Wulf Inquires About Anarchism
September 1, 2008
Wulf aks about anarchism
I find anarchists to be fascinating, compelling, and completely impenetrable. Jokes aside, the lack of dogma and structure makes them a little hard to learn about.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on Anarchopedia and other web resources. I’d especially love to hear from anticapitalism anarchists, because I have no idea where you are coming from.
Haven’t had any chance to go over the Anarchopedia, but it doesn’t look particularly well-put-together.
He references, in particular, a Chomsky quote:
A consistent libertarian must oppose private ownership of the means of production and the wage slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.
I’m not terribly familiar with Chomsky’s work, but he’s all over sites like OneBigTorrent.org so maybe he has something to say.
I really like Anarchism Without Hyphens, which I found one day while perusing people’s archives online.
The only expansion of this that seems to me reasonable is to say that an anarchist stands in opposition to any imposed authority. An anarchist is a voluntarist.
Wulf wonders how a world of 6 billion people would act without governments. Most of us only really interact with a handful of people, in any given day, and on most days that handful of people is largely the same. There are other, with whom we interact on a far less personal level, the grocer, the cashier, and so on. The fact of the matter is that imposed regimes don’t exactly have the greatest track-record, either. To his comment in reply to William, yes, I think most anarchists envision a million or so very small “societies” or societal arrangements, each with some degree of overlap with any number of other societies. Think: six degrees of separation writ large.
There is no agenda, other than freedom: as much of it for as many people as is possible. Would society look different than we currently know it? You bet it would. The organizations and arrangements with which we’ve become familiar are the products of millions of maket distortions and impediments, and the (primarily political) subsidy of history.
As far as the “anticapitalist” anarchists are concerned, I think that the disagreements here are largely semantic, I guess I’d ask for a more thorough definition of what is capitalism is, before I’d venture to answer this question.
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