The US actually had a working system with the McCain Feingold legislation that prohibited “dark” or unregulated money in election campaigns.

The legislation limited the power of wealth which made government more willing to police corporations bad behavior.

With the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United, we are now in a free for all. Wealth now translates to political power. We are seeing not only de-regulation but the active collusion of the current administration and favored corporations.

Don't the anarchists think they have ways to check both state and government power, while promoting human welfare? (I'm unfortunately unfamiliar with anarchist philosophy, so I don't know what their proposals are.)

I think the roadmap to the anarchist view is simple enough in theory - break up large companies, redistribute large piles of wealth, establish laws enforcing size limits, and, following that, scale government back and delegate decision-making to the affected individuals wherever practical. Ignoring the practical questions of how one breaks up, say, Amazon, the state has the guns, so if the state says Bezos loses his yacht, it is so.

The practical side is substantially harder - the anarchist-communal version of the world requires a citizenry committed to their community, phobic to bigness, and willing to assert that something that is not in the interest of the commons is not allowed to happen. Again, this ignores the practical question - balances of innovation vs unknown potential costs, etc - but the bigger practical concern is building an actual durable social contract that people will uphold and enforce over time, even when that means giving up personal glory.

This was basically the state of most societal groups in the pre-modern era - by and large, most people's day-to-day existence was within local community groups that had a lot of say over what they allowed within their sphere of influence - but the modern world creates the ability to concentrate power in ways which are harder for a smaller group of individuals to combat. A teenager with an AK-47 would've mowed through a squadron of Roman soldiers like they weren't there, and the mechanization of industry allows for more rapid consolidation of wealth than prior means, which renders the whole affair much harder to keep in hand.

I also don't know much about anarchist philosophy; would love some insight here if anyone can speak to that.

But if the US (same applies to other countries) became an anarchy today, then entities like Goldman Sachs and Constellis (formerly Blackwater) are going to fare much better than most. So a naive "burn it all down" anarchy doesn't seem an answer.

UPDATE: I remembered Noam Chomsky is sometimes called an anarcho-syndicalist but never looked up what meant. Turns out that is exactly the kind of "anarchism" that answers my question. (New concept to me, so not sure in what sense this might be called anarchism. No central government?)

Real-life anarchists aren't proposing the naïve "burn it all down" anarchy. Apparently that's just a media thing. (Some claim it's authoritarian propaganda, but I suspect it's just writers going: "we need a bad guy who wants to destroy society, but they need a reason, and we've had too many religious extremists: let's make this one an anarchist!"… though maybe this is a false dichotomy? Someone's probably written a book about it.)

Oh, hey, the first text I picked from the Anarchist Library answers the question in my previous comment! https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alex-stefanescu-rela...

> A revolution would be necessary to topple a political regime. But, if your starting point is the rejection of authority, if you don’t need “permission”, you don’t need the revolution either. Anarchy starts not with a bang, but with a whimper — not with an announcement on public television that it is the time to dismantle hierarchies, but with our collective work to slowly build something on the lack of the hierarchies themselves.

I'm not sure I understand the rest of this document, but this bit seems straightforward.

The link between anarchists and 'burn everything down' comes from the fact that in reality, many anarchists have very much taken the 'shoot first' and then hopefully build something better later path.

Those anarchists who didn't do that, were just never politically or socially relevant. So they can write nice pamphlets all they like about what 'real anarchism' actually is.

> we need a bad guy who wants to destroy society

Anarchist and Communists very much wanted a fundamentally different society, one so different that its essentially impossible to get there without destroying the existing one first.

Well, no… Anarchism can be achieved via parallel construction, provided that the existing society doesn't fight back. For example, mutual aid networks (as described by Peter Kropotkin). And an anarchist society could transition to a communist society (or pretty much any other society) – but even Friedrich Engels' "withering away of the state" route to communism (attributed to Karl Marx, but Wikipedia disputes that it was actually his idea) does not require the destruction of the existing society to precede communism.

I only have a superficial understanding of these ideas; but it seems to me that a good idea, whatever the ideology behind it, is worth implementing. And "we should make sure everyone gets fed by looking after each other" is a pretty good idea, so it shouldn't matter that it's technically "anarchy".

