this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2026
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Theres a steep irony in someone doing government controlled work idealizing a system where the work they do would likely not exist. Who exactly would be mandating/funding the existence, operation, or regular testing of a sewage plant in an anarchist society?
Society is poorly designed in the general sense, sure. It could be vastly improved and people could have more liberty wrt a lot of things. But left to their own devices people on average would not choose to mandate water treatment. Even if they somehow did, providing no central system of oversight for making sure that it happens would all but guarantee it doesnt get accomplished.
Its ridiculous how many people take critical aspects of society for granted and assume they would continue to exist in a world where everyone does whatever the fuck they want without any central planning or control. In many places around the world people already dont have access to fresh/clean water for this exact reason…
Look at the libertarian experiments that have all failed spectacularly, like Grafton, NH. Mfs couldnt even agree to not feed the bears or dispose of their trash appropriately. And that doesnt require some massive infrastructure project to accomplish. The greater good often necessitates protecting people at large from their own stupidity, otherwise your liberties are quickly diminished by your neighbor’s negligence
You have a very simplistic view of what an anarchist society could look like and it's rooted in the assumption that the only possible alternative to central planning is no planning. It's absolutely possible for people to organize access to clean water in a decentralized manner and I know this because it has been done repeatedly all over the world and throughout human history. In the places you're thinking of that do not have access to clean water it is often not the result of a lack of central planning, but directly caused by it, such as when a multinational corporation claims a community's water supply as its private property and restricts access.
This feels like projection more than anything else.
There are tons of people who voluntarily do hard, unpleasant, or dangerous work because they care about the people around them. Volunteer firefighters. Mutual aid groups. Community search and rescue. The number of regular people who stepped up during disasters when official institutions failed is huge. The idea that nobody would bother maintaining water systems unless a central authority forced them to says more about how you see people than about how people actually behave.
You’re also mixing up anarchism with “no coordination.” Anarchism isn’t “everyone does whatever they want and society collapses.” It’s opposition to hierarchy and domination, not opposition to organization. Sewage plants and water treatment don’t exist because of some mystical power of the state. They exist because people need clean water. They require technical knowledge, cooperation, and systems of accountability. None of that logically requires a top-down ruling authority.
You brought up Grafton, NH, (I had to google this) but that doesn't look anything like anarchism. That looks more like a hyper-individualist, market-first version of libertarianism with almost no civic culture. Anarchism, especially in its socialist or syndicalist traditions, is built around collective responsibility and shared management. Those are very different things. “Nobody owes anyone anything” is not the same as “we organize ourselves without bosses.”
And on the clean water point: communities historically pushed for sanitation because cholera and dysentery were killing people. Public health measures often came from collective pressure long before centralized bureaucracies standardized them. People don’t need to be tricked into wanting potable water.
You say the greater good requires protecting people from their own stupidity. Maybe sometimes. But you seriously think centralization magically fix negligence? Flint, Michigan had a state. That didn’t prevent a water disaster. Bureaucracy can fail just as hard as decentralized systems, and sometimes with less direct accountability.
The real disagreement here seems to be about human nature. If you assume most people won’t lift a finger unless coerced, then yeah, anarchism sounds ridiculous. If you assume people are capable of organizing around shared needs when they actually have ownership and say over things, it becomes less far-fetched.
Ok, so you have people willing to work at the wastewater treatment plant. What happens when the Reverse Osmosis pump gives out? Costs $500,000 to replace. Whose going to pay for that? Wait, sorry I forgot we're in an anarchist society so supposedly no money (if there is money, add on a whole other layer of complexity to the following questions).
So who's going to build the pump? People willing to work at the pump factory? Ok, where do they get the materials to build it? I'm assuming none of this is local because logistically that's practically impossible, so who delivers the materials to them? The pump factory is unlikely to be next door to the wastewater treatment plant, so how is the pump delivered? Who is the specialist that installs the pump? Who makes sure it's done safely and correctly? Are there consequences if it's done in a way that doesn't result in clean water?
That's the thing, anarchism seems great whenever everything is working and everything is already in place. The moment something big breaks, anarchism just doesn't provide enough resources to get it fixed. We would need a post-scarcity society before we could move to something like that.
Again, you’re assuming complexity only works if there’s hierarchy and profit at the top.
Now I’m no hydraulics expert, but I’m pretty sure a reverse osmosis pump does not need a CEO to function. We have engineers, machinists, operators and logistics workers who coordinate their labor. For the last time, anarchism does not mean no organization. It means organization without concentrated ownership and coercive authority.
The way you frame this makes it sound like the only reason you’d ever lift a finger for anyone is if there’s a paycheck or someone above you making you. That’s not really a strong critique of anarchism. It’s more of a self report about how you see community.
Would you (or any other anarchist reading this) ever want to do an AMA? I have questions, but I imagine that asking them here would feel like dog-piling and I don't want to do that to you. I'm just curious and want to learn more. The last time I heard people take anarchism seriously, school teachers were quick to shut it down.
