I think they meant to ask “in an anarchic society, who enforces rights in the absence of the state?”
Also I’ll second that motion because I honestly know next to nothing about anarchy.
My understanding is that anarchy isn’t about the lack of any authority, it’s the lack of unearned authority or unearned authoritative hierarchy. If the members of a community choose to use a democratic process to elect individuals to hold some specific authority for an amount of time that doesn’t stop being anarchy. It stops being anarchy when individuals capture or hold authority not granted by a dictate from the community. There are some issues with how a species like humanity could be governed under anarchy, but enforcing rights isn’t a necessary problem.
I thought absence of a state was kind of core to anarchy. Wouldn’t any sort of elected official or rights enforcing body be the de facto state regardless of how you frame it?
Though, I’m not trying to debate, just trying to grasp the concept, so if y’all have something like an anarchist pamphlet I’ll be glad to take that and go lol. Longer literature is fine but no promises on when it’ll get read.
Yeah no sweat I’m not an authority on anarchy if you’ll excuse the pun and https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anarchism/ is probably going to be a better source
I think the biggest difference between what I was describing and a state is the individuals elected are not part of any governing body or political party and are granted authority by a community for a specific purpose/job.
In general and broadly somewhere between ‘that’s Diane we elected her during the last community meeting to take care of the roads for the next 5 years based on community funds because she’s got some good ideas on how to do that we mostly agree on’ and ‘the person you elected is a member of a governing body representing a political party following a bureaucracy of processes and they’re in charge of police, education, roads, etc so if you want anything done get your wallet ready for lobbying and if you try to fix that pothole yourself it’s illegal’ a line is crossed.
Anarchist here. I recommend the Anarchist FAQ. for an extensive and well sourced answer.
I love how you have the decency to frame it as a lack of understanding on your side. If you’re interested, I can look up entry level material about that question tomorrow or the day after for you.
Yeah I’ve seen too many “just asking questions” types so I absolutely don’t want to be seen as doing that. I have a basic concept of anarchy but that’s all. And that’d be cool, drop a reply here or dm.
Glad to be of help! I think it’s better to do it here so other people might find it as well.
A very resourceful channel is Anark. Maybe his “mini series” Listen, Liberals and Listen, Conservatives is a good starting point or Why we must destroy the state. He also has a series about Liberation in Action. More to the point of your question might be a video by another resourceful channel Andrewism called We Need To Rethink Justice.
I hope this is still entry level. It might be too much but you don’t have to watch everything but once you did, you will find more videos about this topic.
In an anarchist ideal society everyone would get along and it would be butterflies and gumdrops. But in reality the person with the bigger stick will simply take what they want and everyone will just say “hey stop that” and then get shot in the face. Naivety: political edition.
Which anarchist said everyone had to get along? You’re building a straw man nobody is actually advocating for.
If you need an example of how a system of agreement across large groups that sometimes violently disagree can work without any governing body see bitcoin and the block chain ledger it maintains. You don’t need 100% agreement to maintain the integrity of the ledger, just 51%.
Who do you think keeps getting into street fights with fascists? Like anarchists are notoriously willing to engage in political violence against oppressors. For fucks sake we had an army in the Russian revolution and we poured in from around the world to shoot at Francoists.