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Re:Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism (1995) by Karrot_Kream on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @07:54PM (#31676006)
The problem is that there's a million strains of anarchism and none of them agree:

* The political layperson thinks anarchism is a synonym for chaos.

* Anarcho-communists think anarchism comes after the organized demolition of capital because they think the existence of a capitalist class by definition creates exploitation.

* Minarchists think the anarcho-communists aren't actually anarchists because they support a very specific form of structure, namely one that opposes markets. Can you really be free from the state if the state needs to tell you how to structure your commerce?

* Left anarchists (broadly any form of anarchism on the economic left, but mostly anarcho-socialists and anarcho-communists) think libertarians are terrible people because they think capitalistic markets are terrible.

* Libertarians don't understand why an ideology opposing the state still wants a state to tell people what forms of capital relations are allowed.

* Anarcho-syndicalists fit somewhere between the minarchists and the anarcho-socialists.

* Religious anarchists think that anarcho-communists are supplanting faith with belief in Marx's specific dialectical materialism.

* Some anarchists oppose the creation of even large, voluntary bodies of cooperation arguing that they are essentially the same as a state. Therein lies the paradox; if participants agree fairly to opt-into forming their own para-state, is this still compatible under anarchism?

* Green anarchists insist that small, distributed networks of mutual aid can hit environmental goals but grapple with the reality that the number of people on the planet alive today are alive at the behest of heavily centralized systems and processes.

and on and on. It doesn't help that by virtue of being minority/upopular ideologies, adherents find a lot more political capital in being uncompromisingly fundamental rather than practical. The minarchist in the corner telling you that issues are complicated, producing long nuanced theses, and urging compromise is boring while the fiery communist telling you to cleanse humanity to build labor relations anew Khmer Rouge style strikes passion into your heart.

It turns out that simply rejecting "coercive relations" or "the State" doesn't lay out a vision that others can agree with, especially because many parties don't agree on what constitutes a coercive relation or the State. In other words, if you tell Hobbes that the Leviathan is unnecessary, you should be prepared to say what comes in its place as that's where everyone disagrees.

You can see this dynamic play out in other comment threads on this story.

Re:Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism (1995) by sien on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @10:20PM (#31676927)
A timeless clip from Monty Python on the subject :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4

Re:Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism (1995) by CrackerNews on Thursday June 09, 2022 @10:29AM (#31681618)
The irony is that I can argue that this overview is too simplistic and reductive and even too opinionated. I don't think I got a good impression of what a minarchist or an anarcho-syndicalist is from this either. Then it's like what are religious anarchists for then? Christian anarchism?
Re:Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism (1995) by anemoiac on Monday June 13, 2022 @07:30AM (#31723950)
> Can you really be free from the state if the state needs to tell you how to structure your commerce?

Wouldn't many anarchists take issue with the minarchist & libertarian critique you list above, claiming that the state is necessary to enforce capitalistic markets?

Re:Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism (1995) by Karrot_Kream on Monday June 13, 2022 @03:55PM (#31730905)
I can't claim to be a libertarian, but I don't think minarchists claim to espouse an economic system at all. You may be thinking of left market anarchists. And I'm pretty sure some libertarians will make their point with private force applied to consenting market participants used to secure their capital markets.

Also this isn't meant to be an exercise in ideological critique so there's no need to defend what "many anarchists" think. My post was just there to demonstrate how many strains of anarchism there are and how few goals they tend to share. Also it's partly to remind folks that there are more than just Ancoms and Ansocs out there, even if they tend to be the most vocal in tech spaces.

Re:Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism (1995) by anemoiac on Friday June 17, 2022 @05:37AM (#31775970)
My reply was a little ambiguous - I simply meant that many anarchists would find the minarchist and libertarian positions you lay out to be self-contradictory. Namely, they both claim to (mostly) oppose state involvement in the economy, yet (generally) support a free market economy that needs to be enforced by the state.

I'm agreeing with your premise that anarchism consists of many competing strains, just adding a point of clarification for the audience here (...which is probably more familiar with the libertarian perspective than the others you listed).