And you know nothing of Anarchy if you believe that.
You know nothing of humanity, untwisted by State power.
For 99% of human existence, we were Anarchists of one flavour or another.
The State is a recent and poisonous novelty, a collection of monopolies used to construct further monopolies.
I understand anarchy as anarchists want it. I also understand that society as we know it arose from that prehistoric anarchy you speak of. Because someone finally managed to consolidate enough resources to establish themselves as ruler. Which is what would happen if you took modern societies and put them in anarchy. We do not yet have the tools to keep each other in check, or else we would already HAVE peaceful anarchy. I think decentralized techs can do a lot to address that, but as it stands now, today, if we converted to anarchy without massively redistributing wealth, the richest among us would simply immediately entrench themselves as rulers.
On that, we largely agree.
But without the State, corporations cannot hope to survive in competition with free labour.
Proudhon was no starry-eyed idealist, he had been a successful small entreprenuer himself under Absolutist crony-socialism.
Corporations would simply form their own states. They'd buy small armies and if libre labor poses an actual threat to their profits, they'd be removed. Even if you ignore that inevitability, economies of scale suggest at least the biggest businesses would be able to compete quite well.
Unless you're prepared to be a farmer, you're going to need to buy food, so you're going to *need* to sell your labor to survive, so individual laborers have to deal with the power imbalance of needing food immediately, compared to a business owner capable of hiring you clearly having extra money on hand to weather a shortfall until you cave out of hunger. There's an inherent power imbalance in the worker-employer relationship, and the absence of a state won't fix that.
You're thinking good thoughts.
The societies we speak of lasted thousands of years, and attempts at doing all of those Statist things were done. And nearly all failed. You really need a critical mass of monopolies to become self-sustaining, if your victims are able to flee OR resist.
And now we know more about the "failure states" and how to spot them. And we can engineer technology to distribute power further than ever before.
Books I recommend:
"Seeing, Like a State"
"Against The Grain: a prehistory of the earliest States"
"Debt: the first 5000 years"
What? We've had a practically unbroken chain of authoritarian state societies going back like 6,000 years or more. Some of them failed, sure, but always to be consumed by another state, never again to form an anarchic community for any meaningful length of time on a historical scale. If there's a critical mass of scale, we've already blown well past it. It's practically demanded by the sheer scale of work required to maintain society. It's the only way we know how to organize ourselves at scale.
We can develop tech to change our power structures, but for better or for worse, I would not brand the ones we have as failures. They've survived without any real threat to their fundamental structure for thousands of years, only ever seeing one state fall to another. It's incredibly difficult to scale without centralizing, which is why it took thousands of years and the advent of networked computers to just decentralize the money.
