Anarchy...WTF? or, The Good Side of Government.

I wish anarchy worked. In an anarchist society your rapist would have been detained by the community and ejected, or possibly killed if the community is a little harsh. Just because there are no formal rules or laws doesn't mean that somekind of process, no matter how informal, wouldn't be in place for removing undesirables. You would also have had the option of taking matters into your own hands.

Everything that detective does for you is something that you are not allowed to do for yourself. You give up plenty for that protection. I am not saying that it isn't a good thing that you are getting the push towards justice that you deserve, but you are lucky to have your case taken so seriously. Plenty of people have their rapes essentially ignored.

Obviously we need some kind of government, but a lot of cops, and a lot of what they do are/is still bullshit aimed at putting as many people in jail as possible.

I seem to have lost my train of thought...

Anyway, I hope you get justice and can move on with your life.

Res ipsa loquitur.
memor mori, mahalo.

How can you be sure that a community would detain/eject or do whatever else to an offender like that? That's the whole part I am unsure of about the theory. One of the reasons why most rapes go unreported is because the victim fears what others may think. The guy who did this was someone I worked with, even considered my friend. He was well-respected and I doubt anybody would guess that he could commit a crime like this. So what if in this theoretical community he was well liked? What if other members of the community had only my claims and description of the incident to go on? What if, for some reason, some members of the community thought I was lying? Just a few questions. You got my brain working now.

___________________________
"Let the world change you, and you will change the world."

i'm giving this blogging thing a try, but music comes easier...http://www.myspace.com/myfutureself

You have a bsic misunderstanding of anarchy. Anarchy does not mean no rules. Anarchy does not mean no government. Anarchy means no state, that is, no centralized authoritarian rulers.

Anarchy is democracy taken serious.

In your unfortunate situation, in a functioning anarchy, you would have been taken care of by your neighbors and fellow community members who would form ad-hoc groups to take of care of victims of such crimes. An authoritarian police force would not be necessary, as your fellow community members would support you and bring the culprit to justice.

Justice would consist of re-establishment of balance, not retribution. The community would direct the culprit to make good to you what has been taken from you, and to support you until balance is achieved,

Crimes occur against the community, not just against individuals. In anarchy, community balance is uppermost.

Hayduke

I agree with what you said, Dr Gonzo, and what Hayduke said as well. You have both explained things better for me...like I said, I never studied anarchism in depth. But, Hayduke, I was never under the impression that anarchy means a complete absence of rules, or a chaotic society or anything like that...maybe I came off that way because of what I said.
The anarchist scenario doesn't sound so bad. I have two major problems with it though, still. First, what Dr Gonzo said about a rape kit probably not being available: I didn't know a rape kit even existed until I had to get one, and I (as well as anyone else who's ever been through this) now know that it is completely necessary. It tests the victim for a whole slew of STDs as well as HIV and pregnancy. The nurse also checks for internal injuries (sorry if this is getting too graphic), which is especially important in violent cases.

Second...about what Dr Gonzo said: "In an anarchy you could just kill the guy if you wanted, or tell a bunch of people and get them to not deal with him until he leaves." That is a horrible idea. First, because even though I really hate this man, I would never kill anyone. Maybe it's just me. If it came between killing him and making him suffer for years, I'd choose the suffering. And more importantly, most victims of rape, myself included, have absolutely NO desire to see the assaulter, or even be reminded in the slightest of anything to do with him. I am okay to talk about it, especially online where I am pretty anonymous -- but just the thought of certain things that remind me of the incident makes me very anxious. I don't know if any victim would want to personally deal with the process of bringing justice. If there were a supportive community willing to do it, fine. But in all honesty, in my case, I am perfectly fine with giving up certain rights in order to have the police deal with this.

Wait, I thought of one more thing. "It might not and people might decide you are lying or even that it doesn't matter because they like the dude better." That's exactly what I don't like about the scenario. Something like 2% of all reported rape cases are lies. That's not higher than any other crime. Why would anybody want to lie about it? The rape kit alone is a very obvious indicator of whether or not the victim is telling the truth. Yet you say that in the anarchist community, there would likely be no rape kit. So, what, the community is supposed to just guess as to whether the victim is telling the truth? They risk the health and possibly the life of a (most likely) totally innocent woman...maybe just because they like the man better? What the hell. Sorry if I am being harsh here. Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut, haha, because now I'm getting wound up.

