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Seventh Arrow
Jan 26, 2005

Please forgive any inaccuracies in this post, I only know a little bit about the subject.

From what I understand, there's a right-wing strand of anarchism - one that's so anti-government that they believe in no government at all. I believe Milton Friedman's son was a proponent of this. That, however, is not what I'm asking about.

The older and more well-known strain of anarchism is left-leaning and, from what I can tell, its adherents are interested in the same kind of social justice issues that socialists and communists care about. As far as I know, this kind of anarchism doesn't quite believe in no government at all, but instead that there should be local communities voting on larger issues that can affect them. Is this correct? If so, I'm wondering how anarchists can address social justice issues without the larger infrastructure afforded by socialism and communism. Doesn't it take a large government to be able to distribute welfare, social security, housing, education, etc? I'm also interested in how anarchists would plan to implement such a system in a setting like, say, the constitutional republic found in the US.

Thanks in advance for any replies.

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MettleRamiel
Jun 29, 2005
All I can add is that I have a cousin who is bat-poo poo crazy about this, but it's confusing as can be. There seems to be four or five different sects of anarchism and they all hate each other because of their tiny, insignificant differences.

She talks all the time about how much better the world would be with anarchy even though she is on social assistance. The jist of it, as far as I can tell, is that without government, everyone would just take care of each other in a blissful utopia.

Also, if all of her friends are any indication, being an anarchist seems to go hand in hand with being a gullible conspiracy theorist. You know, the kind that is so much smarter than you because they can see the obvious patterns of the lizard alien cabal running the world.

Mofabio
May 15, 2003
(y - mx)*(1/(inf))*(PV/RT)*(2.718)*(V/I)
So anarchism is a gigantic body of philosophy, and as much as I hate to do this, The Anarchist FAQ will answer your questions better than most people here. I'll try to summarize, though.

The guiding principle of anarchism is anti-hierarchy. The primary hierarchies that anarchists are against are: capitalism, the state, racial hierarchies, gender hierarchies, and the ecological hierarchy of humans dominating the planet. The hierarchies that attract a bit less attention in anarchism include organized religion, the modern school system, nuclear/patriarchal families, and violence in general (there is active debate on when and whether violence is an appropriate tactic for social change).

Many anarchists are fine replacing more oppressive hierarchies with less oppressive ones. So to your question about welfare and social security, very few anarchists oppose social programs outright. You're more oppressed if you need to work until you're 90 or starve, than you are in a country with robust social security. A lot of anarchists get caught in the romance of being free from all oppression (there is certainly a younger component, since that's around the time when people figure out what kind of hosed up world they're about to enter), but most are pretty practical. If there is any political philosophy that could be said to be anarchism's opposite, it would be fascism, where all oppressive systems are combined into a single, totalitarian entity.

Unlike many political systems, there are both historical and contemporary anarchist societies. For the vast majority of humanity's time on the planet, there was no capitalism and there was no state. Maybe the most cited modern anarchist society is Revolutionary Catalonia. Others include the Ukraine Free Territory, the Zaps in Chiapas, Mexico (currently active), and (arguably) the revolution going on right now in Rojava. Among others.

Anarchism is the state-skeptical branch of socialism. Flavors of anarchism include anarcho-communism (my guess would be this is the most prominent), anarcho-primitivism (think twigs and the Unabomber), post-left anarchism (don't know much about this; active in the 80s/90s), anarcho-pacifism (think Tolstoy), communalism (Bookchin), anarcho-syndicalism (Catalonia/IWW), and a bunch more. They agree on most of the big questions, it seems like more of an ethics-and-tactics debate.

Anarcho-capitalism is not anarchism. It's capitalism, completely unregulated, and instead of the state enforcing property and breaking strikes, it's private armies (think the Pinkertons, or Mussolini's blackshirts, or the Freikorps). Many ancaps are admitted fascists. There is a long history of far-right groups co-opting left messaging; this is just the latest.

