How, tho?.. How do you defend that system from roving hooligans? From popular tyrants? When the people agree on basic laws, how are they enforced? Are they just supposed to meet in the town square to hunt down thieves and killers?
Have you heard of Community Policing before? That’s an example of non-hierarchical cooperative policing, and it’s effective all over the world. I don’t know if you’re trying to be obtuse or just really haven’t heard or thought about any of this, but it isn’t anything particularly revolutionary.
Logistically, getting the whole town together to make every decision just doesn’t work. There are too many little fiddly conflicts for total democracy, no one would have time to do any of the important stuff, they’d be in councils all day. So we assign representatives (legislators, judges, police, etc) with cumulative referred power to enforce the democratic will of the people. Follow that process a few steps and you wind up right at a modern liberal democracy.
I talked about this above. Yes, not everyone can be involved with everything all the time. The key is accountability and cooperation. Our current democracies are largely missing both of these. In an ideal world, sure they’re accountable to voters, but power in that is unfairly controlled by the owner class.
The structures we have in place are flawed, but not by lack of trying. The founding fathers seemed to have made a sincere attempt at developing
Absolutely, and they should be treated as human as anyone. They weren’t flawless gods. They thought we’d have torn it apart and built something better by now. Hell, they threw out their first attempt in a few years (The Articles of Confederation). We should be inspired by their attempt and actions and try to fix the issues we can see in the current systems. That’s could mean starting over, like they did… twice.
I don’t see anarchism as a mature system that has taken these difficulties seriously. It hand-waves the difficult parts with “We’ll figure it out through cooperation”, without serious consideration given to how that cooperation manifests in implementation.
It does not hand wave it away. You hand wave away the solutions and just say “oh, they haven’t actually considered it.”
Anarchism has been a philosophy for hundreds of years. There’s solutions to everything you’ve presented, and probably anything you could think of. Being ignorant of something isn’t the same thing as it not existing. It just means you don’t know about it yet. If you made a sincere attempt to understand Anarchist philosophy and though, and different forms of Anarchism, and they’re solutions, you wouldn’t be so confused. You don’t have to do this, but if you’re actually curious you should.
Have you heard of Community Policing before? That’s an example of non-hierarchical cooperative policing, and it’s effective all over the world. I don’t know if you’re trying to be obtuse or just really haven’t heard or thought about any of this, but it isn’t anything particularly revolutionary.
I talked about this above. Yes, not everyone can be involved with everything all the time. The key is accountability and cooperation. Our current democracies are largely missing both of these. In an ideal world, sure they’re accountable to voters, but power in that is unfairly controlled by the owner class.
Absolutely, and they should be treated as human as anyone. They weren’t flawless gods. They thought we’d have torn it apart and built something better by now. Hell, they threw out their first attempt in a few years (The Articles of Confederation). We should be inspired by their attempt and actions and try to fix the issues we can see in the current systems. That’s could mean starting over, like they did… twice.
It does not hand wave it away. You hand wave away the solutions and just say “oh, they haven’t actually considered it.”
Anarchism has been a philosophy for hundreds of years. There’s solutions to everything you’ve presented, and probably anything you could think of. Being ignorant of something isn’t the same thing as it not existing. It just means you don’t know about it yet. If you made a sincere attempt to understand Anarchist philosophy and though, and different forms of Anarchism, and they’re solutions, you wouldn’t be so confused. You don’t have to do this, but if you’re actually curious you should.