___________________________
"Let the world change you, and you will change the world."

i'm giving this blogging thing a try, but music comes easier...http://www.myspace.com/myfutureself

Actually, that implied statement popped out at me, but I'm here going to criticize the whole dialogue here from a solid anarcho-communist position - as I'm an anarcho-communist. Kind of. Anyway, let's begin!

"Two things I used to really hate: policemen and the government."

Anarchists don't hate policemen, they hate the police as an institution. I spent ten weeks travelling this summer and I encountered a police officer almost every single day. They were the nicest heavily armed white middle class males I've ever met - probably because I'm a middle class white male (the one cop I showed my combat knife hummed and hawed with glowing respect, even though I was a vagrant with an illegal weapon). Cops are "nice" people, meaning they're normal people with a knack for harassing people systematically and doing with the pretense of making a safer society. Just because your detective was nice, it does NOT follow that the police as an institution are either necessary or "not so bad" - again a delusion we can afford to harbor as some of the few sole benefactors of the police presence, who exist primarily to defend the property of the rich and the precariously balanced middle class as well as to reinforce hierarchy (the opposite of anarchy, NOT "the government") in all its' forms, from racism to jingoism, et. al.

"A little more than a year ago I became interested in anarchy as an idealistic way of life." Anarchy is not an idealistic way of life, a utopia, or what have you. It's simply a more intelligent, efficient, pleasant way to organize our society. It's a stepping stone to even better ways to organize ourselves as humans as we do whatever we feel like doing while we're alive and stuck on the same planet (or, later, perhaps just in the same solar system) together.

"I loved the idea of people working together for the good of each other; just the whole sense of community behind it." People do that now! We just want to institutionalize it!

"For me, believing in anarchism required one thing which I was very good at: trusting other people." You don't have to trust people irrationally (I'm not saying you do, but that's what most people associate trust with - an irrational faith in the good intentions of others, which is something apparently to be proud of) for anarchy to work. Trust is something that is earned by empirically observing patterns of behavior in other individuals, and this would apply in the same manner (perhaps more rigidly) in an anarchist society as collectives, federations, and communes communicate with each other about needs, goals, and projects.

"I think that humans are good by nature, that we are instinctually kind beings." That's cute, but I think it misses the point: that we're *cooperative* by nature, that we're a *social* species, and that our abilities are oriented towards maxamizing the input of every individual to more efficiently achieve some goal which would be beneficial to each individual. People fall in love and trust each other and have fun together and teach each other things not because of some abstract tripe about being intrinsically good - as if our characters are magically separate from the material world, as if the way we analyze information and experience isn't preset by our genes and then molded (quite extensively, it turns out!) by our social experience (as well as, though this is still very much under the microscope, diet and exercise!) - but because it's just a more effective way to maintain the existence of the species and its' dependants, as demonstrated by (pre-!)history itself.
"None of that crap about man being a war-mongering and destructive species." We hear this a lot from the few, extraordinarily wealthy idiots who stand to gain from repeating this scientifically incorrect bullshit - the "unbiased" mass media which is owned by huge multinational corporations owned and run by some of the most conservative, braindead motherfuckers on planet Earth (including more than a few literal self-proclaimed fascists). Who's surprised, then, that this bull is also most prevalent (more and more) among the junior benefactors of the bourgeoisie, that is, the priviliged and so-beloved buffer between the few rich and the vast number of suffering (marginalized by borders and gated communities) poor - the middle class?

