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The ethics of anarchism
Hello! I'm researching anarchism and would like to find out more about its basic ethical ideas. From what I gathered so far, anarchists support the idea of self-ownership and possession, which means the right to exclude other people from using your body and other things you are using, is that correct?
The second idea anarchists support is that hierarchy is illegitimate. Is this accurate? Could someone give me a definition of what precisely hierarchy means?
Some anarchists think you should be able to own things and use them any way you want to. If you want to know more about this point of view, read Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Norzig. These guys are referred to as "right libertarians".
http://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-State-.../dp/0465097200
Left libertarians promote a:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism
For this point of view, just read anything by Noam Chomsky. Or watch him on Youtube. He's abundant.
http://ppe.mercatus.org/
Noam Chomsky is shit.
I would look into egoist anarchism (read stirner, renzo novatore, enzo martucci, Bruno filippi) as it is way more interesting IMO than most other trends. A closely related trend of anarchism, nihilist anarchism, is also very interesting.
"I'm not interested in indulging whims from members of your faction."
Seeing as this is seen as acceptable by an admin, from here on out when I have a disagreement with someone I will be asking them to reference this. If you want an explanation of my views, too bad.
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist.../mostgold.html
I think this answers your inquiry pretty well. Not to, you know, be that person who just throws a book at you, but there's no point in repeating what she said when she already said it and better than I could.
Right Libertarians are not Anarchists. They are capitalists. Capitalism and Anarchism are mutually exclusive.
Egoists and individualists aren't anarchists either.
now this i disagree with
they might be wrong but they're still anarchists and they still "get" what anarchism is supposed to be
hell, some of the best anarchists have been individualist anarchists and illegalists and shit like that
the ancaps are another animal entirely but stirner is legit, even if he's a bit eccentric
Their conception of anarchism is no more coherent than anarcho-capitalists.
Last edited by The Feral Underclass; 24th October 2014 at 21:47.
Same can be said of some AnComs who call themselves that yet have read little to nothing of anarchism. I'd have to say the individualists/egoists are just as much anarchist as I am.
"But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first free-thinker and emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge." ~Mikhail Bakunin
Erm, anarchism isn't defined by how much people who call themselves anarchists have read about it...
So not at all then.
But reading Proudhon and Bakunin as well as Kropotkin can give a great base for people that identify as anarchists. Reading and life experience I'd say are great to get to understand anarchism. Indeed there is significantly more to this and I missed it a bit.
Is that because of my tendency?
"But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first free-thinker and emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge." ~Mikhail Bakunin
Stirner is interesting, but he was a fuckin' nut.
Chomsky is alright, but you need to look into Kropotkin, Goldman, and Bakunin above all else IMO. I would even say Tolstoy, but that's me.
edit: double post
Nah, that's wrong. Stirner's concept of anarchism, as tongue-in-cheek his writing could be, did not really differ too much from later anarchist communist conceptions of anarchism. His idea of "ego federations" or whatever he called them, for example, and his description of people coming together to fulfill each others self-interests, did not really differ much from Kropotkin's ideas of mutual aid or the idea of affinity groups.
Stirner was a big of a mad man, but to say his brainchildren so to speak are not anarchists is just not true
I had to check if I was actually on revleft when people were defending egoist anarchism for once. Damn dude.
Anyway I don't really call myself an egoist anymore but I still like it more than your average leftist tendencies (I honestly only call myself an anarchist for convenience sake anymore, I consider myself more of a nihilist now).
Why do you say that egoist anarchism is not anarchism, TAT? I am interested in hearing it (I may not agree but your thoughts are generally valuable to me).
"I'm not interested in indulging whims from members of your faction."
Seeing as this is seen as acceptable by an admin, from here on out when I have a disagreement with someone I will be asking them to reference this. If you want an explanation of my views, too bad.
Anarchism can be rather broad in it's definitions, some people say one thing and other individuals say something that contradicts what someone else has said. Anarcho Capitalists insist they're anarchists, yet they're not anarchists at all because they're advocating for capitalism without the state, which the state is tantamount to the functioning of capitalism. There are individuals who call themselves national anarchists, yet this is also a contradiction in terms and is used by white nationalists that appeal to anarchism for whatever reason.
Anarchists support the idea of people having their own personal possessions like their toothbrush, a bed, some even say the home they occupy and the car they use as a personal possession. Anarchists are against people having private property that they use to meet their own economic means over someone else. The anarchist wants the workplace collectivized for the benefit of all rather than benefiting some capitalist that makes a claim on a piece of capital like a factory, and they use this capital to generate a profit. They don't want someone profiting off of other's labor, no matter what kind of labor it is. The anarchist wants a society where individuals can have their own personal autonomy and decide their own schedule freely. Rather than asking themselves "How am I going to feed myself? Where am I going to live? Where will I work?" The anarchist wants a society of freely associating and disassociating producers, where people work for the benefit of themselves and the whole of their community. Work in an anarchist society will be down out of what someone enjoys doing rather than the economic servitude which prevails in capitalism. No one will have to work someone's private enterprise to gain a revenue, not achieving the full value of their labor.
Anarchists oppose all forms of coercive and parasitic authority. Authority arises from hierarchy which can necessitates minority rule, and from this minority, they have and hold onto the authority as they rule over everyone else. All hierarchy is illegitimate because it is within this hierarchy within our classist and statist system that the majority are forced to the bottom for the benefit of the few at the top of the pyramid.
"But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first free-thinker and emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge." ~Mikhail Bakunin
I'm talking about definitions of anarchism, not how someone becomes an anarchist.
To focus on the individual "living out" with disregard for "humanity" stands fundamentally in opposition to the principles of anarchism.
Anarchism emerged as a distinct tendency in the period of the First International (Proudhon predates the First International, of course, but Proudhon's connection to modern anarchism is tenuous at best; one is more likely to find various schemes for reforming credit than opposition to hierarchy in Proudhon), as the branch of socialist thought that denied the necessity of a transitional, revolutionary state.
The problem is, some people view anarchism as nothing more than an opposition to the state, and they don't quite understand what the state is either. Hence "anarcho"-capitalists, who claim to oppose the state but not capitalism, which is somewhat like opposing the death penalty but not cutting people's heads off. Hence the references to Stirner, a young-Hegelian liberal, who never claimed to be an anarchist and who was never considered an anarchist, simply because he wrote a few lines (seriously, I think the pages on "Saint Max" in the German Ideology outnumber the pages actually written by Stirner) of extreme egoist philosophy.
I don't know to what extent actual anarchists would ascribe their position to some moral opposition to this and that, but (as an admitted outsider), I would say they rarely fall into the moral system-building hysteria of people like Nozzick (the - don't laugh! - "right" liberarians). That is a good thing.
Why do the principles of anarchism include humanism?
"I'm not interested in indulging whims from members of your faction."
Seeing as this is seen as acceptable by an admin, from here on out when I have a disagreement with someone I will be asking them to reference this. If you want an explanation of my views, too bad.
