The Precarity of Anarchy: A Reason to Doubt

I am fairly confident that it would be entirely possible to organize a society on a completely stateless basis. There are two models of "anarchism" that seem likely to work. The first, broadly speaking, is social anarchism which seeks to organize society locally on the basic of direct, participatory democracy. This model traces back to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin, who held that local communes (or municipalities) could be organized on such a bases and confederated into larger regional or national networks for mutual aid and defense purposes. Decisions would ultimately be made locally, at the level of the autonomous commune/municipality, and delegates (not representatives) would be sent to councils at higher levels of the political order. The delegates would have no arbitrary power or decision-making authority: they would have an imperative mandate, being bound by the consensus of their constituents, and would be recallable. This approach has been utilized with some success by the Spanish Anarchists (CNT-FAI), Zapatistas (EZLN), and the people of Rojava (DFNS/YPJ/YPG). Social anarchist organizational principles and tactics have also been applied, to various extents, with some success, by movements such as Occupy Wall Street, Food Not Bombs, and Black Lives Matter.

The second model of anarchism is market-anarchism, which seeks to organize society on a voluntary basis by handing everything over to the market. The State would be replaced with a system of private law, with adjudication by private "courts" and enforcement by private "police". The viability of this model of governance is equally as well established as the social anarchist alternative. There have been systems of private law, like the Brehon Code in medieval Ireland or that of the medieval Icelandic Commonwealth; there have also been private police and security services, like the Pinkertons or the V.I.P.E.R.S. in Detroit, and such private police are the predominant form of security/policing in certain places like South Africa; and examples of private militias and private arbitration services for contract dispute resolution are abundant.

No case against anarchism can rest upon the claim that it cannot, or does not, work. As a model of governance, both types of anarchism have been thoroughly proven to work. The question is whether or not, in practice, they are actually preferable to all non-anarchistic alternatives. And this is where I think there is room for doubt.

It is entirely possible to create a stateless society. However, I am extremely pessimistic about the likelihood that a stateless social order would actually be preferable to conventional social democracy or something like ordoliberalism. I doubt that anarchistic systems would be able to provide quality universal healthcare or adequate welfare measures, and so I would rather live in a less-than-perfect social democracy over a stateless society without the same assurances. In my estimation, what makes a society just is that it minimizes suffering. One society is more just than another to the extent that it has a system that reduces overall suffering more than the other society in question does. To minimize human suffering, poverty ought to be eliminated. Furthermore, everyone ought to be guaranteed access to the basic necessities, like healthcare, shelter, food, and clothing. Thus, a country like Norway, with its social democratic model that provides universal healthcare and decent welfare programs, is more just than the United States to the extent that it reduces and, to some extent, tends to minimize the overall suffering of its citizens, whereas the United States has an approach to healthcare and welfare that tends to increase suffering. It is, theoretically, possible to create an anarchistic system that is analogous to social democracy, where people are provided with universal healthcare free at the point of service and supplied with a basic income sufficient for survival. Elsewhere I have demonstrated that such a thing could, theoretically, be achieved on either a communalist anarchist or an "anarcho-capitalist" basis. (Cf. On Anarchist Social Democracy: Taxation, Welfare, and Anarchy) The problem is that it is extremely improbable for that to occur.

With social anarchism, people would have to reach consensus to implement any system of redistribution or welfare policy. The real problem with this sort of anarchism, in my estimation, is establishing consensus. Land value tax, universal basic income, universal free healthcare, cap and trade and other such policies are really in the best interest of everyone. Out of ignorance or greed, most people wouldn't consent to such policies. Too many people are conservative. When good social democratic policies are passed, they are passed through the mechanism of representative democracy. Representatives are elected by the people. In parliament or congress, they hear the arguments pro and con for various proposals. And the representatives are trusted to vote in the best interest of the people. Having never heard the arguments for land value tax, the average person is likely to oppose it. But a representative is somewhat more likely to embrace such a proposal after sitting and listening to the arguments for it. A system of loosely confederated municipal democratic assemblies is not likely to reach consensus to pass any of the sorts of policies that I believe would actually maximize human well-being. Furthermore, I do not think that general consensus to embrace a communist analogue to my ideal system would be able to be reached either. While an anarchist society would be formally voluntaristic, it's members would likely be worse off than they would be under a social democratic government. An "anarcho-capitalist" system would be worse. With such a system, the creation of an analogue to social democracy would be entirely dependent upon the altruism of wealthy individuals.

The problem of reaching consensus will be exacerbated by dogmatism on the part of anarchists. Anarchists tend to fall into narrow camps. There are communist anarchists, geo-mutualists, and neo-mutualists, each with their own conception of how the problem of property can be resolved. The communists will demand communal-ownership of land and the abolition of markets and money, while the mutualists will demand free markets with competing currencies and usufructuary property, and geo-mutualists will tack on the Georgist idea of communal-ownership of land with ground-rent charged for private use. Some anarchists will support democratic confederalism, either with majoritarian direct democracy or with consensus-based democracy, while others will dogmatically demand total individual autonomy and free association. Then there are "anarcho-capitalists"—and I realize that anarcho-capitalists are not real anarchists in the classical sense, but they are people who do exist and with whom social anarchists would have to come to some sort of agreement. Communist anarchists identify allodial and fee-simple property as being theft, hence fundamentally aggressive and incompatible with a just society. The anarcho-capitalists regard communal-ownership as illegitimate, coercive, and incompatible with liberty. And adherents of the multitude of non-anarchist philosophies, like republicanism, social democracy, Georgism, conservatism, liberalism, et al. can hardly be expected to reject their philosophies in favor of anarchism simply because the revolution has taken place. The ideal is that anarchism would let all of these different models flourish simultaneously alongside one another on a voluntary basis, but the actual result will likely be that social democratic, Georgist, and republican models are prevented from being tried on a voluntary basis. Furthermore, the purist anarchists, who somewhat depart from classical anarchist thinkers like Kropotkin, wish to have pure free association, so that anyone can just opt out, but you can't realistically opt out of society, and I don't think anyone really has the right to do so. “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government,” but it is better than certain anarchist proposals which think we can do away with both markets and democracy and just get along with totally free associations.

What remains to be demonstrated by any anarchist experiment is that anarchy can produce stability and security for its citizens, ensure access to basic amenities, and produce a society with less overall suffering than various "statist" societies have. Personally, I think the prospects of abolishing poverty and wage-slavery through implementing a universal basic income funded by land value tax within the framework of existing republican systems is more promising than stateless dreams of utopia. Given the choice, most people would support policies and practices that actually harm them personally (this is why there are so many people that consistently vote for Republicans and Tories). Given power to make their own decisions, people would likely make the wrong decision. The general populace is usually uninformed about the finer points of economics and policy, and is, therefore, not in a position to make an informed decision. I think people would generally be happier under social democracy with land value tax and basic income, even if that isn’t the form of society that they would voluntarily choose if given the choice. Hence, libertarian social democracy with a republican system is preferable to anarchism, in my estimation.