y’all are acting like the rich don’t already have mercenaries and mafia

I can’t! :) all governments are fucking evil and must be destroyed

you can’t fix the foundation of blood and suffering that the house was built on top of

I usually couldn’t care less about electoralism, but if any politician has get rid of police and government as their platform, I will vote for them and campaign SO HARD.

I really appreciate this thread and I feel inspired to reply. I think a lot of why anarchism is difficult to understand is because it is hard for us to imagine anything other than the “capitalist realism” that has spread to the entire world. As they say, it is the air you breathe, the water you swim in, so it can be hard to see.

So if you want to understand how anarchism can possibly work, really what you have to do is look at places where it is, in fact, actually working. Find the edges of society where affinity groups are actually doing real work in supporting the unhoused, defending marginalized and vulnerable communities, feeding and empowering one-another without any hierarchy. Look closely at the actions of Block Cop City for instance, or the Zapatistas, or Rojava. Look at how things worked in the Spanish Civil War, or Occupy Wall Street. As an added exercise, find some other examples of non-hierarchical activities and actions in your own life (you may be surprised how many there are).

Lots of hierarchy-apologists will decry these things always fail, or are only applicable in very specific contexts, but judge for yourself. There are obviously autonomous tactics that clearly work within these examples, but can you imagine them working in other contexts? How are they organizing themselves if it isn’t by way of hierarchy? How are they getting things accomplished without rules and punishments? Keep an open mind, use your imagination, and you may just find yourself thinking that anarchy is indeed possible beyond these given examples.

I think the confusion here might be in the qualities of what anarchists mean when they say “state.” It is commonly remarked that anarchists are against the state. But as you can probably imagine, they are not opposed to, say, libraries. Or emergency services. Or sewer lines.

What “the state” represents, what anarchists are opposed to, is the upholding of the status quo. The reproduction of the system that murders people, pollutes the environment, enforces the necessity of wage slavery, protects billionaires and punishes the homeless.

That giant system of oppression (capitalism) is not something these small groups can or want to do. Forming councils is very different from the prison industrial system. Kicking out a member is very different from arresting someone for stealing bread to feed his family. And scuffles with neighbors is hardly a war. These are the actions (right or wrong) of groups of friends. This is human-level drama.

What anarchists oppose is the giant machine that is not human-sized; the unstoppable Leviathan that does not think or feel but rather lumbers eternally toward ever greater destruction and madness. It is the worldwide money monster that cuts the trees, turns farmland into parking lots, treats chickens like factory parts, and ensures there are more empty buildings than there are unhoused people.

“The state” is the nation-state, yes. But it is also (and more importantly), the “state of things.” The awful, joyless, depressing, inescapable state of things. That is what anarchists really oppose.

Caveats: 1) Not all anarchists feel this way. 2) I speak mostly from a North American perspective. 3) I didn’t read the article. 4) I’m a lemmy noob.