Do you like fiction novels? I feel like novels that describe potential anarchist societies through the lense of one or more individuals are pretty helpful in kickstarting your imagination.

I would recommend highly

• A Country of Ghosts by Margaret Killjoy
• The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia Ursula K. Le Guin

Maybe others can recommend similar oe shorter stories or different media with similar anarchist societies as a backdrop.

Just a reminder to everyone, if you’re running Linux you can install the Anarchy package which contains the full Anarchist FAQ.

On Debian based systems, run: sudo apt install anarchy

So, this question is often asked and the real answer is that due to the very nature of anarchism, no one can really say for sure. To prescribe one system for “how it will all work” is sort of antithetical to anarchy. Emma Goldman touches on this in her essay “Anarchism” (iirc, someone correct me if i’m wrong lol).
There are lots of different schools of thought, however. It’s not like there haven’t been attempts to answer the question, its just that they should all only be considered as possibilities, whereas the actual implementation may draw from all of these ideas or none of them, possibly even shifting according to the needs and abilities of the people over any given period of time.

Here’s a good resource as well: https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/sectionI.html

What has helped me with my imagination is the idea of the abolishment of money and private (not personal) property. In any society without those two things the burden of being is just not there.

In most societies the pressure that you must work for the sake of working because you must have money makes people desperate. If you do not work you do not get money and then you starve and you are homeless. I ask people “imagine if money is no longer issue. What would you do…” then they see the world through different eyes.

Your question on trust and law today is with that punishing system of work and money and capital. Remove that burden and you remove a lot of those challenges. You begin to no longer judge crimes of need, you begin to mediate conflict of interests.

It is a long path. It is not easy and is against the nature of everything around you. That is why it is revolutionary.

Hello there, these are good questions. Thank you for asking them.

Anarchy in theory is great and it is fairly obvious for small societies.

The point here is that, societies may in fact have to be smaller to function, at least for a while, until people learn to work together better. They may interoperate through networks though, for a good example of this we recommend the book “A Half-Built Garden” by Ruthanna Emrys.

The penalty system.

Time and time again carceral and punitive system have shown not to work for their stated goals. It is likely we would switch to a restorative and transformative model of justice, that or use violence very careful, like a scalpel instead of how it is currently used: like a sword or a bomb, swinging widly around or destroying whole communities of people.

Military forces. I mean like an anarchist country could already be a target.

If people cooperate, share freely and aren’t held back from doing so then it is likely there wouldn’t be those problems, plus we would likely move on from the resources, and ways of thinking that caused this. Though yes that is a good question to ponder in transitional phases, likely there would be something akin to a military that worked for the people whilst they deconstructed both systems and thinking which caused this.

anarchist country

This is kind of a contradiction in terms, countries are a product of having a state/central system of authority which isn’t what anarchists are likely interested in having.

And some person just trying to take the power while getting people join to them.

Right, which is why education and community support would have to be improved in order to counter this kind of person or group, not through coercion but more through teaching people to think for themselves and how to weigh costs against benefits. We tend to think that people would be more for a collective, and caring system/community, especially once they saw the benefits and weren’t raised in a coercive, individualistic, and violent one.

Like Idk maybe I am missing something or I’m dumb

It’s okay to not understand things, that doesn’t make you dumb. However, we would recommend reading, watching and listening to some people who break it all down. We can give recommendations if you’d like?

But I don’t think that’s the mayority of people.

People are maleable and tend to perform better when there’s less or no violence, coercion and they can get rest, none of these things are currently offered by most socieites/communities people live in.

Besides from a lot of people being agaonst the whole idea in the first place making it vey hard or almpst impoasible to mantain.

A lot of people are against things that would benefit them until they see them in action, most fights against anarchist communites/societies have been top down rather than communities against them.

That isn’t to say it wasn’t provoked by those communities, or couldn’t be, however, they usually use state aparatus in order to get their way which is why we have to dismantle the state or figure out ways to protective ourselves against it until we can maintain control in a transitional phase. Which yes, would not be easy, but it would be worthwhile.

