So, whats wrong with Anarchism?

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Euord Pajo                 000360325-3

SO, WHAT’S WRONG WITH ANARCHISM?

Anarchy: chaos, confusion, disorder, lawlessness, rebellion, riot. This is how the dictionary explains anarchism and without a doubt this is how most people understand it to be. However they forget that the ideology itself stands for peace, equality and the idea of a stateless society. In this essay I will seek to explain the theory of anarchy, as well as answering the question by distinguishing between its positive aspects and its negative ones. I will also try to elucidate if anarchism can work and also give examples of it in practise as well as explain what is wrong with it as I go along.

The basic commitment in anarchy is freedom. It teaches that society can and should be organised without the coercive authority of the state and it sees it as its biggest enemy and as an oppressor of the people. There are however four different types of anarchists who agree on a stateless society but they range from defenders of private property and free market to supporters of complete common ownership, co-operative labour and distribution according to need. The four different schools of thought in anarchy are: individualism, mutualism, collectivism and communism. Each of them differs in opinion and how the perfect anarchist society should be constructed. Individualists see the individual as their starting point, the German Max Sterner argued that the person should act exactly as he pleases taking no notice of God, state or moral values. Another individualist, Benjamin Tucker, argued that without the state each person could exercise the right to protect his own freedom. Both of the above mentioned anarchists argue for freedom of the person and no state, they have a vision that everyone would act on behalf of their own interests and their own good. They do forget however that what might be in someone’s good interest may collide with someone else’s interest, and since there is no authority they would have to sort it out between themselves and in many cases this would undoubtedly end with violence. If a whole country was an individualist society than this would mean that millions of people would be in that situation everyday and this would lead to millions of fights and probably ending up in a civil war or in a state of ‘anarchy’.

The other school of thought, mutualism, stands between individualist and collectivist approaches. This term was started by Proudhon who believed in a scheme that allowed individuals to exchange goods and secure credit without the need for political involvement or trade unions. This scheme implies that equal amounts of labour should receive equal pay, this is a great idea but it would be hard to decide which jobs should receive more pay for their work as some jobs are harder and require more skill than others. The capitalist system which we are living under at the moment is the best system in allocating people according to skill and merit, it pays more those who work harder pays less those who don’t as a general rule. It also rewards those people who work hard in school and education by getting better paid jobs in the future as well as doing itself a favour by placing the most able according to skill to the appropriate job.

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Collectivism is the anarchist movement made popular by Michael Bakunin (1814-1876). This is closest to socialism and some form of it was put in practice in the economies of the communist states, known as ‘state collectivism’.  This form of collectivism took all private property which people owned including farms, live animals and even factories and placed them under state control where all the produce would be divided equally between the states population. However the core idea of this theory is that it expects humans to work together for the good of the collective rather than for their own interest. ...

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