Memes

Thanks for this response. Yes, you're correct, letting criminals prey on people is not liberation from coercion. Neither is paleo-anarchism or what have you, and neither is the kind of 'proto anarchocommunism' Graeber describes in debt. The problem with the latter of these is that small communities tend to have very, very strong social laws and mores that can have varying severe consequences if they're not followed, and it functionally boils down to the same as being governed by an HOA.

I believe that government must play a role in dismantling coercive power structures, including the ones you mentioned, but in order to do that judiciously, the government must be accountable to the people it governs, not creating creepy secretive self-surveillance programs like you see in the US, China, and other major players. Anarchists may use violence, but targeted assassination and thrown sticks of dynamite cannot remotely compare to the kind of completely deranged outcomes you get when an authoritarian government mobilizes for violence. You might argue that your preferred violence is for a good cause, but you've got a bit of a trap on your hands, because every bad guy out there convinced themselves that theirs was the right choice to make at the time. Nettanyahu thinks he's the good guy here, the CIA believes that they're right and justified when they set up reactionary movements. Some Americans even rationalize the genocide of first nations by arguing that it resulted in the United States, which is a good thing in their opinion (lol, lmao even), and therefore it's retroactively acceptable. In other words, the problem is that all organized violence is self-assured and self-justified. I personally reject the notion that a just and equitable future can only be built on a pile of corpses.