are there any true anarchists on totse?
if so or not what are your views on anarchy and those who participate?
i am not an anarchist, but i like talking to people with differing views on governments.

I don't fully understand it...

I understand how a society would operate without government intervention, but how society would operate (functionally) without police (at least in highly populated areas) sort of confuses me...I mean, ever see what happens when the power goes out in cities? Chaos and looting...I suppose anarchy would be highly effective with willing and able participants on a smaller level but with 300 million people I feel it would be hard to achieve in America...Not that police actually prevent things from happening physically, just the threat of their retaliation is enough to keep most people from committing serious crimes...Someone explain how this works....(keeping people in order without threat of punishment that is)...Personal morality is definitely something I would not rely on.

Hypothetically, a libertarian socialist society would be completely voluntary. It follows from this, that there would be no police because police only serve to maintain the status quo through coercion - a practice contradictory to the ideals of a libertarian socialist society. Furthermore, anyone who didn't agree with the ideals of a libertarian socialist society could simply fuck off.

Government is voluntary, but stupid ignorance is a shield for the heathen.

One word: Somalia

people would need a lot of guns and some kind of unwritten law between people. I guess. But honestly I don't think that anarchy as well as socialism, communism, absolutism, monarchism and fascism have limited chances of working really well and smoothly on the national level (without plenty of deaths and suffering).

Quite right - theres an upper limit on community size before people start treating others like shit (how big this limit actually is, is subject to debate). Therefore an anarchy of 300 million needs to be made up of many smaller cooperating communities.

Incidently, I am an anarchist. I would iterate my views, but this computer I'm on has a time limit to using it.

But everything being a bunch of decentralized small autonomous communities is not a natural state, given a decent level of technology.

Not to mention there's zero guarantee that those communities (hypothetically assuming they'd exist) would all magically cooperate, instead of antagonize each other.

I'm not an anarchist, but my understanding of how police, military, etc would work is that they would be funded though, basically, charity. The theory being that if these organizations were really vital to society, it would be easy to get people to willingly fund them.

I could be way off though, so don't take my word on it...

Couple of notes here:

- Decentralised socially and politically, not necessarily geographically.
- Autonomous? Who said anything about autonomous? Merely not-entirely-dependent will suffice.
- On the side of peace and cooperation you have enlightened self-interest and momentum (solitary aggressor vs everyone else doesnt work very well), and on the side of war you have the fact that the setup is essentially practical direct democracy and theres nothing stopping a bunch of war-loving assholes forming their own community and doing what they do best.

Anarchism is really just an idealistic state against which anarchists measure society. Many of them, such as Proudhon, believe that it is actually an unachievable goal, but that we should try and move as close towards it as possible, while keeping practicality in mind.