this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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The same that stops them from taking over a democracy. Sometimes.
If a society became anarchist enough to abolish state structures, there obviously had to exist a reason - there had to exist popular support.
Thus, someone attempting to recreate a state would face questions and opposition. People would try to persuade them of their error. If they declared a state, anarchists would not recognize it. If it claimed sovereignity above a territory, anarchists might not recognize that either.
The new state might encounter problems - unwilling residents would leave and be accepted in anarchy, annoyed anarchists would organize trade boycotts and sanctions, ultimately it could go badly and armed confrontation could follow. In some scenarios, the state might remain and attract people who want to live there. In some scenarios, war would follow - and if the majority really was anarchist, the state would lose and disappear.
Oh no, you misunderstand. They're not giving you a choice. They aren't proponents of democracy or any kind of representative government. You have to go from an Anarchic state to resisting an organized group while they are grabbing community leaders in the middle of the night and taking young men and women to work camps.
To resist an organized group, you communicate the problem (in an anarchist society, communicating the problem of a nascent state seems like the easy part), present evidence of the nature and severity of the problem, and ask people and existing organizations to mobilize.
Whether the next step is obstructing the state peacefully or mass production of munitions, would already depend on how bad the state has got.
Well you're already adding violence back in, but honestly that's fine. I didn't buy that pacifism would work anyways. It's good to practice in regards to starting stuff, but you'd have to be ready to end stuff.
And honestly I hope what you're saying would work but now you've got 3 more problems to solve. You're starting from standing and they're already going. So they're going to have a head start in every way. You're asking for volunteers and you have to deal with the bystander effect. They're coercing people to fight for them. And third, you've now created an army and at least some infrastructure to support it. There's more than a few times through history that the defending army just decided it was in charge now.
And just so you know where I'm coming from I've always thought you need at least some of the state institutions we have for a leftist state to work. Like education, enough military to make invading too costly, enough police to tackle organized crime, a tax system to provide help in disasters and keep infrastructure working, and a civil government to manage that infrastructure. Having it all in place negates the Dicky McDickerson problem from the outset. What we really need is to scale back a lot of what we have and to classify much of what people do to get rich as organized crime.
For the US specifically we'll also need a plan to deal with Christian Conservatives who will attempt to institute a theocracy pretty much right away.