LpLiberto's avatar
LpLiberto 1 year ago
I don't disagree on there always being one or more leaders. But the state is not "an agreement on how to do things" otherwise a family or companies would fall into that category. Any community with shared standards, really. The state is an apparatus of coercion. I agree that framing anarchy as the absence of rulers/leaders may be misguided, it's much better to think of it as a system of cooperation based on voluntary association. With that framework, most of our relationships are anarchic because we enter them and remain in them willingly. Our relationship to the state however is coercive, and thus not anarchic.

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LpLiberto's avatar
LpLiberto 1 year ago
Just to complete the thought neither do I think of anarchy as absence of power over others, as influence is a form of soft power based on voluntaryism that will always exist. I've thought a lot about this and the only useful distinction (more so than freedom/power) is voluntaryism/coercion.
The problem is that you only get to make a voluntary association once. After the initial agreement it becomes an apparatus of coercion. That is the whole point. You join because you want to coerce other people to not take your stuff. But that also means you can't take other people's stuff. If you decide to dissociate so you can, no one will honor that new choice. You will be coerced to follow the rules where you live.