Anarchist: Help a brother out

[New Waterford]

What would my anarchist comrades think of a left-wing minarchy?

Not ideal, but preferable over our current capitalist system any day.

[Trotskylvania]

Anymore I just self-identify as "ultra-left" in the same sense as GIlles Dauvé and the communization tendency, so that makes me a sort of fellow traveler of insurrectionary anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism. I was also for a long time a crazed Bookchinite, and so I take that ecological and ecumenical libertarian approach with me.

At the same time, I'm not squeamish about authoritarian methods in revolutions. Like Zizek, if you give me power I'll know how to use it. And while Bordiga may be currently seducing me with his invariant program, Ecology of Freedom is probably the single most influential book I've ever read.

[The United States of the South Pole]

Not an Anarchist myself, nor have I read any Anarchist Literature but ,like you, I'm very interested in Anarchy.
I Personally believe true Anarchy is a form of Individualist Traditionalist Anarchy. In that I consider Family and Guns extremely important to the Survival of Mankind. Family being important to Anarchy may surprise a few of you Anarchists, but I believe man can't live out their entire existence alone. They require their own flesh and blood and an abandoned building, log cabin, tent, or something else for your family to call home. Something you can turn to for guidance and comfort at the end of the day in an unpredictable system as Anarchy. Especially in AnarCapitalism, the most secular and isolationist Anarchy, or in a more Hollywood Anarchy in which danger and violence is Constant.
The Second Traditionalist thought necessary for anarchy would be Guns. In True Anarchy, I beleive, theres is no Laws limiting Freedom, Anarchy means no Government and no Laws, not just no Government. As such I believe there are three ways to deal with a situation with another person in Anarchy.
-Reason, talking to people, using facts or emotion to get a point across
-Bargaining, Ancaps this ones for you, Ancomms ignore this
-Threat or Display of Force
There should be no indoctrinated law stating that in an Anar-Communist Society, a Person can not hire another person as an employee or that a group could not form their own Government if they wish to in any other form of Anarchy mankind finds themselves in. You must use one of the Three options above to get a point across. No one should have the upperhand in a situation and feel high and mighty about following the NAP or Utopia to a T in an Anarchist Society. As such I don't believe in Anar-Pacifism at all, and consider it as one of the least stable Anarchistic Ideas.
Additionally, I have to say that past Individual Traditionalistic, I believe Anar-Syndicalism is the most stable form of government. An Armed Anarchist Society, who firmly believes in the value of the Nuclear Family and Rejection of both Communism and Capitalism to be the safest from tyrannical rule yet still remain Economically relevant.

[The New Sea Territory]

What would my anarchist comrades think of a left-wing minarchy?

Libertarian Marxism-esque?

I'd self-organize with others regardless of the state, but I feel they probably wouldn't do anything about it.

[The New Sea Territory]

Not an Anarchist myself, nor have I read any Anarchist Literature but ,like you, I'm very interested in Anarchy.
I Personally believe true Anarchy is a form of Individualist Traditionalist Anarchy. In that I consider Family and Guns extremely important to the Survival of Mankind. Family being important to Anarchy may surprise a few of you Anarchists, but I believe man can't live out their entire existence alone. They require their own flesh and blood and an abandoned building, log cabin, tent, or something else for your family to call home. Something you can turn to for guidance and comfort at the end of the day in an unpredictable system as Anarchy. Especially in AnarCapitalism, the most secular and isolationist Anarchy, or in a more Hollywood Anarchy in which danger and violence is Constant.
The Second Traditionalist thought necessary for anarchy would be Guns. In True Anarchy, I beleive, theres is no Laws limiting Freedom, Anarchy means no Government and no Laws, not just no Government. As such I believe there are three ways to deal with a situation with another person in Anarchy.
-Reason, talking to people, using facts or emotion to get a point across
-Bargaining, Ancaps this ones for you, Ancomms ignore this
-Threat or Display of Force
There should be no indoctrinated law stating that in an Anar-Communist Society, a Person can not hire another person as an employee or that a group could not form their own Government if they wish to in any other form of Anarchy mankind finds themselves in. You must use one of the Three options above to get a point across. No one should have the upperhand in a situation and feel high and mighty about following the NAP or Utopia to a T in an Anarchist Society. As such I don't believe in Anar-Pacifism at all, and consider it as one of the least stable Anarchistic Ideas.
Additionally, I have to say that past Individual Traditionalistic, I believe Anar-Syndicalism is the most stable form of government. An Armed Anarchist Society, who firmly believes in the value of the Nuclear Family and Rejection of both Communism and Capitalism to be the safest from tyrannical rule yet still remain Economically relevant.

*sniff*

[Isyrannaea]

If I was an anarchist, I'd probably be a religious anarchist.

[The United States of the South Pole]

May I reccomend a few types of Anarchy to that list?
Anar-Monarchism
Anar-Syndicalism
Mutualism
Egoist Anarchism

[Trotza]

RIP

(Image)

I just picked it because it looked so lonely without any votes...

[Egohedonia]

What would my anarchist comrades think of a left-wing minarchy?

Instead of law & order and defense being funded like in night-watchman states, you'd fund welfare and public services?

