Anarchism Is Necessary

Anarchism is necessary, we can say, to create a just society. As far as I can tell, the best definition of anarchism is “the belief that no one has any special authority to do anything that anyone else doesn’t have.” Anarchy, then, is a society in which this principle is widespread enough to be a truism. If one group of people can arrogate special authority to themselves to rule over others, this alone is a vast injustice in and of itself. But it also creates a cascade of further injustices.

Under statism, the overall socioeconomic system tends to divide into classes, some more privileged than others. This allows people in the more privileged classes to use their power to bully others or manipulate them, even without direct coercion. An example of this is “survival prostitution”. There are people who are so abject and miserably poor that they are willing to do anything for enough money to survive until tomorrow. They do not have the option to say “no”, if they want to live, they must say yes. Wage slavery in the modern corporate capitalist world is, for many people, merely a more extended version of this.

Now yes, the state can and does sometimes offer marginalized groups protection from some of the worst effects of their marginalization, but it is the state which put them in the position of needing that protection in the first place. It is the state which makes people economically dependent. It is the state which destroys the wealth of the lower middle class and poor. It is the state which shifts the supply/demand balance of the labor market so workers are chasing jobs, rather than the other way around. And though everything in our world is not economic, in the sense of being about trade and production, economic freedom gives people more space to carve out social freedom. It is difficult if not impossible to wield social power if you’re barely subsisting.


Anarchism: Necessary But Not Sufficient


h/t Liberty Pulse