Is a completely stateless society possible?

Unless a government bankrolls the ammo, odds are folks are gonna use semi-auto rifles.

If you're paying for your own bullets, full-auto is an extravaganza.

edited 9th Jan '12 4:29:26 PM by SavageHeathen

You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.

^ Ever heard of loot the enemy? Every armed person you kill you take his/her gun and bullets. If the bullets are the same as your rifle, you can use your rifle. If you find a better rifle, use that one.

Guerrilla Warfare 101 people.

Then it's bolt-action and scarce ammo against guys who wield automatics supplied with as many bullets as they want.

"Atheism is the religion whose followers are easiest to troll"

Some sort of organized if not centralized arms industry will probably exist for the purpose of pumping out those lovely explosives and antipersonell rifles. It's not impossible to maintain an effective militia in an age of Predator drones and M 1 A 1 Abrams tank columns, it's just really fucking hard.

The nation-state has had thousands of years to prove itself and only recently it's starting to get its act together. Countries are fictions, plain and simple.

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No, effective anarchy is a fiction. Countries are the reality and the way of the civilised world. Deal with it.

edited 9th Jan '12 5:15:47 PM by CaissasDeathAngel

My name is Addy. Please call me that instead of my username.

A smart and skilled marksman with a bolt action rifle and relatively few bullets is more dangerous than an entire squad of automatic rifle toting conscripts.

It Gets Worse when the marksman knows how to use the enemy's weapons more effectively than they do.

Large-scale organizations are, sadly, the way of the civilized world. Countries are a fiction we have used to direct large-scale organization into turning manual labour and natural resources towards the enrichment of a small few, and turning scientific investigation and progress towards military endeavours and short-term political gains. You can't weigh a gram of a country on a scale and show it to me under a microscope, and once you accept that the idea of a country is just that - an idea - you have to look long and hard at how useful that idea has been.

I'll grant that happy hippy kibbutzes for all may not be the solution. But shit, we have to be able to do better than this.

edited 9th Jan '12 5:37:04 PM by RadicalTaoist

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For the purposes of creating loyalty and a sense of identity, the idea of a country has been very useful. It's also a morally neutral idea, and corruption is not an inherent property of the idea of a country. The idea of a country also has very little to do with what type of governing body you have to deal with, which is what anarchy has to do with. Under anarchy, the idea of a country simply gets reduced to your nearest neighbors, instead of everyone who say, shares a language and a religion and history with you. England, after all, has moved from an absolutist monarchy to a democratic monarchy, where the Queen serves as an adviser to the head of government. People there still feel English.

You need to focus more on what the type of government (and if you have the ability to arm a militia, I consider you to have a government of some sort) you want would do to the people, rather than whether or not the idea of a country is worth anything. If anarchy can't serve the needs of the people (and I don't think it could) then it's useless as a societal model. Democracy, at least, gives us a chance to alter the societal model.

Yeah, useful to the elites of the region who want your loyalty and are willing to hijack the public notion of cultural identity to do so. Many of the most successful minority cultures have succeeded by exporting themselves beyond the limits of a country - see the Irish, the Jamaicans and other cultures of the English Caribbean, the Chinese, the Japanese, etc. Napalm is a morally neutral weapon, and sadism is not an inherent property of the technology of napalm. It just so happens to be very useful to people willing to burn civilians to death. And the idea of countries are very useful to those who would exploit others. I'll grant this, though like I've said, anarchism is as much an attitude as it is a set of policy suggestions. Every "political view" tries to answer the question of "what does a society need?" Anarchism's value lies not only in what it offers as an answer, but even more so in how it attempts to reframe the question.

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I'd rather compare the idea of a country to gardening tools. Useful for cultivating gardens and other constructive things in the right hands, but in the hands of the wrong people very useful weapons. Also, when I say corruption isn't inherent in the idea of a country, it's because it's inherent in people who want power plain and simple. Anarchy has to deal with mitigating that just as much as any other form of government. I just don't think it can do so effectively.

edited 9th Jan '12 6:53:38 PM by AceofSpades

@Radical,

I'd rather live in a nation-state than a pinko communist-anarchist society that's about as easy to tip over as a house of cards—assuming the people living around you don't kill you themselves.

"Shit, our candidate is a psychopath. Better replace him with Newt Gingrich."

That is, of course, your preference. Over either of those choices, I'd prefer something like what we had going after the Seattle General Strike, except with more business. And Internet.

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That lasted for what, a week? Two?

It's not sustainable. Your ideal society is a fairy tale.

Then again, most ideal societies are. Hence, "utopia."

"Shit, our candidate is a psychopath. Better replace him with Newt Gingrich."

