If someone is allowed to amass power to to abuse others, it is not anarchy.
You seem to assume anarchy implies no rules, but fundamentally to ensure minimal rules the bare minimum is to shut down any attempt at aggression against others.
An anarchist would argue, however, that protecting society against aggression does not require a top down state.
There was a recent attempt in Capital Hill at creating an area where everyone was equal, and as I recall a bunch of people seized power and went on to cause havoc and violence...
How do you prevent someone from building too much power? Well, you need to cap their reserves of soldiers/hardware/supplies. In order to do that you inherently need a stronger entity to enforce those caps...
An early premise of anarchist movements was that there are already someone trying to grab too much power, namely nation states. As such a large proportion of anarchist thought is down to how to organise and build bottom up structures with the intent of matching and being able to counter and destroy the power structures of nation states.
Now ask yourself why you assume they'd be unwilling to build structures capable of resisting attempts to take power, when that is basically the raison d'etre for these groups.
> Now ask yourself why you assume they'd be unwilling to build structures capable of resisting attempts to take power, when that is basically the raison d'etre for these groups.
Not unwilling. Unable. Fighting against something rarely works to bring about productive change. Fighting for something is harder, but often does.
The French revolution brought about sweeping change across Europe in its aftermath. That the changes it brought were unpredictable is true, and that it took an aftermath that lasted for a long time to resolve the fallout too. But to suggest it didn't bring productive change is ludicrous.
And Animal Farm is fiction.
But if you're so sure it is unable, then it doesn't matter then - in that case these systems will never come to fruition, and so debating them is pointless.
Your history is confused. You're confusing the French Revolution and the American Revolution. Change in Europe came primarily due to a working example in America. America was, in a very real sense, a beacon of hope and freedom for the rest of the world.
The French Revolution in isolation was entirely regressive. It led to a lot of unpredictable chaos AND it slowed productive change. An ill-executed plan is a setback. You can see what the example of the USSR did to Communism.
I think I started this thread by saying we need to push FOR something positive, rather than AGAINST something. That's prerequisite to positive change. Pushing for something requires a plan. That requires discussion, debate, open-mindedness, and a mixture of pragmatism and idealism. Mostly, it requires a lot of deep conversation and thoughtfulness.
No, I'm not at all confusing the French Revolution and the American "revolution" (I always find it funny Americans consider it a revolution in the first place - it was nothing of the sort, it was a secession war that did nothing to upset the economic or class balance within American society).
While the American revolutionary war provided some inspiration, the path towards revolution in France involved political changes that had been brewing for a century, and its historically illiterate to suggest it was all, or mostly, a result of a "working example".
It also happened on the backdrop of the dissemination of enlightenment ideas from writers like the Genevan Rosseau, the French Voltaire, and English writers like Locke, who equally were an inspiration in America.
1789 also happened to a backdrop of some of the most severe inflation France had seen, after decades of social upheaval, for example. The revolution was a matter of survival for a lot of people, not middle classes upset over minor taxation, and it changed not just France, but Europe and large parts of the world.
Numerous countries, far outside Europe, still have legal codes incorporating large aspects of the Napeolonic Code that codified a large amount of the principles coming from the revolution, for example [1].
> The French Revolution in isolation was entirely regressive.
This is just pure fiction.
It's clear there's no point in debating this.
> I think I started this thread by saying we need to push FOR something positive, rather than AGAINST something. That's prerequisite to positive change. Pushing for something requires a plan. That requires discussion, debate, open-mindedness, and a mixture of pragmatism and idealism. Mostly, it requires a lot of deep conversation and thoughtfulness.
Most major change has come through protest and people rising up, nothing as naive as what you suggest here.
You seem to assume anarchy implies no rules, but fundamentally to ensure minimal rules the bare minimum is to shut down any attempt at aggression against others.
An anarchist would argue, however, that protecting society against aggression does not require a top down state.