Was the credit cut? Bc Existential Comics really be a classic
If I recall correctly, a lot of the comics (at least early ones, I haven’t gotten very far) don’t have credit on them.
As much as I abhor the state and wish we live like the state of Cheran (ironic of me to say state in this case, I know), anarchy will only work in a very small group, where everyone knows each other, are like-minded enough to not abuse each other’s goodwill, and respect each other’s personal boundaries.
And then what stops one small group from slowly becoming a giant group again?
So have a lot of small groups
Holy shit guys he solved the whole problem. Where should we send the check to?
Yeah, that’s not my favorite. I don’t really want to rely on people or be part of a close community like that. And I really like having personal property. I probably contribute the bare minimum to society outside of my taxes. Not part of any organizations, don’t give to charity. Definitely don’t give to the homeless. Don’t volunteer. I just want to work and come home to my house with my family and all my stuff. I’d make a terrible anarchist.
Anti-anarchist pretty much think
- Anarchy = chaos
This is heavily promoted by mainstream media and language
- Anarchists are pacifist
Many people seem unable to comprehend how a community might defend itself without a standing military and so assume we must be unwilling to defend ourselves.
- Nothing can be accomplished without coercion
Because most of us have grown up within strict hierarchies coerced to do things we don’t want, we have trouble imagining any other way.
- Everyone is inherently a selfish asshole
This is probably projection in most cases
How do you keep an Anarchic Utopia then? What stops Dickie McDickerson and his thugs from establishing a state on top of you?
The same that stops them from taking over a democracy. Sometimes.
If a society became anarchist enough to abolish state structures, there obviously had to exist a reason - there had to exist popular support.
Thus, someone attempting to recreate a state would face questions and opposition. People would try to persuade them of their error. If they declared a state, anarchists would not recognize it. If it claimed sovereignity above a territory, anarchists might not recognize that either.
The new state might encounter problems - unwilling residents would leave and be accepted in anarchy, annoyed anarchists would organize trade boycotts and sanctions, ultimately it could go badly and armed confrontation could follow. In some scenarios, the state might remain and attract people who want to live there. In some scenarios, war would follow - and if the majority really was anarchist, the state would lose and disappear.
Oh no, you misunderstand. They’re not giving you a choice. They aren’t proponents of democracy or any kind of representative government. You have to go from an Anarchic state to resisting an organized group while they are grabbing community leaders in the middle of the night and taking young men and women to work camps.
It kind of illustrates why anarchy is as doomed to fail as libertarianism; note the use of force and the fact that the anarchists friends are not there defending him.
Anarchy cannot defend itself from organized outside threats because it is, by its nature, not organized, particularly in its use of force to confront fascism.
Anarchy is not by nature disorganized. Lack of hierarchy doesn’t mean lack of organization. Probably a well-functioning anarchist organization is better organized than most hierarchical ones.
If friends are not there to defend the group of three, mutual aid is missing. That’s why it failed.
Actually, there seems to be a bit of a mix-up. Let me clarify.
In an anarchist group, enforcing anything goes against its fundamental principles.
If personal gain is the motive, one isn’t truly aligned with the group’s social contract and isn’t considered part of it.
Decisions are made collectively, without hierarchy. Voting or delegating organisational tasks to sub-groups is the norm.
I won’t go into words like “attacking,” “defense,” or “threats” as they are military terms, far from the anarchist ethos.
And I won’t call you “bro” or make you read theory. I feel you won’t.
Anarchism is really against coercion, that’s what is meant by hierarchy. Hierarchy only makes sense if it’s used for coercion of other’s behavior.
There is no reason a group of people can’t organize in a voluntary hierarchy to complete a task without the use of coercion.
Imagine a group of 10 anarchist making pizza for the homeless. Two of them make pizza for a living and 8 are there for the week to help out. There is nothing preventing those 8 people from taking instruction from the two that know how to make pizza. Nobody is coerced to be there or to do anything.
We don’t need to incentivse not selling people out. Heirarchy creates a set of incentives TO sell people out. Remove those incentives and people will for the most part not sell people out. You’ve got it exactly backwards.
Ask your buddy mao about anarchist fighting forces. He literally took anarchist tactics around decentralized militias and used them to great success. The Vietnamese as well. Or have a look at the Spanish revolution, rojava, the Ukrainian black army, or the zapatistas if you need more proof that decentralized militant forces are effective and capable. It doesn’t warrant an in detail explanation because “but how fight if democracy???” is weak as fuck.
