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Dude his comment is like a paragraph and a half long. At least finish reading it before disagreeing with it. Like you, I think he's _wrong_ about Ancaps not being "true" anarchist (or Scotsmen...), but it's not like he didn't address them and isn't aware of the concept (he addresses them in literally the next sentence! Jesus). Smugly linking the Wikipedia article is entirely unhelpful for anything except revealing that you didn't bother reading for more than 6 seconds before rushing to reply.



>I think he's _wrong_ about Ancaps not being "true" anarchist

I don't believe they aren't "true anarchists", I believe they aren't anarchist at all. They aren't even in the realm of consideration of what constitutes anarchist. Their ideal society would end up corporate feudalism.


By this metric, one can say that e.g. anarcho-syndicalists aren't anarchist at all, because their ideal society would end up as lots of small but totalitarian communities. Of course, the syndicalists themselves would dispute this, but then ancaps would also dispute your "corporate feudalism" claim.

The real difference here is philosophical. Right-wing anarchists believe that private property is a natural concept that exists independently of power hierarchies. Left-wing anarchists believe that's an artificial concept that requires such a hierarchy to enforce, and doesn't exist without it. Hence ancaps believe that absence of government will result in a capitalist utopia, while traditional anarchists believe that it would result in a socialist utopia. These two viewpoints are irreconcilable, because the fundamental premise is not just different, but literally opposite.

However, insofar as both groups believe that their ideal society is characterized primarily by the lack of a power hierarchy (and all other things, like unrestricted property rights, or complete lack thereof, simply follow naturally from that), both groups are "real" anarchists.


> I don't believe they aren't "true anarchists", I believe they aren't anarchist at all.

Yea, that's what I said. Putting "true" in quote marks was me dismissing the notion that you can redefine words because you don't like their current definitions.


Actually if you look at the history of anarchism you'll find it was the ancaps who tried to redefine the word, not the other way around. Murray Rothbard, one of the founders of anarchocapitalism literally says this almost verbatim.

‘One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, “our side,” had captured a crucial word from the enemy . . . “Libertari­ans” . . . had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over. . .’ [The Betrayal of the American Right, p. 83]




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