"Just look at the Native Americans - were they awesome or what? Not very anarchistic by today's standards, but at least they fought wars over real things...not oil or money." I'm tired of this, too. Native people spend a lot of time worrying about mythical non-sense and kill each other as a part of rituals (sound familiar?), or over (yes!) conceptions of property - more usually human property than land or food. Yeah, they understood that cooperation is useful and effective for surviving and generally getting things done. But that doesn't mean we should orient ourselves around them, only that we should take a hint, and learn the lessons that need to be learned - for instance, that the rich and powerful who benefit from the maintenance and reinforcement of the status quo will not hesitate to genocide whole masses of people to ensure their own existance; just because the pilgrims were essentially "evicted" from their own countries does not mean that they were not ready to become the new masters in the new world, as should be obvious. Of note, war occurs because some few individuals (the same ones behind the corporations as behind the checkbooks of state officials as behind the front somewhere else as behind the cross in the church - once again, the bourgeoisie; the ones who stuff their bellies and pockets by the death, suffering, misery, and even ignorance and stupidity of others - and always by their labor, of course) decide that killing huge numbers of people, maiming vast numbers more, and destroying unbelievable amounts of material wealth is to THEIR benefit - not to most humans (when will this obvious fact make itself known to, uh, everyone? How many must die before it becomes clear that dead people and broken shit is only worth it when it brings a new, better world before it, not reinforce an old, wildly imperfect world even as its infrastructure crumbles back to the bones it was built with?)
"It also varies depending on what tribe we're talking about, but they were largely a very peaceful people." "they" were a huge number of DIFFERENT peoples and it's unwise to convolute all tribes as "they" unless you're seriously analyzing (as I have above) everyone in those societies together, in which case your conclusion that "...they were a largely very peaceful people." doesn't follow, as (and this contradicts the popular myth that the victims of imperialism have frustratingly loved to perpetuate) most native/aboriginal conflicts, when they occur, take proportionately higher death tolls, even in essentially symbolic conflicts. (There are numerous anthropological works on this, I urge you to research these facts.)

"As much as I liked the idea of anarchism, I didn't really believe that it was a possible alternative to government." It's not a matter of belief! Not only is anarchy working right now (throughout most of the world, most of the time) but it has worked throughout most of history (in fact, the vast mass of history and all its' intricacies, from lovemaking to the international postal system)! Not only this, but explicitly anarchist societies have thrived even under the most violent manifestations of capitalism and hierarchy, in spain 1936-1939 (where, by the way, anarchists and communists fought the fascists in the streets with shitty old guns while capitalists in the US and England [not yet the UK, I don't believe] were sending Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler checks), where an anarchist revolution occured and blossomed even in the midst of a civil war between the Republican liberals and Franco's army (behind him, as usual, the Catholic church - which anarchists didn't hesitate to massacre even as they were condemned by the "peaceniks" for being "violent" against some of the most disgusting, shit-peddling, violent "people" (if the clergy could be called that) on the planet; in the Ukraine the 20's even as the statist Bolsheviks' Red Army fought the reactionary capitalist (or, vaguely, the "socialist"!) white armies from the residual first world war and the antsy empires of the Balkans. Both of these, of course, were eventually crushed through bombs, torture chambers, rapes (thank goodness for the police!), and burning fields that had been collectivized not on the authority of some commissar, but by the will of the peasantry themselves! (Though not until they killed or otherwise persuaded the "peaceful" landlords to leave.) (And please don't convolute my advocacy of "violence" - [imagine that, violence now includes an attempt to end violence!] - in tactics and strategy [killing murderers, evicting landlords] with the concept of anarchy itself - the absence of hierarchy; a society oriented around cooperation and freedom as effective and pleasant. I understand the temptation to call anarchism violent, but please understand that there is a difference between putting a degrading, miserable, *violent* situation to an end and maintaining it - and that this is the difference between the "violence" of anarchists and the "peace" of the liberals: the difference between making a free world and defending the slave-holders!)

