Anarchism Revisited
Apparently the poster I made previously was wrong in some aspects, so it was revisited with this one. I agree with the points made in this poster, however I don’t see how the points made in the poster I created were wrong. Any ideas?
I wrote to you about why this is wrong when you first published it. It’s still a mess.
First, crass libertarian voluntarism is capitalist and aristocratic. It is not anarchist. It explicitly favors those that own land and lots of stuff. This kind of voluntarism springs from the capitalist myths of merit and upward social mobility, and the Austrian School’s construction of liberty. It assumes that what is owned is justly owned. And it assumes that wealth represents earned ambition. These are white myths constructed by people who can afford to be free from others. The crass libertarian principle is that liberty should be constructed such that individual citizens are constituted in the free market as white subjects, or in classical Austrian, if you will, consumers. This is all fine if you’re born into privilege.
You’re conflating a grotesque sense of voluntarism with classical anarchism. This kind of libertarian wish represents a lack of desire to consider equality and an inability to consider poverty.
Your manifesto is not very solid.
- What does total freedom for the indvidual mean? You don’t mean total as in with no social relation to others, do you? If you do, then how the hell are you going to participate in the free market? Capitalism is not about freedom. Don’t you get it?
- No such thing as self-ownership exists. You don’t know yourself outside of yourself. You’d think you thought we’re all commodities on a Wal-Mart display waiting to be purchased. You cannot own yourself. Your manifesto is a silly summary of complex subjects you really cannot explain because you do not know the classic texts. It’s clear you don’t even know the important foundational texts by Smith, Ricardo, Marx, et al. You don’t know what the self is in the western philosophical tradition. It’s clear you have not done your homework. On the other hand, it is clear you have been to libertarian sites and are paraphrasing pundits’ nonsense about how anarchism can be capitalist. Sorry to say, but it cannot be so.
- Nothing is purely voluntary. No thing. No act. A stateless society is nevertheless a society. I don’t think you know what a state is. In addition, I don’t think you know what it means to volunteer, to need, to desire, to want, nor do you know how these work to create community between others. You’re trying to create a sense of to volunteer that permits to be free from all others. That’s just not possible. You want voluntary to be synonymous with free choice, which in our current paradigm is related to consumer behavior in the free market and regulated by the liberal social order. This doesn’t work.
- You can’t free people from something. Capitalists are idiots about this. People don’t choose freedom like they choose a lifestyle. Stop listening to idiots like Stefan Molyneux. You already are free. Maybe you’re oppressed, but you’re actually at liberty to do what you want. Even in an anarchist society with non-hierarchical relations, you will simply never be free the way you seem to think is possible. Freedom-from is a kind of bondage, and capitalist libertarians just don’t get it. Freedom-from is inauthentic freedom.
- One doesn’t govern one’s self, one governs with others, even in an anarchist society. One lives in relation to others. One knows one’s self only in relation to others.
- Members of society WILL voluntarily offer to help? Really? You have written subjugation into this manifesto. Way to go.
- Tolerance is a law of the heart and, as we know it, is based in white notions of civility. Tolerance is something people can afford, it’s not something equally afforded to all people. After all, what interest do Capitalists have in tolerance? Absolutely none.
- In a voluntarist society, the likes of which capitalist libertarians describe, there would be nothing to tolerate. Your manifesto is based on a misunderstanding of what it means to volunteer. You cannot volunteer if you must do some thing. In other words, tolerance is a demand and that demand is not consistent across social class and ethnicity. The law of the heart is a law that only wealthy people can afford. You must have a surplus to be charitable and to be tolerant. Your manifesto applies an already existing and oppressive ideological structure that represents a distinct hierarchical structure for the free market that will benefit the most wealthy as those who can be most magnanimous with their wealth, as those who are the most tolerant. This is aristocratic. This will cultivate power for those who have more than others. This will destroy the potential for a purely voluntary culture.
- Moreover, you seem to think tolerance means to permit the ownership of private property and leave me the fuck alone. No 5 is troubling pseudo-minarchist crap.
- You write about oughts (YOU MUST) and that’s a sign that you admit a state where you don’t want one to exist, but you want to volunteer to participate, but you want tolerance, and it’s apparent you want services and a market, too. It’s all very confusing. You simply don’t understand what a market is, and I don’t think you understand what a society is and how anarchism might inform it.
- Anarchism does not mean the absence of authority. Anyway, capitalism is discipline. The Free Market is a social organizing force. Your beliefs (from your own blog) are in conflict with this self-contradictory manifesto.
