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this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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Anarchocapitalism is the direct result of anarchism if you put any little bit of realistic thought into that matter.
You always have an imbalance of power between people. There's always someone who is stronger, more intelligent, more charismatic and/or who has more stuff. Because people aren't exact replicas of each other.
Communist anarchism thinks that everyone is going to play nice, and even those with more power will just yield that and be nice.
Anarchocapitalism is the more realistic view on the same situation: Whoever has a bit more power will use that power to gain an advantage. That advantage will increase that person's power and that person will come to dominate the society, and will eventually take the role of the government.
This situation is essentially the mafia in any society where the government leaves enough of a power vacuum that somebody else can snatch some power.
I recommend reading up on real-world anarchism experiments, e.g. Kowloon Walled City, which directly turned into an anarchocapitalist nightmare town, or Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen, Denmark, which basically reinvented democracy but still calls it Anarchism.
Christiania is actually a really fun story. It starts with the government giving up on some military barracks. Squatters moved in to form an anarchist society. So they get together, everyone starts making their home there. But then there are things that need to be organized together, so they make up small councils that they call Områdemøde. These councils discuss local issues and decide who to send to the higher level council, the Fællesmøde, which decides stuff for all of Christiania. It's of course not democracy here, and the people who are sent to the Fællesmøde to represent the different Områdemøde, they are of course not elected politicians.
Residents have to pay money that goes into a pot to finance upkeep of community resources and areas. These payments are mandatory, but of course they are not taxes.
When 10 residents died in 1979 from overdoses, the Fællesmøde started to decide hard rules for the community. One such rule was that hard drugs were not allowed to be sold, owned or consumed in Christiania. Of course, these rules weren't laws, just mandatory rules. To enforce these rules, some strong men were enlisted to patrol Christiania, and remove offenders from the commune. They'd call Copenhagen's police to the entrance of Christiania and hand those offenders over to be dealt with by the official police. Of course, these strong men weren't Christiania's police.
In the 80s, the Bullshit Motorcycle Club basically invaded Christiania and made a center of their drug operation. Residents of Christiania, the police and the Hells Angels united to get rid of the Bulllshitters and since then biker jackets are banned in Christiania. Again, not to be confused with a law, this is just a mandatory rule.
TLDR:
This anarchist community is a straight-up democracy with councils, representative democracy, laws, taxes and an informal police force.
Anarchism, by definition, cannot exist. It either turns into democracy if people work together, or into a dictatorship if someone manages to play the masses.
thanks for sharing the stories. I'm not myself an anarchist, as I also agree with that reasoning.
however, not being practical doesn't prevent people from defending it from an idealistic point of view. and to be fair, I think we always have to be open-minded about the limitations imposed by our contemporary mindset - remember that some people can't even conceive a world without capitalism because of them, where it could be perfectly possible (and we should probably do it hehe)