More important than opposition to the current system is the prefiguration of an anarchic one. So much online discourse is about attacking, a lot less is about building. I drew this to remind myself and others that confronting the state is only a part of the puzzle and building new systems without it is also important.
Licence (as always): CC-0, No rights reserved.
How would a stateless society enforce contracts?
The way it worked for millennia in societies without a powerful state –
by shunning the contract breakers in your community.
Just extraordinarily naive.
What kind of contracts do you expecting within a moneyless system?
Are you for real? Do you think work will cease to exist? Monetary compensation isn’t the only thing that can be exchanged for work/art/etc.
We already have all sorts of contracts that don’t involve money directly. Marriage is a contract, and that wouldn’t just cease to exist.
People are selfish and greedy. There needs to be something to try to prevent and/or punish that. And literal force/violence is the only thing that can ever do it. Without it, there will always be people who abuse it.
So what happens is the person with the biggest gun/stick/army/etc. wins the dispute. Every time.
That’s how you end up with feudalism. How come libertarians always need to personally re-learn every mistake and lesson we’ve already learned the hard way? It is literally currently destroying the US government.
Learn some history and we don’t have to repeat the same mistakes again and again.
People aren’t selfish or greedy. People are ambitious and in the current society those people are raised to believe that to be the best you have to be selfish and greedy. They aren’t traits you are born with, they are learned.
But anarchy still is the best way to deal with greedy people as any kind of hierarchy will just allow the greedy people to get to the top. Hierarchies don’t punish the greedy, they elevate them to the highest positions in society as those that aren’t concerned with other peoples well being can always find a way to gain authority over them.
Anarchy has that something. You can counter abuse without being abusive yourself. We can build social structures that prevent greed without hierarchy. The solution isn’t to give some people a monopoly on violence because that position will always attract the most violent. It’s to build a social networks that sees problems before they happen and provides support. Punishment isn’t a productive method of preventing harm. It’s vengeance, not prevention.
What is currently destroying the US isn’t libertarianism, it’s bad education, mass media manipulation and a bunch of people following orders.
OK
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Catalonia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makhnovshchina
This is just so naive.
You can name like the only two or three times that you believe this worked, but they are all very small scale made up of people who share the ideology, and WANT to be a part of that kind of society.
You show those communities to certain types of people, and they see dollar signs and opportunities for exploitation.
That’s what humans are. You need to accept this.
What kind of enforcement would a “marriage contract” need in a moneyless society?
Greedy selfish people can’t abuse a system that doesn’t allow accumulation of wealth.
Sidenote that this is an anarchist space and while we tolerate such some debate, we don’t have to tolerate your shitty attitude. Check the sidebar.
Possessions will still exist. Divorcing couples need to divide stuff too, not just money.
There’s also the whole thing about the custody of children… What happens when a father decides the judge (or whomever makes the ruling in your utopia) is wrong about giving full custody of a child to the mother, and decides to take the child (something that already happens all of the time in the US and elsewhere) and disappear?
Does the mom just throw her hands up and say, “oh well. Guess I’ll have to make another”?
Does the father get to keep the child simply because he’s the bigger (like physically bigger) person of the two, and can physically prevent the mother from seeing the child?
Violence (either the implied threat, or literal straight up violence) is ultimately the only thing keeping any sort of contractual law from completely disintegrating.
The best solution we’ve found so far is a social contract where everyone agrees to cede some of their freedom in return for security and stability. We allow “the state” to have a monopoly on violence.
It’s obviously far from perfect, but as long as you have an educated and informed public, it’s possible (yet very difficult) to maintain.
When you take that away, you end up with feudalism.