Okay I have some legit questions about your theory on anarchy being great. 1. What about individual rights, who will protect them, and how? 2. What about the economy? Won't it fall apart if people have the option to steal whatever they want without consequence? How will the economy grow? 3. What happens when someone comes along and tries to unify the people for better or worse? Thanks I can't fathom what the answers will be and I'm interested in your viewpoint.
I just replied to your giant wall of text on my post but I think Ill address these concerns because they’re pretty legitimate concerns for someone new to anarchist ideas.
Leftists in general concern themselves not with ethereal notions of universal rights/freedoms but rather the real material preconditions for those freedoms. Take free speech for example. The government can give every citizen a right to free speech, but your ability to express this right depends on how wealthy you are, what kind of platforms (media and the like) you have access to; the material conditions of society, (essentially the economic distribution of wealth and power) determines who can express their rights in a society. So i rights of the individual are determined by the material conditions of the society in a much more real and direct way than by any legislation. Leftists realize that political freedom cannot be created while economic inequality exists. Anarchists seek to reorganize the material conditions of society to put everyone on an equal playing field, allowing each individual to express their rights maximally. Just like how there are material conditions necessary to express freedom, their are material conditions necessary to take it away. The material conditions for oppression in our society include artificially enforced scarcity, state power based on violence, etc. If we can organize society in such a way that the material conditions required for oppression cannot exist, no one can accumulate the capital and power to oppress others.
2. Why steal if you have everything you need? The concept of theft grows out of the concept of ownership, of property. Anarchists want to redefine the economy, instead of serving the narrowly defined concept of progress in capitalism, profit and the accumulation of capital, the economy would the organization of labor to provide the material needs of society. Economical progress should serve humans, humans should not server economical progress. In a system like this, minimizing the amount of work needed to sustain society is progress, not minimizing unemployment or increasing production of pointless shitty consumer commodities that kill the planet.
3. This point really ties into the other two. Anarchism has a long history of studying coercion, how a small group of people can get a larger group to work against their best interests. Again this goes back to material conditions. If members of a society are fulfilled, they have everything they need and can provide for themselves with mutual aid and communal economies, there is nothing a single individual or small group can hope to persuade them with. The mechanic of coercion requires that the coercive force have control over the means of production of the necessities of life, if a society controls these directly and democratically, coercion becomes almost impossible. In Bookchin’s terms, coercion evolves from mediation and specialization. As individuals put themselves in mediating roles, a priest mediating between individuals and divinity, or a boss mediating between producers and consumers, individuals are alienated from the vital aspects of their lives. This alienation creates their unfreedom, they are no longer in control of the areas of society which play major roles in their determining the coarse of their lives. By creating a society in which people engage directly with production, in which individuals engage directly with economic and political processes, this alienation is removed and the material conditions for freedom (along with order) are created.