> how “anarchy” is used colloquially.

> E.g. It’s NOT about “There was anarchy in the mall today as shoppers demolished the stores and injured eachother fighting over Black Friday deals.”

It always annoyed me how anarchy is conflated with chaos. Nowhere is implied that a lack of coercive hierarchy means to be allowed to smash everything and kill people.

It's a relic of the successful destruction of anarchist unions and parties in the early 20c (especially in the US.) It's similar to how the philosophy of the People's Party (populism) somehow got propagandized from every direction over the next century until it became an epithet suitable to throw at extreme-right authoritarian nationalists.

I agree that it's silly to assume that's what people would do without coercive hierarchy (I think this conflation is often intentional to make the concept less attractive to folks who aren't paying attention), but surely it would be "allowed" because who would be disallowing it?

Some (most?) flavors of anarchy eschew hierarchys, not rules in general. Eg. your local collective or union or guild (depending on your flavor of anarchy) would collectively decide "killing is wrong, here's what happens if someone does it".

Ah, thanks, that's fair since most people are going to make those sort of voluntarist associations. I guess I was imagining an edge case for people who opt to not do that, but that feels an awful lot like when people today make arguments like "well, nobody's forcing you to carry a phone!"

I suppose this all comes back to the point that nobody is pragmatically advocating for absolute anarchy - it's simply a valuable concept to reference as we collaborate to build actual, functioning social systems. Or, at least, that's how I tend to think about it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anarchy should be the ultimate (and always moving) goal of any healthy society.

Once hierarchies solve the issues they are born from, they cease to be necessary. Hence a government that permanently solves poverty and thus crime in the most common sense, eliminates the need for an authority to regulate interactions between individuals.

I think we're just using different definitions here.

There will still be a non-zero amount of hierarchical order within social systems even if it doesn't come from the government.

We actually agree, hierarchies can exist and be good, they just need to be voluntary and not in the capitalist sense, where you can "voluntarily" choose between homelessness or wage slavery.

I just wanted to elaborate (since I agree) on your point that Anarchy is "a valuable concept to reference as we collaborate to build actual, functioning social systems".

I won't exclude that Anarchy could eventually concretize though, who knows!

We definitely agree and I also wouldn't exclude that!

I tend to speak this way because I lean towards discussing near and mid-term futures as opposed to longer term ones in many conversations for a number of reasons.

I do this in part because I'm biased toward the now both subconsciously and out of pragmatism as a material being living in the present, but also largely because I find that other people I encounter tend to be even more that way and struggle to envision the longer-term possible that may require a number of intermediate steps.

Anyway, to our future, voluntarily!

They're literally synonyms. From Merriam-Webster:

> anarchy - a state in which there is widespread wrongdoing and disregard for rules and authority

If the political ideology doesn't want to be conflated with this it needs a new name.

It sucks but language is descriptive not prescriptive, and meanings change over time.

Dictionaries are neither objectively descriptive nor apolitical - their definitions reflect the biases of their authors and the systems they exist within which allowed them to obtain positions of relative authority.

It meant "without ruler" when it was chosen. It was demonized after the fact.

It's the other way around. Historically "anarchy" almost always had negative connotations. Then Proudhon co-opted the term to use it in a positive sense.

The idea that the absence of a ruler meant total chaos goes back at least to Hobbes.

If I was Calvin's pet tiger I'd probably come to a similar conclusion.

The problem is that there's a million strains of anarchism and none of them agree:

* The political layperson thinks anarchism is a synonym for chaos.

* Anarcho-communists think anarchism comes after the organized demolition of capital because they think the existence of a capitalist class by definition creates exploitation.

* Minarchists think the anarcho-communists aren't actually anarchists because they support a very specific form of structure, namely one that opposes markets. Can you really be free from the state if the state needs to tell you how to structure your commerce?

* Left anarchists (broadly any form of anarchism on the economic left, but mostly anarcho-socialists and anarcho-communists) think libertarians are terrible people because they think capitalistic markets are terrible.

* Libertarians don't understand why an ideology opposing the state still wants a state to tell people what forms of capital relations are allowed.

* Anarcho-syndicalists fit somewhere between the minarchists and the anarcho-socialists.

* Religious anarchists think that anarcho-communists are supplanting faith with belief in Marx's specific dialectical materialism.

* Some anarchists oppose the creation of even large, voluntary bodies of cooperation arguing that they are essentially the same as a state. Therein lies the paradox; if participants agree fairly to opt-into forming their own para-state, is this still compatible under anarchism?

* Green anarchists insist that small, distributed networks of mutual aid can hit environmental goals but grapple with the reality that the number of people on the planet alive today are alive at the behest of heavily centralized systems and processes.

and on and on. It doesn't help that by virtue of being minority/upopular ideologies, adherents find a lot more political capital in being uncompromisingly fundamental rather than practical. The minarchist in the corner telling you that issues are complicated, producing long nuanced theses, and urging compromise is boring while the fiery communist telling you to cleanse humanity to build labor relations anew Khmer Rouge style strikes passion into your heart.

It turns out that simply rejecting "coercive relations" or "the State" doesn't lay out a vision that others can agree with, especially because many parties don't agree on what constitutes a coercive relation or the State. In other words, if you tell Hobbes that the Leviathan is unnecessary, you should be prepared to say what comes in its place as that's where everyone disagrees.

You can see this dynamic play out in other comment threads on this story.

A timeless clip from Monty Python on the subject :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4

The irony is that I can argue that this overview is too simplistic and reductive and even too opinionated. I don't think I got a good impression of what a minarchist or an anarcho-syndicalist is from this either. Then it's like what are religious anarchists for then? Christian anarchism?

> Can you really be free from the state if the state needs to tell you how to structure your commerce?

Wouldn't many anarchists take issue with the minarchist & libertarian critique you list above, claiming that the state is necessary to enforce capitalistic markets?

I can't claim to be a libertarian, but I don't think minarchists claim to espouse an economic system at all. You may be thinking of left market anarchists. And I'm pretty sure some libertarians will make their point with private force applied to consenting market participants used to secure their capital markets.

Also this isn't meant to be an exercise in ideological critique so there's no need to defend what "many anarchists" think. My post was just there to demonstrate how many strains of anarchism there are and how few goals they tend to share. Also it's partly to remind folks that there are more than just Ancoms and Ansocs out there, even if they tend to be the most vocal in tech spaces.

My reply was a little ambiguous - I simply meant that many anarchists would find the minarchist and libertarian positions you lay out to be self-contradictory. Namely, they both claim to (mostly) oppose state involvement in the economy, yet (generally) support a free market economy that needs to be enforced by the state.

I'm agreeing with your premise that anarchism consists of many competing strains, just adding a point of clarification for the audience here (...which is probably more familiar with the libertarian perspective than the others you listed).