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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • turdas@suppo.fitoMemes@lemmy.mlDemocrats: Stop dividing the left
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    15 days ago

    People like Thoreau and Emerson aren’t fringe; they are extremely influential in American political philosophy, to the point where there’s a long-ass Wikipedia page about them.

    Now there’s a lot that could be said about them and I don’t want to start writing essays here, so to cut to the chase I will just write down a couple of bullet points.

    • As we can both see, that page considers itself “part of a series on socialism”, which I believe is because these thinkers courted socialist ideas at their time, seeking to come up with an alternative more along the lines of their personal very American individualist philosophy. I think it should not be contentious to say that time has proven that individualism and socialism are not compatible ideologies.

    • I think time has also proven that this brand of anarchism did not survive contact with industrialization – this is what I meant by it giving birth to libertarianism, because the same (very American) principles of individualism underpin both.

    • Nonetheless, this philosophy is a school of anarchist thought. They themselves called it that, other people at the time called it that, and scholars that came after call it that. Ergo, anarchism is a far broader category that contains more than just the clearly leftist schools of anarchist thought like anarchist communism, and therefore using just the word “anarchism” to refer to contemporary leftist anarchism is incorrect and going to confuse people.


  • turdas@suppo.fitoMemes@lemmy.mlDemocrats: Stop dividing the left
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    16 days ago

    If you think it’s thoroughly left-wing then I think you must not be familiar with individualist and libertarian anarchist thinkers. I don’t think free-market anarchism involves much social production for example. In American political theory anarchism is what gave birth to libertarianism, which is pretty much a right-wing ideology.


  • turdas@suppo.fitoMemes@lemmy.mlDemocrats: Stop dividing the left
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    16 days ago

    What? It’s possible for both modern democracy and Athenian democracy to be democracy, because it is an umbrella term that covers many different implementations of rule by the people.

    The exact same thing applies to anarchy. It is possible for both The Culture and Lord of the Flies to be anarchy, because anarchy is an umbrella term that covers many different situations of “no rulers”.


  • turdas@suppo.fitoMemes@lemmy.mlDemocrats: Stop dividing the left
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    16 days ago

    the phase space of vague stuff like political ideology would have an arbitrary large number of parameters, not whatever 2 you see in memes.

    Weird to hear this from the person who moments ago was arguing that there’s no problem projecting this concept on an even smaller number of dimensions.



  • turdas@suppo.fitoMemes@lemmy.mlDemocrats: Stop dividing the left
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    16 days ago

    Secondly, I’m not referring to what the random person thinks anarchy is, but what actual anarchists believe, and among anarchists anarcho-capitalism is fringe, and an offshoot of liberalism.

    You’re doing the monopoly thing here again. When by “anarchist” you refer exclusively to left-leaning anarchists, of course anarcho-capitalism is going to be fringe among them.

    Not to mention the fact that free-market anarchism is a distinct ideology from anarcho-capitalism and, to my understanding, much less fringe among self-described anarchists. The primary distinction seems to be that anarcho-capitalism exists at a lower energy state, a sort of a decay product that free-market anarchism would likely almost immediately decay into upon contact with the real world.

    Plato having talked about anarchy at one point doesn’t suddenly mean that the entirety of anarchist history suddenly doesn’t matter.

    One ideology misappropriating the term also doesn’t mean that all other meanings of the word suddenly don’t matter. Don’t get me wrong, I sympathize with many of the ideas of left-leaning anarchists, but they do suck at naming things. When the same concept covers both extreme right-wing libertarianism and extreme socialism, you really should be qualifying it with something to avoid confusion.


  • turdas@suppo.fitoMemes@lemmy.mlDemocrats: Stop dividing the left
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    16 days ago

    I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here? But to go along with what I assume your analog is, if you’re talking about height then you need to say you’re talking about height regardless of what unit you’re using. “Two metre box” means constrains only one dimension, much the same as the word anarchy by itself does.


  • turdas@suppo.fitoMemes@lemmy.mlDemocrats: Stop dividing the left
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    16 days ago

    This is a pretty biased way of putting it. The concept of anarchy predates the interpretation used by modern left-leaning self-identified anarchists by a couple of thousand years. In online circles such anarchists often seek to monopolize the term (like you are doing right now), but they factually weren’t the ones to coin it; when it was originally coined by Plato, nobody had any idea what the fuck capitalism or socialism even are, and in fact Plato used it as a cautionary example.

    I am guessing your gut reaction will be to recoil at this grave attack on your ideology. I implore you to stop and consider that most people are not in fact at all familiar with left-wing anarchism as defined by Proudhon etc., but are vaguely familiar with the concept from many other sources. Therefore when you talk about anarchism without a qualifier to mean anarchic socialism, most people will assume you are talking about some Mad Max law of the jungle nonsense and then summarily dismiss anything you say as insane rambling.