How would an Anarcho-Capitalist society actually function?

Answer: Transhumanism.

relic: You are right, but I get annoyed when people try to shut down an interesting discussion with oversimplified arguments.

edited 14th Aug '11 11:43:27 AM by eX

Just to weigh in on anarchy's tendency to quickly rise up into government... Somalia has had no central government for 20 years now. So there is at least some precedence on an extended anarchy.

They also have to constantly kill each other to sustain it, as I said.

As a result of a dividing civil war. Hence my conjecture that it would require a deliberate peaceful founding to have a chance of remaining stable. At the very least, it shows how long the international community is willing to let an anarchistic state lie, even a violent one.

I thought Somalia was more of a 'warlord' situation than anarchy. The only difference is, now the guys with the biggest guns are bossing everybody around instead of the governemnt.

And I agree with USAF. The vast majority of people are going to want a governing body of some sort, because they know that without one the physically weak of society will die. So they're going to start electing people or whatever as soon as possible. How would anarchists stop them from doing that?

edited 14th Aug '11 5:15:14 PM by LoniJay

Yeah, that stepped up from anarchy a while ago.

edited 14th Aug '11 6:30:32 PM by Kino

The corporations would hire private police forces to beat up the protestors/activists? That's what happened in the past.

@ Diamonnes : yes we all become robots, that's your anwer for everything

There are several long-term anarchy societies actually :

Icelandic Commonwealth 930–1262 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Commonwealth

Xeer in Somalia 7th century - 19th century http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeer

How much there are actually no government is questionable. Iceland has althing. and in both society family and clan ties is strong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy#Ungoverned_communities

Anarchism has been in many societies that have existed for years! People need to stop acting like anarchism has not been done successfully already:

The people of FEJUVE or The Federation of Neighborhood Councils-El Alto. Back in 2008, FEJUVE was estimated to have a population of 114,000 and the community has been around since 1979, so it has lasted for forty-three years and still exists to this day. FEJUVE is a participatory democracy based around having over six hundred neighborhood councils to provide public services and jobs. Each council has at least 200 members with their own leadership committees that hold monthly neighborhood assemblies similar to town meetings. The whole thing has an informal anarcho-mutualist economy self-managed by city workers and small trader/sole proprietorships as described by Emily Achtenberg in the book Community Organizing, Rebellion, and the Progressive State: Neighborhood Councils in El Alto, Bolivia.

Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities has been around since January 1994. This anarchist territory exists in the Chiapas region of Mexico which has a population of close to 363,000 people. It is still around to this day, follows an economy of worker cooperatives according to the book Resistencia Autónoma: Cuaderno de texto de primer grado del curso de "La Libertad según l@s Zapatistas", runs on a libertarian socialist consensus democracy, and currently fights against the Mexican government and various drug cartels in a conflict known as the Chiapas conflict.

The Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement has been around in Sri Lanka since 1958 according to the book The Impossible Community: Realising Communitarian Anarchism. by John Clarke. It has been around for over 63 years and the movement is active in 15,000 villages in Sri Lanka. It follows Buddhist anarchism and Gandhism (ideas inspired by M.K. Gandhi).

Freetown Christiania is an anarchist community practicing agorism: a form of market anarchism invented by Samuel Edward Konkin III. It is located in the borough of Christianshavn in the Danish capital city of Copenhagen which has been around since 1971 and offers cannabis and other 'soft drugs' to visitors.

Also, not all anarchists believe in having 'no government' whatsoever. Some anarchists like anarcho-syndicalist Noam Chomsky and Peter Marshall support a night-watchman state: a state that does not have a monopoly on violence and meets the minimum requirement set by John Locke in his book Two Treatises of Government to be considered a government. So an anarchist can be someone who wants a volunteer-based government without a monopoly on violence based on , a general horizontal hierarchy (an organizational structure with few or no levels of middle management between the average person and those in charge) instead of just hoping everyone will follow all the rules and no one will ever do anything bad ever.