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RE: Driver, Where You Taking Us? (Washington DC In A Hell Of A Hurry)

in Worldmappin4 years ago

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.

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I can't tell you everything

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.