That's a lot of history. What do anarchists do? Besides protesting (har), anarchists are over-represented in free software/free technology. They've set up infoshops in major cities where you can learn and talk and get help (especially if you're down on your luck). Food Not Bombs, which just distributes free food to whoever, is an anarchist group. Occupy was really over-represented, both in planning and during the occupations, by anarchists. Most anti-fascist organizing (antifa) is performed by anarchists, violently. There's really a shitload though, and every major social movement I can think of has or had an anarchist contingent. Okay, maybe not the Tea Party.

Hope that helps.

edit:elaboration and grammar

Mofabio fucked around with this message at 05:34 on Mar 10, 2016

A Wizard of Goatse
Dec 14, 2014

Seventh Arrow posted:

Please forgive any inaccuracies in this post, I only know a little bit about the subject.

From what I understand, there's a right-wing strand of anarchism - one that's so anti-government that they believe in no government at all. I believe Milton Friedman's son was a proponent of this. That, however, is not what I'm asking about.

The older and more well-known strain of anarchism is left-leaning and, from what I can tell, its adherents are interested in the same kind of social justice issues that socialists and communists care about. As far as I know, this kind of anarchism doesn't quite believe in no government at all, but instead that there should be local communities voting on larger issues that can affect them. Is this correct? If so, I'm wondering how anarchists can address social justice issues without the larger infrastructure afforded by socialism and communism. Doesn't it take a large government to be able to distribute welfare, social security, housing, education, etc? I'm also interested in how anarchists would plan to implement such a system in a setting like, say, the constitutional republic found in the US.

Thanks in advance for any replies.

you remember Occupy? yeah.

Anarcho-syndicalism and stateless communism kinda predate Marxism, and the idea generally isn't 'no government' (which is p much impossible when multiple people are working together) but a strictly non-heirarchical model of government where there is no aristocracy or political class or distinction between the rulers and the ruled. The basic idea it's (more or less) all founded on is the general strike, a mass grassroots uprising where people just get together and... stop serving their masters, and there's nothing they can loving do about it because the workers do all the actual work.

Since the movement never really made it past Step 1 (and never really recovered from Lenin taking over the Russian Revolution and by extension command of 'legitimate' communism) it's generally a bit less concerned with having a fully realized political system ready to go in advance than it is with the more immediate concerns of what's hosed up about the status quo and how to break away from that so people can figure out a better way of doing things. Sometimes post-revolution government is to be accomplished through direct democracy, sometimes through delegating all policy to cooperative unions, sometimes it's just all tribal social-pressure stuff that assumes agrarian societies of hundreds of people. The throughline on all of it is that it's all chiefly concerned with making sure nobody in particular gets too powerful and starts lording it over everyone else, as a consequence has basically no point of continuity with existing societies, and no model of it that's been attempted has been remotely able to compete with authoritarian nation-states for whom a bunch of independent individuals who all have to agree on what they're doing before they can start doing it look like free dinner.

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Mar 10, 2016

Seventh Arrow
Jan 26, 2005

Thanks guys, that did indeed help. I knew that there had to be more to it than just "no government, at all, ever." The idea that it tries to eliminate hierarchies makes more sense. I'll go read the FAQ, thanks for the link.

Tias
May 25, 2008

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I founded an anarchist organization in my home country, and have worked with it for some ten years now, and I'd just like to second the Anarchist FAQ. It does away with the most glaring misconceptions, like believing that ultra-capitalist lolbertarians get to call themselves anarchist.

The anarchist movement is rooted in the socialist labour movement of the 1800s, and cannot be meaningfully removed from class-conscious socialism.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Seventh Arrow posted:

From what I understand, there's a right-wing strand of anarchism - one that's so anti-government that they believe in no government at all.
This sounds like you're talking about anarcho-capitalists or voluntarists.

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Tias
May 25, 2008

Pictured: the patron saint of internet political arguments (probably)

This avatar made possible by a gift from the Religionthread Posters Relief Fund

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