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> left side of the political spectrum has for a very long time advocated for an interpretation of 1A that is "free as in liberty" while the right prefers a "fre

> left side of the political spectrum has for a very long time advocated for an interpretation of 1A that is "free as in liberty" while the right prefers a "free as in anarchy" approach. This is incredibly incorrect. > right prefers a "free as in anarchy" The right wing of USA politics claims this but clearly act in opposition to this claim. Also, “anarchy” is the most extreme is “leftist” politics.

eru 2y ago
> Also, “anarchy” is the most extreme is “leftist” politics. Depends on what you mean by 'left' and 'anarchy'. See eg anarcho-capitalists as an example that most people would see as 'right' and that uses the term 'anarchy'. (I'm explicitly not saying that their use of 'anarchy' is the correct definition of the term, just pointing out that at least a substantial number of people use a definition of 'anarchy' that makes this concept possible for them.)
- some_furry 2y ago
  Anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron. Capitalism creates hierarchies. Anarchy is a rejection of hierarchies, because it creates rulers.
  - dartos 2y ago
    Potentially unrelated, but isn’t anarchy-communism also an oxymoron? How could you enforce communism under anarchy?
    - dragonwriter 2y ago
      > Potentially unrelated, but isn’t anarchy-communism also an oxymoron? Communism implies anarchism. > How could you enforce communism under anarchy? Communism, as a state, is the hypothetical self-sustaining stateless end-state envisioned by Communism, the ideology. Socialism (an intermediate state in the theory), and State Capitalism (an intermediate state—and one most real regimes claiming Communist ideology get stuck in—in practice) may need enforcement, Communism, almost by definition, does not (whether it os attainable is, of course, a different question.)
      - x-complexity 2y ago
        > > Potentially unrelated, but isn’t anarchy-communism also an oxymoron? > Communism implies anarchism. The economic system of communism in no way implies that it would be achieved via anarchic means; It only outlines that the participants in the system share resources towards achieving the common goals of everyone involved. How it should be done has been left as an unfortunate "left as an exercise to the reader". Anarchic forces may be one way of doing so, but it is in no way implied by communism.
      - dartos 2y ago
        > Communism implies anarchism How so? Communism, as a state, requires rules. By that virtue, it’s not anarchy. Communism as the utopian ideal I suppose could be considered anarchy, but in reality that would never happen, so IMO not really worth discussing.
        s1artibartfast 2y ago
        Communists (believers in communism) set up socialist states. A communist state would be decentralized and voluntary. The two are often conflated, but this fact is fundamental to communist philosophy, economics, and literature. The USSR was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, not "Communist Republics" As a term, communist state is used by Western historians, political scientists, and media to refer to these countries. However, these states do not describe themselves as communist nor do they claim to have achieved communism — they refer to themselves as socialist states that are in the process of constructing socialism and progressing toward a communist society.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_state
        eru 2y ago
        Was the USSR 'not communist' because it's lacked electrification, or because it lacked Soviet Power?
  - teh_infallible 2y ago
    Anarchy is not a rejection of hierarchies, it’s a rejection of a central authority.
    - eru 2y ago
      I guess it comes down to definitions again. If you look at what people do for fun, they often create hierarchy and even central authority. They formally or informally elect a leader to their football team, who calls plays and helps with coordinating. It's just that no one can really force anyone else to stay in that club.
  - x-complexity 2y ago
    > Anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron. Capitalism creates hierarchies. Anarchy is a rejection of hierarchies, because it creates rulers. Incomplete understanding: Under the ideals of anarcho-captialism, the capitalism part stresses any internal bureaucracies & hierarchies within an org to its absolute limit, and contributes to breaking them via competition from other businesses. Hierarchies are not an inherent part of capitalism. Hierarchies arise by themselves as a result of the needs to specialize & coordinate labour towards tasks whilst scaling up the org's task-completing capabilites. Regardless of the economic system involved, the adoption & proliferation of hierarchies will persist as the need to scale becomes critical. Capitalism stresses against this encroaching force by ideally having competitors with lower overhead, and pressuring them into adapting/improving themselves, or face collapse from within. ---- The above section is by no means an endorsement of ancap, as (like most proposed economic systems) it requires a more-ideal-than-realistically-possible environment & participants to exist. However, blanket dismissals of a proposed system are similarly non-advisable, as both lead to the same conclusions: A stunted development in ideological rigor & critical self-analysis.
