Okay, but weapons exist. Any country that declared that it had no government would be taken over in less time than it’s taking me to type this.

Zapatistas seem to doing a good job.

Anarchism isn’t about pretending harm doesn’t exist either. The people that want to do real harm and will cause harm (will in bold because it’s important to distinguish people who want to do harm and people who will do harm) can just as easily get into positions of power in our current system. Most people don’t want chaos, so why should we organize society around the assumption that we need rulers to prevent it? Basic morals are very, very easy for a super majority of a society to get behind.

Bad actors will mess up any polity, to any degree. That’s not a unique fault of anarchism, my friend.

Betrays and slaughters the people of Makhnovshchina

“See! Told you it would fail!”

If you don’t mind, I’d love to chime in with my own perspective :)

My path to anarchist ideas was pretty organic. I grew up in a rural area, lots of farmers, my school was just a short walk away, and most of our food was locally grown or raised. It struck me that even if the government had suddenly disappeared, our community probably would have been okay. We already relied so much on each other.

I’m not here to tell you what to believe or what label to adopt. Over the past four years, I’ve done a lot of reading and reflecting myself, and what helped me the most was trying to apply different leftist ideas to the place I knew best, my own hometown. That process helped me figure out what might actually work for the people there and for me, that led to anarchism.

So I’d suggest doing something similar: take the ideas you’ve encountered from socialists, communists, anarchists, or whereever and ask yourself “If we did this and this, could this work?” “If we stopped using money in these areas and these areas, could that work?” Even just exploring things like reducing reliance on money in certain areas can be revealing. (It’s worth noting that many anarchist ideas hinge on an optimistic view of human nature, but that’s a whole other conversation.)

At the end of the day, if you’re trying to identify both an ideal society and a realistic path toward it, I think the key is understanding that socialism, whatever shape it takes, requires a culture built on cooperation. That has to come first.