Just a topic to chat about.
I would love to live in an anarchist society! I just don’t know how to get there, it seems like to many people prefer the current situation. And I also want everyone to be able to live as they please. Maybe if things get bad enough under capitalism, but it feels like most people will jump on the other side and the far right will benefit from it.
I would take significant cultural change, the kind of change capitalists will do their damnedest to prevent. People have to first believe a world not based on mutual exploitation is even possible.
That’s not the question, though. There will always be imbalances of power. Transitioning to a “nonhierarchical” society just ends up with a bunch of power dynamics festering while no one talks about them because they’re not supposed to exist. Obviously there’s such a thing as too much concentrated power, but having spent fairly significant time in contexts where people believe there’s no hierarchy, I like my hierarchies out where I can see them, rather than waiting to stab me from the shadows.
Plus, there’s the warlord problem: Other people don’t stop using hierarchy just because you do.
If the state were to suddenly disappear, yes, I’d agree with you. Humans have existed for hundreds of thousands of years, most of that without a state, and with many groups living in what were likely arguably something like anarcho-communist societies (check out The Dawn Of Everything from David Graeber). Warlords are a symptom of a power vacuum.
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