I don’t really understand what you’re getting at by saying that if you removed government people’s lifestyles would have to change. In one sense, yes of course it would, and that’s no bad thing. At the moment, almost all individuals have little to no say about the conditions in which they live their lives, the structures of the institutions they find themselves in, etc. That would change, and that’s partly the point. Anarchism is about freedom, and that includes the freedom to participate in determining your own mode of living. But in another sense, many things wouldn’t change. You wouldn’t have to participate in providing your own health care for example. You would have to, at some point, enter into an association with someone or some group that provides healthcare. And seeing as it’s an important part of our lives, you might choose to be engaged with that group to some extent, understanding how it works and how it affects you. Very likely, part of the process of association would give you some say about how that organisation would run, which you could exercise, if you chose to, either individually or collectively as part of another group.

So yes, being part of an anarchist society does put some extra workload on people, in that you have to be actively engaged with society rather than just passively engaged with it. I take this to be a good thing. Now maybe your point is that there would be so many things to engage with that it would be impossible to handle it all, you’d spend all your life thinking about it. But I don’t think that’s true. The point is that you would be able to be engaged with all these things if you chose to be, which is not true at the moment, but you wouldn’t be forced to be engaged in the running of everything all the time. Leaving aside, for the moment, the transition stage, after an anarchist society had existed for a while, for the most part, most of the time, most things would already work in an acceptable way. Your engagement would usually be a matter of occasional tweaks to the way things are run.

Let’s compare this with the way things work at the moment, and the way you imagine them working. As a citizen who doesn’t have an active engagement with my political life, if I want something changed I can only express that in a very indirect way, via the minute effect of my vote every few years. In effect then, I’m powerless to exert any influence over the conditions of my life. Alternatively, I can become a political activist. This requires a significant commitment from me, requires me to break out from the passive structures of my life, learn about and understand the political and institutional structures whose details are largely hidden from me at the moment, and enter into voluntary associations with other people to attempt to effect a change. In other words, it involves me entering into a microcosm of an anarchist society. And even after all that, we can’t effect direct change, but only exert a terribly small influence on the people who have the authority to make decisions. These people can just choose to ignore us. Witness the 1m people who demonstrated on the streets of London against British involvement in the war on Iraq, and the polls that indicated a substantial majority of the population were against the war. End result: we were just ignored, at essentially no cost to the government. That was probably the largest voluntary political association ever organised in the history of the UK (outside of the trade unions), and it had no effect at all.

A top-down society where other people organise things for you works fine when it works, but when things go wrong, change from below is much harder to effect. Changes that benefit the elites, the ruling classes, are easy to effect, but changes that benefit the masses have to be fought for, and can only be won when things are getting to the point where the alternative is insurrection or revolution. When do governments choose to give themselves less power for example? Hardly ever, why would they? But when do they choose to extend their powers? All the time. With this dynamic in mind, a top-down, hierarchical society would be expected to provide the minimum amount of equality and fairness to the masses necessary to prevent revolution, and not much more. And that is, I would argue, roughly what you see today. Things occasionally get better at moments of crisis (and now has the potential to be one of those moments, but so far it looks like nothing will get much better), but mostly get worse. Inequality tends to increase, government powers tend to increase, etc.

Perhaps you could say what it is that you think is wrong with the current system? And why little changes to the way democracy works would make that better? For example, why would having an elected council of learned individuals for each sector work better than having a single individual?

There can be government without negative hierarchies, but it does require giving authority to individuals, even if to voluntary representatives. This requires going beyond assumptions as well and seeing what could be, as opposed to what is in regards to governments.

Authority doesn’t have to be a bad thing… this is where I think I get so frustrated at anarchism. Authority is about trust. It’s about trusting someone enough to make important decisions that will effect everyone; our responsibility in modern democracy means ensuring that the right people are put in charge and removing those who have proven they are not to limit absolute authority and ensure the collective is respected. Authority can mean that someone has been thoroughly educated and is looking out for the best interest of the population and regarding their thoughts and opinions. Authority is not always this absolute negativity of power hierarchies.

You have clearly been educated, and this required listening to some form of authority to get your knowledge. Reading a book is trusting a type of authority. There needs to be some authority out there or there is no trust at all. If there is no authority searching out answers, there is no learning. Placing important decisions on people who have not been educated or experienced on a subject is not always the best course of action, even if it the most “democratic” way. This does not mean that some authoritarian body must dictate all ways life. There must be some balance between the both. People can be put in charge of things because they have been educated to do so and have the knowledge necessary to understand all the factors that are involved. Throughout history, many may have come to power through force, but governmental requirements can change this by ensuring educational standards and proven success and by having a democracy that is actually respected. Have a council of learned individuals on each sector that change periodically or are elected into office for periods of time instead of one power-head to make decisions. There are many other options without having to go to the extreme of trying to achieve a no-authority society, which I think would only lead to absolute chaos.

