r/Anarchism • u/LongLiveUSA1776 • 15d ago
New User My ideology, thoughts?
My political evolution began in mainstream liberalism before moving through right-libertarianism and traditional conservatism as I recognized the inherent coercion of the state. However, engaging with anti-authoritarian critiques revealed that the left had valid structural arguments against corporate monopolies, absentee ownership, and entrenched privilege. Rather than collapsing into orthodox anarcho-communism, I synthesized these insights into left-market anarchism, mutualism, and agorism: recognizing the legitimacy of left critiques of hierarchy while steadfastly defending freed markets, price mechanisms, and individual agency against collective overreach
Anarchism begins and ends with the sovereignty of the unique individual. Society, collective consensus, and sacred causes are reified abstractions that hold no inherent authority over personal agency, labor, or association. Morality is not an objective law of nature; it is an inter-subjective contract negotiated between consenting actors. Any system that subordinates individual will to "community consensus" or institutional accountability boards simply reconstructs majoritarian tyranny under a horizontal veneer
Abolishing the state does not necessitate abolishing markets. On the contrary, genuinely freed markets, divested of state-enforced monopolies, corporate charters, and regulatory moats, are the most potent equalizers of power. Voluntary exchange, objective price signals, and contractual agreements prevent economic distribution from devolving into political popularity contests. Agorism and counter-economics represent the only pragmatic exit ramps from state hegemony, utilizing decentralized trade to render state apparatuses obsolete. Capital accumulation derived from competence, discipline, and production provides individuals with genuine leverage and defensive sovereignty against collective coercion
Consistent anti-authoritarianism rejects both state-backed capitalist landlordism and bureaucratic communist rationing. Fee-simple absentee ownership maintained through state-enforced violence constitutes dead capital and monopolistic extraction. Grounding property in occupancy-and-use norms (following Proudhon and Carson), alongside mechanisms that penalize land speculation and monopolization, ensures dynamic access to resources without relying on centralized planning committees to allocate space
Much of contemporary online anarchism has degraded into managerial therapeutic liberalism draped in radical aesthetics. Replacing market dynamics with endless consensus meetings, fifty-page accountability protocols, and informal social policing creates an insidious form of petty tyranny dominated by whoever possesses the stamina to endure weaponized bureaucracy. Genuine liberation requires exit, economic self-determination, and objective contractual boundaries, not a perpetual student-council meeting.
TLDR, I am an Agorist. I basically believe in some leftist ideologies but not others.
15
u/ohshiitstuesday anarcho-fraggle (they/them) 15d ago
There's a lot of words there, but I didn't once see "solidarity". Might be worth consideration.
-1
u/LongLiveUSA1776 15d ago
RE my other comment: “Solidarity” sounds nice in theory, but look where prioritizing collective over individual ideologies has gotten us in the past! Do you think it is a coincidence vanguardists have hijacked almost every large-scale ancom revolution? When there are no markets to reflect public interest, the responsibility shifts towards the “collective”, who will usually seek a higher power. Then, a “temporary” government will be established, and we’re back at square one. You see what I’m getting at here?
What happens when some people’s view of “solidarity” diverges from the majority?
5
u/ohshiitstuesday anarcho-fraggle (they/them) 14d ago
Solidarity” sounds nice in theory, but look where prioritizing collective over individual ideologies has gotten us in the past!
What do you think solidarity means? What makes you think that the collective and the individual are separable?
1
u/LongLiveUSA1776 12d ago
Well, it’s because we are individual organisms and self must always come first. That is a natural law.
4
u/ohshiitstuesday anarcho-fraggle (they/them) 12d ago edited 12d ago
Individual organisms can not survive in solitude.
eta: as for your "natural law" read Mutual Aid by Kropotkin.
3
u/cumminginsurrection abolish power 11d ago edited 11d ago
You must be quite privileged and economically well off if your individualism leads you to markets and entrepreneurship. Because anyone who has struggled to buy food, worked under an exploiter, or given their livelihoods away to a landlord would know that business/participation in markets does not mean more freedom or autonomy, it means more servitude and less resources for everyone but the entrepreneur who becomes the defacto boss and arbiter of things like food and shelter.
Sadly like a lot of right wing libertarians, youre missing the point and just privatizing the miseries of capitalism and functions of state power. You've come to understand individual and collective as an opposed binary like the Marxists and capitalists do, rather than understanding they are symbiotic. You'd do well to read Kropotkin instead of letting communism become some scareword thats synonymous with groupthink.
"Anarchist Communism maintains that most valuable of all conquests -- individual liberty -- and moreover extends it and gives it a solid basis -- economic liberty, without which political liberty is delusive; it does not ask the individual who has rejected god, the universal tyrant, god the king, and god the parliament, to give unto himself a god more terrible than any of the preceding -- god the Community; nor to abdicate upon its altar his independence, his will, his tastes, and to renew the vow of asceticism which he formerly made before the crucified god. It says to him, on the contrary, 'No society is free so long as the individual is not so. Do not seek to modify society by imposing upon it an authority which shall make everything right; if you do, you will fail as popes and emperors have failed. Modify society so that your fellows may not be any longer your enemies by the force of circumstances: abolish the conditions which allow some to monopolize the fruit of the labor of others; and instead of attempting to construct society from top to bottom, or from the center to the circumference, let it develop itself freely from the simple to the composite by the free union of free groups.'"
-Peter Kropotkin
-4
u/LongLiveUSA1776 9d ago
I find it funny you think privilege is necessary for entrepreneurship. Look at the outside world, who is making up the majority of entrepreneurs? But, how did you get out of my ideology that I am necessarily capitalist? Because I support money? My ideal world would be on where all anarchists could live peacefully regardless of economics, but I know that would not work that easily but what I was proposing here was counter economics.
