Meta_Digital t1_j0zs2ey wrote on December 20, 2022 at 5:05 PM

Reply to comment by chrispd01 in Anarchism at the End of the World: A defence of the instinct that won’t go away by Sventipluk

Liberalism as a political ideology grew from thinkers like John Locke (the supposed "Father of Liberalism") and Adam Smith during the Enlightenment.

This is the very early days of capitalism, before socialists would coin the term, and theorists were just attempting to objectively describe economics. They didn't yet fully understand that they were describing a particular mode of economics. You can see this confusion to this day, where many just assume that "capitalism" means "markets" and that "free market" means "freedom". This is a leftover from those early thinkers.

Liberalism, as a political ideology, takes these economic assumptions and integrates them into a political and moral theory. For instance, Locke's idea of personal rights and property rights being essentially the same can be found in liberal democracies (and was a justification for voting rights being connected with land ownership). This is where we also see the argument for laissez-faire economics, or the idea that a government should let the market regulate the economy of a nation (every prior system restrained markets with a heavier hand since markets regularly commit atrocities for profit). It's also where you see the idea of the "tyranny of the majority", which references the fear of the "agrarian" population (the working class at the time), and how if they had democratic power, they'd vote away the private property of the ruling class (the founding fathers of the US specifically write about this).

The result is a preservation of the autocratic caste system of capitalism which divides everyone into employer (owner) and employee (worker) where the former has all the wealth and makes all the decisions, and the latter does all the work and makes none of the decisions. Liberalism specifically preserves this arrangement through democratic suppression of workers (look up the history of worker's rights; they weren't won democratically), often through state violence. The police are one such institution, which exist primarily to protect private property rights, because it is impossible for private property owners to protect their own property, and it is unprofitable to pay for that expense yourself, so it becomes subsidized by tax payers under liberal democracy to maintain the caste system of capitalism.

That's a very brief overview of the subject, but you can find a little more information on the Wikipedia page. It's not going to be as direct a response, but you should be able to verify what I've said here.

chrispd01 t1_j0zvzmh wrote on December 20, 2022 at 5:30 PM

I was not 100% sure where you were going with that but I appreciate you laying this out.

It seems to me, though that there are a couple of ways of looking at this development. , see the development of liberal democracy, increasing recognition within certain spheres of an individual. That is individual has a certain dignity and worth and independence that cannot be abrogated. I don’t think it’s wrong to see political development as the increasing expansion of that zone. So you see things like the Magna Carta before locke as beginning to impose limits on arbitrary rule, and that trend continuing.

For my own self, I think the notion of private property can be overstated and can warp itself through disproportionate political influence and act to a bridge the autonomy of others.

But I’m not sure that problem isn’t found, and just the institution itself. That is to say the remedy for all the ills you identify are thoighbthe exercise of political power

If you tell me that because of economics, there is disproportionate, political power, I would agree. But I would also say that that is not liberal democracy. That is the warping of liberal democracy to a different end

Meta_Digital t1_j0zypy8 wrote on December 20, 2022 at 5:47 PM

Liberalism is very specifically the combination of democracy with capitalism. What we are living through is the natural consequence of trying to merge democracy with its opposite. Either you end up with a society that abolishes capitalism for some form of socialism (democracy in the economy), or you end up with a society that abolishes democracy in favor of some form of capitalism (some kind of corporate feudalism or fascism). We are living through the latter today.

I agree that over time there is an expansion of the moral sphere, but the path to moral expansion is treacherous, and we are currently in a period of backsliding. Victories won in the past are being rolled back. Some are new victories, like abortion rights in the US. Some are ancient victories, like acceptance of gay or trans people. I do agree that in general there is an expansion of this sphere, but only over very long periods of time, and in the short term it expands and contracts, sometimes violently.

We have this narrative of progress, which is an Enlightenment thought, which paints history as backwards and primitive while painting the present as progressive and advanced. Sadly, the real world is much more complicated than that. Some progress is made and some progress is lost as time marches on. It's convenient for those in power to paint the past as being worse because this is a much easier (and more profitable) strategy than actually making the present better. Be wary of progress narratives because, more often than not, they're misleading.

The world today has many wonders, but it also has more inequality than any historical period, the rising threat of nuclear war, and global ecological collapse. These are all the result of not only failure to progress, but serious regress. The point of critiquing liberal democracy is to ask how we got to such a dire situation and work towards something better than this. Anarchism is one, of several, such responses.

chrispd01 t1_j100evg wrote on December 20, 2022 at 5:58 PM

Yeah. But from the article I read, it seems to suggest that the answer to the problem is not really anarchism, but just better liberal democracy. That is a liberal democracy that is less influenced by special interests.

Meta_Digital t1_j101v4y wrote on December 20, 2022 at 6:07 PM

Yeah, I agree actually. The article seems to conflate socialism with "when the government does stuff". Socialism is, instead, just the democratic organization of an economy. Thus it's incompatible with liberalism.

Take the Zapatistas in Mexico. They control an anarchist autonomous zone, and their economic system is socialist in structure. Socialism and anarchism are perfectly compatible, though socialism is not necessary. One could have a communist economy that functions as a sharing or gifting economy instead, for instance.

Or, look at the autonomous zone in Syria, Rojava. It is also founded on anarchist principles, and once again, its economic structure is socialist.

Basically, if you're going to take an anarchist stance, it's also going to be anti-capitalist. That's why anarchists universally don't consider anarcho-capitalism to be a form of anarchism, because that ideology (which is mostly a byproduct of online tests like the political compass which nobody should take seriously) doesn't actually apply the anarchist critique to capitalism (which is often its primary target).