Yes, and that mutual aid relies on people all voluntarily helping when there is a problem, rather than having people who are tasked with ensuring people are protected, which is the same reason libertarianism fails; it’s an ideology that doesn’t acknowledge human self-interest and selfishness, instead it assumes everyone will just agree to abide by a communal philosophy. Many people do not, for all kinds of reasons.
If you are going to create laws and codes of conduct and a means to enforce those laws that’s just a normal state with extra steps.
You can maybe do anarchy at a small scale and in specific contexts but not at the scale needed to make a society function and do things like protect minorities the larger community doesn’t give a shit about.
What does a well-functioning anarchist organization look like, though? How does one of any size prevent from fracturing into competing factions over time? If such organizations are limited to tight-knit community scales, I can’t see how it’s not eventual feudalism with extra steps.
Hierarchy isn’t the opposite of anarchy.
It’s just a type of rule. As in “an-archy”, without ruler.
There’s also “synarchy”, meaning “joint rule or government by two or more individuals or parties”, which I feel is far more what people here are advocating in the name of anarchism.
Who said anarchists and their friends will not defend from outside threats? The Spanish anarchists organized and fought for 3 years against overwhelming odds when they had to.
Yeah , but …
In Paris we fought and were massacred.
In Korea/Manchuria we fought and were massacred.
In Ukraine we fought and were massacred.
And as you say in Spain we fought, but then we were massacred.
There’s more of course, but you get the idea.
Something probably should be done differently in the future.
So? How many slave revolutions did we have before it was “technically” abolished (it’s still ongoing, but at least illegal in principle)? We had legal slavery for like ~6K years until it was abolished. Capitalism only exists for ~400 years and there were hundreds of failed democratic revolutions. Anarchism as a movement is barely over 150yo and no anarchist revolution happened before 100 years. Just because things don’t happen overnight, or even in our lifetime, doesn’t mean they’re impossible.
Remains to be seen if anarchism can ever win though.
Statist forces have always triumphed.
Monarchy always triumphed over democracy until it didn’t. Slavery always triumphed over abolition until it didn’t.
Every empire’s days are numbered, it’s not like anything is destined to be forever. I wonder how many days are left for the Zapatistas?
Also notably, the Kronstadt anarchists held a general assembly to dicsuss the question of “shall we accept Lenin’s ultimatum, or fight a battle against the Red Army?” and decided democratically to fight.
(The battle was extremely bloody, anarchists lost and the Red Army won, at the cost of losing at least 5 times more people. Considerable numbers of anarchists escaped to Finland.)
In short: anarchists can use heavy artillery when needed, even if they know that war is not healthy - neither for them or the society they want.
mutual aid, equality or freedom are not doomed to fail: as long as human beings live in societies they will seek cooperation and justice.
Perhaps like… organised cooperation, even perhaps putting things on paper to make sure what has been agreed upon gets followed through. Maybe even assign some people to do that for the larger society, so everyone doest have to worry about it. I mean, everyone should help each other, so if someone just doesn’t anyone on purpose and even takes other’s things, they should face some sort of negative consequence, but then we’d need to assign people who verify that someone has broken the rules and some to enforce that the negative consequences actually happen.
And wow, the anarcho-syndicalist commune now has government, taxes, justice and law enforcement.
People are by nature cooperative unless fucked over, but I find it weird that the prescriptive meaning of “anarchy” is completely glossed over.
The type of society I want to live in definitely won’t happen without any sort of rules or regulations about at least some things. Otherwise we won’t have industry, and I like my toys. We can’t manage a good (and advanced) society without good regulation which requires good government.
Otherwise we won’t have industry, and I like my toys.
Your toys are being manufactured by some underpaid slave worker in china or india. Have fun playing with these in the few hours of life you got left from the industry.
as long as human beings live in societies they will seek cooperation and justice.
You defeated your own position. Humans aren’t, nor can be perfecly just nor perfectly cooperative.
You defeat your own position, no one said perfection was necessary to achieve any kind of society, no need to let perfection be the enemy of good enough and functional.
Do you wait your turn in line at the store under the threat of violence? Do you only drive the speed limit because if you didn’t you would get pulled over and have your license suspended? Do you give money/food to the homeless despite it being againstl local bylaws that could land you with a fine?
