Are we too harsh towards anarchists?

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Hi all.

As you already know, I am a history nerd. I even took history classes in university ... but I also love to read about history in my spare time. I often stay up all night binge-watching historical documentaries on YouTube.

Today, I want to talk about the history of Anarchism. Lately, I have been listening to audiobooks regarding the history of anarchism and I have discovered some interesting things about anarchism.

- "Anarcho-capitalism" is a very modern invention. Most anarchists aren't fond of it.
- Most anarchists don't want chaos. They want a world without any sort of oppression. Thus, most anarchists oppose capitalism, which they consider to be a form of oppression.
- Not all anarchists are violent. Anarcho-pacifism is a thing.
- Anarcho-feminism and LGBT anarchism are both real things.
- Christian anarchism, Jewish anarchism, Muslim anarchism and Buddhist anarchism are all real things.
- Not all anarchists talk like punk thugs. Lately, I have been reading some stuff by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. I don't agree with everything he says, but DAMN he was a genius. Noam Chomsky is an anarchist too.

I don't self-identify as an anarchist, but I think that our society judges anarchists unfairly. There are many different sides to anarchism ... and yet most people just focus on the violent thuggery. Is that really fair?

Discuss.

Harsh? I'm not sure. I've always thought of them as a bit dim, myself, which I suppose is a little harsh. It seems obvious to me that most forms of anarchism I've heard about are dumb ideas, that even if achieved would be very quickly replaced with anything but anarchy.

Perhaps dim was not as harsh as I thought. The only way to oppose capitalism is with more "oppression" of a different, more far reaching and often worse kind.



Not saying much. He is probably the most overrated "intellectual" in human history.



I associate them with air-headed bong-hitting hippies more than violent thugs.

An anarchist, according to a formal definition, is somebody who doesn't believe in government.

I suppose that the definition has been extended and de-formalized somewhat.

Similar to how nihilism doesn't strictly mean a belief in "nothing."

It's hard for me to completely dismiss people who have such positive intent.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homage_to_Catalonia



Noam Chomsky is a great intellectual. He has a poor reputation because people take his words out of context to make him look like a genocide denier and a raving anti-Semite. He's one of the most frequently misquoted people in history.



Perhaps I should claim that all conservatives are fat rednecks then.

don't...not here.

In the modern era, the term "limited government" has been ruined by people who want a government that only exists to protect private property.

Many leftist thinkers in the past, from Karl Marx to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, have pointed out that private tyranny emerges when the concept of private property becomes an absolute.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Yep. This obviously happened under monarchies in the past.

Ok hypothetically a group of people claim they have found a way to solve world hunger. You think wow, what have these geniuses come up with? A new crop? A magical pesticide? You look into their ideas and discover they believe that hunger is an illusion and humans don't actually need food. Their solution to world hunger is to teach people not only not to feel hunger, but not to eat. It obvious to you that this will result in mass starvation. Dismiss these ideas or not? They surely have positive intent.

That actually exists.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Breatharianism

Two Things:

1. People believe in anarchism because of historical cases, such as the Catalan anarchist society. I totally understand why an intelligent person would believe in anarchism. Breatharianism is stupid.
2. Breatharianism kills people. Anarchism only kills people when it is violent. I already explained that anarchism is not always violent.

This all reminds me of a certain episode of South Park.

Super Adventure Club Guy: He discovered that children have things called marlocks in their bodies, and when an adult has sex with a child, the marlocks implode, feeding the adult's receptor cavity with energy that causes immortality, so sayeth the ruler of Venvos.
Kyle: Do you realize how ret*d that sounds?
Super Adventure Club Guy: Is it any more ret*d than Jesus coming back from the dead or Buddha sitting under a tree for thirty years?
Stan: Yeah. It's way, way more ret*d.

That that society no longer exists sort of proves that point I seek to make. Anarchism is weak compared to other forms of human organisation. The only way for anarchy to survive would be to prevent the formation of human groupings that would supplant it. Which is not just intolerable "oppression" but itself can not be anarchy by definition. Lasting anarchy could only be achieved inside the bounds of a tolerant non-anarchist society doing all the things that anarchists refuse to do. The same way Mormon polygamist culture only survived inside a monogamous Christian continent, which negated many of the bad things that come with polygamous society (low value Mormon men without mates can escape to the monogamous culture, a pressure valve of sorts, where otherwise they would resort to violence, not to mention the relative peace, rule of law and strong economy that comes with the Anglo-Christian model, things that more polygamous societies cannot provide to anywhere near the same level).

I don't believe most Mormons are polygamists these days.

Noam Chomsky has contributed a great deal to linguistics, but applies very little rigour to politics and particularly economics.

Trusting Chomsky on economics because he's a good linguist is like trusting Dawkins on theology because he's a good biologist.

The Catalan anarchist society did not collapse from within. It was crushed from the outside by Francisco Franco.

I disagree with anarchists when they say we can create a classless society within the next ten years using direct action ... but I agree with the more sensible anarchists who argue that peaceful anarchy could exist within a few centuries.

What if every society on earth gradually moved towards classlessness? They would all achieve peaceful anarchism at the same time, and nobody would show up to crush them.

This certainly won't happen in my lifetime, but it is a scenario that liberal sci-fi authors should consider. Too many sci-fi stories nowadays have a grim view of future politics.

Liberated societies tend to be bad at defending themselves from outside forces. That's the only flaw that they have. That's how the tyrannical kingdoms of the bronze age managed to destroy their democratic, stone age neighbors. That's why the American military has strengthened Middle Eastern authoritarianism. That's why liberals should pay attention to what is happening all over the world. Human liberation is a global effort.

Yeah. It was weak.



That is a very big if. As for classlessness, I think that is another human impossibility. The Soviets more or less succeeded in destroying the existing class system in Russia, mainly by murdering millions, but another class system soon rose to take its place. It's our nature.



Put to one side whether it is their only flaw, being terrible at defending and propagating themselves is probably the only flaw that matters in the long run. Societies that can't defend themselves are worthless.

Human beings lived without hierarchies for thousands of years.

The soviets eliminating class?!

That wasn't even their intentions. Russia was a pre-industrial society during the revolution. Because of that, the Maxist-leninists believed (and still do) that state capitalism was a necessary step before creating a communist or even socialist society.

Confusing this with anarchism is huge mistake.

That's Marxist theory and it is another thing they got wrong. Hunter-gatherer societies do indeed have hierarchies.


Oh but it was. Marxist socialism is all about class warfare, the Soviets took matters to their logical conclusion, deliberately targeted entire classes of people and succeeded in destroying them.


This is excuse making by Western Marxists as part of their reasoning for why the Soviet system failed. Russia had a wake up call after the Crimean war and started taking industrial methods seriously. Indeed, Russia's industrialisation, economic reforms and serf emancipation half a century before the Bolsheviks helped create the kulak class "enemies of socialism" later targeted by the Soviets. Russia, while not at the forefront of industrialisation, was not a feudal wasteland in 1917 either, it was coming along.


I didn't, I was just saying that the Soviet attempt to create a classless society resulted in ... another society with a different class system and a mountain of corpses.