We do not need Government

It would have been so much better if we could have sorted out the definition of "government" in the first round rather than the last. It's not semantics so much as making sure we're talking about the same thing. Pro said: Government always implies governance over a group of people by a class of representatives. An organized society does not necessarily means "Government." See, here we are in the final round, and I don't agree with this at all. Government can be a class of representatives, but those representatives can be constantly being replaced. For example, in renaissance Florence, government was selected from the citizens by ballot, so a random selection of citizens was obliged to perform governmental duty every term. [1] And there are many advantages to a transparent, formal process of election, but it doesn't need to be formal. In a casual system, there are optional decision-making meetings and anyone who has free time turns up to "form government". It could be a different group of people each time. This is still a government. In order to make decisions for a large population, there would have to be a system of representation simply for pragmatic reasons. For example, in Miami alone, there are over 400,000 people in the city itself. If Miami became an anarchist society, it is simply impossible for every person in the city to have control over every decision made. Why, for just one decision, if every person spoke for a minute it would take nine months to get through them all. Pro said: "If [the decision-making meetings] were compulsory...Everyone would agree to contribute and follow the rules. That wouldn't be governmental as it wouldn't be a "governance" over a group of people from another group of people." Actually, it would. "Compulsory" means everyone has to do it whether they want to or not. This means that when people don't want to do it, they have to be forced or persuaded otherwise. They are forced or persuaded by other people who are acting on the authority of the group. This is governance. Pro said: "If the meetings were optional, than the society would work as a direct democracy where majority amount of people who want to contribute would deliberate the decisions. The people who would implement the ultimately made decisions would be volunteers." Yes, so we agree on this point. Pro said: "The Anarchist society would also most likely be self-sufficient, where the people would grow their own food and clean their own houses. Most of the dirty work, or jobs that nobody wants to do will be done self-sufficiently." This is a new idea. Again, I wish this weren't the last round because I would like to ask Pro more about this. Most importantly, why? And wouldn't that be too inefficient to feed all the people in the world? And how on earth are you going to force people back to self-sufficiency? And what if they refuse? Pro said: "If anything, the hard working Anarchists who strived for this society would volunteer to do some of the dirty work." So there would be "the hard working Anarchists who strived for this society" and then there would be the rest of the population. This sounds like a class division to me. Mostly, it sounds like party members and others in a communist society. Or, as in Orwell's Animal Farm: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." Pro said: "An organized system of sharing resources is necessary to satisfy people's fundamental living needs, not Government." Yes, but this organized system needs to be administered and enforced. Even if 99% of people are naturally cooperative and generous with each other, the remaining 1% could arm up and take over resources or try and create a monopoly on some essential thing like water supply. This would be true especially when resources are scarce. Pro said: "Our three brains would be completely unified if we worked in an equal left Anarchist society...This points our that our well beings would be the strongest in a Left Anarchist society since all our three brains would be in harmony under this society." I suppose I said that the neurophysiology was irrelevant because I feel that this aspect of Pro's argument doesn't really add anything. I don't think there's much difference between saying "life will be bliss under anarchy" and "life will be bliss under anarchy because our three brains will be unified and satisfied." Both statements are unsupported future projections. I have no doubt that Pro believes them to be true, but how can we be sure that she is right? The reason why I mentioned elections in South America is because this kind of argument isn't new. It's common to hear things like everyone will have a TV under this government or everyone will be rich under this type of system or there will be no more unemployment. But these sorts of promises are never delivered on. And my concern is that Pro's promises about life under anarchy would not be delivered on either. Pro asked: "Why do you think there are so many countries that are in peril? Why are there so many starving people when there is no shortage of food? Why is the gap between the rich and the poor so large? ... Why are there genocides that are barely covered in the news? ... Why?" These are very good questions. The only time I've seen genocide in action was in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh. When I was there, the entire area was blocked off and occupied by the Bangladesh military, and I think that's still the case [2]. The people in the hills are of a different cultural, racial and linguistic background from the rest of the country. And they do slash and burn agriculture, which means that large parts of the hill tracts are left unoccupied and unused in between times. So it's very different from life on the plains, which is one of the most crowded places in the world, and most people are in desperate poverty.So anyway, the government of Bangadesh had a treaty with the people of the Hill Tracts, and the military were there in violation of the treaty. And they were doing things like burning villages. And there was a lot of talk of murder, beatings and rape by the military. I believe it, but I didn't see any of that first hand. I did see them burn a whole street of houses, though. And people were definitely oppressed and scared. And the military were definitely strutting about. But see, this is the thing I learned in Bangladesh. In the US, and in similar countries, we think of the government and the military as the same thing. So you can say the US/the US government/the US military invaded Iraq, and it all means the same. But in countries like Bangladesh, it's not the same. The military might support the government or it might not. Which means that even when it does, the government has to be careful all the time not to push the military too far. So here are the people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. They're being oppressed, their leaders disappear, and their land is slowly being stolen. What would happen if the government and the military left them alone? My personal view is that they wouldn't last more than a week or two. Because in Bangladesh there are over 100 million people in dire poverty. The streets of Dhaka are lined with starving homeless people. And in the Hill Tracts there's all this "empty" land. It would just be taken over.On the other hand, the military occupation is hateful.So to answer your question. Of course, I don't know. But if Bangladesh had a stronger government, it could keep the military more in hand. And if the economy was stronger, a lot of things would be better. But I can't see how anarchy, as Pro describes it, would help at all. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org... [2] http://www.iwgia.org...