May I reccomend a few types of Anarchy to that list?
Anar-Monarchism
Anar-Syndicalism
Mutualism
Egoist Anarchism

The poll can only fit 10 choices unfortunately

[Meryuma]

What would my anarchist comrades think of a left-wing minarchy?

I've toyed with the notion in my head; specifically a geoist society with a basic income implemented. Incarceration and border enforcement would be slashed along with all corporate subsidies.

[Prosocial]

Christian communitarian anarchist with a fetish for compassion. Some of you will probably be able to guess who I am.

The reason I don't believe in the state is that I've come to the conclusion that at the end of the day, violence, power, and hierarchy are inseparable.

Power here meaning unbalanced power, the power that one person has over another, and the power that one class of people has over another. It's inseparable from violence in the obvious sense, that controlling someone usually requires threatening them and that controlling a class requires subjecting them to a constant stream of abuse, and also in the sense that you're literally taking something from them, usually the product of their labor. But it's also violent in the spiritual sense that controlling someone through lies and manipulation is violence against their psyche. Under the control of someone else, we lose our initiative, self sufficiency, courage and willingness to act, our passion for what we want to create, and our love for life. We become convinced of our own inferiority to the person who controls us and suffer deep psychological wounds that can harm us in unpredictable ways. We become accustomed to a stifling conformity and become ever further removed from the truth.

Hierarchy, meaning any system in which one person or class is believed to be superior to another and in which the relationship between parties is not mutual but fundamentally one sided, also can't be separated from power. I'll give an example here that I've had to deal with: a lot of Christians argue that complementarianism isn't inherently sexist because it simply treats the sexes differently, without necessarily favoring one over the other. But the fact that it really does favor one over the other can be seen in the fact that the role of men had to involve control over women- control which women were expected to resist. We couldn't have a hierarchy without having power, and you can't have power without violence.

When you conceive of hierarchical gender roles in terms of Christian men habitually subjecting women, especially their wives, to violence, it becomes immediately apparent that this cannot be reconciled with the rest of the New Testament. But this is exactly what it has historically meant: when sexism was at its strongest, beating or raping your wife was accepted and common.

The opposite is also true: you can't find an institution dedicated to exerting unbalanced power over the entire population through a campaign of violence which is not doing it to maintain hierarchies. The police subject blacks to disproportionate violence in the United States- to maintain white control over the black population and thus maintain the hierarchy of whites above blacks. More broadly, the primary purpose of authoritarian measures like mass surveillance and of the existence of police in general is to subject the entire nation to the government- and this to maintain the hierarchy between the most powerful men in the country and everyone else. That group includes people like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton- millionaires whose full time job is the study and use of power.

The common narrative is that power can be misused, but I think that power in the sense that the state has it is itself a misuse of our ability to impact one another's lives.

The reason I believe in anarchy is that spontaneous order, especially in the internet age, is far more powerful than I think most people realize. You can even look to odd cases like the origins of Anonymous to see glimpses of what it's capable of. At least at first, they were hardly political, and they didn't give a shit about morality: they were just a bunch of assholes looking to have fun at others' expense. But they understood what the internet means better than most people. So they went to a site where everyone has to be anonymous and nothing is stored in memory for more than a day, and you can't post anything that anyone has ever posted before, with no rules, that punishes self aggrandizement. The first thing that happened was that culture evolved, quickly, and people had fun, and realized that they don't care as much about morality as they pretend to, which is at least more honest. And the second thing that happened was that they got political, and were and are a fucking nightmare for the FBI to try to stop. The usual strategy is to arrest the leaders- but they don't have leaders.

A lot of older liberals are critical of leaderlessness. I think they don't understand the future. Leaderless doesn't mean that you have one less leader, it means everyone had better be as active as a leader if they want anyone to be, but nobody wins a conversation by default.

In the vacuum left behind when you get rid of power, the positive thing that takes its place is people pursuing the things they want. What do we want? Some of us want to make art, some of us want to climb mountains, some of us want to figure out the laws of physics, and it turns out that most of us want to laugh at a drawing of a frog and make our own variant. We want to create cultures, make friends, and interact with them. But I also think there's a sense in which we won't know what we want until we've won the freedom to pursue it. It's probably true that no two people have exactly the same reason for wanting anarchy. But that's kind of the point- the personal and political come together in the concept of liberty.

Anarchism is serious in the sense that it talks about what it means to be a part of the working class and it talks about oppression. It's also willing to fight. But its ideas also end in the creation of a world that's more fun, and I'm not embarrassed about that. I think what's going to become clear is that sometimes life can be fun even if it's spent fighting, and fun is worth fighting for.

Ideologically speaking I'm the furthest thing from an egoist and I believe in everything they don't: sacrifice, humility, forgiveness, radical compassion and an emphasis above all on the very last in society. Everything that Nietzsche would call pity I rush to embrace, and want nothing more than to be counted among his weak, and, for that matter, among Jesus' weak. As for the honor of believing in a true slave morality, I know that I'm not there yet. But I'll hold up James Cone as such a man.