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    Capitalism, in the sense of the real world system for whom the term was coined by its critics, relies centrally on the State to create an enforce a particular model of property rights to serve the interests of the capital class, from whence the system gets its name. However. “capitalism” is sometimes used as a name for orientation toward something that is not that real world system, which isn't particularly coherent (because it was created after criticism of the real world system almost entirely for the purpose of “No True Scotsman” rebuttal of arguments against actual existing capitalism.) One of the consistent features of this somewhat amorphous construct is opposition to (and, indeed, ascribing every observed problem to the existence of) the State.
  - Dracophoenix 2y ago
    Strictly speaking anarchy just means "without rule". Not all anarchists explicitly rejected hierarchies of ability or markets that exploited such differences. Henry David Thoreau, Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, and Herbert Spencer, are examples of such an approach.
Spivak 2y ago
I guess you could read the word anarchy that way but the phrase "as in anarchy" has caught on to describe the notion of a thing being unrestricted on an individual level so that's what I went with. It's the common usage of the word and bares no intended relation to The Anarchist movement. I'm curious as to your thoughts on the matter if you don't believe this is a fair assessment of each side's ideals. I do agree that how it plays out in practice is always going to be much messier once those ideals are filtered through humans who are by nature imperfect.
- CobrastanJorji 2y ago
  You two agree on what the right claims its position is. However, the Republicans are passing a bill called "Take It Down" that the Republican President told a joint session of congress he intends to use specifically to remove speech against him. This is clearly not demonstrative of a "free as in anarchy" position on speech. Same thing happened with Elon Musk. When taking over Twitter, he described himself as a "free speech absolutist," which is the same as "free as in anarchy," but in practice he bans speech against his interest liberally, for example automatically removing any post that uses the word "cisgender," but also deleting tweets from reporters that he dislikes.
  - stouset 2y ago
    Also restricting videos that parody him. The right believes in “free speech for me but not for thee”. Which isn’t compatible with any good faith attempt at a definition.
    - userbinator 2y ago
      So does the left.
      - CobrastanJorji 2y ago
        No, sir. Democrats have done lots of stuff that's not great for free speech. For example, when in charge of the government, they've worked together with obliging social media companies to remove what they considered foreign misinformation. But stuff like that is absolutely nothing compared to what's happening now, and it's disingenuous to suggest otherwise. I can't think of a single thing Democrats have done in the last hundred years that is even in the same league as the President's promise to use the "Take It Down" Act to silence criticism, and I'll bet you can't either.
dartos 2y ago
> Also, “anarchy” is the most extreme is “leftist” politics What? No it’s not. Anarchy is the extreme libertarian position. The smallest possible form of governance is anarchy. The extreme left is total communism, where everything is controlled in order to ensure a minimum standard of living.
- mplanchard 2y ago
  You’re wrong, which is why you’re being downvoted. A decent intro to the topic on the anarchist side is Chomsky’s On Anarchism
  - dartos 2y ago
    I’ve been right and have been downvoted too ;) But I’m not an expert on this topic. How is anarchy not the extreme libertarian position?
    - rat87 2y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism Vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism > While the earliest extant attestation of "anarchocapitalism" [sic] is in Karl Hess's essay "The Death of Politics" published by Playboy in March 1969,[8][9] American economist Murray Rothbard was credited with coining the terms anarcho-capitalist[10][11] and anarcho-capitalism in 1971 Left wing anarchism used the name much earlier and arguably was more influential historically even in the US. For example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_William_McKinley https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_William_McK... was done by a left wing anarchist. But arguably in the US it might be used more often to refer to anarcho capitalists these days I believe there's a similar sort of issue with the term libertarianism that was at least sometimes used to refer to something similar to anarcho Communism
      - dartos 2y ago
        My understanding of the main libertarianism is that it calls for extremely small government with minimal impact on the lives of individuals. This seems pretty in line with anarchy. I know that in the US “libertarians” tend to be fairly right leaning, but I don’t think that “libertarian” means “republican” Maybe the confusion is just over semantics.
foul 2y ago
>The right wing of USA politics claims this but clearly act in opposition to this claim. Not at all. They just immediately embraced war dynamics. USA conservatives and libertarians (stop referring to right wing and leftism in USA, it makes no sense) view anarchy as their chance to fight for a fief or a monarchy. EDIT: >Also, “anarchy” is the most extreme is “leftist” politics. Not really, it depends on whether you mean Bakunin and Foucault, or Thoreau, Stirner and Rand

