Is anarchism a feasible idea? Could an entire society of anarchists work?
Posted by T.Collins Logan on
Thanks for the question, James. Of course certain kinds of anarchism are feasible, and for fairly large societies. There is historical evidence of this in the following places:
Free Territory - Wikipedia
Strandzha Commune - Wikipedia
Guangzhou - Wikipedia
Revolutionary Catalonia - Wikipedia
(you can see a full list here: List of anarchist communities - Wikipedia)
Unfortunately, many folks don’t know of these experiments, some of which endured for years before they were violently suppressed (usually by authoritarian dictators…and, rather ironically, “communist” ones of the Stalinist variety). Peter Kropotkin inspired many of these experiments, and I would encourage reading him (Conquest of Bread is a good place to start).
One interesting place to watch is the anarchist region of Northern Syria (previously called Rojava). You can read about it here: Syria's Kurds Experiment With Democracy Amid Civil War. It’s still thriving today…although with the U.S. abandoning Syrians now, it may not endure much longer.
Lastly, we must recognize that only left-anarchist experiments have been successfully tried. These actually fall under the “libertarian socialism” heading. Right-libertarianism, “Libertarian” with a capital “L,” or anarcho-capitalism, has never been successful.
My 2 cents.
Free Territory - Wikipedia
Strandzha Commune - Wikipedia
Guangzhou - Wikipedia
Revolutionary Catalonia - Wikipedia
(you can see a full list here: List of anarchist communities - Wikipedia)
Unfortunately, many folks don’t know of these experiments, some of which endured for years before they were violently suppressed (usually by authoritarian dictators…and, rather ironically, “communist” ones of the Stalinist variety). Peter Kropotkin inspired many of these experiments, and I would encourage reading him (Conquest of Bread is a good place to start).
One interesting place to watch is the anarchist region of Northern Syria (previously called Rojava). You can read about it here: Syria's Kurds Experiment With Democracy Amid Civil War. It’s still thriving today…although with the U.S. abandoning Syrians now, it may not endure much longer.
Lastly, we must recognize that only left-anarchist experiments have been successfully tried. These actually fall under the “libertarian socialism” heading. Right-libertarianism, “Libertarian” with a capital “L,” or anarcho-capitalism, has never been successful.
My 2 cents.
Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entryThis link is not meant to be clicked. It contains the trackback URI for this entry. You can use this URI to send ping- & trackbacks from your own blog to this entry. To copy the link, right click and select "Copy Shortcut" in Internet Explorer or "Copy Link Location" in Mozilla.
No Trackbacks
The author does not allow comments to this entry
Comments
Display comments as Linear | ThreadedNo comments