What is anarchy?

Yup. But then it's probably more productive to simply concentrate upon improving yourself as a human being and attempting to educate those around you rather than actively pursuing anarchism as a goal. No society will be able to sustain an anarchist model until its citizens have evolved to a point where they're able to function healthily with such freedom. And given such an evolution, anarchism would arise naturally from the ashes of capitalism as we outgrow it. So there's not much point chasing anarchism as a political goal - may as well chase your tail.

 

But then I'd have to get a job and work for 'the man'!

I have no intention of funding any governments murderous overseas excursions and willy waving!

I think I'll just carry on as a part of 'rent a mob'.

 

Well... you have this interesting diversion that is continuing to grow (particularly in the states) of the "anarcho-capatalist" which has grown from the assumption that the definition of anarchism is "without government" rather than the wider definition of "without authority"...

Anarcho-capatalism is essentially an extreme extension of free-market capatalism whereby the role of government would be replaced by free market enterprise... hence the NHS would be dismantled and replaced by an entirely private health care system... same with the education system... but it would even go so far as to create a system of competitive police and jurisdical systems...

Of course, pur anarchists would argue that this is nothing more than a bastardisation of anarchist theory based on a mishaprehension of what anarchism is in the first place... but it does create an interesting debate and alternative to traditional anarchist thinking...

Fly...

 

It certainly does!

 

I've only dipped a toe into anarcho-capatalist theory... but it has made me wonder if there might be an alternative route to creating an anarchist way of living... it is always assumed that, to get to anarchism, you would have to go through an increasingly left-wing series of political agendas... that you can only get to anarchism by going through socialist revolution... maybe there is a possibility of reaching a state of anarchist living through the anarch-capatalist free-market philosophy... I'm not supporting it... just wondering...


Fly...

 

Maybe you would know:

What about goverments that work for a more 'liberal' 'free' society within the restrictions the voters put upon them [for religous reasons]. Awaiting the day slowly but surely 'the people' become tolerant.. please tell me this was not something i dreamt about..

People bemoan 'goverments' sometimes they are better than 'the people'

'beyond the need for laws'

I got into a arguement about toast and bread [being two different things] [I said they were two different things] with a friend today .. This in the 21st century !!! we have a long way to go.

 

Very true. Governments are often way to the left of popular opinion on a number of issues. This gives rise to the whole debate over whether governments shape public opinion, public opinion shapes governments, or do the two feed each other. Or perhaps they're both just expressions of human nature. Fuck knows. The smart money though says that people are still basically fucked up and haven't advanced all that far since climbing down out of the trees. I doubt governments are to blame for human nature.

 

As they say about directors 'only as good as the last film' . I believe we are only as good as our last century.. Endlessly going around in circles 'up and down the monkey tree' [as it were].

 

I think the leader that most directly controls ppls lives today is money and I can't see anarchy working whilst we use it. That libertarian crap scares me, frankly and, at best would make things worse, much worse, before they got better, if they ever got better, which I don't think they would. Money creates leaders and an underclass by obeying the law of gravity. The only reason we the non-leaders are still struggling, with all the tools and technologies we've developed, is because money attracts money, whilst not having money means you don't get any, simple.

Someone is going to say: "But money makes trade more efficient, you would have to trade things and you would get ripped off". What we have to do is not keep count. Can you imagine many people going through life living as a net loss, consuming more than they contributed? I can't. I just can't. But I've probably spent a lot more time thinking about it than those of you who think money is essential so ask any questions you want to.

This is a link to a thread about how to get there:
http://www.hipforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=99870

And this is a thread where I describe a useful tool for circulating the wealth beyond the land we (the anarchists) live on, if you ignore the stuff about the dispossessed:
http://www.hipforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=101839


As a side-note, the end goal of communism is anarchy isn't it?

 

The average person in the UK generates 13.000 GDP .. I would imagine most people spend or have funds spent on them that outweigh what they contribute [to the economy].

 

Yes, but money isn't a thing in itself. It's simply an expression of an aspect of human nature - greed. Money isn't the problem. Greed is.

If you had a world in which people were ready to live in such an unselfish, altruistic fashion, we wouldn't even be needing to have this conversation.

 

Sticking with the human nature aspect, we have a strong desire to conform and therefore follow. If you put a group of people together in any situation, natural leaders will emerge. Generally speaking people don't want to take responsibility for themselves, life is much easier when you take orders, how do we change this? It will take a huge shift in human consciousness before people stop taking and giving control.

 

From the descriptions above, Anarchy = Utopia. Everyone working/living their lives in co-ordination and conciousness of each other.
I don't understand how this can be achieved through political means, it comes across to me as more of a philosophical concept. Peoples attitude's to each other needs better focusing.

 

Duh, well how come the country isn't in debt? Besides, how much money you earn or spend doesn't necessarily correlate to how much you've contributed or taken. Investment bankers - what do they actually do, yet they're rich. Theives and frauds - don't contribute anything but get money.
So many people, in fact everyone to some degree, spends their time looking after money, taking care of it. Some spend their whole lives in this pursuit whilst they could be putting more in rather than making sure everyone has their 'fair' share. The bean counting works against us all.

 

But it's evil . It makes it so easy to accumulate vast amounts, orders of magnitude more than how much a person could ever need, whilst at the same time making it fucking impossible to get off the bottom should you find yourself there, no matter what you have to offer.
What it is is a tool to keep count, nothing more. If we didn't need to keep count before we had any technological advances (which are all tools which help us do something) why would we now? I mean does anyone know the real cost of producing food (per person fed) on a modern communal farm? It's a pittance. You obviously don't see anything of value in the modern world Doc, but I think we've come quite far.

People being evil is part manufactured, part myth. A big part is that we have much less to live on than we earn, if you take my meaning. The cats at the top get all the cream, leaving ordinary people working their bollocks off just to make ends meet. Poverty obviously leads to crime, that's a given. On the flip-side, others believe so completely the idea that making money is good, that they'll do clearly bad things to get it. And, whilst not forgetting the fact that the value of money is imaginary, let's not forget that it is still a very real thing and making money means receiving it from someone else. There are honest ways to do this, of course, but however you look at it, charging someone for something (whatever it may be), is depriving them of something else - unless they're so rich they don't need to keep count in which case what's the point of keeping count?

Besides, it's not entirely unselfish. Doing things for others does make a person feel better.

It's true, it would be a very different world from the one we live in now. When we get there, it'll be quite close to your 'green anarchist' (or whatever it was) idea of a goal because civilisation will be centered around the areas of production, not consumption. I know it takes some imagining, but it's not gonna happen all at once, it's going to happen bit by bit, starting now.

 

That's it! Team Earth. We help each other and get help in return. Before there was money, what did we do? We helped ourselves. And when we felt good about ourselves we started helping others. That, contrary to some people's beliefs, is human nature.

Most of the time the demise of anarchry was due to isolation from other societies. If you trace the idea back to the time the idea of money was conceived, you will find it was a conveinient way to keep track of a society's, and later an individual's contribution to the total good.

Over the years, we have found different ways to accomplish basically the same thing. Finding ways to reward the hard-working for their efforts, and encouraging others to find a way to make not only theirs's but also other people's lives better. With the advent of the internet, and later the web, you could theoretically find the idea of money may be redundant. If we can help each other, while maintaining the disipline required to acheive such acts regardless of whether we get paid for for it or not, that in itself is payment.

Exactly. A nickle there. a dime here. We don't actually need a tally to show what we have contributed, what matters is what we've done in the end. And no amount of monetary reward can change or diminish that.