JimmiBaez :
I find this entire FAQ to be a very good read.
Me:
I didn’t. One of the reasons I stated “by Anarchist, I meant Anarchist” is because I meant one word which stands alone. There is no lead in a lead pencil and no gold in fool’s gold. I recognize libertarian socialists as anarchists. However that doesn’t mean that libertarian means anarchist, it means that libertarian socialism is a sub-set of anarchy. Some of the hyphenated or qualified anarchies I don’t recognize as anarchies. I don’t really understand this attraction of people for the label anarchist. If you have a social political philosophy which is not anarchism, why not call it what it is. The fundamental bedrock of anarchism is this, no individual or group of individuals has the right to compel any other individual or group of individuals to their will. This doesn’t mean that if someone attacks me I can’t fight back, or if some one seeks to deprive me of food or water which I feel I have a right to, and I realize this can become complex, then I have a right to defend myself. However, setting up a state in which people are forced to comply with certain rules is not anarchism as far as I am concerned. You have the right to withdraw, you don’t have the right to compel in anarchism. That doesn’t rule out highly complex social organization, as for example Proudhon’s Mutualism. It still has to pass the bedrock tests, and I don’t recognize the Objectionist mumbo jumbo rationalizations for slavery.
I’m not particularly concerned with what people called their publications or their organizations. I’m concerned with their beliefs. A lot of people didn’t want to use the word anarchist because of the nihilism problem. If they were anarchists and didn’t want to call themselves anarchists, I can understand that. However, that doesn’t make libertarian mean anarchist.
In the “FAQ” you listed, it seemed to me that somebody was trying to take the libertarian label from the Libertarians. There were libertarians before 1971. The dictionary gives the Libertarians the right to use their label.
As far as how far anarchy dates back, it goes back a bit farther than you seem to think. The name is not the thing named. The Tao Teh Ching is anarchistic. At least that’s what Archie Bahm says in his translation. From reading it, it becomes clear to me that he is right, so Anarchism goes back quite a while. I suspect that many of the first social organizations of Mankind were Anarchies. The Polar Inuit of Greenland were Anarchists, and far more so than any European post Roman anarchists.
As for me, the Libertarians are welcome to their label.
“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler”, A. Einstein
“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” A. Einstein.