I have my own concerns and reservations, but I don't truly know how much of it exists from being stuck in an authoritarian society, and I simply haven't heard the solutions yet because of it. I've always been a skeptic, and I'm always looking for a new way to think about things, even things I don't necessarily agree with. I think a question-and-answer session could be quite enlightening.
I might not be able to go outside this authoritarian box and explore for myself, but an AMA would at least allow me (and others like me) to look out a window.
How do those engineers get their education? Do they find a mentor engineer? So for each engineering student you need an already engineer teacher?
Or would there perhaps be a school of engineering with a hierarchy to organize the engineering lectures so there could be more students per teacher?
But there's not only engineering. Perhaps we might also need medical schools, art schools, sewage maintaining schools. Maybe those schools might want to interact with eachother in order to provide consistent curriculums and aid students if they want to switch from one school to another. Perhaps we need a department of education to coordinate all this schools.
Maybe, like we arrived at the department of education, we might want departments for other matters. Look! A government!
I think that you should read about anarchism because you're so confused that it's difficult to explain where.
councils, working groups, community bodies, assemblies etc are all entirely compatible with anarchy.
It is not opposition to collectivism, indeed anarchism is (generally) deeply collectivist.
How is that different from a government?
If you're actually interested and not just being debate-y then I'd suggest you read some foundational literature or if you want stuff that's more how this might work in practice consider reading about the CNT FAI during the Spanish civil war.
The government derives its authority from its ability to direct men armed with guns and torture implements to force you to comply on pain of death or agony.
Seriously if you're actually curious just read, it'll be more informative than any silly internet comment section.
Oh yea, and how is that working out for you?
Everyone in Lemmy is American, everyone knows that
Why do you think sewage treatment plants exist in the first place? I’ll give you a hint, its not because people came together altruistically to build them (or even regulate that they need to exist).
The Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899 was signed because people, left to their own devices, self-destructively pollute their water supplies. That law mandated people couldnt dump shit in the water. It also was passed because state laws weren’t effective at stopping people from polluting the water
It wasnt enough, so there was the Water Pollution Control Act of 1948. And then the Water Quality Act of 1965. And then the Clean Water Act of 1972, which provided funding to create sewage treatment plants, and mandated that all wastewater be treated to a certain standard. And even that wasnt enough, which is why we later invented the entire EPA, an entity dedicated largely to that one issue (among similar things).
None of that would have occurred without centralized authority, nor would have been necessary if a plurality of people were not inherently self destructive when left to their own devices. Anarchism is opposed to any central authority. Thereby, under the most basic logic, sewage treatment plants would be virtually guaranteed not to exist in an anarchical non-society society.
Giving people at large the benefit of the doubt about an issue they have repeatedly shown to fuck up for centuries is silly. And sewage treatment plants require centralization to be built and maintained.
When will it be enough?
It’s interesting that you quietly swap in “people” where history mostly shows industrial corporations dumping waste for profit.
Working class communities were not the ones lobbying to pour chemical sludge into rivers.
Most of the legislation you listed was not the state heroically saving humanity from itself. It was the state reacting to industrial capital externalizing costs onto the public. Central authority stepped in because private ownership plus profit incentives produced pollution at scale.
You’re treating absence of centralized state authority as if it means absence of rules, standards or coordination. That is not what anarchism argues. It argues against concentrated political authority. It does not argue against collectively enforced norms.
You cite centuries of people “fucking up.” A lot of that history is profit driven extraction protected by law, not spontaneous communal self destruction.
If anything, your examples show that concentrated power and profit incentives required constant correction. That is not a great defense of hierarchy.
I didnt realize corporations were sentient entities capable of acting on their own, rather than groups of people doing people things…
The 1899 act was legitimately created because everyday people were literally throwing their garbage into water as a form of waste management. So much so that it was difficult to navigate boats safely, ergo “Rivers and Harbors Act” as in the places that were affected by floating masses of garbage
There are HIERARCHIES that coerce people within them to put profit above all else or they lose their position in the hierarchy. I can't tell if you are a troll or just genuinely haven't put any thought into this at all.
I didn’t realize it takes rocket science to understand the difference between individual behavior and institutional incentives.
Precisely. The original post shows there could still be labor willing to do the work, but it does does not address how that work would be funded. Even if the labor was free there are resources required to build and maintain that plant that are not free. Where do those resources come from?
Wait till you hear about the anarchist that loves going into the mines with toxic gases and all to get the resources for the sewage maintainer guy.
Wait, you imagine that there must be a guy forced into dangerous situations against their will and that this society is better because it forces that guy to exist?
What happens is that different people have different options. For some people, they have options that are way better than mining. For some other people, the other options might not be as appealing because they might pay less or whatever. That is the market.
If nobody wants to be a miner, the pay/conditions of mining should go up enough so that there is someone that prefers mining over what they're currently doing.
This encourages people to do jobs that are unappealing.
