: : To an anarchist, government is simply not the solution to anything: more laws mean more cops, more prisons, and more ruined lives. Prison is TORTURE.: I think victims of true torture would find your assertion to be simplistic, at best, but granting the prison is no place anybody would want to be, how would your anarchist society deal with violent criminals, or people who commit anti-social crimes such as dumping toxic waste in the village pond?
Well there are the two kind of classic anarchist responses to this in my experience (perhaps Farinata/Gideon could enlighten us further):
A) Summary Justice, Kneecap the bastards, direct action, mob retribution, retalitory anti-criminal violence, in a way this works, the guys who have had their legs removed in Northern Ireland with 12 bore shotguns arent likely to be joy riding again but is this really any kind of 'torture free' alternative to incarceration?
B) There isnt going to be any crime post-revolution, now I just think this is naive, you can say 'the kingdom of god is at hand' or the 'the revolution has changed all' but the fact is it doesnt.
: As for how any society can function without some form of group consensus and rules, i.e., government, enlighten me please (really).
Well, I've always thought that the really smart Anarchists have realised the need for some lind of executive authority, like the Trade Union or Council Communist Congress or Central Union or Anarchist Flying Columns, but have demanded that such authority, if it is to be legitimate, be tempered by libertarianism and popular control and established through trial and error, which is something I could agree with couldnt you?
This was the approach of D A de Santillan the Syndicalist theorist of the Spainish Anarchist Contingent in the Civil War, who advocated the jailing rather than mass execution of facists because it was more in accordance with libertarian principles (which I regard as remarkable, possibly far too, generous considering that reports where coming out of Facist prisons that sometimes the rooms where a foot deep in blood because of all the mass slaughter of reds that was going on), but then maybe D A de Santillan doesnt count because a US syndicalist anarchist commented once that he was also at the forefront of the '20th century reform not 19th century revolution' movement that held that FDR etc. where pretty much Socialism achieved.
