this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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I was being pithy. I think it's a bit absurd to say that corruption is impossible under anarchism because no one has power.
Power disparity is an unavoidable fact in every society, no matter the structure (or lack thereof). Some will be popular and some unpopular. Some will be physically strong and others physically weak. Some will seek to build up community and some will seek to tear it down.
And any amount of power disparity is prone to corruption. Surely I don't need to point out examples of an absolute asshole getting popular and then using that popularity to take advantage of or hurt other people.
Anarchism, if it has one thing going for it, is that these problems tend to stay fairly local. But it also doesn't give any solutions to these problems other than lynchmobs. So its a bit of a tradeoff. But it absolutely isn't immune from corruption.
Well, technically it is immune to corruption. It isn't immune to people being terrible and exploitative, but that's technically not corruption. To be corrupt, you'd have to be given legitimate power, and then misuse it. The popular asshole created their power from scratch.
A system without legitimized power isn't immune to bad people creating power, but it is technically immune to corruption since there's nothing to corrupt.
I don't think it's possible to have a system without some form of legitimized power, as people will always fill that vacuum. There will be a village elder or judge or peacekeeper or something, as those all fulfill necessary elements to a functioning society, and they will all come with some amount of legitimate authority.
Now, I suppose it might be fair to say that those "legitimate authorities" aren't prescribed by the system, and therefore any corruption that follows is not the fault of the system. That seems a bit squishy to me, as those "legitimate authorities" are a natural outflow of society, and if the system does not have built in controls on those positions it is tacitly approving of any corruption.
But I'll grant there may be a purely semantic argument that the system itself is immune to corruption, in the same way that a starving person doesn't have to worry about food poisoning.
Yeah that's what I was alluding to, hence "technically". You're correct that power is inevitable, and your system not prescribing power only limits its ability to moderate that emergent power.