Time to piss off a bunch of anarchists! Hopefully, you’ll take it in stride and disembowel me in the comments.
Anarchy is quite the opposite of Communism when it comes to political structure and social order. However, when it comes to the relation of these ideas to their respective political segments, Anarchy is the Communism of the Right (or if that’s too harsh for your sensibilities, it’s the Communism of the Libertarian movement). How so? There are three major similarities: 1) The likelihood of long-term, stable implementation, 2) the resultant social order, and 3) the big lie that must be believed in order to accept the philosophy.
Stable Implementation
We’re very quick to trot out the old cliche that Communism has failed every time it was tried. When the accusation is turned back to us, we quickly disavow Somalia and begin thinking through history for a good example. However, the search through history ends very differently when looking for a successful minarchy versus a successful voluntaryist society. There are certainly successful examples of both, but the difference is in scale. History is rife with examples of empires controlling a city or region with a small military presence and a minimal government. Sure, the occupiers tended to plunder the occupied lands, but in comparison to today, such plunder would be considered libertopian. Anarchic societies are comparatively rare and quite fleeting. Usually, they are either quite small and isolated (nomadic tribes), or extremely volatile (territorial California). In essence, an anarchy does not have what is required for a stable society: protection from conquerors, safety from bad actors, and normalization of trade.
As much as we all wish the world worked more like theory, it usually doesn’t. This is because we ignore or misestimate some of the factors that significantly affect the result. Such is how it is in a voluntaryist society. These societies are unstable for many reasons, especially because they are bad at protecting their citizens from conquerors and from bad actors. With limited recourse available, regulating and normalizing trade is outside the reach of an anarchic society of any real size. As such, any anarchic society would necessarily subdivide into small tribes with an extreme distrust of outsiders. It’s hard to imagine the amount of devastation that would be required to create these small anarchic tribes in the modern world. The sheer population density of modern cities would render it impossible sans cataclysm.
Resultant social order
Communism requires the deaths of millions in order to be properly implemented. In essence, instinctual self-preservation needs to be beaten and bred out of a populace before they are able to accept communism. The New Soviet Man was always a generation away because the commies could never kill off that self-preservation instinct that is endemic to all nature. The resultant social order was extremely distorted and self-focused. When staying alive meant selling out the next guy, the next guy ended up in the gulag and you slept soundly that night.
Similarly, anarchy requires massive upheaval to be implemented, and the resultant social order has invariably been harsh, unjust, and lacking in technological growth. Despite the immense gold reserves in mid-19th century California, it was a horrible place for many of the adventurers looking for a boon. Although there was a nominal military government in place, it was wholly unable to police the vast expanse of California territory. In cities like Los Angeles, Monterey, and San Francisco, murders in the streets were common. Theft, fraud and violence were daily hazards. There was such a vacuum of power that vigilance committees were formed on a regular basis, enacting their form of justice, usually politically based and manipulated such that the leaders were enriched at the expense of the citizenry. Rather than the idyllic picture of small virtuous tribes scattered across the countryside or the progressive image of a futuristic city filled with happy prostitutes, heroin vending machines, and no taxes, the history of California shows a dystopian mix of these two images. There were small islands of virtuous, justice-seeking families floating in an ocean of rights-violating horror.
Much like the communists’ aggression borne out of survival, the bad actors aggressed against citizens. However, unlike the communists, the bad actors were aggressive because they could get away with it.
The Big Lie
Acceptance of communism requires belief in a faulty premise. Namely, the premise that individuals do not have agency. Government is greater than the individual and thus can appropriate the property and labor of its citizens. Much of the horrific nature of communism derives from this faulty premise.
Likewise, acceptance of anarchy also requires belief in a faulty premise that there is no valid authority over an individual. In reality, people are quite unstable when completely given over to their own devices. Both outside conquerors and the less savory elements of society show the results of solely individual authority: the complete inability of society to protect citizens from outside conquerors, make citizens safe from bad actors, and normalize trade.
We can always have discussions of what level authority we rightfully have over one another, and, in extension, what authority society and its civil government legitimately have over us. However, the idea that the individual is not subject to any authority (whether legitimate or not, virtuous or not), results in similar absurdities like when the government is fully authoritative. Might makes right. Exploitation over altruism. Vulnerability in the face of outside threats.
