Anarchism’s plausibility diminishes as division of labor and inequality deepen

Evidence

Its sociological realism therefore varies very greatly with historical setting, from the Nuer (‘deeply democratic, and easily roused to violence’: Evans-Pritchard 1940: 294) to the classes dangereuses of a great Third World metropolis like Cairo (or Beirut) or a centre of advanced capitalist civilization like Manhattan. As Locke pointed out (1967: II, chapter 5), and as most subsequent social and political thinking has amply confirmed, this sociological realism diminishes markedly with a deepening division of labour, enhancement of productive power, and widening of economic inequalities. To restore to anarchism a measure of sociological plausibility, it would be necessary to extricate an anarchic community from the modern world economy and to reconcile its members to decidedly more modest standards of living than those which prevail in, for example, Sweden or Spain or the Soviet Union. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1094

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Blindness project: the doctor’s wife’s world collapses into Hobbesian predation when the division of labor (specialist roles) and formal monitoring vanish — the novel is a controlled experiment removing exactly what Locke says makes dispersed self-regulation untrustworthy.
• CANDY: The image of classes dangereuses ranging from the democratic-violent Nuer to Cairo, Beirut, and Manhattan is a striking elevator-level juxtaposition.