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[–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

I've never seen anyone square the circle of how anarchy would work with earth's sporadic and unfair resource distribution.

Imagine one community is built on nothing but arable land and a neighbor is starving with access to iron mines. What material force prevents the latter from subjugating the former with superior weapons?

The arable community "gifts" food? Sounds an awful lot like a Danegeld, and that historically doesn't end well. Some day the harvest will be too little or the ask will be too much.

The arable community defends itself through sheer numbers? Good job, you fended them off, but those people starving in the hills still have better weapons and are still desperate enough to raid; you'll need a group of people to hyperspecialize in violence for defense. So now you're optimizing your society around feeding and arming the defender class... Over time the domestic power imbalance accumulates and one day you look up and realize you've invented feudalism.


You can extend this thought experiment to any set of resources. If you want your anarchist utopia to have electronics, how do the copper mines of Chile not generate disproportionate power for whoever occupies them? What non-hierarchical power equilibrium enforces stability around fossil fuels, rare earth minerals, fishing rights, solar/wind power production, water access, etc... Don't just tell me, show me on a map how it will work.

And when you can't do that, we can proceed to hunter-gatherer anarcho-primitivism. Then you can tell me what power equilibrium prevents the occupation of arable land for agriculture and the reseeding of sedentary civilization and violent hierarchy.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Your questions have little to do with anarchism. You are describing situations where people do not want to do anarchy (as in collectively sharing ressources for the improvement of living of all people, practicing solidarity and prioritizing cooperation over domination). Anarchist are not forcing people to to anarchy when most of them do not want to do that).

    And I think " Don’t just tell me, show me on a map how it will work." this is just a bad faith thing to do when you are not willing to make a similar effort. Your examples are of literally two communities when on a global scale there would be uncountable communties. Please make your examples more realistic, so options such as intercommunity solidarity, reasonable alternatives for food sources and isolation of colonialist communities are actually available options.

    And if you really want detailed anarchists programs on how to distribute resources, this section of the anarchist FAQ highlights some theoretical attempts at that with citations so you can actually dive deeper into this. Many of the cited texts should be freely available.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago

    this is just a bad faith thing to do when you are not willing to make a similar effort

    It takes very little energy to provide mountains of evidence but that doesn't make it bad faith. Just look around at geopolitics to see it at play.

    • 130+ years of posturing for oil reserves
    • The power of China's rare earth embargo on Japan
    • South American power struggles for Lithium
    • The Democratic Republic of Congo holding 70% of all Cobalt
    • The majority of global staple foods produced in six sub-regions of the United States, Brazil, China, India, Ukraine and Russia
    • The early positioning for Africa's untapped insolation potential
    • Brazil, Russia, USA and Canada controlling huge chunks of the world's freshwater reserves while 1/5 of the global population is heading towards permanent drought

    There are no "reasonable alternatives" for those resources; you have them or you don't. Not having them puts you at huge disadvantage against adversaries who use them against you.

    What inter-community solidarity will stop endless waves of drones with guns from occupying your critical resources? How will your community plead with the subjugated drone makers on another continent when the subjugator controls all media access?

    The plainest fact I can see: the people who control the biggest slices of those pies will have the power to extort and subjugate most people, anarchist or otherwise. And as a corollary, the anarchist society will be at an incredible disadvantage against a state bolstered with subjugated labor.

    Anarchist are not forcing people to to anarchy when most of them do not want to do that

    You're looking right past my question: what preserves a state of anarchy in a sea of state actors? How does a system of voluntary and conditional participation remain cohesive at a scale that can sustain itself in real world conditions, specifically while retaining core anarchist principles?

    I'm not opposed to anarchism in general, it makes sense as a personal philosophy and day to day mindset. But I'm baffled by those who believe they can manifest a strong stateless society. I truly don't see how it could be sustained beyond fleeting and niche scenarios. "Go read theory" is a cop out answer for such a basic question.

    And unless I missed a section in your reference, none of that touched on my question at all. It's hyper-focused on the internal stabilizing forces of anarchist societies. That's all well and good, but none of it details the specific mechanisms that grant any advantages to preserve anarchism from communists shooting you in the back or colonialists looting your resources.

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