It was bought out at the top and oppressed at the bottom. Let me clarify that. It did not collapse from internal pressures, but from a combination of coercion and force from outside.

If the biggest historical flaw with successful anarchist societies is non-anarchist societies ganging up on them, I'm not sure how that qualifies as "unsustainable".

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Hence why I said they're easier than a house of cards to tip over.

If you can't account for outside forces in your model, and your model only works absent these (inevitable) outside forces, your model is worthless.

"Shit, our candidate is a psychopath. Better replace him with Newt Gingrich."

There's several options there. One shot is to look for the most geographically uninvadable place to set up your anarchist shop. The other approach, the one which I would prefer, is to move existing governments more towards a democratic peace approach towards foreign intervention, while building up popular support for nongovernment forms of social organization. Ideally when you launch your anarchist experiment, there's enough outside resistance to invasion that people will leave you the fuck alone until you are able to surpass the critical mass necessary.

A more likely scenario is that an anarchist society of communes, co-ops, and syndicates will arise out of necessity after the economic collapse of an existing government. The success of the anarchist society would depend on how much people decide they don't want to give up what they had going when it comes time to reestablish a world economy. In that situation, you'll most likely have some form of minimalist government beholden to the co-ops. This is not anarchist enough to qualify as anarchism for some people, but whatever. This would depend on a maintenance of communication infrastructure for maintaining an informed populace willing to sustain and organize bottom-up methods of self-governance; the exciting thing about the 21st century is that technology can make that possible.

The cynical and easy way of getting anarchism is for some billionaire philanthropist to buy a big chunk of land and declare it a Nation-Free-Zone. This will work because every governmental model is valid if somebody really really really rich decides to back it. -___-

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So your answer is "we need to try and get rid of all the fuckwits."

Dude, if it were that easy we'd have done it already. Since human civilization has been going for thousands of years and we've never even dreamed of doing such a thing, I think you need to step back and realize how profoundly naive that entire concept sounds.

"Shit, our candidate is a psychopath. Better replace him with Newt Gingrich."

Which, in theory, could be everyone...

Keep Rolling On

Except you or the group you belong to.

If a chicken crosses the road and nobody else is around to see it, does the road move beneath the chicken instead?

Which is repeated for another group which is opposed to yours — in other words, a theoretical (or later, literal?) Mexican Standoff.

In the end....Everybody's Dead, Dave.

Keep Rolling On

Not necessarily. Neutering the ability of fuckwits to do damage has been the goal of society since pretty much forever, and several societies have been extremely effective at that goal. When the history indicates that anarchist societies have been able to succeed at that goal until outside fuckwits concentrate enough power to crush them, it tells me that the anarchist society isn't the one that needs fixing.

Another thought: engineer "slow anarchist" revolutions by a) making the price of living extremely cheap among a number different countries, b) making the cost of housing and thus the cost of changing housing arrangements really cheap among a number of different countries, and c) making the cost of travel between said countries as cheap as possible, as well as lowering barriers to immigration. In short, enable geographic and social mobility, so that if a society is unjust to its most fortunate, it's easy to simply *leave*.

Stalin had to raise the Iron Curtain for a reason. Slave states were extremely concerned about ensuring the security of their borders. During the times of conflict with native tribes, some white American hostages who had spent long periods with certain tribes had to be dragged kicking and screaming back to white society when "released". Oppressive systems cannot survive if people can just up and quit.

Of course, the big cultural objective central to this kind of change would be throwing the idea of patriotism and country loyalty onto a bonfire. You don't have loyalty to a brand that isn't providing you with the best value for your money.

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I find it amusing that everybody's ideal society is one in which they get to make the rules. I bet we could have a completely stateless society if everybody worshipped me as the God-Emperor of Earth. If everybody did as I said, there would be no states, since a state only has meaning if there are other states around.

But seriously, the reason we have states is actually pretty simple: they work. Not always well, and sometimes quite poorly, but the fact is that, historically, states are stronger than non-states. They allow for the large mobilization of people and resources towards a common end, which is often protecting their territory and stomping out those who pose a threat.

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.

They work for what? For whom? They've got their benefits, yes, but we've gotten better deals before.

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Taoist just won the thread. States work well for the elites ('cause they enforce their privileges and protect'em from the public). But it's a bum deal for everyone else.

edited 10th Jan '12 12:44:24 PM by SavageHeathen

You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.

In fairness, not always a bum deal. Some have worked fairly well. But none so amazingly well, on the whole and by and large, that non-state alternatives should be dismissed outright.

And the states that gave their citizens a fair deal? Only because people demanded one, and demanded that deal be maintained, rather than acting as though a "country" had any implicit value that demanded its preservation in its current form.

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