Mordor on the Potomac, that has a certain ring to it, I'm going to have to remember that one. Still, I think you're doing yourself and the city a disservice. Once the bureaucrats and functionaries go home to Maryland or northern Virginia it's just another decent sized city, albeit with a fetish for white marble and stunted buildings. Besides, it's quite a bit of fun to eat a bunch of edibles and go wandering in the belly of the beast taking photos of the insanity and absurdity.
As for your critique of democracy, you're preaching to the choir. For all the noise about democracy, this country is technically a republic, in no small part because the founders were far more interested in protecting property rights vs human rights.
Strike the root instead of trying to reform it, I say.
That's great, as far as rhetoric goes, but unless and until it's followed with concrete actions to back it up it's still just more empty rhetoric. What's you got? You can't get people to go along with abandoning the old way of doing things without showing them a better way first. Nonviolent propaganda of the deed so to speak. The organizing of mutual aid and mutual support networks last year as part of the BLM protests is the best example of what I'm talking about that I can point to.
Market anarchist, is that another way of saying ancap? Or is there a distinction between the two? I'm going to have to refresh myself on Spooner but I'm curious, are you familiar with Max Stirner?
(If this comes across as harsh/hostile, please pay it no mind. I blame the internets and lack of coffee)
It's not my original name. Use it to your heart's content.
I can't tell you everything I do to be subversive, because a lot of it is "illegal." However, as a librarian, I do promote a lot of independence. Homeschooling, homesteading, and individual intellectual development are already encouraged locally. I just wish we weren't funded by extortion.
I have read little Stirner. His adherents tend to be off-putting, but that's not necessarily his fault. I would like to call myself an anarchist without adjectives, but the concept of the agora is, Ibthink, one of the keys to a stateless society filling the needs ofnthe community. Mutual aid is not an enemy of the market, after all. But too many lazy thinkers use "capitalism" as shorthand for "things I don't like in modern socoety." Same for "socialism," although it appears to me the critics of socialism can sometimes be more coherent.
No sweat, if you had I'd probably have been more concerned. I was poorly caffeinated and cranky and trying to skip the exchanges of rhetoric.
Dogma is the bane of humankind, so I'm not too keen on the adjectives myself. Stirner makes a lot of sense if you've been on a steady diet of nihilism, I suspect many of his adherents are using him as rationale rather than reason. In my darker moods I can appreciate him, most of the time Bakunin is more to my taste.
I still remember the Great Recession, I suspect our notions of the market are rather divergent 😎 Still, I'd rather figure out where we can cooperate rather than wasting our time not changing each others minds 🙂
Have you seen Michael Malice's The Anarchist Handbook collecting assorted essays from various schools of anarchism? It's a pretty diverse collection. On a broader view, I do see merit in Bakunin, Proudhon, De Cleyre, Goldman, etc. but I recoil instinctively from anyone who claims to be an anarchist today but wants to impose their political and economic preferences.
Using statist means cannot achieve anarchist ends as far as I can tell, and no community built on a foundation other than voluntary consent can stand. The market of voluntary exchanges and interactions does not preclude voluntary communes, syndicalist co-ops, mutual aid societies, and other systems of interaction.
The typical left anarchist I encounter online has a strawman idea of markets as a corporate hellhole while turning a blind eye to all arguments pointing out the corruption political power injects even as they claim Stalinism or Maoism can't be used to discredit communism because it was a political hierarchy.