How would anarchist societies protect themselves?
Letters to an anarchist, part three.
Last year, I asked
, author of , to explain anarchism to me. We spent the past year writing back and forth and are now publishing our letters as a series called “Letters to an Anarchist.” You can catch up here:This is part three 👇🏻
Dear Peter,
Thank you so much for this detailed response. I have officially read through many of the resources you sent me!
I will admit I'm not sure how to navigate these ideas because it feels like we're looking at completely different versions of history. For example, of the idea to remove the police force, you say, "whenever spaces are wrested from the rule of law, many conflicts cease to exist and many of those that remain tend to be solved much more peacefully."
I'm not sure where that idea is coming from? Because for most of human history we didn't have police forces. Tribal communities didn't have police forces and those societies were rife with conflict and very violent means of resolution. Often they just killed people who committed crimes against another person. Or else they just got away with it.
Speaking just of the island of Maui, in the 1500s any crimes committed against another person meant death, unless that person could outrun those who hunted him and make it to sanctuary. Women were killed for just eating a banana. And sure, maybe that removes the need for a police force if you can just kill the people who wrong others, but it doesn't seem like a better way to do things?
And you say: "Free societies would not war with each other, but intermingle in a borderless exchange of goods and ideas completely free of charge.”
But why would we not war with each other? We always have. China and Japan have a long history of warring groups and conquering parties. The history of Europe is just person after person trying to conquer everything and make it theirs. Britain went on a conquering spree around the world, then Europeans moved to North America and conquered everything there too. Before that, tribes around the world were constantly at war with one another.
, of the Anarchy Works website, seems to think if we just didn't have states we wouldn't war and then he cherry picks a couple "stateless societies" that he says didn't war—the Lakota and other Plains peoples who "touched an enemy with a stick" rather than killing him or who vandalized a neighboring town without killing anyone. But that feels very beside the point—because of course there can be peaceful societies. But only until someone else wants a less peaceful one! Those two tribes were eventually taken over by European settlers who had much bigger sticks!Even if being stateless seems like a kind of ideal, someone else will be stateful and destroy it.
Yes, I fully agree that there are bad uses for the police force and the military and we should figure out how to fix those, but I also very much see some form of them as necessary for protection. Both to protect people from bad actors in their communities, and to protect countries from being taken over by other ones. If the United States were suddenly to declare that there is no government and no capitalism and we were just a network of individual communities, I guarantee that another country would immediately take us over.
Peter talks about how borderless societies would go a long way against war and I agree, but I think we'd have a better chance at achieving "local anarchy" if those local communities were protected from bad actors on a larger scale. Because at any time, there might be a mentally ill character who might cause harm, or a power hungry character who wants to take over your land or your port or your oil or your water. (This is, by the way, the premise of Aldous Huxley's utopian novel Island, which features a society that has managed to achieve utopia, but is now being exploited by the outside world for its oil).
Finally, for your vision of an anarchist society, you say: "I'd look at current systems and turn them upside-down: people in a free society would not work, they would play. Things would still get done, but people would not be coerced to do them, or exploited while doing so. A free society would not send its children to schools; instead, young people would participate fully in the life of those around them."
Quite simply, this breaks my brain a bit and I would just love more information. Can you give me examples of communities where people don't work and yet things still get done? Or where children don't go to school but are still educated? I'm very open to alternative ways of doing things, and in breaking some of the systems we currently have in practice in favor of better ones, but these are just not examples I have had exposure to.
Thanks for thinking with me,
To achieve anarchist goals we’ll need a rewrite of human source code. We’ll need a whole new set of stories to bind us and a whole bunch of narratives will need to be tossed away. Discussions like this are a great way to move these stories into the mainstream.
The thing is, to live within our means, we need to embody a lot of anarchist principles. We need to devalue domination while lifting up cooperation. We need to devalue the personal wealth of accumulation and value the common wealth of redistribution. It’s not really utopic when you look at it this way, it’s necessary.
Somehow, we have to get to this state or expect an endless future of conflict over diminishing resources.
I believe this is possible, just not in my lifetime, and I fear that will take planetary level cataclysm to do so.
Tribal living was the way children was educated for hundred of thousands of years. They didn't have anything resembling school, and learning happened naturally by being part of the community. It is easy to underestimate just how much native people learned as part of this process (since it looks so different from our learning), but they had an encyclopedic knowledge about their surroundings and how to survive in it.
For a recent example, check out this article about some native kids that was in a plane crash and ended up alone in the middle of the jungle, yet still was able to survive where even experienced forest guides would have a hard time: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/how-4-children-survived-40-days-jungle-plane-crash-amazon-colombia-rcna88791
You could say that this is all good, but it would never work for the kind of learning needed by children today. You are not going to learn arithmetic in the jungle.
But it turns out that this process also can work for a modern curriculum. There is a school in Massachusetts, called the Sudbury Valley School, where the environment is set up as a mini version of the outer world, with a a full democracy and all the kids being fully autonomous members of the society (so no classes, no grades and nobody can tell anyone else what to do). The surprising thing is that this school has existed since the 60's and have great track record of kids turning out well rounded and ready for college. They have tons of material documenting their method and results on their site: https://sudburyvalley.org/