Every person who have hands can hold weapon. Every person can perform moral judge. People can join group and abandon any system they want and it doesn’t have to be anarchy system. Any people can arrive to any country at any time. Like imagine all UK people are suddenly abandoning their homes and arriving to France. Who can stop them ? Don’t overthink it. We are only two weeks of power failure away from this system.

Imagine the same society, but everywhere there is hierarchy, you replace bosses by a collective assembly, which takes biggest decisions and mandates people for small, specified missions of oversight/management, and you get one option. From there, you can get another one if we want to do it without money : get rid of banks anf stuff, and organize local communities into regional federations, with multiple associations getting the information of what people need, and handling the collection and distribution of what is produced to everyone, and you get another one. Like people said, it can take many forms, both because there is a lot of different anarchist movments and because each one is not written in stone and is meant to evolve according to people needs.

For cops/judges, most anarchist advocate for reparative systems instead of repressive ones. There does not really need to be laws, though you could still have it, because it just tries to solve problems with everyone agreeing on a reparation specific to each situation. People in Chiapas are trying to implement that if i’m not mistaken.

For armies, anarchist did have armies in the past, you could have one or multiple existing in autonomy, or have a system where common people are trained to join an army of needed, like swiss people.

The problem of people trying to rebuild power is of course a big one, but if we managed to get rid of a fully developped power in place since centuries, there’s no reason to think we can’t get rid of an emerging one.

The questions you ask are very common, it’s not dumb. It’s just asked from the perspective we’ve been told so much and so early that it’s deeply rooted in us, that violence and coercion are necessary for a working society, so it’s hard to imagine anything outside of this.

I’ve never seen anyone square the circle of how anarchy would work with earth’s sporadic and unfair resource distribution.

Imagine one community is built on nothing but arable land and a neighbor is starving with access to iron mines. What material force prevents the latter from subjugating the former with superior weapons?

The arable community “gifts” food? Sounds an awful lot like a Danegeld, and that historically doesn’t end well. Some day the harvest will be too little or the ask will be too much.

The arable community defends itself through sheer numbers? Good job, you fended them off, but those people starving in the hills still have better weapons and are still desperate enough to raid; you’ll need a group of people to hyperspecialize in violence for defense. So now you’re optimizing your society around feeding and arming the defender class… Over time the domestic power imbalance accumulates and one day you look up and realize you’ve invented feudalism.

You can extend this thought experiment to any set of resources. If you want your anarchist utopia to have electronics, how do the copper mines of Chile not generate disproportionate power for whoever occupies them? What non-hierarchical power equilibrium enforces stability around fossil fuels, rare earth minerals, fishing rights, solar/wind power production, water access, etc… Don’t just tell me, show me on a map how it will work.

And when you can’t do that, we can proceed to hunter-gatherer anarcho-primitivism. Then you can tell me what power equilibrium prevents the occupation of arable land for agriculture and the reseeding of sedentary civilization and violent hierarchy.

It’s not going to work. There are always people that crave power.

I cant imagine anything being different, how would you do everything the same?

Your imagination has failed. There are a million ways to do this shit, and part of anarchism is allowing many ways of life to thrive.

I’ll also be reminding you that we currently have literally every problem you’re proposing, often funded or exacerbated by tax dollars and capital’s infernal machinery. Literally the worst case you’re afraid of isn’t worse than how most people already live.

conquest

You’ve seen how industrialized centralized militaries do against scrappy insurgencies where every person is a potential fighter. Its not good for them. They lose. They limp home bleeding. The wounds kill the beast as often as not. When the means of production proliferate and are impossible to control, so do the means of resistance. Nothing short of scorched earth extermination would give them the advantage, and I’m not even sure of that.

Though the almost-anarchist AANES has several organized military groups that fought off the much larger better armed turkish-isis coalition, the anarchist-influenced zapatistas fought off the much larger Mexican federal military, and even Mao largely adopted our methods to make his authoritarian warlordism work for shit.

laws

Nope. You know when shit isn’t okay? When nobody would appreciate some shit? Yeah you do. Don’t fucking do that shit, or somebody, anybody, might do something about it. Unless you explain yourself. No more violent than a group of dedicated killers and kidnappers roaming the street, probably less, and certainly more egalitarian.