eru 2y ago

> Also, “anarchy” is the most extreme is “leftist” politics. Depends on what you mean by 'left' and 'anarchy'. See eg anarcho-capitalists as an example that most people would see as 'right' and that uses the term 'anarchy'. (I'm explicitly not saying that their use of 'anarchy' is the correct definition of the term, just pointing out that at least a substantial number of people use a definition of 'anarchy' that makes this concept possible for them.)

some_furry 2y ago
Anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron. Capitalism creates hierarchies. Anarchy is a rejection of hierarchies, because it creates rulers.
- dartos 2y ago
  Potentially unrelated, but isn’t anarchy-communism also an oxymoron? How could you enforce communism under anarchy?
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    > Potentially unrelated, but isn’t anarchy-communism also an oxymoron? Communism implies anarchism. > How could you enforce communism under anarchy? Communism, as a state, is the hypothetical self-sustaining stateless end-state envisioned by Communism, the ideology. Socialism (an intermediate state in the theory), and State Capitalism (an intermediate state—and one most real regimes claiming Communist ideology get stuck in—in practice) may need enforcement, Communism, almost by definition, does not (whether it os attainable is, of course, a different question.)
    - x-complexity 2y ago
      > > Potentially unrelated, but isn’t anarchy-communism also an oxymoron? > Communism implies anarchism. The economic system of communism in no way implies that it would be achieved via anarchic means; It only outlines that the participants in the system share resources towards achieving the common goals of everyone involved. How it should be done has been left as an unfortunate "left as an exercise to the reader". Anarchic forces may be one way of doing so, but it is in no way implied by communism.
    - dartos 2y ago
      > Communism implies anarchism How so? Communism, as a state, requires rules. By that virtue, it’s not anarchy. Communism as the utopian ideal I suppose could be considered anarchy, but in reality that would never happen, so IMO not really worth discussing.
      - s1artibartfast 2y ago
        Communists (believers in communism) set up socialist states. A communist state would be decentralized and voluntary. The two are often conflated, but this fact is fundamental to communist philosophy, economics, and literature. The USSR was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, not "Communist Republics" As a term, communist state is used by Western historians, political scientists, and media to refer to these countries. However, these states do not describe themselves as communist nor do they claim to have achieved communism — they refer to themselves as socialist states that are in the process of constructing socialism and progressing toward a communist society.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_state
        eru 2y ago
        Was the USSR 'not communist' because it's lacked electrification, or because it lacked Soviet Power?
- teh_infallible 2y ago
  Anarchy is not a rejection of hierarchies, it’s a rejection of a central authority.
  - eru 2y ago
    I guess it comes down to definitions again. If you look at what people do for fun, they often create hierarchy and even central authority. They formally or informally elect a leader to their football team, who calls plays and helps with coordinating. It's just that no one can really force anyone else to stay in that club.
- x-complexity 2y ago
  > Anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron. Capitalism creates hierarchies. Anarchy is a rejection of hierarchies, because it creates rulers. Incomplete understanding: Under the ideals of anarcho-captialism, the capitalism part stresses any internal bureaucracies & hierarchies within an org to its absolute limit, and contributes to breaking them via competition from other businesses. Hierarchies are not an inherent part of capitalism. Hierarchies arise by themselves as a result of the needs to specialize & coordinate labour towards tasks whilst scaling up the org's task-completing capabilites. Regardless of the economic system involved, the adoption & proliferation of hierarchies will persist as the need to scale becomes critical. Capitalism stresses against this encroaching force by ideally having competitors with lower overhead, and pressuring them into adapting/improving themselves, or face collapse from within. ---- The above section is by no means an endorsement of ancap, as (like most proposed economic systems) it requires a more-ideal-than-realistically-possible environment & participants to exist. However, blanket dismissals of a proposed system are similarly non-advisable, as both lead to the same conclusions: A stunted development in ideological rigor & critical self-analysis.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  Capitalism, in the sense of the real world system for whom the term was coined by its critics, relies centrally on the State to create an enforce a particular model of property rights to serve the interests of the capital class, from whence the system gets its name. However. “capitalism” is sometimes used as a name for orientation toward something that is not that real world system, which isn't particularly coherent (because it was created after criticism of the real world system almost entirely for the purpose of “No True Scotsman” rebuttal of arguments against actual existing capitalism.) One of the consistent features of this somewhat amorphous construct is opposition to (and, indeed, ascribing every observed problem to the existence of) the State.
- Dracophoenix 2y ago
  Strictly speaking anarchy just means "without rule". Not all anarchists explicitly rejected hierarchies of ability or markets that exploited such differences. Henry David Thoreau, Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, and Herbert Spencer, are examples of such an approach.

