I never implied it was pacifist, but only that it’s ineffective. Without some form of a legal heirarchy where a group is empowered to use force to deal with bad actors those bad actors would run amok because normal people are, by and large, bystanders.
Do you know why we have a professional army that dedicates all their time to training and readiness? Because that’s what it takes to not be steamrolled by your fascist neighbor state who wants what you have. You can’t have some lackadaisical ad hoc minute men arrangement, there are too many humans and too many competing interests for that to work in the modern world. We aren’t jungle tribes, we’re not all going to go live in communial farming homesteads or whatever. So where do I live? In a city with housing? Who makes sure my lights stay on and that my landlord didn’t use asbestos and lead pipes when building the place? Who has the authority to say water must be safe to drink? If everyone else in my building doesn’t believe lead pipes are dangerous am I just shit out of luck if I don’t replace the pipes in the facility myself?
You can’t just have mob justice or random individuals deciding based on their own arbitrary, subjective opinion how to carry out justice at any given moment. If I see a guy shoplifting and just shoot him, who is in a pisition to tell me that I was wrong and what gives them the right under a system of anarchy? Does that person’s wife or brother now get to shoot me?
I’ve never once met an anarchist who can coherently explain how, in a practical sense, you ensure justice and order at a large scale without a state, legal framework and a system in which individuals (whether they be democratic representatives, judges, cops, military members etc.) are granted power by the collective to make judgements and decisions based on an agreed upon legally binding code of law. When you press them on any given soecific issue they basically just start describing the organs of a state.
Anarchism is neither inherently pacifist nor disorganized, that’s your lack of understanding showing.
The circle A anarchism logo means “order without hierarchy”.
I never implied it was pacifist, but only that it’s ineffective. Without some form of a legal heirarchy where a group is empowered to use force to deal with bad actors those bad actors would run amok because normal people are, by and large, bystanders.
Do you know why we have a professional army that dedicates all their time to training and readiness? Because that’s what it takes to not be steamrolled by your fascist neighbor state who wants what you have. You can’t have some lackadaisical ad hoc minute men arrangement, there are too many humans and too many competing interests for that to work in the modern world. We aren’t jungle tribes, we’re not all going to go live in communial farming homesteads or whatever. So where do I live? In a city with housing? Who makes sure my lights stay on and that my landlord didn’t use asbestos and lead pipes when building the place? Who has the authority to say water must be safe to drink? If everyone else in my building doesn’t believe lead pipes are dangerous am I just shit out of luck if I don’t replace the pipes in the facility myself?
You can’t just have mob justice or random individuals deciding based on their own arbitrary, subjective opinion how to carry out justice at any given moment. If I see a guy shoplifting and just shoot him, who is in a pisition to tell me that I was wrong and what gives them the right under a system of anarchy? Does that person’s wife or brother now get to shoot me?
I’ve never once met an anarchist who can coherently explain how, in a practical sense, you ensure justice and order at a large scale without a state, legal framework and a system in which individuals (whether they be democratic representatives, judges, cops, military members etc.) are granted power by the collective to make judgements and decisions based on an agreed upon legally binding code of law. When you press them on any given soecific issue they basically just start describing the organs of a state.