Stateless society

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Stateless society describes a society without a government. It is generally the goal of anarchists who believe that government is both unnecessary and also directly harmful in that it infringes on the personal and economic freedoms of people.

Anarchists of different stripes disagree heavily on the exact form of this final society. The basic principle that all agree on is the non-existence of a central state in a non-aggression system or anarchy. Within this framework, most strands of anarchist thinking propose that a system of voluntary association of one kind or another can provide the services for which human beings have previously relied on the external coercive institutions of the state. What forms of association are desirable or possible in the absence of government is the subject of much debate within the anarchist community, as expressed in the heated debates between anarcho-capitalism (which proposes free market solutions to these problems) and various forms of anarcho-socialism (which tend to advocate a system of decentralized voluntary collectives to fulfill the current social obligations of the state).

From 1991 to 2006, Somalia was cited as a real-world example of a stateless society, with kritarchy (xeer), an informal system of rule by judges, serving in lieu of a centralized government.^[1]

Sections of Spain during the Spanish Civil War (particularly Catalonia and Aragón in 1936) which were organized by anarcho-syndicalists are often referred to as an example of anarchist practice.