What is Anarchism?

How should society be organised, if at all?

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Gary Childress
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What is Anarchism?

Post by Gary Childress »

Mark Bray, author of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist’s Handbook,” said the graffiti that the Portland protesters left behind and the flags some carried included anarchist symbols. There is a “fair amount of overlap” between the ideologies of anarchists and antifascists. Both tend to be anti-government, opposed to both the Democratic and Republican parties, and frequently protest on Inauguration Day and at the parties’ annual conventions.

“Broadly speaking they want directly democratic, self-managed communities at the regional and macro-regional levels,” said Bray, a historian and lecturer at Rutgers University who helped organize Occupy Wall Street. “They want decision-making from the bottom up versus the top down. They reject capitalism.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics ... d=msedgntp

A question for scholars here: Is anarchism a way of societal organization or is it a lack of societal organization? And if it is the case that it is the latter, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Thoughts?
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Immanuel Can
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Re: What is Anarchism?

Post by Immanuel Can »

Y'know, Gary...the poverty problem in the Developing World has been shrinking precipitously, and still is (with the COVID thing representing only a blip in the trend).

Why? Because of capitalist initiatives...both the growth in private industry in developing nations and the extension of capitalistic relief methods such as sustainable microenterprise -- small, independent, privately owned businesses. Even Communist China has abandoned old Socialist methods for "Red Capitalist" ones, creating explosive new wealth in a country that had been much more economically limited before. I've been to some of these "developing" places, and the developing that they are doing is all based on local capitalism. Most wonderfully, the greatest initiatives are privately owned, small-scale businesses that are sustainable in themselves, with no government oversight or interferences. It's truly amazing what these things are achieving.

So I've got to wonder, if it's capitalism that's making the world richer, and if it's capitalism that is destroying the seemingly intractable problem of poverty in the Developing World, a problem the Left claims to deplore, then why are we so focused on hating capitalism? Is it not apparent that there are healthy forms of it, and that not all capitalism is simply a "Wild West" of exploitation?

Is it possible, Gary, that the hating of capitalism is really a "First World luxury" that, like many such "luxuries," the Developing World simply cannot afford? For it seems that all our Anarchists are the children of the First World capitalist middle class.

Strange, no?

But to be responsive to your question, I think you're going to have a difficulty really defining Anarchism, for the simple reason that all definitions of it are fairly provisional. Anarchism itself doesn't like to be defined. Definition implies exactness, delineation, precision and order...things Anarchism itself despises. Rather, I think Anarchism wants a kind of "anything goes" definition, so long as none of the "anything" is authoritative.

However, since you ask, I'll try. It seems to me that Anarchism is the political form of Nihilism. It hates hierarchy, structure, stability, achievement or success. Like Nihilism, it detests the existing order, whatever it may be. It's pure reactivity, pure resentment, an unhesitating desire to make things other-that-they-are, but without any thought of a further, positive agenda.

It's the politics of pure resentment, or as Nietzsche would have more precisely said, of ressentIment. (He had a specific definition for that word, too.)

Perhaps that's why destroying capitalism has become, today, one of its main objectives.
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Terrapin Station
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Re: What is Anarchism?

Post by Terrapin Station »

I don't think it makes much sense relative to conventional/ traditional definitions of anarchy to say that it's about "directly democratic, self-managed communities at the regional and macro-regional levels."
commonsense
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Re: What is Anarchism?

Post by commonsense »

It’s when something is out of place for its time.
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