Spivak 2y ago

I guess you could read the word anarchy that way but the phrase "as in anarchy" has caught on to describe the notion of a thing being unrestricted on an individual level so that's what I went with. It's the common usage of the word and bares no intended relation to The Anarchist movement. I'm curious as to your thoughts on the matter if you don't believe this is a fair assessment of each side's ideals. I do agree that how it plays out in practice is always going to be much messier once those ideals are filtered through humans who are by nature imperfect.

CobrastanJorji 2y ago
You two agree on what the right claims its position is. However, the Republicans are passing a bill called "Take It Down" that the Republican President told a joint session of congress he intends to use specifically to remove speech against him. This is clearly not demonstrative of a "free as in anarchy" position on speech. Same thing happened with Elon Musk. When taking over Twitter, he described himself as a "free speech absolutist," which is the same as "free as in anarchy," but in practice he bans speech against his interest liberally, for example automatically removing any post that uses the word "cisgender," but also deleting tweets from reporters that he dislikes.
- stouset 2y ago
  Also restricting videos that parody him. The right believes in “free speech for me but not for thee”. Which isn’t compatible with any good faith attempt at a definition.
  - userbinator 2y ago
    So does the left.
    - CobrastanJorji 2y ago
      No, sir. Democrats have done lots of stuff that's not great for free speech. For example, when in charge of the government, they've worked together with obliging social media companies to remove what they considered foreign misinformation. But stuff like that is absolutely nothing compared to what's happening now, and it's disingenuous to suggest otherwise. I can't think of a single thing Democrats have done in the last hundred years that is even in the same league as the President's promise to use the "Take It Down" Act to silence criticism, and I'll bet you can't either.

dartos 2y ago

> Also, “anarchy” is the most extreme is “leftist” politics What? No it’s not. Anarchy is the extreme libertarian position. The smallest possible form of governance is anarchy. The extreme left is total communism, where everything is controlled in order to ensure a minimum standard of living.

mplanchard 2y ago
You’re wrong, which is why you’re being downvoted. A decent intro to the topic on the anarchist side is Chomsky’s On Anarchism
- dartos 2y ago
  I’ve been right and have been downvoted too ;) But I’m not an expert on this topic. How is anarchy not the extreme libertarian position?
  - rat87 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism Vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism > While the earliest extant attestation of "anarchocapitalism" [sic] is in Karl Hess's essay "The Death of Politics" published by Playboy in March 1969,[8][9] American economist Murray Rothbard was credited with coining the terms anarcho-capitalist[10][11] and anarcho-capitalism in 1971 Left wing anarchism used the name much earlier and arguably was more influential historically even in the US. For example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_William_McKinley https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_William_McK... was done by a left wing anarchist. But arguably in the US it might be used more often to refer to anarcho capitalists these days I believe there's a similar sort of issue with the term libertarianism that was at least sometimes used to refer to something similar to anarcho Communism
    - dartos 2y ago
      My understanding of the main libertarianism is that it calls for extremely small government with minimal impact on the lives of individuals. This seems pretty in line with anarchy. I know that in the US “libertarians” tend to be fairly right leaning, but I don’t think that “libertarian” means “republican” Maybe the confusion is just over semantics.

foul 2y ago

>The right wing of USA politics claims this but clearly act in opposition to this claim. Not at all. They just immediately embraced war dynamics. USA conservatives and libertarians (stop referring to right wing and leftism in USA, it makes no sense) view anarchy as their chance to fight for a fief or a monarchy. EDIT: >Also, “anarchy” is the most extreme is “leftist” politics. Not really, it depends on whether you mean Bakunin and Foucault, or Thoreau, Stirner and Rand