this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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Well that's not "the purge" obviously, but every description of Anarchy just sounds like it's recreating a high school government (complete with cliques and everything). At any anarchist commune, the popular people are elected to the council. That's how popularity works.
First world countries already have representative democracies. People are getting what they vote for. The problem is: people are stupid and shortsighted. That problem would be worse if you remove the institutions we've built up.
To a degree, I agree, and that's why I'm not an anarchist. I do, however, believe that most of the reforms we need for our democracies are similar to the goals of anarchism, and therefore anarchists can be good to read critically for inspiration.
A more delegate inspired model of representative democracy with more accountability to their electorate, STV and proportional representation so that the government more closely aligns with the population, worker cooperatives and unions so that the population has a broader say in the economy. These are all things I believe we need and feel in line with the spirit of anarchism.
We do not have functional representative democracies. The material and economic reality of the current system leaves what little democratic practices we have vulnerable to manipulation. There is a power imbalance between our democratic systems of power and the purely economic power structures, resulting in the former being dominated by the latter.
What anarchists envision is not simply the removal of the current powerful institutions, but the replacement of them with alternative democratic institutions. For democracy to survive and function it must be the dominant power structure in a society.