Can we have order and security without government?

First, ask yourself whether government really protects us against criminals. Government makes law, but laws are not carried out by them. Instead, it is the police, detectives, state forces, judges, lawyers, prison wardens who are responsible for successful implementation of laws. Government can make any laws they want, but if there were no police to punish the law-breakers, would the laws be still as effective in maintaining order and security? The legislatures pass laws, the judges interpret them, the various officials execute them, the police track and arrest the criminal, and finally the prison warden gets him into custody. Numerous persons and institutions are busy ensuring that laws are still in place and law-breakers are punished dutifully. This whole cumbersome process is not possible without the support of the taxpayers money. In other words, it is not the government, but the tax-paying citizens who are ultimately responsible for making the laws effective in maintaining order and security. Hence, what little order and peace we do have is due to the good common sense and joint efforts of the people, not so much of the government. Who will protect us against the criminals? Assuming that without government (and hence without laws), people would rob and murder. If they really would, why would they commit such crimes? Would they do it just for the pleasure of it or because of certain reasons? Crime is the result of economic conditions, of social inequality, of wrongs and evils of which government and monopoly are the parents. Government and law can only punish the criminal, but not prevent crimes. However, it is possible to eliminate crime by doing away with the conditions that create it. In other words, simply by removing government, crime rates will plummet. Crimes resulting from government, from its- oppression and injustice, from inequality and poverty, will disappear. These constitute by far the greatest percentage of crime. Without government, there will not be many criminals to speak of. How would anarchists deal with anti-social crimes? Crime is the result of hierarchy; the abolition of hierarchy will cause it to disappear. 95% of crime is caused by patriarchy, private property and capitalism (stealing, etc.); its abolition will result in the end of 95% of crime. What little is left over could be better dealt with by the community than by any police force. Many historical pre-capitalist societies had little or no crime; a few weeks after the Spanish Revolution began crime plummeted. The state has proven completely incapable of combating crime - it has been trying to prevent crime for years yet has been a complete failure. At best it merely punishes people after the fact.

Anarchy vs. Government Anarchy would begin by feeding the "criminal" and securing him work instead of first watching him, arresting, trying, and imprisoning him, and finally ending by feeding him and the many others who have to watch and feed him. Surely even this example shows how much more sensible and simpler life would be under Anarchism than now. Anarchy does not cause violence The truth is that in every country, in every social movement, violence has been a part of the struggle from time immemorial. Even the Nazarene, who came to preach the gospel of peace, resorted to violence to drive the money changers out of the temple. As we have seen, acts of political violence have been committed not only by Anarchists, Socialists, and revolutionists of all kinds, but also by patriots and nationalists, by Democrats and Republicans, by suffragettes, by conservatives and reactionaries, by monarchists and royalists, and even by religionists and devout Christians. We know now that it could not have been any particular idea or "ism" that influenced their acts, because the most varied ideas and "isms" produced similar deeds. I have given as the reason individual temperament and the general feeling about violence. What about Human Nature If human nature is bad then hierarchy should be abolished because those on the top will inevitably abuse their power. If human nature is good then there is no need for hierarchy because people will do good things without being dominated by others. Either way, we should have anarchy. If people are too evil to rule themselves then they are far too evil to rule other people. The immense majority of human history has been lived in hunter-gatherer societies, a form of primitivist anarchy. If human nature favors any particular social system it favors hunter-gatherer anarchy because that is what the majority of human history has been lived in. Given the immense diversity of social systems humans have created over the eons it is unlikely that human nature, if it even exists, plays a great role in determining social structure. Coordination and Administration It is possible to coordinate activities without hierarchy. Any group of people can get together and hold a general assembly where they can divvy up the tasks they need to do and decide who will do what. If needed they can assign one or more people to act as coordinators. Such coordinators would simply implement the plans developed by the general assembly and would have no authority themselves. In the Ukrainian and Spanish Revolutions when workers took over factories the worker assemblies often created factory committees that performed administrative and coordination tasks. Decision making power stayed with the worker assemblies, the factory committees simply implemented what the workers decided in their assemblies. Coordination between multiple assemblies can be done through the council system.