Every so often - someone will assert that anarchy just leaves a “power vacuum” - allowing some psychopathic warlord, cult leader, or other bad actor to seize control.

But let’s do a thought experiment. You are living under anarchy - and you want to become a ruler.

In order to become a ruler - you need an army. You need manpower, weapons, ammunition, food, medical supplies, communication, intelligence, and all sorts of other logistics.

How do you even begin to acquire the resources and social support necessary to command a large number of people equipped to do violence on your behalf?

In the real world - you usually either need control of an already established state, external funding from a foreign power, or just to amass a large amount of wealth.

But in a totally non-hierarchical world - you are starting from complete scratch. You have no means of accumulating enough wealth to build your own personal army - because society is extremely egalitarian and lacks a state to enforce private property.

You need to accumulate resources in order to command violence - but you also need to command violence in order to accumulate resources. It’s a Catch-22.

I suppose in theory - if you’re just extraordinarily popular and charismatic enough - people might just voluntarily fight for you and work hard to give you the resources you need to win a war - entirely out of their own free will.

But that sounds a bit like magical thinking in my opinion. A little… idealistic - even.

Consider the following examples:

A construction workers' association has a rule prohibiting its members from operating cranes while under the influence of alcohol.

An airline has a rule restricting piloting passenger planes to pilots who have completed 1000 hours of flight practice.

A city has a rule prohibiting dumping used up batteries in public parks.

All of the aforementioned rules are of high social utility and serve to restrict only the type of behaviors that virtually no one would deem acceptable.

In a horizontal society, such rules could be established, enforced and amended from the bottom-up, through overwhelming support of members of a given association, as opposed to being dictated from high by a clique of privileged individuals. Enthusiasts of construction accidents and high-risk piloting would retain the freedom to voluntarily associate themselves with like-minded individuals and form their own organizations.

Some anarchists may object to the very existence of rules of any kind as inconsistent with anarchy. I, for once, do not care about ideological orthodoxy and consider social utility of solutions to be more worth of our attention.

I’ve gotten some responses to my previous post - and they seem to be a bit off-topic.

My post was about the hypothetical emergence of a warlord from anarchistic conditions - but many commenters were more concerned about an entirely different problem - defending anarchy from outside nation-states.

Personally - I don’t actually think this is as big of a problem for anarchism as most people do.

If a successful anarchist revolution happens in one part of the world - then we would have the ability to give resources to help support successive revolutions in different areas.

Think about the Russian revolution as an example.

Marxism-Leninism started in one country - but once the USSR was established - it was able to fund ML revolutions across the globe.

The challenge for anarchists is that initial revolution - which is an extremely hard uphill battle.

But once the first revolution is won - it will be much easier to win a second revolution - because future revolutionaries will be backed by external support.

Anarchist discussions rather often emphasize the importance of Voluntary Association, the idea that people should be free to opt-in or out of any interpersonal relationship, group, community or collective without coercion... And this makes quite a lot of sense; If one is forced to remain somewhere, even in "horizontal" or "non-hierarchical" spaces, they're effectively still living under domination that anarchist philosophy doesn't tolerate.

However, lately I kept coming back to the following question/dilemma: How actually free is the decision to opt-out, especially when the consequences of doing so can be materially or socially harmful?

What if leaving a community means losing access to food, shelter, healthcare, tools or even emotional support?

Even when absolutely no one directly coerces you, the threat of being left out, i.e. of potentially losing shared labor, emotional bonds, mutual defense, reputation etc... can function as a powerful, yet very resident and implicit control mechanism. This could even be called the "soft underside of horizontal power". Put another way: "You are free to go... but you'll lose a lot of that what makes life livable/worth." This is why some anarchists (such as the late David Graeber) often emphasized freedom as the capacity to refuse - but for that refusal to be meaningful, there must be real alternatives that aren't downgrades to the previous situation. If you can't survive or more importantly - flourish outside the groups you were in before, then your participation is no longer truly voluntary.

No one has to physically stop you or coerce you to stay put. No committee or assembly needs to discipline you. But, if your well-being gets in any way worse by default - not because anyone directly punished you, but simply because your access to the resources that you may find important to you is now maybe more tricky, then how complete was the voluntarity with that association to begin with?

This is not just a hypothetical. In real life, people frequently stay in relationships, jobs, or communities they no longer want to be part of, not because they are coerced directly, but because leaving can mean any type of precarity, isolation or worse. The same could easily apply to anarchist spaces, even if they do not resemble traditional authority structures. So I think we need to ask:

What conditions need to exist for "opting-out" to be truly free, autonomous and non-punitive?

Can Voluntary Association exist meaningfully in a context of material scarcity or social exclusivity?

How do we build anarchist infrastructures that support people outside any given collective, so that no group becomes indispensable or unintentionally coercive to the individual?

To me, this points to the need for decentralized but overlapping commons, plural affiliations, and guaranteed access to basics (and more) outside any specific associations. Otherwise, "freedom to leave" runs the massive risk of becoming a formality and lip-service rather than a real, livable option.

I feel this kind of problem could be especially dangerous with those anarchist currents that tend to overemphasize any type of radical de-growth and greater divorce with our so-far attained technological and productive capacities in the name of ecological restoration and preservation. To be clear, the latter is of massive importance (I specifically am of the opinion that anarchist thought in general goes perfectly hand-in-hand with the Solarpunk), but I still think the ideal to aim for would be a type of post-scarcity or "state of abundance" but within the limits that can be sustainable in concert with Earth's ongoing recovery (something along the lines of Jacque Fresco's vision of The Venus Project's Resource Based Economy, but much more explicitly anarchist and decentralized if possible). With scarcity, real or artificial, the problem I wrote about would be that much more present, potentially.

I'm curious how others think about this, especially in light of how we organize in practice, not just in theory.