Anarchism?

[Orwell]

So this is a simple question, Is Anarchism compatible with Capitalism or does Anarchism require the abolition of all hierarchy (including capitalism).

I am personally of the view that Anarchism is not compatible with Capitalism, due to Capitalism functioning as an "unjust hierarchy" or nonnatural in the views of Anarchists.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

It's basically up to the anarchist, but I'll note that per my teaching, the "OG" anarchists were all left-wing and anti-capitalist. The anarchist view of history at the time was as a series of encroachments by unjust authorities, including the banning and dismemberment of mutual aid societies. As with Marxism, the current system had warped mankind's incentive system, and the idea (hope) was that once the state and its litany of hierarchies--including in some cases religion and in all cases capitalism--had been deconstructed, we would return to a system of voluntarism and communal living. My own take was that the primary distinction was between hierarchy (anarchists) and class (Marxists), and that one was obviously reactionary while the other was progressive.

"Anarcho-capitalism" is a sort of modern, post-1945 invention, I would hazard, and, where the left-wing anarchists would probably still have had to use coercion to enforce their view of society, ancaps would of course have had to rely on some sort of force to maintain private property as it is commonly understood.

[Oswald Acted Alone, You Kook]

Left wing Anarchism or right wing Anarchism?

[Orwell]

Left wing Anarchism or right wing Anarchism?

The question is, it is the belief of me and some others that Anarchism cannot be "rightwing" because capitalism is an unjust hierarchy so that wouldn't be true anarchism

[PSOL]

You and Cath basically hit the nail in the head. Know that even decentralized Anarchist tendencies like Egoism, Market Anarchism, or Mutualism call for the abolishment of Capitalism and current class relations as they now stand.

The AnCaps, in holding private hierarchy as ideal and a good way to rule society, both in theory and in “practice” with cartels cease to be anything close to resembling what Anarchism is actually reaching for, the abolishment of structural unjust hierarchical societies.

[John Dule]

It depends on how you define "capitalism." Without a state and a police force to enforce property rights, you're not going to see anyone amass enough wealth to, say, open a factory or start a large-scale farming operation. So the employer-employee hierarchy would basically not exist. Similarly, the lack of a commonly agreed-to currency would make investments and saving much more difficult, which would contribute to the difficulties involved in accruing wealth. Still though, without the existence of the state you cannot prevent people from engaging in voluntary exchanges that they see as beneficial to themselves, so the spirit of free exchange would still exist. Some form of markets would remain and the economy would mostly function in a barter system. A nonexistent state would, of course, also make it impossible for leftist doctrines of political, economic, and social equality to be enacted.

I like to think of the political compass as a sort of triangle:



The more advanced our technology is, the larger the state can potentially become. The larger the state, the more it can enforce things like racial hierarchy or economic equality. In an anarchist system, certain hierarchies (in terms of skill, strength, and intelligence, for instance) would remain, but there would be elements of economic and social equality as well. So I don't think anarchy can be classified as either left or right, because the lack of state power makes it impossible to enforce a coherent ideology in either direction.

Anyway, this is just my opinion of how the political compass functions. Feel free to criticize.

[PSOL]

You know, I’m not a fan with the authoritarian vs. Libertarian political compass set up and so widely established, given that it doesn’t really match how things work in practice or ever. This can be blamed by a lack of foresight and bad faith free aged by the Nolan Chart.

In attempts at forming purely horizontal, democratic society in the recent era without fixed hierarchies such as caste or class, the way to maintain and set them up requires some sort of restriction or pressure, either informally or formally by the movement. In small communes, that required a sort of community policing and peer pressure to conform. For more revolutionary internationalist movements, such as the territory in Ukraine and Spain occupied by syndicalists and AnComs, that was done by some level of force. Private property was abolished, propaganda outfits smashed, and wartime measures resembling by what some called a quasi-state was propped up.

Similar efforts by AnCaps usually failed far quicker, as their society could not sustain not having some sort of trappings of a standing bureaucratic structure nor would the participants enjoy living in a hierarchy that requires a persistent lower class, something endemic to capitalism. Really, Anarchism as a movement was founded to abolish unjust hierarchies that perpetuate unfair treatment, and you can base how close to this definition a movement is by how far and through what means one is willing to reach said endgame.

[John Dule]

In small communes, that required a sort of community policing and peer pressure to conform.

This is a much worse form of authoritarianism than any hierarchical society. Mobs cannot be reasoned with.

[PSOL]

In small communes, that required a sort of community policing and peer pressure to conform.

This is a much worse form of authoritarianism than any hierarchical society. Mobs cannot be reasoned with.

Oh please, when everything is decided democratically and there’s nothing preventing you from leaving outside of obligations in the commune, it’s hardly authoritarian in a political sense.

Although the problem is that this lifestyle isn’t for everyone, and oftentimes folks can’t be who they are in such confined and close communities. Add into the fact that it’s really expensive to remain an autarkic town semi-closed off from the world and its resources, and personal drama that’s damaging to most small towns already, and you see why the idea of communes fell out of fashion for certain secular philosophers, economists, and social scientists. That’s how the idealist vs. scientific notion first arose from leftist terminology after the followers of Fourier and Proudhons’ ideals got dunked on in the first Internationale when Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin condemned such insular strategies to bring the whole world to change, among other things.

[Brother Jonathan]

Without the rule of law there is no private property, no capital, so right off the bat I think it is fair to say that capitalism as we understand it is impossible in a truly anarchic society. That being said, I don't think it is impossible because all hierarchy is eliminated, because anarchy would still have hierarchies, just not ones reflected in any legal or formal economic structures.  Maybe in a more utopian world anarchy could truly lead to a society without hierarchy, but in reality it just returns us to the most primitive hierarchies, structures of power based around food and brute strength, the means of basic survival. It's just that such hierarchies would not be conducive to trade or industry.

I suppose you could argue that anarchism simply argues for society without any coercive influences, but I don't think it is really possible to argue that small voluntary cooperative groups, living peacefully on their own, would not either eventually become coercive of their own accord (seeking to suppress internal strife) or do so to prevent hostile action by outside forces, like groups not bound by other similar cooperatives (or hostile cooperatives). And at the point, you have groups using coercive action to protect resources they consider theirs from attempts to obtain these resources without providing what the cooperatives consider equitable compensation, and then you are back at where you started (in a very broad sense, of course). I guess maybe self defense may not be "coercive", but such actions create a sort of rudimentary legal structure that governs ownership and disbursement of resources through force. Within the cooperatives as well there would have to be some form of coercion, in order to evenly distribute work, so the idea that these cooperatives are voluntary forever simply because they started out as such seems fairly weak.

The only thing anarchy really does is end the state monopoly on legitimate use of violence, which I would say is not a great thing to discard, and in discarding it you basically destroy the structures and incentives capitalism needs to survive. I suppose it is possible for a society that holds itself out as anarchist in nature to develop a sort of capitalism, but only after it has essentially recreated some version of the state in a sociological sense.

[Saint Milei]

I think most right-winged market anarchists don't really consider themselves anarchism. Anarcho-capitalism is a lot different than "anarchism". It's more about increasing efficiency and less about law not existing. In some ways, left winged anarchists are the actual anarchists