u/aimixin - originally from r/GenZhou
No, anarchism isn’t just “fuck all the rules”, it’s a whole ideology and it’s riddled with nonsense and contradictions.

Anarchists like to put themselves on the same side as socialists, yet anarchism is fundamentally is not a socialist ideology. Socialism is based on the socialization of production, which is something anarchists reject. They are very individualist and view society as oppressive to the individual and want to break up society into small independent units.

A wide gulf separates socialism from anarchism, and it is in vain that the agents-provocateurs of the secret police and the news paper lackeys of reactionary governments pretend that this gulf does not exist. The philosophy of the anarchists is bourgeois philosophy turned inside out. Their individualistic theories and their individualistic ideal are the very opposite of socialism. Their views express, not the future of bourgeois society, which is striding with irresistible force towards the socialisation of labour, but the present and even the past of that society, the domination of blind chance over the scattered and isolated small, producer.

– Vladimir Lenin, Socialism and Anarchism

Anarchists are more concerned with morality than actual concrete reality. They have the liberal mindset that the political and economic system is merely a reflection of the beliefs and ideas of that society and has no connection to the society’s material conditions, and therefore to change a political or economic system, all that is necessary is changing people’s ideas.

Because of this, they think building a utopia merely requires imagining that utopia in your head and convincing everyone else of it, and by extension, any country that has failed to achieve a utopia has only done so due to a moral failing on their part. They think the reason every single socialist experiment failed to achieve some imagined utopia is because of moral corruption, that the leadership was just evil and immoral.

They extend this idea not to just the leaders of those countries, but anyone who supports those countries. If you defend any actually-existing socialist country, they will assume you must only do so because you are morally inferior, they will accuse you of being an “evil tankie” and whatever other insult they can imagine to try and attack your character, rather than your arguments, because in their mind, they don’t believe you believe what you believe due to good arguments. They believe you believe what you believe due to a moral failing.

Let’s stop talking in generalities and take a look at a very concrete example: economics. Going back to Smith’s LTV, we understand how capitalist economies are capable of, to some degree, balancing resources to convert the supply into the goods and services demanded, and how market pressures push companies into buying and selling roughly at cost of production. A planned economy can also balance resources because, in principle, they would have access to the information and computational power needed to directly calculate costs of production and allocate resources efficiently to achieve similar, and with sufficient infrastructure and technology, even better, results.

Many anarchists will propose some economic system outside of markets and economic planning, what they call the “gift economy”. They don’t propose this system because they arrived at it objectively through a rigorous analysis of the development of capitalism as Marxists arrive at their understanding, no, they propose it because it sounds morally good to them.

The problem is, a gift economy fundamentally has no way to balance resources. If I could take whatever I want without expectation of returning sufficient materials, you would inevitably have huge shortages in the economy.

Shortages are avoided in market systems by requiring direct recuperation of cost upon consumption (payment), while centrally planned systems may recuperate cost immediately, but since they are centrally planned, resources from one sector can be allocated towards another, i.e. health care could be provided free at the point of service but funded by another sector of the economy, and it would balance out, because planning is centralized and able to do such a thing.

A gift economy lacks both of these features. It has no planning capabilities nor any market capabilities to regulate consumption of resources. It’s not that economic calculation can’t be done, it’s that in a gift economy, economic calculation never even takes place. Once you begin to introduce any sort of mechanism for economic calculation, you inevitably end up with either a market system or a planned economy. The only way economic calculation could be done away with entirely is if we had a post-scarcity society, i.e. the conditions to achieve full communism, which obviously doesn’t exist.

Of course, this is just one example. Anarchists believe in many things and not all believe in gift economies, but it’s an example of something many anarchists fundamentally believe in purely on moral grounds despite it being nonsense economically.

Anarchism is fundamentally based in decentralization which plenty of Marxists such as Friedrich Engels and Che Guevara already criticized this concept as nonsensical and pointed out how decentralized production is the basis for capitalism and will inevitably return to capitalism.

Anarchism is an incredibly self-contradictory ideology that fundamentally is based in morality without any concerns for concrete reality. It’s concerned with trying to force reality to fit into an idealized utopia rather than deriving answers from concrete reality itself. Political and economic systems are not in our heads, they’re in the real, material world, and they have to operate and maintain complex social relations and modes of production. You can’t build a political and economic system based on morality any more than you can build a smartphone based on morality.