Sure and if I claim that you should do a 1-handed handstand and say 'communism' three times in a row, it will surely create communism right? I can even write it down on a piece of paper and call it a 'manifesto'. But in the actual real world writing stuff down doesn't make it true at all, even if the person that wrote it is famous.

> For example, mutual aid networks

That in reality have never even come close to achieving much more then mutual aid. That such action could be wide ranging enough to replace the state is nothing more then fantasy.

The closest thing to that is Muslim Brotherhood doing aid, but that is with a clear component of military power as well.

> but even Friedrich Engels

Why would you say 'even'. Engles is not in any way shape or form qualified to make such statements. In his times non of these ideas had been tested. And said different things at different times for different people. Engels specifically publicly called out mass death would happen.

In the real world it has never happened and there is no indication that it would ever happen.

Proponents of mutual aid networks aren't trying to "replace the state". I'm not sure which anarchist ideas are supposed to accomplish that (if any): as I understand, different philosophies have different views on that. "Provided the existing society doesn't fight back" was a reference to the repeated criminalisation of Food Not Bombs.

I say "even" because afaik Marxists don't seek to destroy the state: they believe the destruction of the state is inevitable (dialectics!), and seek instead to win battles in the class war – my "even" applied to the "withering away of the state" idea, not to Friedrich Engels himself. (I'm not familiar with all of his ideas.) Marxism–Leninism is the "the Bolsheviks were right all along" belief system, but is quite different to classic Marxism.

In the real world I don't think we'll ever have a group, region, or territory governed by any pure ideology, so I agree that a state of anarchy, or a classic communist society, would never happen in real life. That doesn't mean it's worthless to think about the ideas, any more than it's worthless to talk about uniform point masses on a frictionless inclined plane.

There are historical as well as contemporary examples of societies built on anarchist principles. They are few and fairly marginal, mostly because they tend to be crushed by the surrounding (centralized) cultures, but even so it's not all just hypothetical.

The most prominent contemporary example is the Zapatista territories. To a lesser extent, arguably also Rojava, although "libertarian market socialism" would probably be a more accurate label for that.

> Anarchist and Communists very much wanted a fundamentally different society,

They still want it.

> one so different that its essentially impossible to get there without destroying the existing one first.

Everything else they say is demagogy, in the end, all they are good for is fomenting strife and wars. After the bloodshed, these fools and their fantasies are quickly disposed of, the little tools they are.

Most anarchist tendencies would tear Goldman Sachs to shreds.

Even Rothbard wrote a pamphlet, I think he later disendorsed, justifying the breakup of any entity that contributes to war or state violence. I dont need to look up Goldman Sachs but I reckon I could justify them being in that box.

>anarchism

Anarchy the leftist tendency is the removal of Hierarchy. It can be debated into how you categorise that, but ultimately they all want corporations gone.

Its the right wing anarchists that are solely focused on the government

Hierarchy is not part of the definition of a corporation. There are worker-owned cooperatives which are incorporated.

Yes, you could have a corporation that does not have an internal hierarchy. But (in a left anarchist view) you cant have a corporation without private property and corporate limitation of liability. Both of those are (in their view) hierarchical.

The problem from a left anarchist standpoint isn't (just) "CEO is boss, having boss bad" its that there's a group of people with special treatment everyone else is not subject to.

You might disagree with that view, and probably do. I am just familiar enough with their ideas to relay and explain them.

Anarchism is a spectrum so there's considerable disagreement over how the desirable state of affairs looks like, exactly. All anarchists would agree that you want to get rid of any kind of hierarchical power arrangements where possible, but the vast majority would also agree that it is not always possible, and so the realistic goal is the one where they are minimized. But that invites the question of what such a viable minimum state of organization might be, and different people have different answers to that.

I'd say that the most well-developed concrete platform in this sense is Murray Bookchin's "libertarian municipalism", although that is arguably too organized to be properly referred to as anarchism (Bookchin himself, although he used to be an anarchist, dropped the label eventually). But, even so, it's much closer to an anarchist utopia than any state-centric model. And it actually has some practical successes on the ground in Rojava, although the jury is still out on whether it can hold long term.