TLDR: Statists measure success based on the state, so in order to convince them that anarchism us successful we would need to stop being anarchists.
"For anarchists who do know something about anthropology, the arguments are all too familiar. A typical exchange goes something like this:
Skeptic: Well, I might take this whole anarchism idea more seriously if you could give me some reason to think it would work. Can you name me a single viable example of a society which has existed without a government?
Anarchist: Sure. There have been thousands. I could name a dozen just off the top of my head: the Bororo, the Baining, the Onondaga, the Wintu, the Ema, the Tallensi, the Vezo…
Skeptic: But those are all a bunch of primitives! I’m talking about anarchism in a modern, technological society.
Anarchist: Okay, then. There have been all sorts of successful experiments: experiments with worker’s self-management, like Mondragon; economic projects based on the idea of the gift economy, like Linux; all sorts of political organizations based on consensus and direct democracy…
Skeptic: Sure, sure, but these are small, isolated examples. I’m talking about whole societies.
Anarchist: Well, it’s not like people haven’t tried. Look at the Paris Commune, the revolution in Republican Spain…
Skeptic: Yeah, and look what happened to those guys! They all got killed!
The dice are loaded. You can’t win. Because when the skeptic says “society,” what he really means is “state,” even “nation-state.” Since no one is going to produce an example of an anarchist state—that would be a contradiction in terms—what we’re really being asked for is an example of a modern nation-state with the government somehow plucked away: a situation in which the government of Canada, to take a random example, has been overthrown, or for some reason abolished itself, and no new one has taken its place but instead all former Canadian citizens begin to organize themselves into libertarian collectives. Obviously this would never be allowed to happen. In the past, whenever it even looked like it might—here, the Paris commune and Spanish civil war are excellent examples—the politicians running pretty much every state in the vicinity have been willing to put their differences on hold until those trying to bring such a situation about had been rounded up and shot."
I appreciate getting another perspective even though some comments in this thread are close to the PPB-zone…
The issue I have with this debate is there’s this implicit definition of “the state” and a pre-determined way to define how it works.
For starters, at a very stripped down level, isn’t a state just a very large group of people organized under one system? So wouldn’t the quality of that state vary based on which people are running it and how malleable the structure is in the first place?
So the U.S. is an F-Tier state because it doesn’t give people control over it, it is driven by corporations, and all sorts of mechanisms including its founding documents (the Constitution) prevent that from changing without a complete revolution. OTOH China is a much better state because of the way their Democracy works, the amount of state-owned (i.e. people-owned) industry, and actually holding the richest people accountable for their crimes.
I believe we all have the same goal of a classless, stateless, moneyless society. I just don’t trust pure Anarchism to get us there.
I need people to protect me and my family from Fascist violence.
I need someone to inspect the food we are harvesting to make sure literal shit on the lettuce isn’t giving us mega-diaharria. This literally is happening now under Capitalism!
I need a medical system that takes of us, actually heals us instead of treating us in a way that maximizes profit, and let’s all of us heal without requiring us to be wealthy or go into lifelong debt.
I need housing that I have control over, not some landlord. I need rent control, housing to be for living and not speculation, and people to be able to have basic housing regardless if they are working or not.
I could go on and on. Heck, how do you handle public transport without a strong state?!? The US is a joke outside of a few cities, while China has bullet trains and systems that make it so I can live without a car.
This is a little imprecise. A large company or a religion would meet this definition.
Your mainstream non-leftist definition of a state will usually include something like “a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence in a defined territory.” Leftists have a similar definition, but usually phrased in terms of one class dominating another (…by a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence).
You make some great observations and raise even better questions!
Im terms of a “stripped down version of the state”, shortly before the above passage the author gives his definition of the state, which is a monopoly on violence. Essentially this means that all forms of violence within the boundaries of the state are either done by or permitted by the state. This can be a double edged sword, because while the state might not tolerate invasion or random manslaughter in the streets it also might stop you and your community from starting a militia and fighting nazis.
The comedian Brennan Lee Mulligan describes it really well when he paraphrases Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky “Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic class within a given society, and police act as a sort of occupying military to enact those threats…” The police are the arm of the state.
Also, you said something really funny without realizing it. There is no such thing as “pure anarchism”. Anarchism is rooted in anthropology, not sociology, so it’s observed rather than created.
As for those other issues you mentioned, there is a lot of anarchist theory on each of those, but I can give a few examples.
I can’t say that anarchism will keep you safe from fascists as we are fascisms first enemy. Bakunin fought them back before they even had a name for their ideology, the Spanish Republic was the first to wage war against them, and it was anarchists who retook Paris. Even now anarchists have been explicitly targeted by name by the Trump regime. The anarchist philosophy when it comes to surviving fascism is that it’s safer at the front. There’s a really good article by Crimethinc about this if you’re interested.
As for poop lettuce and infrastructure, when the Fascists began their coup of the Spanish Republic the syndicalists were able to roll out tanks within days. They moved so fast that they completely skipped the labor voucher phase Marx theorized and went straight to distribution based on need and labor from ability. The accounts of life during that brief period changed our understanding of communism forever, but they are often ignored because anarchism was involved. People don’t even mention the Marxists and Leninists, they pretend it was a failure. I recommend you look into some firsthand accounts of it (Not from Orwell, fuckin war tourist)