"And maybe that is a good thing. Recently I've gotten to know our nice little democracy a bit better, and it's not too bad." Says the middle class white girl in the wealthiest, most corrupt, most consistently violent place on the planet. Of COURSE it's not too bad - for you! The rich have a stake in maintaining the comfort of some few of the proletariat through access to credit (and the eternal dangling of shiny things and the task of keeping us busy with offers [threats, perhaps?] of cars, careers, and stupefying - and stupid, to boot! - television shows. Telling the poor that they can't be rich never worked (nevermind the textbooks, read HISTORY!), so they took to telling them they could be. That worked little better, and heads started rolling (the rich's heads, rather than the usual "despots" - pirates, farmers, and other independently wealthy victims of the rich!). Then they said, well, alright, you can be rich enough - just comfortable enough! That's the current sell and it works pretty well, for about a hundred million, world-wide, total. There's a 100,000 filthy fucking rich, a 100,000,000 middle-class (the same who argue for "democracy, but not too much!", and 6.4 billion working 10-15 hours a day, many without access to clean drinking water. So long as we, as a treacherous minority are satisfied by our half-freedoms (the freedom to choose our "employer", the freedom to choose our landlord!), the vast mass of the rest of humanity writhe in agony - many of them within a few miles of our own homes, though perhaps completely invisible to us from the freeway between our two-story homes and our skyscraper offices. (If you don't realize I'm embellishing here, I'm sorry - I'm making the point that most middle class people simply are unaware of the poor, and even moreso of the homeless). And make no mistake, this is not an "economic problem", some mysterious quirk of the glittering perfection that is capitalism - this is a direct result of the kind, benevolent officers of the peace and liberal business-owners using recycled paper in their coffee cups: read about what's going on in Copenhagen right now, or about the people (now long forgotten, of course) struggling to survive in New Orleans - all victims of some or another "nice little democracy" whose principle objective is disarming poor people, beating the shit out of them, and then calling them "violent" (for needing a home - imagine the greed!)

"I still don't like the President (ew) but I have a lot of respect for government and other authorities that I did not have before." Having respect for some individual, it doesn't follow that the institution they find themselves mired in should remain as is, or exist at all. As I said above, I met nothing but kind, helpful police officers, but that doesn't mean I think they or anyone should be cops - that police should exist at all. Similarly, I know of plenty of very awesome politicians who are real sweethearts and want a better world, but it DOES NOT FOLLOW that "democracy" (it's democracy when we choose those who make decisions for us, including whether we live or die! That's not democracy, that's republicanism! Democracy means decision-making power is among the people THEMSELVES! If you're intelligent enough to choose someone to make decisions for millions of people, you're CERTAINLY intelligent enough to make decisions about your own life and work together with others in your community to make decisions about the things that affect your community!) ought to even exist. This should be clear and simple, but people are not very clear, thorough thinkers (and the noise from the television doesn't help, eh?)

"My feelings about government have changed because I was raped a few months ago." Great, now we're making decisions about the organization of society solely on personal, individual experience without any regard for facts, statistics, or otherwise actually informative intellectual tools.

"When I told my mother what happened, we went to the county hospital because I had to get a set of tests done which they call a "rape kit." The only place these kits are available is at the county hospitals. Usually in a county hospital ER, you'd have to wait for several hours before being admitted. My friend (who had also been assaulted) and I were admitted immediately -- mostly in the interest of collecting evidence quicker -- but for someone on the other end of the deal, not having to wait in the ER lobby is more like an act of kindness. The kit was free of charge because the cost of testing is covered by government money."

I can just hear readers foaming at the mouth, "in anarchy, rape kits can't exist because no one will put down the money11" or better, "any anarchist society is likely to be largely agrarian" - what a joke. In anarchy (which doesn't necessitate an end to industry, but in fact most anarchist thought focuses on better, more efficient organization of industry, which de facto includes environmentally-"friendly" industry), there is no money and materials are moved on a gift-economy basis. This means that instead of wasting resources figuring out the absolute "value" of some random item - or all of them! - people simply figure out where things need to go by discussing who needs what and who has what. Like a "command economy", but without the commands - or the commanders! Instead of wasting huge, unbelievable amounts of resources on absolutely fucking nothing (fast food as an industry exists SOLELY because many of us have no time for anything between our jobs and the time we spend trying to forget about them doing drugs/watching tv/going shopping) - imagine that, and our jobs themselves exist largely to manage pointlessness and produce profit for the profitness! (How many people need telemarketers - and yet some people do this for a living!) And of course people now have jobs helping other people stay at their jobs, etc.... In an intelligently organized society, people would produce what we need (and there would be more than enough for everyone to make what we WANT), and people take what they need and like. No trade (that is, no holding hostage of things other people need) is necessary, because no one given individual gains nothing by holding things hostage - people will simply take them. In this manner, (and via workers' and consumers councils) everything everyone needs is moved to where it needs to be as well as produced as much as is needed without any more work put to it. So that, instead of working at a car factory 9 hours a day 6 days a week, one works at a car factory ... as little or as much as one pleases, or perhaps arranges a "contract" to work for a few weeks, learn the skills, etc. If labor is needed, the industry (not the business - no such thing!) will make it known, and so on.

