A lot of construction is exhausting. You stand around the hole and take turns digging. By the end of the day you’re still ready to collapse.

Short answer is a person’s class, and the class they serve, is the single most important factor for the amount of power an individual is capable of gaining in society. Class in this context is how you get the money you need to live. The owning class get that money by owning businesses, land, buildings, or intellectual property. The working class gets it by working.

A bit of a tangent but the year of jubilee is an interesting concept in the Torah. The idea is every 49 years they did an economic reset. Slaves were freed, debts forgiven, and land returned.

Unsurprisingly the concept was very appealing to enslaved people. During the US Civil War, many enslaved folks used it as a justification and rallying cry to escape to the north. In Defense of Looting argues that this was one of the most effective instances of mass political theft in history. This also had the effect of hollowing out the South’s economy, swelling the North’s military ranks, and scaring the shit out of racists everywhere.

I don’t think reconstruction would have gone as far as it did without this mass political action and the power it gave formerly enslaved people.

I moved to a city in the US where I can get around without a car. 95% of my trips I take via bike or public transit. I haven’t actually lost much weight but I have gotten much leaner

I was looking for Aurora. I also think it’s right on the money. Gets into the weeds with micro ecosystems.

The idea that humans need the diverse micro ecology of earth in order to not become ill over the course of generations is pretty interesting.

According to MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) governments sell debt in the form of bonds in order to create a stable store of value for investors. They feel safer making risky investments if they know that some if their money is safe. Governments, particularly governments with fiat [1] currencies, are extremely safe borrowers. You can more or less guarantee that their bonds will be paid back. Because if a government wants to pay that bond back they are incapable of running out of money. So governments could buy their bonds back and forgive them but it would defeat their actual purpose. I read about MMT in The Deficit Myth. It’s an interesting book and worth the read if you want a different perspective on monetary theory.

1. Fiat in this case means the currency is not based on any asset. Common currency basing assets are gold, silver, petroleum, and cryptography.

This is proven incorrect. While many societies throughout history have been heirarchical, many were egalitarian and rejected heirarchy. Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, Worshipping Power, and The Dawn of Everything all talk about various early societies many of which reject authoritarian structures. One still existing group of egalitarian societies in Africa is called the San, by all accounts they’ve been around for millenia. I’m not aware of a long lasting egalitarian industrial society but the idea that human beings are incapable of living free from some authority is simply untrue.

I’m definitely not advocating for a return to hunter gathering. Billions would die. But I do think they have things to teach us.

Humans have long memories when they want to. Some of the longest surviving cultures are very egalitarian. The San peoples of Africa for instance. Oral traditions have long told stories that impart moral lessons about how to treat the environment, animals, and other people. Anti-authotitarian traditions and education are quite effective. The idea that a person can own a hundred acres was, and could be again, as absurd as claiming a pig can fly not all that long ago.

Long lived anarchist societies [1] have traditions and structures that resist this sort of thing. Morality tales, traditions that shame those who aim to put themselves above others, and a tradition of armed self defense serve to prevent subversion from within. These things tend to be frustrated early. If your neighbor gets “picked off” or joins a cult of personality are you going to sit around and wait for it to happen to you or are you going to get your neighbors together and put a stop to it. You’re right that individuals cannot stand up to such a threat, that’s precisely why they’ll form a militia to stop it. Ideally such things can be resolved with words but violence is a perfectly rational response to such a threat.

Centralized power is actually pretty bad at holding ground and subjugating populations. They have to build whole expensive structures of social control to ensure soldiers will fight. As soon as that structure is less convincing than a losing fight they run. The people being subjugated need no such structure. They have every reason to fight to protect themselves, their family, their community, and way of life.

Nothing I’ve described goes against your definition. A group of people deciding not to feed, house, or allow someone to stay in their midst is not a heirarchy. It’s also not government. Just as a group is free to associate it is also free to disassociate.

1. They have long existed and some still persist. The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow talk about several.

It is true libertarianism in the older socialist sense. It assumes most people will act in their own self interest. It assumes that most people are at their core social. It asserts that the structures of capitalist control: isolation, bigotry, corporate media and more have convinced people to act in destructive ways that neverless enable their survival. Capitalism also enables unempathetic narcissistic people to gain unjustified control over all of our lives.

Power vacuums demand to be filled. Anarchism leaves no openings. When early states began encroaching into stateless societies they had an easy time with patriarchal and other heirarchical societies. Bureaucracies and tyrants were easily subsumed by dethroning a leader and implanting a friendly local. Anarchist societies were another story. They were not habituated to authority, they fought tooth and nail to maintain their anarchy. I don’t have access to my books right now but in a couple days I’ll drop an excerpt from Worshiping Power that goes into detail on a couple of examples.

I think “more developed” is not great here. It’s assuming because it’s the most common currently and supplanted more anarchist methods that it is better. States and capitalism have benefits that anarchy does not. You can not engage in an anarchist invasion. You can not extract value from a country using colonialism in an anarchist society. This enables capitalist and state control to expand and eventually control the land that anarchist, chieftain led, and other pre state communities once controlled [1]. Capitalism and the state conquered and coerced until it held an almost universal control [2] but that doesn’t mean it’s better to live under.

One of the agreements I have in mind is trading what a farm’s workers need: insurance in case of bad harvest, tools, infrastructure, education, labor, etc for what a city or town needs: food [3]. The “punishment” for breaking such an agreement is not violence. The result is the end of the agreement. That is not coercive control because the other can go to someone else for the same need.

