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Tequila_Wolf wrote (edited )

My general answer to this is that (following Bonanno), in terms of societies, anarchy is a tension, not a realisation.

Maybe another way of framing what u/subrosa said also is to say that an anarchist society (for lack of a better term) would full of coercion, because it would be a constant tearing-down by all of everything that seeks to stand above.
A society without coercion would be more like stigmergy, which I don't think makes sense for people and evokes a kind of Brave New World situation where people are playing their roles with consent, always consenting while being totally comfortable with their hierarchical existence.

Accepting authority can be understood as consenting to being ruled. One can kneel without coercion. So for us at least I think it's about undermining the conditions that cause people to kneel.

u/ziq's bio is succinct on this point: you don't need to be ruled.

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Tequila_Wolf wrote (edited )

I want to expand on this because as life happens I came by someone to reference worth engaging in relation to this: Canonical anarchist anthropologist Pierre Clastres's posthumous book:

on the affirmative role of violence in “primitive societies.”

"The war machine is the motor of the social machine; the primitive social being relies entirely on war, primitive society cannot survive without war. The more war there is, the less unification there is, and the best enemy of the State is war. Primitive society is society against the State in that it is society-for-war."

Elaborating upon the conclusions of such earlier works as Society Against the State, in these essays Clastres critiques his former mentor, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and devastatingly rejects the orthodoxy of Marxist anthropology and other Western interpretive models of “primitive societies.” Discarding the traditional anthropological understanding of war among South American Indians as arising from a scarcity of resources, Clastres instead identifies violence among these peoples as a deliberate means to territorial segmentation and the avoidance of a State formation. In their refusal to separate the political from the social, and in their careful control of their tribal chiefs—who are rendered weak so as to remain dependent on the communities they represent—the “savages” Clastres presents prove to be shrewd political minds who resist in advance any attempt at “globalization.”The essays in this, Clastres's final book, cover subjects ranging from ethnocide and shamanism to “primitive” power and economy, and are as vibrant and engaging as they were thirty years ago. This new edition—which includes an introduction by Eduardo Viverios de Castro—holds even more relevance for readers in today's an era of malaise and globalization.

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