alt Hacker NewsI was an anarchist as a child because I read a short dictionary definition, maybe describing it as meaning "without rules", and I figured that was what I wanted in life. Then I graduated to libertarianism as a teenager. Then in my 20s I encountered people who really called themselves anarchists, and they were all basically socialists with a sprinkling of individualism, which seemed incoherent because the socialism is all about taking people's property away for "the public" (which definitely won't ever turn into for the state, right?) ... so I sadly had to stop using the word "anarchy" since the dictionary had apparently misled me and nobody is just purely against being ruled.
But, I must say, I'm increasingly easy-going about the whole thing. I don't claim to know how things should be arranged, tax me if you must, assign me to clean the communal latrines, do what you like, such is life. I will generally assume that we're all getting it wrong, regardless of viewpoint.
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There are sub-families of anarchism, and you would be correct that the predominant form at the moment is a flavor of socialist anarchy. The purported relation to anarchy is that the world would be split into tons of small, self-organized communities that individuals are absolutely free to join and leave at will.
I tend to agree that it makes far more sense to call it socialism with some individualist facets than anarchy with some socialist attributes.
What you’re describing would be closer to individualist anarchy or philosophical anarchy. Individualist anarchy believes the right of the individual is paramount, excepting when the rights of two individuals clash. Philosophical anarchy is the general belief that the desires of individuals should not never be co-opted because one person can never morally justify forcing another to do something and thus governments can never be moral as their entire reason to exist is to wield the monopoly on violence against individuals to override their will. Individuals are of course still free to join groups and abide their rules if they choose, but those groups would not be able to enforce any kind of agenda against its members.
> so I sadly had to stop using the word “anarchy”
Thanks! Anarchism is about removing hierarchy, of which the most potent in our modern times is the hierarchy of capitalism. Anarchism is also opposed to the state; you’ll find there’s a lot of us at protests of police brutality and other instances of the hierarchy of the state.
> I was an anarchist as a child because I read a short dictionary definition, maybe describing it as meaning "without rules", and I figured that was what I wanted in life.
I was an anarchist as a teenager. Then I stopped thinking about politics until recently, when I rediscovered it, with a much more critical look. Then I read the Tao Te Ching, fell in love with its positive view of humanity and nature, and more importantly because Laozi can be described as the first anarchist but more grounded, as a large part of his work was advising actual monarchs, not academic posturing that's prevalent today.
Anarchism today means everything and nothing. One thing I have learned to loathe in my adult age is any form of anarcho-communism, as communism is nothing more than dictatorship of the proletariat. The much maligned anarcho-capitalism, and even early American libertarianism is more compatible with the ideas of freedom and "don't tread on me nor impose any rules on me" than any anarcho-communism that has been so popular in the past 100 years. Why should proletariat decide that I cannot have any private property?
On the other side, Randian and modern day libertarians are just conservative republicans with a different name, but libertarianism at the end of the 19th century had its root firmly in anarchist ideals.