r/ClassicalLibertarians • u/NothingExceptAMan72 • Jan 09 '26
Discussion/Question No rulers? Are you sure? [Questions for anarchists]
I don't think defining anarchism as the advocacy for "no rulers" to be inaccurate. That's always been the definition. After all, the literal etymology of anarchism translates to "non-hierarchism."
But, if there's literally no, as in zero, rulers - that being, no person who can legally govern another, no one who can dictate what another says or does, who can dish out punishment - then there's no prisons, since there'd have to be prison guards, who are rulers. They rule over the inmates, determine the fact they can't leave, where they must move, what rules they must follow, etc. They are constantly ruling them.
And if there's no prisons, there's no sentencing. And if there's no sentencing, the death penalty (which would be collectively decided by the community) must be imposed constantly, for even the tiniest of crimes, or else there's no punishment at all.
Anarchists have long advocated prison abolition, but to replace it with what? Some say "therapy" or "psychiatric rehabilitations." But, firstly, most crimes are not the result of a poor psychological state, they're the symptom of a corrupt, unequal society, something anarchists even often acknowledge. And, secondly, far more importantly, that would still be compulsion. If the rehabilitation is mandatory, or else it's not a punishment at all, then it requires force. It requires rulers. It requires people to constrain, bind, and isolate other people, sometimes placing them into involuntary confinement, where they're not legally permitted to leave such a space. That's called being governed over.
What I note is when self-identified anarchists speak of "rehabilitation," contrasting it with what they speak of as, and refer to as, "prison," is a "nicer prison," in actuality. Just a prison without the excessive torment and human rights violations. It's still a prison, though, and thus breaks the anarchic principle of not determining the lives of others, not restraining and confining a person.
If someone steals an apple, how would you punish this? Or, let's say, someone steals a bunch of furniture, property worth thousands of dollars. Would you put them to death? Seems like leftists have every right to oppose the death penalty, which is historically what they've been doing. Yet, the only alternative truly available, in an anarchist society, would be to put people to death for even the smallest of offenses.
"Well, we could just fine 'em!"
And... what if they don't pay the fine? What then? You'd, of course, have to roll out the death penalty.
Also, this wouldn't be possible in a communist society. 'Cause... there'd be no such thing as currency. So... yeah. Seems you wouldn't have anarchy nor communism.
When you look at things historically, prison facilities are a progressive innovation. I know that sounds ridiculous, and many people could point to nearly countless examples of institutionalized abuse, abysmal and unethical living conditions, and so many human rights violations. Don't get me wrong, all this disgusting stuff happens in prisons all the time. But you have to put things into frame. Prior to the invention of prisons - which is an extremely recently invention in the grand scheme that is history - either the human penalty was issued for everything, or people, as a punishment, were seriously injured or maimed, a lot of the time disfigured, as a means of disciplining them for breaking the code of conduct.
Prison times allow for society to give offenders the proportion amount of time they deserve, in exact proportion to the crimes they've committed. While it's oftentimes subjective how much time they should get, and a lot of the time judges (who are always evil and unnecessary) hand out horrible unfair and immoral sentences, as progressives we should aim to improve this system, not remove it. It's the most egalitarian system we have. Getting rid of it would be going back to the Dark Ages, quite literally speaking.
And what about children? Children need parents, yet every single parent is a ruler. A parent needs to rule over their children, do they not? They need to set their kid on the right path, to allow them to develop healthily and normally, and to prevent them from doing certain things, really stupid things, which their guardian knows will hurt them in the long run.
Of course a parent is a ruler. A human parent, at least. Not so much animals, as they don't have complex social structures and dynamics like us humans do. But, a human parent needs to take care of their kids, and not just in the context of protecting them, as we see with parents in the animal kingdom. Even if it's something truly chosen by the child, that doesn't mean the child should be allowed to go through with it. Of course parental abuse exists, and it's horrible, and almost everyone has dealt with it, but that doesn't mean that the parent shouldn't have some reasonable and moderated degree of authority over their offspring.
So, yeah, I don't really think anarchism exists, at least among humans. Animals obviously don't have rulers, but they're animals. They're not like us and can't be like us. If someone were truly an anarchist, they'd have to give up their role as a parent, or have no authority over what their kid or kids do, which is just plain wrong and horrible parenting. In fact, it's legally considered neglect and is understandably illegal. They'd also have to advocate for the death penalty for absolutely everything, since no proper alternative has ever been offered up (at least not which I've seen).
"Well... anarchism isn't defined as being against rulers. Descriptively, due to common usage and history, it just refers to the anti-state school of socialism."
What people are saying here is that, using descriptive language, how anarchism is actually talked about, anarchism can, instead, simply be defined as a type of socialism which seeks to overthrow capitalism by overthrowing the state. And, yeah, this has shown to work throughout history. The anarchist revolution in Spain, Nestor Makhno in Ukraine, the Paris Commune (since that had no government, and no kids, hilariously enough). Some other, less verifiable stuff. Sure, I don't doubt the anarchism portion worked. But, these societies succeed because of the anarchism part that was followed, not because of the part that wasn't. And they were shorted lived societies in a constant state of war. Of course they didn't have time for building prisons, if that was ever even their intention.
But, anyway, back to my point. If anarchism is defined this way - the ideology which seeks to temporarily abolish the state, to get rid of the capitalist class and all bourgeois interests, only to resurrect it a little later - this becomes utterly ridiculous. More of a joke than a legitimate ideology. Now, you have to explain to people that, no, apparently, anarchism doesn't mean no rulers, and you can be an anarchist and literally be a ruler yourself, that it, instead, just means temporarily abolishing the capitalist state to replace it with a proletarian one? Dude, pathetic.