"We talked to a police detective, who made our case high priority, so they searched the offender's house that very night, and arrested him a week later." As another reader mentions, you're lucky - extraordinarily so. Throughout most of the world (which, if I haven't made this clear, isn't SEPARATE from the United States but is engaged in a dialectic with it - where one has, another does not, because of the insanity of the "invisible" hand, which is actually the disembodied hand of the capitalist, of the state), indeed including most of the United States, the UK, France, and other western capitalist states, people are raped and nothing is done about it - in fact, many women suffer regular, repeated rapes (often in the "free market" of the sex industry). Aside from the absurdity of suggesting the exception to the rule is indicative of the nature of some or another institution or organization - you're doing exactly this - is the ridiculous attempt to reconcile some few state agents' kind, benevolent activities with the vast majority of the sexist, racist police who murder, rape, and extort from Minneapolis to Dubai.

"He is out now because he posted bond, but my family and I as well as my friend's are still waiting for the trial." Where, no doubt, justice will be served! I reject the "justice system" as much as any religion, as I'm not much persuaded by arguments of faith set against the horrifying patterns laid out by studious scientific investigation.

"The hospital treated me free of charge because that's what the law requires...the kind policeman who helped me is payed by the government...even the county-appointed lawyer for my case is running on the government's money." Imagine that, kindness by threat of law and bribery! Listen to yourself. Most people would help because it's moral, because it's kind - not because guns and checkbooks are pointed at them, and the fact that these things are done only under threat of extortion (they call it fines) and kidnapping (they call it arrest) should be indicative of the sort of society we're making for ourselves, here.

"I talked with the detective and got to know him well enough that he has completely changed my opinion of police officers." Yeah, I base my stereotypes of whole groups of people on single, isolated experiences. Please. Stereotypes - if they're going to exist at all - should be scientifically/historically informed, NOT based on highly contorted personal experience. That said, I'm sorry you had an irrational hatred of police officers, but as an anarchist my disgust is with the institution - the system of rules, assumptions, and dead bodies - that guides the actions of otherwise kind, beautiful people; NOT with said individuals.

"The law has worked in my favor, and the process has been relatively painless." And therefore the state is benevolent! This conclusion doesn't follow, please stop extrapolating individual experience to entire social systems. This is nye idiotic.

"And virtually all of the services that have helped me were even possible because of government funding." ...yes, because without money stolen from already-struggling poor, miserable workers, we couldn't possibly have hospitals!I don't think I need to provide a really expansive response here, as I think merely highlighting the ridiculousness of the suggestion that without tax, the state, and the rich (whom which magically seem to appropriate most of what little of our paychecks aren't stolen back immediately by our "employers"), such simple and obvious things like hospitals and criminal investigation couldn't exist - as if a stagnant, war-mongering bureaucracy makes kindness possible!
"Where would I be if there WAS no government?" In a much happier, safer world, where people don't have to worry about going outside because they might get the shit beaten out of them, or threatened with it if they don't pay up, or raped, or kidnapped, etc. etc. etc. Of course, I can't emphasize here enough that it's more than just politicians and police - it's the military, the decision-making bureaucracy and the priest class of lawyers and judges, spies, and so on; and even more than that, is capitalism itself, the system by which our labor is exploited and we are sold shit we don't need and spend our lives making it - the most unintelligent management of our limited resources I can imagine, by any measurement - doubly depending on exponentially expanding wastefulness as well as exponentially growing violence and their requisite poverty and ire.

