this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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That’s not anarchy, it’s chaos. You’re maybe thinking of warlordism, aka ‘ancap’ or market libertarianism?
Anarchy is a lot of work for its participants. If you aren’t outsourcing management decisions about your life, neighbourhood, region, etc., you have to collaborate in making those decisions. If power is allowed to concentrate, your self-determined governing system collapses and anarchy, by definition, is lost. It’s a life of constant renegotiation.
Rojava is illustrative, as it’s established in a self-conscious anarchic process, and by all reports it’s great in many ways but a lot of daily effort, and is under direct assault currently.
Is a system that requires a highly engaged populace to avoid organically devolving into chaos tenable? Seems even more perilous when considering the inevitable influence of hostile entities trying to encourage that decline.
Don't get me wrong, I have no idea what to do here. I'm just hoping our current decline is slow enough that I can live out the next 20 years or so peacefully and then off myself while I still have the faculties to do so.
I think it's tenable, yes. Dealing with destructive people needs to be at its core.
FWIW people said the same thing about democracy, humanism, etc., because one feature of ideology is that it naturalizes core concepts like authority systems.
The more individualist one's culture, the more difficult it is to imagine a functional anarchy, I think. Trust needs to be a starting place, but some places, like the USA, have a fairly low level of trust, maybe not enough currently to make such a system tenable.
There is no true anarchy because government emerges spontaneously from human interaction. "Anarchists" start to add these structures and fail to realize that what they are creating is just an idyllic state without using the word "state" because they don't like it.
Okay, fine, you got me, we're just creating an idyllic state that is objectively better than capitalism or state communism.
So, you've got me to confess, what's the next step in your master plan?
There is no true democracy, no true totalitarianism… no true scotsman?
No one on the inside of these systems thinks it’s idyllic, I can assure you, once they realize how much work and commitment it requires, and governance does not require privileged classes wielding centralized power to be a government.
You are conflating State with Government. They are synonymous but only similar, not the same. Self-governance requires a great deal of education along the way, and a constant flow of meetings and chores.
The first generation in restructuring both economy and governance makes a lot of mistakes. Propagandists point at this as though it proves non-viability, but that’s just deception.
Rojava also directly dictates the structure of local councils and delineates their power within its confederal structure.
This is not meant as a 'jab' at Rojava, which I deeply admire, but that even libertarian socialist polities do make decisions for other people, even local majorities which may not agree with the confederation's central positions.
Well yes, power is never cleanly distributed and autonomy always hits a boundary, usually one of causing harm to others.
In most situations the possible solutions to a problem cause other problems. Management skill requires minimizing harm, while not crossing red lines. Rules can only be an attempt to be fair.
A functional anarchy needs federation based on rules negotiated with other polities of the same scale or order. Common principles of anarchism such as mutual aid glue things together. Enforcement and expulsion would be part of a much larger collaboration on justice.