[SecretSquirrel]

Now I probably just need to get rid of you capitalist right?

??

[Melodramatic]

A libertarian anarchist is most likely an anarcho-capitalist, a overall silly ideology.

[Kropotkin]

Anarchy has never worked for anything else and wont work for anything else. Its only a transitional period and a lot of the time (not always) its transitioned into a dictatorship.

Maybe he's suspect, but Peter Kropotkin's description, in Mutual Aid, of proto-anarchist socities before the rise of the State, didn't seem dictatorial at all.

[LetsTalkAboutIt]

All I know? It is using voluntary co-operative means within a capitalistic society to take over.

I tried to get wolfman to explain it to me in the libertarianism sub forum (see left libertarianism thread). not much explaining but there were some links to very interesting left libertarian sources.

Anarchy and any other political system designed to eliminate the state will end up creating a totalitarian state if people want it above everything else.
This statement deals with contradictions between outcomes and belief.

[Donna]

Anarchism provides a context of accountability to progressive or revolutionary movements. The left of the left, if you will. This makes anarchism timelessly relevant. It is as important today as it was in 1936.

Every society needs also its radical fringe of freedom-worshippers, if only to give everything else in political life substantive meaning that isn't static.

[SecretSquirrel]

anarchism isnt left or right. Even if the terms "left" and "right" had any actual meaning in the context of modern politics, it still wouldn't be one of them.

[Donna]

Anarchism is firmly left. I am of course intentionally omitting fringe and nearly irrelevant peripheries like anarcho-capitalism or post-leftism, but historically the anarchist movement has been married to Marxist analysis and the canonry of working class struggle. I don't think you can really make blanket statements about modern anarchists, but the anti-globalization movement is also quite obviously leftist.

[Melodramatic]

I consider anarchism left wing, although I also consider libertarianism generally left wing (the matter of American conservatives is more complex due to right wing illogicalness, they're right wingers trying to conserve the ways of left wingers).

Anarcho-capitalism, a more left extension of libertarianism in a way, makes a small yet critical regression to the right by deciding that land ownership and therefore all property can be made absolute by homesteading and the use of labor, using consequentialist logic or voodoo-ish explanations.

Anarcho-communists and such are surly left, and the mainstream of anarchists, but I'm not sure I consider them anarchists at all...

[SecretSquirrel]

so you consider the murderous, bomb-throwing, propaganda-of-the-deed terrorist thugs of the 19th and early 20th century to be "anarchist" then?

[sans-culotte]

^ The main focus of Anarchism was Southern Europe in the interwar period, when an anarchist-influenced working class took power over vast territories and industries through armed insurrection during various points. I recommend you read Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia"

[Donna]

so you consider the murderous, bomb-throwing, propaganda-of-the-deed terrorist thugs of the 19th and early 20th century to be "anarchist" then?

While some groups like the Bonnet gang in France were terribly obscene, it was simply thought at the time that assassinating bourgeois statesmen, politicians and industrialists would spark the working class into revolutionary action. By the inter-war period it was clearly realized that this tactic was not viable as a revolutionary device. Some of these murderous, bomb-throwing terrorists (particularly in the United States) were also the first to offer a radical defense of prison abolishment, free love, birth control, gay liberation, sex-positive feminism, etc., so it is difficult to ignore their work and ideas on the basis that they engaged in political violence.

[Melodramatic]

so you consider the murderous, bomb-throwing, propaganda-of-the-deed terrorist thugs of the 19th and early 20th century to be "anarchist" then?

Whether a group is anarchist is based on ideology rather then means of achieving anarchism, after all anarchism considers the state an enemy worth of destruction. furthermore the means of violence are acceptable, though possibly counter productive as they make the elite propaganda much more efficient.

Of course the attacking of industrialists (people who are not directly guilty in my opinion) is not part of a revolution I would support, but that is probably amongst the division in ideology between me and them.

[SecretSquirrel]

the means of violence are acceptable

It always makes me sad to have misjudged a man and find myself disappointed.

[Donna]

Why is violence directed toward symbols of authority (whether human or not) an 'unforgivable sin'? I can only really relate to pragmatic arguments against violence on a case by case basis. The killings of William McKinley and Alexander II, for example, arguably only resulted in the expansion of state authority and violence and thus should be rejected on that basis, but pacifistic mysticism should be avoided outright as an ideology that potentially preserves systems of hierarchy.

[SecretSquirrel]

im not a pacifist. I firmly believe, however, that every human life and liberty is valuable to the point that killing can only be justified in immediate self defense (it can... but not always will be justified)

[Donna]

Justified to what and whom, exactly?

[SecretSquirrel]

? Morality? Ethics? Respect for fellow human beings?

[Donna]

You are the one that spoke authoritatively on what violence can be 'justified' or not. I'm just wondering where you get this moral standard from.

[SecretSquirrel]

Please explain to me then what makes it acceptable for you or any other man to decide that you can end a human life of your own volition.

My position is the null hypothesis -- that we should refrain from killing; the burden of proof for your pro-violence stance is squarely on your shoulders.

[Donna]

Please explain to me then what makes it acceptable for you or any other man to decide that you can end a human life of your own volition. My position is the null hypothesis -- that we should refrain from killing; the burden of proof for your pro-violence stance is squarely on your shoulders.

The merits of political violence are best decided by their usefulness in serving the interests of society or that of oppressed and subjugated groups. It should never be romanticized, and that's as far as I'll go. As for anarchists at the turn of the 20th century, I find it difficult to ignore that, for the most part, they sincerely believed that propaganda-of-the-deed was a potential revolutionary device, that it would mobilize the working class to action. But it was not and many of them even admitted this in later years, so I don't really understand your moral outrage. I'm not sure how I can 'prove' my "pro-violence stance", I simply do not offer the same blanket condemnation that you do.