There was some edgelord meme about a year ago about how social-anarchists were doing what the governments were saying regarding masks and future vaccinations, and someone modified it to explain that anarchists agreed with the government not because they supported the government, but because it was a good idea regardless of who suggested it. I can’t find that one though.
Do I really need to repeat the Bakunin bootmaker quote again?
I like to think of ideological Anarchists with a capital “A”, and today’s Libertarians as “small A anarchists”, as in anarchists before Bakunin et al, when the word still meant “chaos/absence of any authority”. I understand you guys think you own the word now, but I’m still going to use it in the other sense sometimes, “pertaining to anarchy.”
I’m not a single one, but a mixture of anarcho-communist, anarcho-syndicalist, anarcha-feminist and queer anarchist. They don’t really contradict each other much, they are just focused on different areas.
I’m also social ecologist green anarchist, but definitely not primitivist green anarchist (they do tend to be antivax, because vaccinations are an invention of civilisation). Anarcho-primitivists are the only group who I strongly disagree with, along with pure Egoists but pure Egoism is a meme ideology that can never function if there is more than one person involved, so that doesn’t really count.
No. It’s just that words have meaning, even if that meaning can and does change over time. There has been an attempt to claim the space of actual freedom that anarchism as a political philosophy came to represent since the 1950s onward. The people that @anon73430903 is referring to are attempting to co-opt the term from those meanings. They are not using it to mean “chaotic or without order.” They use the term “libertarian” in the same way, wrenching it from it’s late 19th and early 20th century context and imposing a new meaning on it.
Does the “no” at the beginning of your sentence mean they don’t claim to own the word then?
Either I can use it without referring to the political meaning or not, and if I can’t then it only has one meaning now, which means they do claim it as their own.
If this is just a misunderstanding, fair enough, my use of it was clear enough (or so I thought). It’s a perfectly descriptive word, and one that’s likely to annoy a modern Libertarian because of the older meaning.
The earliest reference to anarchism as a political structure unrelated to chaos was in the 17th century/first years of the 18th century. Even before then it was mixed, as anyone who questioned Polybius and his ideas around government were called anarchists. Is it any wonder some of us decided to reclaim it centuries ago?
agreed
still agree, except radical has a long history of progressiveness.
This has no historical foundation to it, and is as accurate as calling Nancy Pelosi a Marxist. It is capital W Wrong. We have millennia of proto-anarchist movements (Let’s start with Laozi and philosophical Taoism), and none of them resemble the Republican party of today or 20 years ago.
(I can’t actually watch the video to understand the context, I just get a black screen)
That’s giving them too much credit. Capital-L Libertarians (really AynCaps) in the U.S. are mostly selfish and hypocritical (and often self-deluding) greedpigs who throw tantrums when they’re not allowed to do something or have to occasionally participate in the society their leaders tell them doesn’t really exist. That’s before you get into the fact that saying names like “Mises” or “Hayek” or “Friedman” to them will result in a blank or puzzled look.
You would probably agree with nearly all of what he says. A lot of it is about public apathy, money controlling politics etc. It’s only about 6 minutes long. I briefly tried to find a transcript but no luck.
I do understand the history of the word, and I am probably going to continue to use it in the more archaic meaning sometimes.
In sociology, anomie (/ˈænəˌmi/) is a social condition defined by an uprooting or breakdown of any moral values, standards or guidance for individuals to follow.[1][2] Anomie may evolve from conflict of belief systems[3] and causes breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community (both economic and primary socialization).[4] E.g. alienation in a person that can progress into a dysfunctional inability to integrate within normative situations of their social world like to find a job, find success in relationships, etc.
Except you seem to be referring to people who ARE using it as a political term. You are not using it to describe the STATE of anarchy, but to describe someone’s political views. You even referred to a particular individual. It is pretty clear that the an-caps are attempting to hijack anarchism the same way they hijacked libertarian.
So yeah, you’re going to get push back from folks who have some working knowledge of anarchism as a political philosophy.
But honestly, when it comes to all things anarchism, I really do defer to our @anon73430903…
That’s fair. When I typed it out I simply grabbed the first adjective that came to mind for someone opposed to any kind of authority over them, but not necessarily interested in the specific philosophy.
I was not aware anyone was trying to hijack anarchism as a term. I’ve always thought that when someone proudly described themselves as a Libertarian, calling them an anarchist would be driving trollies them while also making a valid point about how they view government. @anon73430903 suggested “anomie” but I can’t see using that word and having any Libertarian know what I’m talking about. We’re discussing communication, but it’s like when two people claim to be Christians, and yet believe very different things.
@orenwolf there seems to be a political semantics thread nesting in this one about Covid. May benefit from splitting out, if it looks like it may run some more.
Libertarians really are. They see Anarchism as a rival to their beliefs, and need to stop people from going there instead of supporting them. It was part of the reason why they hijacked the word libertarian in the first place.
They also try to claim individualist anarchists such as Max Stirner (friend of the young Marx and Engels), Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner, and conveniently ignore all the anti-capitalist ideas that they wrote about. They viewed capitalism as a form of collectivism, which is rejected by modern libertarian capitalists but they need to somehow claim a history that they don’t have.
It is a very real problem, and it is basically the same problem as saying that Democrats are Marxists (I’m sure a tiny minority are Marxist, but most Marxists are members of minor parties) and that Republicans are conservatives (they were about 50 years ago, but have since moved into reactionaryism and more recently fascism)
While I realize there are Libertarians who are studied in their political philosophy, there are also a lot who are pretty clueless, they call themselves Libertarians but they’ve just glommed onto the word from hearing it on talk radio, these are the ones I’ve met most over the years. “I’m a Libertarian, because like, freedom, I believe in freedom.” The name Bakunin means nothing to them, so calling them an anarchist only conjures up an image of a nihilist.
I don’t want to argue the point. I used the word in an offhand manner, forgetting that the bbs community is more learned than the average person, so naturally you take umbrage with my usage.
When I was younger I proudly called myself a communist, socialist, or multi-faceted amalgam of different philosophies. Now I’m just a humanoid. I don’t think there’s any perfect state, there will always be problems, so whatever works best for the most people, and what can reasonably be instituted.
You are not using it to describe the STATE of anarchy, but to describe someone’s political views. You even referred to a particular individual. It is pretty clear that the an-caps are attempting to hijack anarchism the same way they hijacked libertarian.