You expect people to just know about issues that would effect them and to know of the binding decisions in a society, but even this requires authority. They must read about the decisions or learn about them somewhere. More than likely, this will come in the form of a newspaper or similar media access, and this requires listening and trusting an authority on the subject to give them the information necessary to make a proper decision on the situation.

I never said that a voluntary society free of coercion was tried in human history. I also don’t think this a possibility as coercion is something that is not avoidable, it is part of every human relationship (although on differing scales). I did say that the incentive to be part of a group is not enough to make all people cooperate. This is reality and has been tried and tested throughout time. It works for some, but never for all.

There is indeed a reason that there are people in charge of things, but that reason is nothing to do with it being a better way of organising things. It’s about power and how it is better for those who have it to organise power in hierarchies (easier to control from above). In the UK, our society started from one with incredibly centralised, hierarchical power, and has largely remained so (we went from having a king at the top to having an oligarchy of barons, to weak forms of democracy with no votes for poor people or women, to stronger forms of democracy). The power was originally captured by force, and the mitigations were fought for at every stage. At no point was hierarchy and authority introduced in order to make life better for ordinary people. It might seem like I’m labouring the obvious here, but there’s a good reason. We tend to assume that things are like they are because they must be like they are, or because there is a reason for their being like they are. Obviously you’re committed to social change so you don’t make this assumption, but nonetheless it can sometimes sneak in.

When was a voluntary society free of coercion tried in human history? Are you talking about some primitive, tribal societies or something like that? If so, it seems fairly irrelevant for these days.

It’s true that people won’t always follow the ‘group will’ (I’d rather say the group decision than the group ‘will’) without a reason to do so. In an anarchist system, the incentive is that cooperation as a strategy is more beneficial than non-cooperation. The society has to be structured so that this is the case. If you are someone who doesn’t cooperate, then others in turn will be less likely to cooperate with you, which will make your life more difficult. This shouldn’t seem strange, it happens in everyday life all the time. Suppose you like action movies and your partner likes romantic comedies. You go to see the rom coms even though you’d rather see the latest Bruce Willis movie because you know that this contributes to a happy and harmonious existence, and that you will also get to have company when Die Hard 5 comes out.

The word anarchy has gotten a bad reputation (as has the word socialism in the US of course), and has become associated with chaos. But except for a very few silly ‘anarchists’ that was never the idea. So I can sympathise with not wanting to use the word, lots of people who are very sympathetic to anarchist ideas don’t make a big deal about it probably for that reason.

The point about rulings is interesting. In an anarchist system, you can have decisions made in a democratic way that are binding on the members of a community. The point is that there shouldn’t be a hierarchy with individuals or offices empowered to make these binding decisions on others. It’s another very complicated area.

This relates to statism: the problem with it is that whenever you have a hierarchy where individuals higher up in the hierarchy are empowered to make binding decisions on people lower in the hierarchy, you form a sort of ruling class. This is a dangerous situation. I’m not saying a more egalitarian, less authoritarian government wouldn’t be a huge improvement over what we have now though of course. And in the short term, it makes sense to fight for more equality and less authoritarianism within the system, but that doesn’t mean abandoning the long term goal of doing without authority and hierarchy altogether (when the world is ready for that). Anarchists and socialists can and must cooperate on the short and intermediate term goals (unless we’re talking about old school socialism of the highly centralised, authoritarian sort, which should rightly disappear).

There’s no such thing as ‘true democracy’ though. Democracy isn’t an ideal, it’s a loose concept which should be understood in historical terms. There’s no perfect conception of democracy which all forms of actual democracy aspire to. Try to define such a thing and you’ll run into trouble. It’s allied to some genuine ideals though, such as self-determination, self-management, equality, etc. These are all worth promoting and fighting for, and are consistent with anarchism and socialism.

I tend to believe that most people in this world are inherently good and mean no harm to any other person or thing and would not knowingly or purposely hurt anyone else without reason. Unfortunately, I think the incentive for the uncooperative to cooperate with each other would be for control of resources and I think this would be difficult to stop. Reducing the inequities would go a long to also reducing the uncooperative however.

I think my biggest problem is separating the word “anarchy” and its meanings from “anarchism” or “anarchist” ideas. It’s the chaos implied by the first meaning that is hard for me to avoid. I think I have a lot of the same hopes as many anarchists do, but I cannot use that term to describe these hopes or ideals because of the other connotations involved. Anarchism (the word) is rooted from the Greek “arcon” (meaning ruler/leader) and the prefix “an” (meaning without or against). I see government of any form, whether it is through voluntary cooperation or not, as some form of ruling. It is communal ruling, but ruling none the less in my eyes. I just cannot separate the word from these meanings.

I have mixed feelings about democracy. I feel it’s the best system we currently have (in some forms), but is still no where near what I would actually call a democracy. I’ve written about this issue before here.

I also feel that statism can work if the inequities are reduced in the system. If we had true democracy, instead of the current systems– it would be very similar to many anarchist ideals. If the government were to become less authoritarian and more equal, would that not be just as effective?