Enforcement in day to day life is an illusion. People don’t need to be forced to “behave”. By and large, most of us just do because we want to get on with our day. If there is no social incentive to harm others, for the most part people.wont harm others because we simply have no desire to harm others. There are ways to account for fringe cases that don’t require a hierarchical, domineering system
You have a very skewed idea of anarchism. I won’t deny the existence of anti-organizational and pacifist anarchist groups but they’re not a majority. Social anarchism, anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, communalism, Marxist autonomism, council communism, neozapatismo, and especifism are all libertarian socialist ideologies that espouse the necessity of organization and self defense. I’m sure I’m missing a few too. You’re taking a silly comic as serious commentary on the ideological substance of a deep and diverse body of political theory.
Anarchism is neither inherently pacifist nor disorganized, that’s your lack of understanding showing.
The circle A anarchism logo means “order without hierarchy”.
I never implied it was pacifist, but only that it’s ineffective. Without some form of a legal heirarchy where a group is empowered to use force to deal with bad actors those bad actors would run amok because normal people are, by and large, bystanders.
Do you know why we have a professional army that dedicates all their time to training and readiness? Because that’s what it takes to not be steamrolled by your fascist neighbor state who wants what you have. You can’t have some lackadaisical ad hoc minute men arrangement, there are too many humans and too many competing interests for that to work in the modern world. We aren’t jungle tribes, we’re not all going to go live in communial farming homesteads or whatever. So where do I live? In a city with housing? Who makes sure my lights stay on and that my landlord didn’t use asbestos and lead pipes when building the place? Who has the authority to say water must be safe to drink? If everyone else in my building doesn’t believe lead pipes are dangerous am I just shit out of luck if I don’t replace the pipes in the facility myself?
You can’t just have mob justice or random individuals deciding based on their own arbitrary, subjective opinion how to carry out justice at any given moment. If I see a guy shoplifting and just shoot him, who is in a position to tell me that I was wrong and what gives them the right under a system of anarchy? Does that person’s wife or brother now get to shoot me?
I’ve never once met an anarchist who can coherently explain how, in a practical sense, you ensure justice and order at a large scale without a state, legal framework and a system in which individuals (whether they be democratic representatives, judges, cops, military members etc.) are granted power by the collective to make judgements and decisions based on an agreed upon legally binding code of law. When you press them on any given specific issue they basically just start describing the organs of a state.
You speak as if we’re in a functional system where people are safe, getting here was smooth sailing, and I’m proposing a preposterous idea. Our system currently does not work and billions have died to get to this fucked up place. Why would you think a different system will fail because it is not like just the current failing system?
If I see a guy shoplifting and just shoot him, who is in a position to tell me that I was wrong
The community, a functional anarchist community wouldn’t tolerate this, it would become a crime in itself. A functional anarchist community would defend itself and have members ready to do so. If somebody shot another person for something like shoplifting (which wouldn’t be a thing in anarchism duh) that would be murder and that person would now be at risk of termination as a mortal threat to the community. People don’t usually desire to escalate things though, so contrived examples like this are silly.
You can’t have some lackadaisical ad hoc minute men arrangement, there are too many humans and too many competing interests for that to work in the modern world.
I’m not one of those that thinks anarchism is a drop-in replacement for capitalism or that anarchism can come from violent revolution. If anything close to anarchism could ever happen it would take at least a couple generations (of cultural change) and co-occur with degrowth. We know that our current system is unsustainable, so we’re either going to end up with something like anarcho-communism + degrowth or we won’t exist anymore. There is no way a hierarchical system that exploits that planet to support billions will be able to exist beyond the next decades, can’t happen. Even socialism just makes things more equal while we destroy the planet.
I’ve never once met an anarchist who can coherently explain how, in a practical sense, you ensure justice and order at a large scale without a state, legal framework
The scale and ways of life now are the result of an exploitative economic system. Without that it’s not our nature to form into efficiently exploitable structures. We’d form into manageable communities as humans have done for hundreds of thousands of years prior to the appearance of the state.
Who makes sure my lights stay on and that my landlord didn’t use asbestos and lead pipes when…
You and your community work to keep the lights on and other needs met. For asbestos and lead pipes, the motivations to do these things come from an exploitative economic system. In anarchism, if someone sells you poison, you can defend yourself. There won’t be many people selling lead pipes when their life is on the line rather than a fine or job loss.
You can’t just have mob justice or random individuals deciding based on their own arbitrary, subjective opinion how to carry out justice at any given
So instead we should have the opinion of the rich powerful racist people enforced by people with a license to kill and who use in inordinately more often on vulnerable populations who cannot legally protect themselves?
Does that person’s wife or brother now get to shoot me?
Yes, and the community might say, “well, he deserved it, have a taco”. Our current system basically allows most men to rape women and the woman has no recourse because the state protects the rapist. This is not a working system.
The answer actually did surprise me!