"Who would defend me, who would arrest the man who raped my friend and I?" If you can't imagine a social situation where people cooperate and defend each other and attack disgusting aggressors and parasites, I can't really believe you're actually thinking - no human is so unintelligent that they can't think of alternative situations, and if such a problem ever arises, it is exactly because individuals aren't THINKING but rather ACCEPTING, PASSIVELY myths handed down by the idiot savants of state and capital.

"I'm really thankful that there has been some form of authority backing me up every step of the way. It's reassuring. I have realized now that some people in the word are truly not good...and I'm thankful for the good ones who create the type of laws that have made the legal side of this whole thing very easy." This is sad. Though some few may be content to rely on patriarchs to do things for them, I refuse to surrender my power to others, and I demand that everyone take up the same position, so that each may cooperate together and abolish "authority" by seizing the power of decision and action and distributing it to all - by achieving anarchy and rejecting the systems of power that keep the bastards in power and the benevolents in jail cells (or, sometimes, in those crazy moments where anarchists - perhaps unwitting! - take power for themselves and find themselves in back allies with firebombs and spraypaint; locked to the last trees of old growth forests; at the first meeting on the eve of the death of the old world).

My point is that, simply, you don't need the authorities - the authorities need you, and they'll do anything to convince you of the reverse, of the bullshit myth that without people having outrageous powers over others, we would all be constantly raped and live with nothing and be veritable slaves... That's where we are NOW, RIGHT FUCKING NOW! Look around, comrade: everything they say about "anarchy" - the violence, the misery, the chaos - that's capitalism, that's right now, all over the world!

I have to note, that the article you link to and describe as being "the two different type of anarchism" is an examination of the difference between anarchists and idiots - those with an anarchist analysis of society and an aim to make a better world, and those who are too fucking dumb to understand class analysis or even science in general; or otherwise stupid enough to think one can fight one's enemy without understanding how it works.

"...But in all honesty, in my case, I am perfectly fine with giving up certain rights in order to have the police deal with this." The myth is that you have to do this for the police to do this, and that only the police can do this. The fact is that ANYONE can do these things, that they can do it without restricting your freedom, and that in fact they can do it BETTER and more effectively when everyone is free. Get it? Brain, use your brain, sister! It's really fucking frustrating that people assume that as soon as the situation is anarchy, people become stupid (start killing each other, fail to realize how to operate motor vehicles, don't know how to test for STD's or examine scientific evidence). The only fucking difference is that people are free, things are shared, and decisions are made together instead of by patriarchs and matriarchs. All the tools and knowledge we have now would still exist, and would be employed by EVERYONE for EVERYONE instead of by the rich and the police. Christ, it's very simple.

I'm not going to apologize for being scathingly sharp - I feel it's necessary to drive home my point, that these things are so clear and obvious I can hardly believe it's even up for discussion.

Props, btw, to Hayduke, whose short n' sweet statement clarified basic positions, but who unfortunately failed to expound upon them to demonstrate their conclusions (that I have done systematically though wildly incompletely here).

Check out infoshop.org/faq/index.html for an amazing exploration of anarchism with endless quotations and citations. Infoshop.org itself, as well as libcom.org are great news sources and have informative (and pretty amusing) forums, and another forum is revleft.com, which is dedicated to all revolutionary leftist discussion, most of whom are anarcho-communists or Leninists, though there's a few Maoists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, syndicalists, council communists, et. al. Libcom also has some fantastic articles, and several parts of the site are dedicated to specific ongoing or recent struggles, like the anti-CPE movement in France the year before last.

I also highly recommend http://en.internationalism.org/, the homepage of the International Communist Current, a Left communist group with some very solid analyses (and a lot of internal organizational problems); indymedia.org as a huge international directly-democratic/autonomous independant media movement - a lot of media covering things the corporate media ignores or distorts by ignoring or just lying about details. (The greatest thing about indymedia is the number of photographs and film, set against the 30-second bytes spliced together by puppets in corporate media).

Also, prole.info; anarkismo.net; anarchistnews.org; redanarchist.org; and so on.

Feel free to e-mail me at Zanturaeon@Gmail.com or visit my (still crap, as of now, since I don't actually have a PC to work with but am bumming others') website at http://www.freewebs.com/cfarlington.

Yours in struggle,
-David