ANCAP 2100 🟨⬛️

What would an ancap 22nd century look like?

First definitions. Anarchy is the absence of a ruler. The absence of nation-state style sovereignty, a monarch or an emperor. More abstractly it would be the absence of an entity with the monopoly of force in a certain area.

In practical terms it means no central authority with the capacity to impose its will on the entire population, be it by collecting taxes or enforcing laws.

A country or territory with no army, no taxes and no centralised police force would be anarchic, even if its nominal government claimed to rule, in the absence of the capacity to do so it would be an empty vessel.

We have plenty of examples in history of large territories in such a situation, where distance from the seat of government made it impractical to collect taxes or enforce laws.

We also have plenty of examples of government being so local and fragmented that both laws and taxes could only be enforced on a small area, in competition with neighbouring polities. A large swathe of history is the history of competing city states. Empires are a relatively late development in human history, nation states even more so. Even early empires had to allow a great degree of local autonomy if they wanted to survive. The Achaemenid Persian Empire being a prominent example, which the alexandrian successor states adopted. Until transport and communication technology made it possible, most government was local government.

Competition between local governments and the easy possibility of exit kept the abuse of power in check to some degree.

But would we call a collection of city states anarchy? Some statists call anything more decentralised than one world government anarchy! We can be more discriminating... Neither competing local governments nor a collection of tribes is anarchy, at least not as long as each of these polities has the power to maintain a monopoly of force within its own territory, extract taxes and impose laws. Regardless of whether this is done democratically, by a dictator or a priest king.

Of course a lonely sheriff in a remote town, perhaps elected and backed by a citizen militia, called only when needed, paid a salary by the same people that elect him, would have a lot of trouble imposing any tyrannical law or tax. Not when his enforcers and voters are the same people that he has to extort.

Current transport and communication technology makes this independence, decentralisation and self-reliance possible but unlikely to be widespread. Just as it took the collapse of the Roman Empire to allow a vacuum into which the more decentralised Feudal government structures could develop, it would take the total collapse of the current nation-state system for local autonomy to flourish again.

The conscious, intentional construction of a system of anarchy would be a very different development and could happen peacefully and gradually. It would not require an apocalyptic destruction of the current system. It could develop as an ideological movement, much as democracy did in the 18th century and gradually spread from one or a few new polities to the rest. The american revolution is a prime example. Independence from the British Empire happened in the right intellectual climate that the revolutionaries deliberately set out to build a Republic. Similarly the French Revolution attempted to build a Roman inspired Republic. Unlike the americans they failed in the short term... but the important thing to keep in mind is that 18th century revolutionaries shared the republican ideal, just as many 19th or 20th century revolutionaries shared marxist ideals. Not just revolutionaries! Reformers in Britain, Switzerland and many other places shared the ideals of the time. They preferred reform and gradualism to war and revolution... but their goals were similar!

This leads us to the first important key: the ideas of anarchy are a prerequisite. When the intelectual foundations are built, change will eventually happen. The battle of ideas is the most important one.

However it is not the only one. Once enough critical mass is built, a real world experiment is necessary. Success breeds success. Example is the best teacher. Tangible, visible reality is the best killer of strawman arguments.

The second that you start to touch real and practical concerns, intellectual anarchists will criticise any attempt to "centrally plan" an anarchist society. So let me preface this with the caveat that nobody knows the future and nobody knows which political experiments will succeed and which will fail. Nevertheless just as entrepreneurs plan their business models and then have to adapt to reality, political entrepreneurs should have a detailed plan for a new political experiment, even if that plan is flexible and open to change. This is of course compatible with a thousand alternative plans competing to make the best model of an anarchist "constitution".

So allow me to imagine some possible ancap foundation stories, which then could spread to -not- rule the world.