Political Fantasies Or Realizable Utopias

According to some sources,anarchy has conceptual roots in Ancient Chinese Daoist thought.On one side,Daoism emphasized perpetual change and the unity of opposites.On the other side,it discounted hard and fast rules based ontologically on Aristotelian logic and on what philosophers like Immanuel Kant,would later call categories.Despite this,Daoism can,at best,be said to provide critical of ways of thinking that frequently produce the sort of strong states that Confucians,Platonists and Aristotelians rationalized as vital for human progress.Subsequently,in the West,anarchy sprouted within various alternative religious schools that started defying the rules imposed by the church in Europe,in the Middle Ages.There are multiple schools of thought that bestow on anarchy both positive and negative attributes.However,a tendency towards three basic regards for anarchy in the West prevails.Firstly,the pro-anarchist,generally leftist stance on anarchy is positive and proposes the complete or relatively complete absence of the state.Secondly,the state's complete or relatively complete absence is perceived as negative by anti-anarchists.Thirdly,some American and European rightist conservatives,libertarians,supporters of radical laissez faire economics and a robust civil society that promotes social responsibility and private property rights hold that the state be limited as much as possible.This thesis will focus primarily on the Western tradition in the first and second regards,but will also note and draw insights from Chinese and Japanese source materials.To focus on the concept of anarchy,much attention in academia and in the media has been given to various activist anarchist movements that openly resist and fight states and governments.Less attention has been directed to comparative studies that seek to juxtapose literal,imaginary visions of anarchy with real-life anarchist communities.The main purpose of this paper is to examine and compare the visions and results of anarchy presented in the graphic novel ‘V for Vendetta' with the subsisting praxis discovered in the anarchist communities,Freetown Christiania and Exarcheia.In order to do this,the present study uses three different theoretical lenses that emphasize anarchism as a theory of slow change in contrast to the previously popularized and frequently-researched notion of anarchy as violent and active resistance.The theoretical frames that will serve as the backbone of this study are philosophical anarchism,David Graeber's theory of anarchist anthropology and the Marxist concept of the state withering away.