It might even stop some of the awful shit victimization and exploitation that laws enforce and do nothing to stop.

My answer to ‘who will stop murders if not police?’ is always ‘worst case? Same as now; friends and bystanders. But bystanders will be empowered to act and my tax dollars won’t have paid for the bullet and a weeks paid vacation for the murderer’

people suck and need to be good

People including myself have been raised and brutalized when we fail to participate in societies that run on engines of vice. Its been drilled into us. You still asked this. I was still here to answer you. A decentralized system of social cohesion is more adaptable and less corruptable, because there are no single points of failure and it doesn’t valorize exploitation and corruption.

Without the hyperobject of authoritarian violence escalating everything, it gets a lot easier to talk to people about shit.

When we aren’t all alienated from how others support us and our ways of life, it gets much easier to compromise with them, because the compromise is shit like ‘okay, let’s make more slightly less excessive graphics cards’ or ‘let’s all be a little hungry, so nobody fucking starves to death, because I throw up and waste like a thousand calories every time I see a corpse’ rather than ‘exterminate half the Jews and half the queers and half the (oh my god thanks was a centrist)’.

inequality

Takes a lot to maintain. The maintenance of injustice obeys almost the rules of thermodynamics. Without a belief than injustice is necessary or even acceptable, without a follower herd mentality where we can only make change with the permission of a daddy, it’s much harder to do and does not scale. Of course it will never be completely even-the best fish will always be at the coasts, just as it is now, and the farmer or expert gardener will always taste the best vegetables, but a conscious effort to keep everyone happy and fed is in everyone’s best interest, and who doesn’t want to share what they love? Which leads to

why would anyone do anything

If I want to put together a gaming computer, that requires infrastructure. That requires miners and electrical engineers and mechanical engineers and all sorts of technicians and tons of resources. That’s not really a problem; I know for a fact there are people in all of those professions who want to call me slurs and remind me that my mom gets way more laid than me (like I never lived in the same house with the woman) while they tea bag my virtual corpse. And they want others to shout slurs at over the internet too!

It’s usually infrastructure that takes the real work. Infrastructure works for everybody, and if nobody owns it, everybody can use it, be responsible for it, maintain and improve it, make it work for them. Look at how open source software works.

And its a lot less tempting to exploit others when you’ll have to defend that shit yourself, and everyone will hate you for it. Maybe kill you or embargo you for it. So everything ends up being for everybody. Or close enough.

fairness

You’ve never seen this shit. Every time you’ve ever been told you’re allowed or disallowed, it wasn’t based on ecological carrying capacity or long term feasability, but on totally artificial structures of privilege.

It feels a lot different to be told ‘I’m sorry, there’s no food left. I can’t help’ or ‘this is incurable. All the research is hitting a brick wall’ than ‘sorry, you can’t afford to live, fucking peasant.’. Right now if I steal food, less food gets thrown away and the line doesn’t go up so much. During a famine in a rational society, if I steal food someone else goes hungry-or there was enough food I didn’t have to steal it. It’s not the same.

In the future; consider reading a fucking book.

Here’s a thought experiment:

Imagine trying to operate a modern county hospital as an anarchist organization. For the sake of the experiment, let’s assume this is a miraculous money-free post-scarcity society and we’re not worried about the cost associated with anything or handling billing nonsense. We are absolving ourselves of all of the complexities of the accounting department, thus simplifying everything. Materials and labor are supplied for free, somehow (handwaving details TK).

OK, so what we’re concerned with is system management. Inputs and outputs, and internal processes. Patient appointments, work shifts, task assignments, surgery schedules, emergency response, education and training programs, laboratory analysis, medication distribution, food distribution, waste disposal, supply requisition, shipping and receiving, inpatient and outpatient care, and above all sanitation for everything. The goal is to have the right resources in the right places at the right times. If you miss the goal, people die.

Is this a system that can operate effectively without dedicated authority figures? without centralized management? Can a hospital be run effectively as a coalition of equals, with no empowered oversight?

No.

Why would the rest of a society that exists around a hospital be any less complex in practice?