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RE: The Social Democratic Case Against Anarchism

in #politics7 years ago (edited)

Left-libertarian, as in Peter Kropotkin, Murray Bookchin, et al. It generally refers to the anti-authoritarian left, like libertarian socialism, anarchism, democratic confederalism, council communism, etc.

I follow "civic republicanism" in defining liberty as "non-domination." This is a comprehensive definition of liberty, as opposed to the partial liberty of liberals (positive liberty, the freedom to do things) and right-libertarians (negative liberty, freedom from things). Taking this freedom as non-domination approach, I say government's task is to ensure the maximizing of liberty, which entails ensuring domination is minimized. People ought not to be dominated by gangs, politicians, bosses, monied elites, corporation, etc. The sole purpose of government is to protect people by minimizing domination, which would entail social libertarianism (drug use, "sodomy", prostitution, public nudity, etc. would be legal), but also entails an anti-interventionist peace-seeking/diplomatic foreign policy, and ensuring universal basic income to eliminate wage-slavery (domination by bosses), help prevent domination of women (who are often exploited as a result of their economic dependency on men), etc. And politics must be thoroughly democratic and participatory in order to ensure that people are not dominated by politicians or government. The term "left" denotes egalitarian, meaning equal distribution of wealth and power among the populace. So, my libertarianism, being based on civic republican "liberty as non-domination", is actually left-libertarian or anti-authoritarian egalitarianism.

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ok, im on board with left-libertarianism then.

the corporate types are going to wine about being told what to do, but at this point I simply don't feel bad about telling these non-human entities what to do so they don't outright destroy the world.

Corporate types loves telling others what to do, so they just have to deal with being told to relinguish their power over others. :D