Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

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> state power rests on violence and coercion; violence and coercion, to be defensible, require a moral justification; social contract theory and all other attempts in this regard are pathetically inadequate. Therefore, there should be no political state.

Stuff like this is why anarchist writing is so unreadable and unpersuasive. Like okay you've discarded the entire framework of society and oh I should read your book to find out why... But what would I, given this sample of how inhuman and inane your analysis is?

This stuff is dropped like it's a logical conclusion of a rigorous mathematical framework and therefore incontrovertible. Yet it sounds instead like clear evidence that the logic and the framework are themselves broken, since the conclusions are laughable and absurd. Anarchist writers always seem unable to grasp this. The result is that their body of theory is essentially meaningless to anyone who doesn't already believe in it at a basically religious level.

Obviously I haven't read, like, a majority of anarchist writing. But anyone who's wandered the internet for a while has likely encountered a lot of what I'm talking about.

Dismissing an argument on the basis of its conclusion certainly seems like an odd way to go about things. Many of the social structures we take for granted today would have at one point seemed absurd.

Agreed. For example: Animals in the wilderness also rely on violence and coercion. Even herbivores predate on plants. Clearly this violence and coercion is even less justifiable, as animals as a group have no social contract theory etc to speak of. Therefore, there should be no animals.

There are people who genuinely believe this, such as https://reducing-suffering.org/ . But they definitely don't come at it from such a half baked angle.

That page has some wild topics... https://reducing-suffering.org/should-we-intervene-in-nature...

I abhor graebers writing,but this conclusion is reasonable. "The entire framework of society" I think the point is, that the entire framework of society developed to enrich people who are already rich. Palace and Temple economies wouldn't have existed if they didn't raid and ultimately conquer their agrarian neighbors. Surely there's a social framework that doesn't require violence? If there isn't, shouldn't there be?

>Anarchist writers always seem unable to grasp this. >Obviously I haven't read, like, a majority of anarchist writing.

hmmmmm

> hmmmmm

I said it that way on purpose! Of course I haven't read the majority of anarchist writing, because all the anarchist writing I did read had this same fatal flaw that made it uninteresting. It'd be crazy to keep reading.

Its funny because I have the opposite problem. A lot (A LOT) of anarchist writing presupposes a very strong government, but that government gets a pass as not being "The State" because its super nice and gives you bread.

Seems like you have higher tendency to rejecting an argument because you don't like it's conclusion, which obviously irrational.

It's refusing to accept that there is a moral basis for initiating force or harm against another.

Now this world really does operate by force, and spends a lot of resources to accommodate its citizens to its force - education, culture, finance, law are all part of the toolbox. It will justify itself, call itself 'good', 'better than other options'.. it will even use its superior forces to undermine any other attempts of living. Anyone who initiates violence against someone is in the wrong - it does not miraculously become 'right' when the government does it, just cos it has written some rules on bits of paper.

So it depends on how you stack things. Is doing things right most important thing? Or is one in thrall to whoever currently holds the levers of power to exercise its force as they see fit? And, a personal question, if it is the latter - do you call this is if force 'good', is government good? Do you accept this authority?

Right but most people won't agree with that premise, about there being no moral basis for harm. It is weird and irrelevant to reality for most of us.

If you are trying to make a point to someone else who doesn't reject that premise, then it does literally nothing to talk about all the conclusions that follow from the premise. It only convinces your audience that they were right to ignore you in the first place because you are discussing an irrelevant contrived question.

Yes, most people think it's fine to initiate harm. It's foundational to the state. It's a choice to accept this, and go along with it.

It seem like you are writing bullshit because you have no idea what you are talking about. Read about projects like Revolutionary Catalonia or Free Territory of Ukraine to see how anarchists organized on a big scale - through some kind of federated horizontal structures.

> through some kind of federated horizontal structures.

If you federate horizontal structures, what you have is a hierarchy. All this proves is that some kind of hierarchy and delegation of power becomes neessary for large-scale decision making. We see this even in voluntary organizations, such as large firms (including large co-ops, which do have formal management).

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