Post
Topic
Board Politics & Society
Re: How long would it take for Anarchy to start working?
by
deisik
on 09/12/2013, 09:47:59 UTC
Could I expect you throwing some light on what you meant by the state being involuntary and anarchism being voluntary?

Quote from: Wikipedia on State (polity)
There is no academic consensus on the most appropriate definition of the state...

The most commonly used definition is Max Weber's, which describes the state as a compulsory political organization with a centralized government that maintains a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a certain territory.

Quote from: Wikipedia on Anarchism
Anarchism is a political philosophy that advocates stateless societies often defined as self-governed voluntary institutions, but that several authors have defined as more specific institutions based on non-hierarchical free associations.

I never said that state would not be engaging in compulsion and coercion. These "features" are inherent to it, that's what makes such an institution a state. My point, actually, boils down to two things which I expand on in detail below

Firstly, state is just a somewhat embellished form of exploitation and expropriation that one small group of people promotes towards the rest of population. Why that group of people would ultimately have to restrain themselves from looting the population, I had explained in my posts before

Secondly, states evolved naturally from the initial condition very close to what you call here anarchy. Because of the universal character of this phenomenon throughout the world, I find it very dubious that anything like anarchy has even a remote chance of materialization or persistence in reality