EoLE
17th July 2014, 12:23
Hey everybody,
I just joined tonight after looking for the difference between personal possessions and private property and found some good explanations here.
I've been somewhere on the left of the linear left/right political spectrum for as long as I can remember. I took an active interest in Castro's Cuba in my late teens simply because of how resilient it has been in the face of US hostility and also relative to some of the horrible events that happened in other communist/socialist states it seemed much of Castro's policies were not as dictatorial and in some cases even justifiable and understandable.
It was around then, I might have been 20, that I first came across Kropotkin and I thought then I'd strayed a little too far into some far flung catacomb of leftism when confronted by statements like 'property is theft' (which I misunderstood at the time and which I'm still trying to understand more, hence my looking up possessions vs property). I lost interest in politics altogether for a good while, kind of disenfranchised with leftism and politics in general, but then thought I'd give George Woodcock's book 'Anarchism' a try after I found it for a couple of bucks in a second hand bookshop back in 2007.
Since then I've tried to learn more and wrap my head around certain elements of radical leftism because parts of what I was learning made so much sense to me at last. Thanks to Bakunin's version of socialism I came to see how destructive the state truly was and how even a non-anarchist in Max Weber also, like Bakunin, predicted the tyranny of socialist bureaucracies.
I still don't know which of the many types of anarchist I would most closely resemble. Maybe anarchosyndicalist as I believe workers, whether an individual homesteader or thousands of factory labourers, know better how to organise themselves and live their lives than a centralised authority and should be recompensed for the full amount of their labour and not a mere portion of it to justify capitalist profit.
Sometimes I don't even know if the title anarchist is appropriate though. Even after about 7 years I challenge myself constantly as to how effective an anarchist society could be at tackling social deviance and harm done to others without police, courts and prisons (not that I approve of any of those mind you but I wonder if the absence of them would prove to be even worse).
I also believe that market exchange does not necessarily equal capitalism and that there may be economic systems of exchange, like barter or gift economies, that could replace capitalism but still involve the free and voluntary exchange of goods or services at perfect parity without anyone gaining profit or exploitation over others.
So I hope to learn more here directly from other leftists and may even share some ideas of my own.
Glad to be here :)
EoLE.
I just joined tonight after looking for the difference between personal possessions and private property and found some good explanations here.
I've been somewhere on the left of the linear left/right political spectrum for as long as I can remember. I took an active interest in Castro's Cuba in my late teens simply because of how resilient it has been in the face of US hostility and also relative to some of the horrible events that happened in other communist/socialist states it seemed much of Castro's policies were not as dictatorial and in some cases even justifiable and understandable.
It was around then, I might have been 20, that I first came across Kropotkin and I thought then I'd strayed a little too far into some far flung catacomb of leftism when confronted by statements like 'property is theft' (which I misunderstood at the time and which I'm still trying to understand more, hence my looking up possessions vs property). I lost interest in politics altogether for a good while, kind of disenfranchised with leftism and politics in general, but then thought I'd give George Woodcock's book 'Anarchism' a try after I found it for a couple of bucks in a second hand bookshop back in 2007.
Since then I've tried to learn more and wrap my head around certain elements of radical leftism because parts of what I was learning made so much sense to me at last. Thanks to Bakunin's version of socialism I came to see how destructive the state truly was and how even a non-anarchist in Max Weber also, like Bakunin, predicted the tyranny of socialist bureaucracies.
I still don't know which of the many types of anarchist I would most closely resemble. Maybe anarchosyndicalist as I believe workers, whether an individual homesteader or thousands of factory labourers, know better how to organise themselves and live their lives than a centralised authority and should be recompensed for the full amount of their labour and not a mere portion of it to justify capitalist profit.
Sometimes I don't even know if the title anarchist is appropriate though. Even after about 7 years I challenge myself constantly as to how effective an anarchist society could be at tackling social deviance and harm done to others without police, courts and prisons (not that I approve of any of those mind you but I wonder if the absence of them would prove to be even worse).
I also believe that market exchange does not necessarily equal capitalism and that there may be economic systems of exchange, like barter or gift economies, that could replace capitalism but still involve the free and voluntary exchange of goods or services at perfect parity without anyone gaining profit or exploitation over others.
So I hope to learn more here directly from other leftists and may even share some ideas of my own.
Glad to be here :)
EoLE.