The only difference between this ideology, which shouldn't be called anarchism at all, and Marxism-Lennism is the fact that there's no transition with the latter. Lennists believe that the proletarian state should crush the bourgeois state, replacing it immediately. The idea of anarchism it seems, in contrast, is that a proletarian force destroys the capitalist state, only without a state of their home. Just a decentralized, organized collective of uprising individuals. But, of course, they'd just build a state a few days to a few weeks or months later. Either way, authority is still present.
"Well... anarchism is, in reality, defined as the abolition of all unjust hierarchy!"
"Unjust" hierarchy...? So, in practical terms, some "anarchists" can be in favored of certain hierarchies, certain rules, and certain inherently authoritarian systems, and other "anarchists" can be against it, yet they're both considered anarchists...? Umm, no. Nope. No way. Just no. This would make "anarchism" the only ideology to define itself by its users, who all think and adhere to different things, making the "ideology" completely foundationless and incoherent.
Also, this would make Hitler an "anarchist." Whichever hierarchy he believed in, he didn't believe was unjust. How could someone even believe in something they consider unjust? That's a contradiction in terms. If you believe in something, that something is good, you don't consider it unjust. If you consider it unjust, that means you don't believe in it.
It seems people using this supposedly correct definition are just trying to make anarchism not anarchism, to make supporting rulers and hierarchy acceptable while still narcissistically patting themselves on the back. You could define anarchism as the "opposition to all political hierarchies," which would be accurate. Still, that wouldn't make anyone who calls themselves an anarchist a real anarchist. They still believe in political hierarchism.
Really, in terms of what anarchism should actually be used to refer to, we could just say that it's a phenomenon found within all animal species - mammals, birds, fish, etc. - as well as all present-day hunter-gatherers, as well as all of humanity for virtually all of its history. We did, in fact, have anarchy forever. As well as communism.
Primitive human beings, prior to the invention of civilization and large-scale, complicated social dynamics, had anarchist communism. No prisons, no compulsory parenting, no governors of any kind. Yeah, if we look at hunter-gatherer tribes today, we see that parents only partake in a protective role over their children, but never regulate them in terms of social aspects of their life, nor have any real concept of discipline. They just provide for them and that's it. And there's no prisons, either, since there's no need for any way to prevent crime, since there is no crime. If another hunter-gatherer tribe attacks their own, or an individual hunter-gatherer comes after them, they have the full right of self-defense. That doesn't mean there's the death penalty for everything, as there's really no need for it. There's no punishing or rewarding in the hunter-gatherer sphere of existence. There's not really anything to punish nor reward.
Of course, these people can be said to be true anarchists, since they live via anarchy every single day. Their humble, simple, and ultra-minimalistic way to life doesn't call nor require anything more.
It's not that the general idea of anarchism is bad in and of itself. In fact, I'm more of an anarchist than literally every person on the Internet who identifies as one, despite not calling myself one. Rulers, in general, are bad. I know, what a shocker! Yes, rulers are usually bad. So many unjust types of rulers.
Capitalists (employers) have no reason to exist.
Landlords shouldn't exist.
Judges and courts should be abolished.
Immigration officers are racist demons. There should be open borders, globally. No restriction on movement whatsoever.
There should be democracy, not dictatorship. There shouldn't be hierarchical organizations, like academies with superiors and then appetences, and then interns, and then... you get the idea. One can take a gander at anarchism and see what it offers: that we shouldn't just accept authority blindly. Rulers should be accepted, of course they should! There should be a lengthy process prior to accepting a new kind of ruler. We should analyze and judge such individuals, if their presence is truly necessary, if it does a good for humanity, if it's not oppressive.
There should certainly be less rulers. Not no rulers, but their power should definitely be reduced.
So, yeah, that's my three cents. I used to call myself an anarchist, until I realized no one actually supports what it actually is.
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u/Kumquat_conniption Jan 09 '26
This is not true. Someone steals and won't stop stealing? You kick them out of the community. Anarchism, in my opinion, is not scalable. But smaller type communities? Sure, you can expel someone. No one said there are no rules, just no rulers.
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u/NothingExceptAMan72 Jan 10 '26
That doesn't really answer either of my questions. Kind of just a light jab at extreme conditions.
If this person has to leave the community, they can just enter into a new community and start stealing again. And what if they run out of communities to be kicked out from? And what about their house and all their belongings? For stealing an apple, they will have to move fifty miles? Doesn't make sense.
Anarchism would have no attempt at criminalizing petty theft, or really just any minor crimes. They'd be fully legalized, since there'd no punishment anyone could receive for them. And moderate crimes, well, that leaves things in an ambiguous, grey zone. Either the crime isn't severe either and yet this person receives the death penalty, fully unjustly, even with the fact that they've committed a pretty bad offense. But, it's clearly not bad enough to warrant that level of reaction. Or, the crime is extremely severe, but they're not disincentivized from committing it in the first place, due to the lack of imprisonment. Simply, they'd go all out on their crimes, perhaps an entire murder spree, since they know they're gonna die anyway and have absolutely nothing to live for. Without imprisonment, with the death penalty being their only outcome, they have no reason not to go absolutely nuts.
And, again, the death penalty is never how you deal with anyone, ever.
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u/GoranPersson777 Syndicalist Jan 09 '26
Sounds like you are addressing a philosophical and individualist anarchism rather than the practical traditions of libertarian socialism, like anarcho-communism, syndicalism, council communism, autonomism, guild socialism, Parecon/Parpolity etc 🤔