I claimed, "If an opinion doesn't touch the question of when violence is justifiable, it's not a political opinion.". Brian Mastenbrook asked, "Doesn't this imply that there are no politics amongst anarchists?" As I understand it, the underpinning of this question is that anarchists do not accept or consider justifiable the kinds of state violence that everyone else considers not only justifiable but usually morally obligatory.
Leaving aside current deep philosophical differences among anarchists about the question of when non-state violence may or may not be justifiable, I think the discussions we normally characterize as political still, usually, boil down to questions of violence.
Of course, the most usual example of politics is entirely, 100%, about when violence is justifiable: it concerns either what policies the State is to enforce using its Westphalian monopoly on justifiable violence, or who will make that decision. Taking as an the example the politics that created the US Civil War, the question was whether the State was to use violence to return escaped slaves to slaveholders, or to free slaves from slaveholders. I argue (disagreeing diametrically with Al3x Payne) that this is indisputably a central example of the fuzzy class that we usually refer to by "politics". But there are clearly other examples around the edges, suggested by Mastenbrook's question, where the question is less clear-cut.
Let's consider a microscopic example of politics: a housing co-op that meets to discuss that the common bathrooms did not get properly cleaned last week. Pat, the person who had been assigned by the group consensus to clean them, simply did not do so. Pat does not dispute this. The group explains to Pat that doing their fair share of the common work is an obligation of residing in the co-op.
Pat answers that they will continue to reside in the co-op, but will not clean the bathrooms when assigned to do so, because they prefer not to clean bathrooms. The group explains that they will have to leave the co-op. Pat declines the request to leave. Different people from the group repeat the message. Pat says that if the discussion does not move on to other topics, then they will leave the meeting, because they have other things they prefer doing over listening to people criticize them.
The situation persists for a month: Pat continues to get periodically assigned to clean the bathrooms, and continues to refuse, with the consequence that the bathrooms reliably become filthy, and furthermore refuses to listen to criticism.
What will happen then?
The housing co-op could bar Pat's entry to the house where they live, or to their room in that house. Perhaps you could argue that this does not necessarily involve any violence. But I think that expropriating someone's home and denying them access to of the possessions stored therein is normally considered, if not a violent act, at least an act to which a violent response is often justified. Certainly, if you came home to your own house and found someone living there and barring the door, a violent response would at least occur to you as a possibility.
The housing co-op could call the police to evict Pat. But the police are inarguably agents of violence; this merely delegates the violence to someone else. It doesn't eliminate them from the equation.
The housing co-op could sue Pat in court, hoping to be awarded damages that will pay for a janitor during Pat's assigned bathroom-cleaning weeks. Again, this is merely delegating the violence to someone else — presumably Pat prefers not to pay the damages, or the involvement of the court would not be necessary, and the court's judgment is enforced either by the police or by the social expectation that police enforcement could happen and would be legitimate.
The housing co-op could simply cease to assign Pat to clean the bathrooms. But presupposing this as the only possible outcome of the dispute would prevent the dispute from arising in the first place; the reason the dispute happens is that other people in the situation are hoping for a different outcome than this, an outcome that invariably involves the threat of violence. (It might also result in extremely filthy bathrooms.)
Now, maybe this isn't the way it has to work. For example, salespeople often have a great deal of success at getting people to do things simply by requesting them repeatedly, without any implicit threat of violence. I have occasionally escaped being robbed by simply stubbornly refusing, repeatedly requesting that the robbers leave me alone. The Amish and Hutterites enforce their social norms, not through threats of violence, but through threats of shunning or non-cooperation.
But I have never seen or heard of this working on a scale larger than Dunbar's Number. There's fiction imagining it, but there don't seem to be any working examples.
But Mastenbrook seems to be pointing at something very interesting. At least an economist could imagine dominant assurance contracts, similar to Kickstarter, working to persuade enough people to voluntarily clean the bathrooms that they stay clean even without threats of violence. And surely organizing people to support a DAC, just like organizing people to go to a protest, would count as politics, even if you aren't relying on any implicit threats of violence to enforce the contracts. Wikipedia, PBS, the free software movement, and indeed the internet as a whole (except for the for-profit parts) are inspiring examples of this kind of social relation.
I still don't know how we could protect people from being enslaved by these means.