I'm going to get some sleep, if anyone else is curious about anarchism the AFAQ often has answers for many of your common questions.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq-full
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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Also people can always ask their questions in good faith in any of the
communities to have the chance for follow up questions.
I would only really recommend !anarchism@lemmy.dbzer0.com.
Slrpnk is largely inactive, and has a post celebrating Chomsky .
And .ml is well .ml, not a good place for anarchists.
The "not making decisions for me" part is a very Trump-like thing to say. Society only works by compromise.
A federalist democracy is probably the closest we get to a free society, and one difficult part of it is, that you have to make decisions for others.
The “not making decisions for me” part is a very Trump-like thing to say. Society only works by compromise.
Society only works by consent. If the people do not consent to the laws, they are authoritarian and should be resisted.
Any top-down system of governance will never be free by its very nature.
The only free society we will get is an anarchist one where people agree to work together and create rules that they can all abide by. Those who don't want to abide by the communities rules can leave.
When I shoot a Nazi in the face, I am taking away his choice to shoot trans people in the face. If the Nazi does not consent to the law of not shooting trans people in the face, I will still shoot him in the face. If the Nazi argues that I am taking away his ability to make the decision to shoot trans people in the face, I will still shoot him in the face.
And if the Nazi argues that he is part of a community I am not in and that community has a law about shooting trans people in the face, I will still shoot him in the face.
Society only works by mutual aid. If you will not help me when I am vulnerable, why should I waste my time building a relationship with you?
Consent is secondary. A specific form of helping someone by creating a smooth exit with them if they don't want to be there anymore. Which means it can be overruled if aid is more important. You can push someone out of the way of a moving bus without asking. You can raise a child who isn't capable of consent yet. You can shoot a Nazi in the face.
Which unfortunately means that a community where people agree to work together and create rules they can all abide by is not necessarily in the clear. If that community produces far more CO2 emissions than their fair share, they are causing harm through climate change and should (IMO) be stopped. If they are on stolen land and refuse entry to native people, if they poison the river downstream, if they abuse children, if they put barbed wire fences across a natural area, if they factory farm animals, if they dry out a natural aquifer for frivolous consumption - if they raid the commons or cause harm to others in any way, they should (IMO) be stopped.
I'm ready to admit this is less free for those local societies than if they could pollute everyone into extinction. Anarchism isn't about perfect freedom, it's about abolishing hierarchy. You will attend the weekly meetings and you will help the community make informed decisions. You will avoid causing harm and you will avoid violating consent. Not because someone told you to, but because "everyone" told you to. Horizontal accountability, and horizontal enforcement if necessary.
Part of anarchism that bothers me is that without central authority keeping track of everything my ability to find specific help I need would be solely dependent on whether I or any of my friends know person with that particular set of skills.
Nothing in anarchisms stops doctors / patients from creating a website / list where they collect contacts and provide them to their community. Same goes trades, IT specialists etc.
Yes, but wouldn't whoever creates and manages that list became new equivalent of authority? They decide who is worthy to get on the list, and who can access it.
If the list is such an important resource that managing would give the person / people too much power, mechanism to mitigate that could be implemented either from the organizational side or from the technical.
Examples for organizational mitigations could be:
- management of the list rotates between members of the community
- the power to make decisions and the role of management could be split: the community decides on a policy, the people responsible only implement the policy
Technical mitigations might be:
- design the list to be decentralized, like the fediverse where multiple list exists, they get federated and noone can monopolize the knowledge
- list are maintaned similar to code repositories where everyone can make a copy, change it, fix it etc.
Also like... why would you do that in a world where nobody else does that? Growing up / living in a society where sharing, solidarity, equal access to ressources etc. are the norm, its hard to imagine this being much of an issue. There wouldnt be a profit motive, being in a position of power would be undesirable and maybe even looked down upon and you could spend your effort for something actually fullfilling. But even if that issue would pop up, a society attuned to a anti authoritarian life style would be easily challenging that situation anyway. When capitalism, the state, and hopefully other systems of power are out of the way, this small problem would probably get dealt with in a single meeting or mediation session. Because its so miniscule in the grand scheme of things.
We're on the fediverse, if you don't like one server you go to another. Maybe you moved here from reddit? Systems can be created with anarchism in mind.
Anarchism depends on free exchange of information, I'll give a real life example from people without an anarchist ideology to make this more approachable:
I've recently installed an arch-linux based operating system, knowing that there is ArchWiki to depend on if i need guidance on specific issues, that is solely because the arch community tries to be helpful and documents almost every issue or thing one might need help with.
So now I, someone who's new to linux (albeit with existing knowledge in software overall) and arch specifically, does not need to know anyone personally to fix my own issues.
Do note about this example, that this approach is limited by my existing knowledge and also by how accessible the wiki is, BUT, in other, simpler situations I wouldn't be as limited in my scope.
TL;DR: as long as people can exchange information (ideas, recipes, etc) comfortably, we can expect they will, and we can depend on information sources (libraries, platforms, etc.) to hone our skills, fix whatever we need in the moment, or whatever else.
PS. All anarchists advocate for bringing about a reality in which we all have more free time, so that we may reap the fruits of this and many other aspects of life we want to improve, read about other ideas for a more in-depth explanation.
If you're interested in more, read about Tool Libraries, I'd go into more details about all this but this comment is getting long enough :^).
I know what a tool is. And while I admire the ideals of renaissance men trying to become proficient in every possible skill, I would not trust a person who watched few videos and tinkered a bit with every single situation in my life.
