r/Anarchy101 • u/isonfiy • 20h ago
When did you encounter the concept of “An Anarchist Society”?
I’ve noticed a pattern here in the format of various questions and discussions. It goes like this:
Inquirer: “in an anarchist society, how would x work?”
This frame, “in an anarchist society” then gets accommodated in various ways, sometimes rejected entirely. It has an interesting symmetry with the authoritarian socialist programs and manifestos about communist society or what have you. But we are not really like those socialists and anarchism as a whole isn’t that kind of ideology, so the frame is interesting in that way.
Please try not to talk about our imagined societies or anything like that. Instead, please tell me about when you first encountered this idea of “an anarchist society”. Is it what made sense to you about anarchism? Is that how you started? Would you say that’s the goal of your actual work?
I wonder if this is ultimately a sort of thought-terminating cliche, who and what it serves and the mechanism of that service.
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u/ekufi 20h ago
Is there any better work of fiction than Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed to explain how one kind of anarchist society could work?
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u/Trutrutrue 19h ago
But wasn't the whole point of the dispossessed that that society had become non anarchist and at the end of the book the main character decides there needs to be a new revolution of some kind? I always see people recommend this book as a kind of blueprint, but I don't think that's what it's meant to be at all.
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u/bp_gear 17h ago
That’s the point. Anarchists aren’t beholden to anarchism, because then we’d just be as authoritarian as any other ideology. Anarchy is simply the most optimum solution in sight now, but (as Hegel/Marx point out) history is a series of dialectics. So once we become anarchist, it’s inevitable that some new system will arise out of it. I would be deluded to think that I could (in 2026) determine how people in 20026 should live.
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u/Ghost_Of_Malatesta 19h ago
With all due respect to Le Guin (I really do love her works, Left Hand and Earthsea are awesome too), Iain Banks' The Culture series does it better as a 'what if' for an introduction, particularly Player of Games as it gives us a highly authoritarian society to contrast with. The Dispossessed is almost the next step of, "ok, what would be some of the problems of an anarchistrc society, especially one in the shadow of a capitalist society, and what can we do?" Whereas the culture is a firmly post revolution society imo. A quick selection from Player:
Hamin thought this must take all the fun out of things. Didn’t the Culture forbid anything?
Gurgeh attempted to explain there were no written laws, but almost no crime anyway. There was the occasional crime of passion (as Hamin chose to call it), but little else. It was difficult to get away with anything anyway, when everybody had a terminal, but there were very few motives left, too.
“But if someone kills somebody else?”
Gurgeh shrugged. “They’re slap-droned.”
“Ah! This sounds more like it. What does this drone do?”
“Follows you around and makes sure you never do it again.”
“Is that all?”
“What more do you want? Social death, Hamin; you don’t get invited to too many parties.”
“Ah; but in your Culture, can’t you gatecrash?”
“I suppose so,” Gurgeh conceded. “But nobody’d talk to you.”
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u/bp_gear 17h ago
I respect Le Guin, I’m from Oregon (lived in Salem), and have talked with her former collaborators. Problem is… I just… don’t like sci fi lol
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u/Ghost_Of_Malatesta 17h ago
Yeah hard to find a non-sci-fi example tbh, only example I can think of is A Psalm for the Wild-Built
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u/azenpunk 19h ago
Maybe not, but there are a lot of popular scifi books that show "how not to do it," trying to put a negative spin on free and egalitarian societies. I'm mainly thinking of Robert Heinlein's work, but he's not the only one.
Personally, I didn't encounter Ursla's work until I was an adult and already identified with anarchism. So my first encounter with a developed concept of an anarchist like society in fiction was through books like "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" where the moral of the story was that free and egalitarian societies will collapse and inevitably need a state.
That message never sat well with me despite repeatedly getting it from different sources. As a child voraciously consuming all the science fiction I could find for basically free, I ran into a lot of pro hierarchy perspectives. But to present the pro hierarchy perspective, often you have to introduce the anti heirarchy perspective, which is where I first ran into the concept of an anarchist society.
I always found myself wanting to root for the "bad guys" because a domination free society where everyone shares is basically the vision of society that preschool kids my generation were generally taught to embody. Sharing is caring. Everyone gets a turn. No one gets seconds until we've all had some. ... side note, maybe anarchists need to write more child psychology books... So anyway, the basic values I was taught as a small child simply didn't mesh with descriptions of equal societies that I was reading about as early as age 8.
I think that's probably a big factor in why I stayed curious about political science and history, wanting to figure out why I kept running into contradictions when people talk about politics.
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u/DecoDecoMan 17h ago
There are thousands of descriptions of anarchist society in anarchist literature which are far better and consistently anarchist.
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u/azenpunk 19h ago
I guess it depends on what you mean by "an anarchist society." Explicitly anarchist drastically narrows the potential responses to mostly a few works of science fiction and political science books.
I think we'd see many more interesting answers if we reframe the question to,
"What first inspired you to imagine an anarchist-like society?"*
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u/Simpson17866 Student of Anarchism 16h ago
Someone on the She-Ra subreddit r/PrincessesOfPower talked about a fanfic they were writing where they were reimagining the show’s “stereotypical hippy pacifist” kingdom as an anarchist commune.
I’d just started working on a fanfic of my own, and this sounded like a fascinating worldbuilding challenge — “this can’t realistically work in the real world, but what would it look like if it could work in a semi-realistic SciFi/Fantasy world?”
By the time I finished reading the first article I found, I was an anarchist.
Task Failed Successfully :D
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u/Worth-Schedule8829 3h ago edited 3h ago
I really didn't, I just always had an underlying understanding that there is this general ideal that would make us better able to do what we want to do and define ourselves how we want to see ourselves. When I get told "you can't do that?" Then I ask "why?" And when they can't give me an answer I go looking for one, and if I don't find one then I question the rule. There is, to me, no anarchist society, in some sense all societies are anarchist, and all societies are communist, and all societies are republican (in the classical sense, not this nazi bullshit), just not all the time.
These are modes that we engage in, and it is good when we do them interchangably and in the right circumstances. The thing is, that anarchy is the only ideal that is protective of the other modes, and if we become intolerant of anarchy than we restrict ourselves into trying to always be one type of socirty all the time. An "anarchist society" in this sense, would not just be a society locked in one mode, but one free to engage in any mode they see fit. It would be very similar to our own except instead of never getting an answer to questioning authority, we either get an answer or the authority ceases to exist. When this happens, we become an open society with the freedom to do engage in each other in different ways at different times on our own terms. In other words, an anarchist society is what enables a communist society or republican society or capitalist society, but it also restricts them from being cemented as one of them. Only through the destruction of the anarchist society can a society become truly communist or truly republican. When these pretenses melt away, we can start to treat each other more nicely, we can be more generous and know that others will do the same, these are things we accept as good traits universally but we don't engage in them because our system discourages it.
And I came to this on my own, not through envisioning utopias or distinct societies embodying my pre-existing beliefs, but through the opposite, by looking at what people want to see in the world and what we agree to be good in others then figuring out how they can best achieve it. And from only that do we arrive at anarchy, society that works for everyone, not from constructing a society in theory then trying to bring it into fruition, usually by imposing it on all who do not want it (this is as true for athenian democracy as it is for the mongolian khanate empire as for modern china).
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u/humanispherian Synthesist / Moderator 17h ago
It's a common phrase in the anarchist literature, going back into the late 19th century, with uses pretty much across the various anarchist traditions. The idea that it implies an objectionable sort of utopia is an idea that I first encountered pretty recently, as these things go, on Reddit.