On the other side, if you are a bad fiction writer, you're probably not earning enough money to survive. That's because you're spending resources but you're not calming many people's desires, so you'll probably take up a job that you like less but pays way more, and is probably more healthy for the community.
Nobody is forcing them. But if those jobs were not done, we wouldn't have the society we have today. Mining safety gear will probably not have been invented in an anarchy society. Water treatment plants wouldn't either. All those things we have today is because we used our resources way more efficiently than "go do whatever you want, the guy over there that loves farming and the guy over there that loves cooking will keep you fed".
Let's see; keep things running by going into a mine and digging out something that is needed with the proper safety gear, or going into a mine and digging out something with only the safety gear your boss couldn't convince the the government to not require.
Such hard choices...
Yeah, now you just need someone that has a passion for manufacturing safety gear!
You think the issue with non authoritarian collectivization is that people don’t like making things?…
No. The problem is that what people want is not the same as what the people need.
The central problem of economics is that humans have infinite desires, which need resources to be met, and resources are finite. Therefore, we should aim to efficiently allocate our resources to meet the most of our desires.
If in a population of 1000, there are 100 fiction writers, you're gone get more fiction books than you can read, and you're probably die of hunger, because now the other 900 have to sustain the 100 writers for basically no value. Since probably most people will only want to read the top 1-2 that are actually good.
If the other 99-98 other writers don't have any pressure to change careers because the community provides for them, why would they? The thing they want to do most is writing!
And all that is assuming such a civilization exists. From my PoV, dreaming about anarchism makes no sense. Our world was born anarchic. There were no CEOs nor governments. And the people that lived in that world rapidly formed societies that had hierarchies, because that is the most efficient way.
The natural consequence of anarchy is non-anarchy. Anarchy is not a final state, it's transitory. Anarchy is not a stable state.
Just like you can try mixing water and oil all you want, the moment you stop stirring, they will separate.
The only way to keep a non-stable state is by force. That is, if you want anarchy, there must be someone enforcing that there be anarchy. And if that's the case, then it's no longer anarchy, since there is a ruler.
Rapidly formed hierarchies huh? miiight wanna read about early human history.
Hundreds of thousands of years passed before tyrants became the norm
You don't need tyrants for hierarchies. Tribes had sages and leaders.
Hierarchy is not when you are convinced someone is wise lol. Please read a book
That’s a very definitive sounding comment. I’m going to single out some stuff I don’t necessarily care for.
Reader intended to infer that state capitalism accomplishes this despite ongoing evidence of looting of lower classes
Stop. You’re dismissing reality—people can organize without coercion; people grew and foraged and hunted more than enough for millennia—via a terrible hypothetical.
That’s a fine opinion to hold.
There were no decision makers and nobody performed any disinterested administrative work or otherwise aided the public good?
Stop spitballing prehistory to back up your opinion of anarchism. Study some anthropology. For instance many archaeological digs show defined differences in construction at different times that show evidence of the overthrow of hierarchical rule, and great disparity of housing, in favor of more egalitarian organization and more egalitarian construction of homes and places of gathering.
Money is most efficient when it circulates, because its purpose is to effectuate economic transactions, yes? Yet the current hierarchical world order is squeezing the lowest classes and ensuring they have nothing left to spend in their withering communities while amassing both real and virtual capital. The most efficient way to do what?
I would put forward constant action and striving. I can choose to keep mixing the oil and the water. The ideal democracy is a process, not an endpoint.
All that aside, your original comment that I replied to is still very funny.
We're not talking about capitalism. IDK where you're getting that from.
I'm reading your argument as "the current system sucks, so this other that I propose is obviously better".
Yes, you can keep mixing water and oil. That's the point of my argument. But to do that, you need someone to enforce anarchy. But when you have someone enforcing a political system, you no longer have anarchy. Since that dude/organization is clearly above others, forming a hierarchy.
If it's necessary, someone will do it. If that can't be counted on, we're kinda fucked.
Will you? Because I know I won't
If all that stands between me and the beginning of a society with no oppression is strapping some gear on and doing some manual labor, then fuck it gimme a pickaxe I'm going down there.
Am I suited for it? Absolutely the fuck not, but I'm willing, and I'm sure many others are as well, especially if they know that whatever happens, their safety and health comes before profit, and they'll always come back to a good place. I could certainly stand working until things begin to hurt if I knew every bit I dug up would do good.
Yeah that's cool. You and sewage guy will make a great duo. But the 5 dudes over there organized themselves, acquired a weapon and killed the other guy. They're waiting for you to come out of the mine with all those resources and you don't even know it.
Is that freedom from oppression?
Anarchism is the absence of hierarchy, not organization. The means of the people to use force against violent attempts at theft for personal gain are neither eliminated nor lessened.
So you're saying that you and sewage treatment plant guy will successfully defend against 5 armed men that ambushed you while you were working?
Remember: this is not an action film, this is real life we're talking about.