I guess anarchism isn't something I would be able to work with.
I admire the ideals of renaissance men trying to become proficient in every possible skill ...
Look, maybe given the situation you would try to become proficient "in every possible skill", most people will just focus on a few key ones, and maybe have a few auxiliary ones.
No one is telling you to put your life in the hand of a hobbyist, but if you had a big wooden table with a broken leg, would you rather buy a new table (seeing as actually finding someone who deals with woodwork in this economy is almost impossible), or go see a friend/neighbor/friend-of-friend who does woodwork as (mostly) a hobby, and trade favors with them in exchange for keeping your old table you are probably sentiment about for longer than expected?
What central authority pairs you with finding specific help today? When I need to find someone, I generally search online and connect myself with people I need to.
Internet, of course!
By central authority in this case I mean any list, forum, chat, collection etc. that gathers information like "A person X has competences Y and office in place Z with contact number Q". Whoever manages, control that list becomes effectively able to dictate who and why should be accessible to public.
By saying that you search online you support Google, Bing or any other specific search algorithm as the global central authority
You can also have wikis or defederated platform, you should know, you're on one...
Internet is the definition of a decentralised information sharing system, though. If you don't like your current search engine, you swap to another. If you can't find the information you need on one forum, you go to another. If you have the information more accurate and up to date than the list you find online, you update it (if it's in a wiki format) or contact its author to contribute.
Centralisation of the internet is the direct result of authorities trying to impose their will on people who didn't consent to it.
The part where we all die, because a foreign army invades us, and no one is doom guy.
Saying this as an green anarcho transhumanist.
For anarchism to happen ideally, I believe everyone in the world has to share the same values and mindset for it to work. That foreign army invades, because they don't share the same peaceful and horizontal societial values as we do. In other words, anarchist values has to be planetary wide.
The best example of planetary wide anarchist community is the Fremen in Dune. They still have local cultural differences between the northerners and southerners but they all get along. But in spite of that condition, there is the problem yet again of foreign armies coming to invade, but from a different planet. This yet again requires the need for scaling anarchism to a universal level to prevent the threat of "outsider" invasion.
I would be an anarchist, but because of said reasons, we still don't have the culture yet of wide scale egalitarianism. Having grown up multicultural, I know many cultures are hierarchical and competitive. Unfortunately, with the current paradigm, the threat of foreign armies invading anarchist societies is real.
Maybe we should invade them first with our ideas and acts of solidarity, so that they have to focus their armed forces on quelling their local unrest.
How do you expect there to be a "we all" to invade without "us all" being able to take on nation-states?
Daily reminder that the Taliban managed to send the US military packing by fighting from a cave with a bunch of scraps. Guerilla is incredibly effective at turning empires into dust if you start the guerilla prepared, which any newly independent anarchist commune would automatically be by virtue of being newly independent.
I'm not sure if I consider "Afghanistan during the Taliban guerilla war" a good example of ideal anarchist living. Nor what came after that for that matter.
No, but they serve to illustrate how a guerilla can defeat the largest state military in the world, which is what the concern was.
If you want to have exact historical examples of something succeeding before supporting it, you're never going to be first at anything. And with capitalism murdering over a hundred million of our grandchildren per year, we don't have the luxury of patience.
My problem with anarchy is that your freedom doesn't end where mine begins.
“Your rights end where another’s rights begin.” According to that logic, the more people there are, the less freedom.
But freedom is not a tiny bubble of personal rights. We cannot be distinguished from each other so easily. Yawning and laughter are contagious; so are enthusiasm and despair. I am composed of the clichés that roll off my tongue, the songs that catch in my head, the moods I contract from my companions. When I drive a car, it releases pollution into the atmosphere you breathe; when you use pharmaceuticals, they filter into the water everyone drinks. The system everyone else accepts is the one you have to live under—but when other people challenge it, you get a chance to renegotiate your reality as well. Your freedom begins where mine begins, and ends where mine ends. [...]
Freedom is not a possession or a property; it is a relation. It is not a matter of being protected from the outside world, but of intersecting in a way that maximizes the possibilities. That doesn’t mean we have to seek consensus for its own sake; both conflict and consensus can expand and ennoble us, so long as no centralized power is able to compel agreement or transform conflict into winner-takes-all competition. But rather than breaking the world into tiny fiefdoms, let’s make the most of our interconnection.
Citing crimethinc as an answer to this
According to that logic, the more people there are, the less freedom.
This is only true to a certain extent. People have rights that align.
I didn't have more freedom when I lived in my small 38 pop vilage than I have now.
It is correct that a car releases pollution in the atmosphere everyone breathes. This is why in most civilized countries, there are regulations that people have to follow.
Regulations are meaningless without enforcement.
You are concerned by the pharmaceutical stuff that filters into the water... Such a miniscule non-issue.
In your anarchy world, what are you going to do when some community upstream decides that the river is a perfectly good place to dump their waste?
That makes zero sense. I’m sure subverting the saying sounded cool, but it doesn’t convey a meaning.
The part where you either assume people don't have misaligned interests or that they do but they can resolve it in a rational way.
I think a system where everyone has a pretty similar amount of power / influence is way better in dealing with that than systems where individuals are able to hoard power and resources to further their misaligned interests.
As a basic level everyone has the same interests.
Food, community, shelter, utilities (in the modern era)
interests on these basic needs can still be misaligned
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