> With a lack of stimulus or even just in this economic system, bars and businesses in general are incentivized to stay open. They are being ‘coerced’ to stay open.

You could say this about any thief in any economic system, including the economy of survival (stealing food, shelter, etc). This is not a thing anarchy could solve.

> People started rejecting masks and shutdowns en masse after astroturfing and media convinced them to.

These aren't laws or government, and they would still exist in an anarchistic system.

> There are countries where orders were followed voluntarily and good results followed.

Yes, and there are no countries where no orders were required because people self-regulated.

Capitalism is fundamentally built on competition, it pits all participants against one another. It stratifies social bonds and breaks people apart because any cooperation represents unrealized exploitation.

Its why people are so miserable en masse, hostile, and chomping at the bit for targets to attack and hate. Its worse in America because theres almost no socialism at all to raise the floor of society - the country is buried in homeless and something like 1 in 5 persons is food insecure (probably higher now in the pandemic). If you fail in "winning" at capitalism to some degree you are supposed to feel fortunate shelters and soup kitchens exist. Sometimes. Society has broadly rejected them as the socialism they are and underfunds or destroys them where able.

Its also why drug addiction is totally out of control. Desperation and social isolation by our culture creates whole populations of people to be exploited by drug profiteers. Many other nations don't do this by catching people before they get that despondent or miserable and by helping (rehabilitation) rather than hurting (prosecution) those that get that bad.

The process is cyclic. The desperation feeds into the hate feeds into the predation feeds into the exploitation feeds into the desperation. But breaking out of it requires class consciousness that is opposed at every level - at the bottom by the animosity and inability to trust and at the top by the profits and power reaped through the harm done.

Ask the hundreds of millions of murdered Chinese or a Russian how well alternatives to capitalism work out.

Maybe the problem isn't the economic model.

Stalin and Mao, and their successors, were totalitarian dictators. Trying to call the states they commanded socialist is as disingenuous as most other arguments in defense of capitalism. Its like saying the National Socalist German Workers Party was socialist or in the interest of workers. Instead it might just be that those of evil intent will co-opt the hallmarks and language in the peoples interests to undermine their efforts and seize power in their stead for their own tyrannical ends.

But yes, if you want to participate in a socialist revolution, make sure your movement isn't taken over by fascists.

You think socialist and communist counties don't have drug addiction problems?

They do if they are poorly run. The critique a socialist would make is that it is mechanically impossible to run a capitalist society in a fashion that reduces desperation to an appreciably low level. There are fewer theoretical reasons a socialist society should have this problem though practically any particular government and situation can get messed up.

If a socialist state fulfills its mandate to provide what it can for the betterment of its peoples condition than it would see many fewer cases of addiction than traditional capitalist economies with little or no socialism as a safeguard against destitution. See the Nordics, as per usual.

> Capitalism is fundamentally built on competition, it pits all participants against one another.

Life is built on competition, life pits all participants against one another. Resources are not infinite.

Resources are not infinite but human imagination is. We already produce more food than needed, there is hunger in the world, but not because of shortage but for multiple other reasons.

Main point is that humans are intelligent and we can choose where and how we compete or if we don't want to compete at all.

Holocene extinction is mainly because humans collaborated in much better way than any other animal can. Life might be build on competition but we see how powerful collaboration is.

> there is hunger in the world, but not because of shortage but for multiple other reasons.

That there's always been hunger in the world, even when we didn't produce more food than needed tells you production of food is not the resource limiting the distribution of food, other resources are. Even with all the imagination and collaboration of every communal government in the world to a scale never seen before in history, hunger is still a huge problem, because food is not the only resource, everything is a resource: time, interest, emotions, infrastructure, goods, distribution, people, communities, everything, and they compete with one another for our time and attention.

Everything is in competition, even your ideas and mine right now, and that's a good thing, but the first step to try and better our situation is to accept the reality of the natural world and not fight against it.

Just because you implement anarchism, you haven't automatically abolished capitalism. Bars would still be privately owned, and the owners would have incentive to keep them open in order to earn money to buy food (and protection etc).

In theory you could institute socialism in an arachic society. But that seems ... ill advised for anything larger than a small community. I can at least imagine socialism working in an exceptionally well organised state, but how would that work in a large-scale arnachy?

Wait did you say money?

Money doesn't exist in the situation you describe. Who is issuing the money? At best trading for good is the best possible.

Money is just a concept. Whether that's governement issued legal tender, gold, cigarettes or coffee beans doesn't really matter. Silver coins were in use long before governments started stamping them.

bitcoin does though

But without anyone to engage in fiscal or monetary policy to protect the value of BTC, it'd be vulnerable to huge swings in value.

Well, despite what anarcho-capitalists may say, in an anarchist society you would find it very hard to maintain capitalism as is familair to us today. This is because the State, and by extension its threat of violence, enforces private property rights. In a truly anarchist system where no other protection force evolves to reinstitute the government's role in protecting private property, you would have a very hard time building large amounts of capital. You may be able to control some small amounts of relatively private property (in addition to some personal property), but you absolutely could not maintain the current breadth of our global supply chain without the credible threat of violence from a large organization bent on maintaining private property rights.[0]

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[0]: Merely the threat of violence from a large organization, but not one with a goal of maintaining private property rights, is insufficient to maintain capitalist supply chains, because such an organization would naturally try to increase its own power through force. It would look more like a warlord, cartel, or small-time dictatorship with all of the corruption that implies than a smoothly working system of trade.

If you run a pub, either you're tougher than any challengers or you employ bouncers. Maybe you even have the local community on your side because they like how you run the pub.

The problem is if someone amasses enough capital to pay a gang of thugs to do his bidding. Then you can just take over properties, which earn you more money to pay more thugs. You can easily scale that to a global organisation. That's basically what drug cartels are. They run just fine, trade with other illegal organisations etc. It's just that the overhead of building infrastructure and providing security is enormous, so it only really works in extemely high margin industries like illegal drugs.

But according to anarchist theory, those thugs wouldn't do that because that would violate anarchy. This is the problem with most political theories. They assume near 100% compliance.