OK, on to a more serious tack of replying to your post... ;-)
Lash wrote:Economic freedom from the state is the starting point.
No. Most anarchists have not prioritized the struggle against state over
or under that against capital; it was part of the same thing, the same urgency.
To wit: in its ugliest face, anarchists (in Spain, Russia) killed or chased out factory owners, businessmen, landowners at the same time they killed or chased out priests and policemen, state officials.
The "starting point" vs "later point beyond" thing, I do not recognize from what I know about anarchism, which is why I've asked where you get this from. I wouldnt mind learning about new, individual branches of anarchism, but at the moment all I have to go on is that this is how you personally would imagine that anarchism would / should be like?
But how can anarchists, who are against having poor and wealthy people, who are, generally, against having bosses and employees, who are, ultimately, against money and property itself - how can you describe them as the logical extension of capitalism? They are its antitheses! They may choose a radically different path from communists in what they want
instead of capitalism; not state power, but communal self-government. But they both want to deconstruct, if not outright destroy, the capitalist order.
Again, I'm not defending this or that brand of anarchism, at this point; I am merely trying to grasp how you can redefine anarchism as a kind of super-capitalism when most every anarchist of prominence swore to the cause of revolution?
If communism is about equality and libertarianism about freedom, anarchism is about
both; and the one does not precede or override the other (more below).
Lash wrote:I realize neither is synonymous wih anarchy, but how you aren't seeing the easy answer to where anarchy fits on the structural model is baffling to me.
Yes they do want to go MUCH farther into individual freedoms, but they are worlds removed from the enforced slave labor of communism, and the heavyy paternalist oppression of socialism.
Yes, they'll pass capitalism haughtily on their journey further right into well-meaning, but doomed free communalism, but c'mon!
OK, but lookit.
First, I've never equated communism with anarchism. In reality, they are enemies. But they are, in fact,
as much enemies as anarchism and capitalism are.
Lets go back to the graph that I responded to. It has four corners. That concept may be useful here, because what seems to be part of the misunderstanding is seeing only something linear, from communism to capitalism, and trying to place anarchism somewhere on that line. In reality, its a triangle (three corners) or a square (four corners) - with anarchism
in an opposite corner from either.
Imagine a square - another square. Two axes. Lets take your cue, and say one is about political structure, and the other about economic structure.
Left-end: state power; right-end: freedom from state.
Top-end: power of capital; bottom-end: freedom from capital, equality.
Then roughly speaking, in the top left you would get fascism - strong state, strong capital. Bottom left communism: no capital, leaving the state in all power. Top right libertarianism: no state, the market decides everything. And
bottom right anarchism: no state, no capital! No bosses: neither state nor corporate.
(Socialism, being a much more amorphous/flexible thing, would cover pretty much everything on the bottom - all the way from the self-governing (anarchist-type) commune bottom-right to the state-centred (communist-type) behemoth bottom-left.)
The difference between libertarianism and anarchism: both are against state power, but one wants unfettered capitalism, whereas the other wants to
destroy capital, and have a self-governing, egalitarian society instead.
The difference between communism and anarchism: both are against capitalism and want all men to be equal, but the one wants an all-powerful state and the other an abolition of the state.
My point being: those two differences are roughly equally large...
This is where the square in the graph gets it totally wrong, IMSO (in my strong opinion ;-)). It explicitly states that the top end of the graph is ultimate economic permissiveness; its where capitalists, libertarians and republicans are. But anarchism is not, in any such sense, economically permissive at all! Anarchists have expropriated factories, chased out landowners, deposed bosses and managers. Because
nobody is to be the boss of another. That makes for a permissiveness of a wholly different sort; they had workers manage factories as a co-operative instead. The land equally shared among the villagers. Does that sound more like libertarianism or socialism?
(It deserves note that many of the famous historical anarchist leaders, most even - even if they were hostile to
communism (once that existed), actually
called themselves socialists! The main anarchist paper in the Netherlands, for example, was called "The Free Socialist"!)
The reason why anarchism and
communism, at least, are in opposing corners as well, is because communists would then have the state take over the factory and farms, rather than leave it to the community's self-government. But being anti-communist doesnt put anarchism in the capitalist corner, just like being anti-capitalist doesnt put them in the communist corner. Again, a triangle, or square.
IMSO, in the square of the quiz, anarchism should be bottom-right: morally permissive, and economically egalitarian. Communism - at least the soviet version - would be the bottom-left, the part thats labelled "totalitarianism". Thats my beef with the graph, and I consider it rather elementary.