I believed in Christianity first and it's far more important to me than anarchism. I came to believe in anarchy purely because I became convinced that it's what Christianity requires, and I still think that to this day. Jesus condemned violence, repeatedly. If there was ever a doubt that the political authorities and the religious establishment regard God as an enemy, it should have been cleared up when he came to earth and they immediately executed him as an enemy of the state. He told anyone who wanted to follow him to sell all their possessions and give the money to the poor, turned away a rich follower who wouldn't do so, overturned the tables of money changers in the temple and drove them out, said that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil and that you can't serve both God and money. He wasn't impressed by the pride of the ritually pure and the powerful, promising that everyone who exalted themselves would be humbled, and he spent most of his time dealing with lepers, Samaritans, women, the poor, tax collectors, and sinners, promising that everyone who humbled themselves would be exalted. The early Christians refused to say "Caesar is lord." They would only say "Jesus is lord." They were, in any meaningful sense of the term, anarchists. As was he. Which is to say, God is an anarchist. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be one.

Even before you get to the gospels, the bible says as much. Not only was Israel founded by literal slaves who God led to freedom, but whereas they were supposed to have no political leaders at all, since God was their king, they insisted on a king. God answered, "they have rejected me as their king." He warned them that a king would tax them, and conscript their children. But they insisted upon one. And even with the best person he hand picked for the job, everything he had said came true. Nobody deserves to be king, nobody can handle it, not even a man after God's own heart. And it only got worse from there, with each king being worse than the one before. And on the other end of the bible, you get revelation, which, whatever else it might be, is definitely a massive allegorical condemnation of the Roman empire. "Fuck Rome" is a recurring theme in the bible.

But honestly, while my religion is certainly political, its political aspect is really not the main part of it for me. I'm an orthodox Christian, something like an evangelical (although not quite), and like any orthodox Christian the most important part to me is the gospel. I believe in the forgiveness of sins, and the power of God to transform lives radically, a gift that's never outside of our reach. To me Christianity is personal as well as political; in fact, it's intensely personal. God is just really important to me in my real life even outside of this stuff.

So the books I would recommend are the kingdom of God is within you (obviously,) God of the Oppressed, and, if you haven't read them, the gospels. They're an interesting read.

[The New Sea Territory]

Christian communitarian anarchist with a fetish for compassion. Some of you will probably be able to guess who I am.

Thoughts on liberation theology? Specifically Gutierrez's A Theology of liberation if you've read it?

[Jello Biafra]

I'm an anarcho-communist because I believe it results logically from the notions of freedom and property rights, whereas I believe that ideas about freedom and property rights that are not anarcho-comministic in nature are illogical. I also believe that an anarcho-communistic society would be better than any society today.

I recommend the writings of Peter Kropotkin and Emma Goldman.

[Wolfmanne2]

I'm a social democrat.

[PaNTuXIa]

What would my anarchist comrades think of a left-wing minarchy?

Instead of law & order and defense being funded like in night-watchman states, you'd fund welfare and public services?

Pretty much. There would also be a basic constitution.

I'm a social democrat.

Then you aren't an anarchist.

You believe in the ballot, you believe in reform!

I'm an anarcho-communist because I believe it results logically from the notions of freedom and property rights, whereas I believe that ideas about freedom and property rights that are not anarcho-comministic in nature are illogical. I also believe that an anarcho-communistic society would be better than any society today.

I recommend the writings of Peter Kropotkin and Emma Goldman.

Of course you do. You're Jello Biafra!

[Salus Maior]

One question I've always had about Anarchism is how could you really defend it from being destroyed by organized states?

As far as I know, Anarchism is about the lack of unwanted authority, and only allows authority on a strictly consensual basis.

So, how could one construct an effective military with such an ideology in mind? Something that requires hierarchy and the chain of command to be strictly obeyed to work? What would an Anarchist military look like?

[Lady Scylla]

I'm an archist. Not sure about literature, but Roman Arches are by far my favourite to look at.

[Conscentia]

One question I've always had about Anarchism is how could you really defend it from being destroyed by organized states?

As far as I know, Anarchism is about the lack of unwanted authority, and only allows authority on a strictly consensual basis.

So, how could one construct an effective military with such an ideology in mind? Something that requires hierarchy and the chain of command to be strictly obeyed to work? What would an Anarchist military look like?

You can ask on this on the LWDT, rather that gravedigging. That very subject happens to have just come up anyway, so it would be very relevant.

viewtopic.php?f=20&t=363314&start=10325

[USS Monitor]

One question I've always had about Anarchism is how could you really defend it from being destroyed by organized states?

As far as I know, Anarchism is about the lack of unwanted authority, and only allows authority on a strictly consensual basis.

So, how could one construct an effective military with such an ideology in mind? Something that requires hierarchy and the chain of command to be strictly obeyed to work? What would an Anarchist military look like?

You can ask on this on the LWDT, rather that gravedigging. That very subject happens to have just come up anyway, so it would be very relevant.

viewtopic.php?f=20&t=363314&start=10325

I was kind of on the fence whether to lock this for gravedigging or let it go, but if you're talking about the same thing in LWDT, I will just lock this and people can join the conversation over there.