It probably wouldn’t be efficient at large scales [4]. That’s why you make small decisions among those the decision effects. A group might elect a recallable representative for their watershed council and the meeting notes would be distributed to everyone who wanted to read them. However, most decisions about a workplace or neighborhood could probably work by assembly [5]. It is a kind representative democracy but the purpose of anarchy is not ideological purity. The point is creating a society that eliminates as much oppression as possible and enables the most freedom possible.

Bartering, as large scale economic system, is a myth. Gift economies, slavery, stateless communism, and more were far more common. Barter between communities existed but it was the minority of economic activity. The economy I suggest has more in common with Anarcho Communism. To borrow a phrase, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.”

1. The exceptions are legion but they don’t exactly control a lot of land. The San are an example.
2. Worshipping Power does a good job examining the transition if you’re interested in reading more.
3. Each of those line items could be spread across a miriad of organizations and communities.
4. The current system is only efficient at funneling money to the top so I’m not that worried.
5. These are just possibilities but I think it’s a workable structure that I would describe as non-heirarchical.

Anarchy is liberal in the sense that it pursues individual’s freedom not only from oppression but also to act in ways that enrich themselves. It does not require total chaos as it’s detractors have tried to characterize it since the term was coined.

Anarchy is social in the sense it accepts human beings are almost always better off in groups and that society’s goals should be for the betterment of all.

It is democratic in the sense that people come together to make decisions; although, consensus is perhaps a better descriptor. Democracy has an association with first past the post voting and decisions that bind those represented.

It is not a liberal social democracy as that tends to be used to describe a capitalist society with strong social programs, a beauracracy, and police state. They also tend to be supported by colonialism abroad or petrochemical extraction but I suppose that’s not necessarily a requirement. I would agree that such a society is not anarchist.

Structure is not heirarchy. A collective farm is a structure just as much as a factory farm. An agreement where a farm exchanges food for labor, infrastructure, medicine, education, and tools from a city does not preclude anarchy. Either side breaking that agreement when the other begins acting in bad faith is not oppression or a police state.

People tend to think of anarchism as a power vacuum. As soon as a charismatic person comes in they’ll start gaining more and more following. But that’s not really how it works. Anarchy is about filling that vacuum with everyone. If a decision needs to be made you bring in everyone the situation effects to make it. You start at the level of a household to neighborhood to watershed to biosphere. A charismatic wanabe tyrant will be frustrated every step they take towards getting more power.

Anarchists develop structures and agreements that discourage concentration of power. They enable people to guide their own lives and improve their communities. When violence occurs, when agreements are broken the community decided what is too be done.

All that assumes you’re already there. One of the primary differences between anarchists and MLMs (Marxist Leninist Maoists) isn’t necessarily their longest term goals, it’s the means by which they reach them. MLMs believe that they must use the state, capitalism, and by extension coercive control in order to reach those goals. That brings the risk of capture and co-option of those structures. They’ve also accomplished incredible feats of human uplift so I wouldn’t say their position is without merit.

Anarchists see the revolution coming about through a unity of means and ends. They create a better society by building it while the old one still stands. Their groups are horizontally organized. They create organizations to replace food production and distribution; and devlop strategies for housing distribution (squatting).

Country is a little vague so I’ll supliment state in it’s place. I’d argue there are communist societies but no communist states. “communist states” may be an oxymoron.

A useful way to think about self described communist states is that they are attempting to build communism. Whether or not their strategies are effective is up for rigorous debate of course.

Communist societies on the other hand have existed since the dawn of humanity. I read an interesting book titled The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. They cover a variety of indigenous groups’ economies and social structures. Some could be described as communism, others were as exploitative or worse than our current society. The San tribes are a modern example of an egalitarian society or maybe more accurately a group of egalitarian societies. I’m also interested in the Zapatistas and what the folks in Northern Syria are doing but I doubt they constitue communism.

Anyway I’m no authority on these things but I hope you found the perspective interesting. The audiobook for the Dawn of Everything is fastinating and a local library might have a copy if you want to check it out.

Any society that is not communism is not free. If your continued existence is dependant on you working for a wage you are not free. Being “free” to sign a contract that removes your rights so you can work and thus eat is not freedom.

A free society does not need to coerce you into doing things that are good for society. You do them because they are fun or fulfilling. In other words, the same reason people work on open source software.

I didn’t say they can’t, I said it was fraught. A better phrasing is “can cause issues a non-euro country does not have.” This quote explains what I mean:

So, in the eurozone a national (federal) government cannot run out of money as long as:

• tax revenues are high enough to bring the Treasury account back to zero or
• bond revenues are high enough to bring the Treasury account back to zero or
• tax and bond revenues together are high enough to bring the Treasury account back to zero.

This means that a eurozone national government does not run out of money until it has exhausted its tax revenues and bond revenues

The United States, Great Britain, Japan, and every other fiat currency country don’t have this problem. They are incapable of running out of money. They are capable of making so much money it is completely debased like Weighmar Germany or Zimbabwe. However, those cases are rare and extreme. As long as they ensure the supply of goods people want to buy us sufficient they can spend as much as they want. This enables them to pay off their debts on a whim (if they want to collapse the safest store for money that investors use to outweigh risks).

Sources:

The Deficit Myth I’d give you page numbers but I listened to the audiobook https://www.intereconomics.eu/contents/year/2022/number/2/article/modern-monetary-theory-the-right-compass-for-decision-making.html

It’s the euro even a good idea? Convenient for tourism and trade sure, but according to MMT it hamstrings a countries ability to invest in it’s economy and makes government loans fraught.