With everything going on in the US I am seeing more and more of these takes by Mastodons anarchists and I once again fail to understand how their alternative would work. Especially coming out of an intensively individualized system like capitalism, how do you just do no hiearchies? And why is the State always just the cops and military, would someone think about the infrastructure, hospitals, schools…
I am biased, because I am most definitely a statist. Mainly because I have studied them and work in the public sector. It is surprisingly a lot that goes into seemingly mundane things like city planning or the planning and implementation of services of any kind, you do need experts for it. Even in luxury space communism, someone is going to have to steer the ship and design it.
I don’t know, from real life experience I know that when for example there is an emergency, people do self-organize. But at the same time I have not once experienced this happening without a hierarchy forming almost instantly.
Hopefully Anarchist comrades can chip in, but no state != no government, and no involuntary hierarchies != no hierarchies of any kind.
Government without state would mean that all the different functions that the state currently has, except for the oppressive ones, would be performed by organs that are not centrally organized by an authority with a monopoly on legitimate political violence (the state). How does that actually work in practice? That’s probably one of the main things Anarchists disagree on, so I don’t think there’s a solid answer.
I think it should be fairly self-evident how involuntary hierarchies are only a subset of all hierarchies. I think there’s a bit of a problem here WRT how they’d effectively decide which people are excluded from this arrangement to protect communities, since shooting a fascist sounds an awful lot like imposing an involuntary hierarchy of being dead onto them, but historically speaking Anarchists have done pretty well at defending against fascists so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.
But I do have some questions about education: kids probably won’t just voluntarily go to school if you give them a free choice, which I know could be improved with better education that puts their well-being first, but I think learning is something that will always be a little boring to most people so it might still be necessary to coerce children into attending school. 16 and up definitely should be allowed to freely decide for themselves, but I can’t imagine it’d be a good idea to put an 8 year old’s education entirely on their own hands.