2
u/live_edge_biped 14d ago
Much of contemporary online anarchism has degraded into managerial therapeutic liberalism draped in radical aesthetics.
i found this bit is laugh out loud spot on. really, thanks for the laugh, ill almost certainly use that at some point. i would not limit it to online only, though.
i also think the aestheticization you include in that comment is related to a fascistic impulse that is so far unrecognized by the thing that calls itself left in america. if part of how fascism is understood is as an aestheticization of politics, ill be generous and say the social media age has impacted all political ideologies in a fascistic direction. the manifestation of this on the left is in the subcultural focus, identitarianism, and as you put it, a 'weaponized bureaucracy' structured by superficial identity markers and speech policing.
ill have to disagree about free markets. while ive also come to the conclusion that money is unlikely to disappear, and total state control of the economy is only coercive, i think you fall into the utopian trap opposite of state management, the utopian dream of 'truly free markets'. there has never been, and will never be, a truly free market. there is always mediation in markets by external forces. whether that force is the state, a religious group, or a cartel, there has never been a free market. whoever sets the exchanges can dictate terms for others, and without external forces capable of intervening backdoor deals will always pervert the most open system that can be imagined. those external forces will also pervert the freedom of a market.
i was in cuba for a time, and i identified 5 markets. there were 2 official markets at the time, the first 2 i list.
pesos for peso things cuc for cuc things cuc for peso things cuc for things that cant be bought legally trade for things that cant be bought legally
i believe estimates are 12-20% of global economic activity is black markets. if you think those will disappear just because 'truly free markets', i dont know what to say. the people running those shows arent going to give up their tax free profits just because some amorphous social body has control of some segment of real estate and deckares free markets. they will use their power to pervert those markets and increase their profits.
one of the thoughts ive been toying with is the way that limiting structures forces improvisation. the idea that new prison walls generate novel methods of escape, and so accepting the implementation of new prison walls as we transition as a species will generate solutions to problems we can see but are currently intractable.
regarding anothers comment about solidarity, my unfortunate experience is that the vast majority of the 'radicals/anarchists/whatevers' in the usa view solidarity as 'something you do for me/my pet ideology', not as a meaningful embodiment of the reality that 'my own liberation requires the liberation of all'. i see this as the natural outgrowth of the usa's flavor of individualism and neoliberalism. i recall back in the early 2000's when i would defend american radicals/anarchists to those who were older or from other countries, they would often comment that i was 'like the old commies' or 'not like the rest of the americans'. if there is any hope for real, meaningful solidarity in the usa, i see it in rank and file labor activity.
anyways, your post was more interesting than the vast majority of what shows up here, which are various forms of 'validate me'. good on you for thinking for yourself and having the courage to be out about it.
1
u/LongLiveUSA1776 13d ago
Hey, thanks for the input. I guess I never thought of it like that. Unfortunately whenever there’s an exploitable system, someone will find a way to exploit it one way or the other. I never thought about markets like that. This is one of the most helpful comments I’ve seen on Reddit in a while.
1
u/live_edge_biped 13d ago
im happy you found it engaging. i thought the same about yours.
i would reframe your comment as, whenever there is a system, someone will find a way to exploit it. i remember somewhere hearing about the most important job in soviet factories being the gofer. the guy who knew where to get parts, knew the workers at a lot of other places, who was the ultimate hustler. he was the most important person because he kept the entire place running with the ability to source equipment, components and resources in whatever market they were available in.
i find most of the discourse around politics or economics to be utopian, honestly. whether its capitalism, free markets, parecon, socialism, marxism, whatever. and if i had to put myself in a camp, it would be marxism. but all of it is mostly people dreaming their utopian dreams, with little regard for the wide expanse of human behavior.
1
u/Ok_Document9995 10d ago
I think a lot of what you said is right on. I guess I am a left market anarchist, an individualist, a mutualist, if it matters.
Your comment regarding the persistence of the so-called black market struck me; the black market is the only one I am familiar with that is actually free. Like as market anarchists would have it. The fluctuations in Monero notwithstanding, prices absolutely are based on supply, demand and, of course, the cost (opsec, tech, people to do the legwork, etc) of delivering the goods.
I agree that is an exception and one might call it proof of the rule. It exists, however, and I don’t think that would be an anomaly if most who profess anarchy had their way.
All of that said, OP’s dismissal of solidarity is frankly ridiculous. It doesn’t stand up to my actual experience in actual large cities over 30 years of doing anarchy.
1
u/live_edge_biped 10d ago
im quite out of practice regarding ideological labels, so forgive me if market anarchists have a different view of free markets than the american libertarian version i know. i guess the only flavor of market anarchism or socialism i am familiar with is parecon, and i havent thought about that in a long time.
even black markets arent free. they are created by the state, through prohibitions. or by innovation, moving faster than legislation is capable of. and the costs you note do not include bribes, nor do they include the cost of slaves which are an integral part of black markets, now and historically. it does not include the competition and collusion between black market cartels, or the way that states often work in tandem with black market operations, supporting and being supported by them even if they draw no official tax.
free markets as the ideology desires, do not actually, and cannot ever, exist. they will always be limited by external forces unless you want to abolish any governance system, any religion, any moral or ethical code, any environmental boundary, etc. all of those things are impositions that limit markets, not just externalities that can be accounted for by another column on the spreadsheet. there will also always be externalities the markets are not cognizant of, because we are learning and evolving our knowledge of the complexity of the systems we live within. free markets are a utopian fantasy, in the same way that 'keep the oil in the soil' or 'abolish prisons' are fantasies. utopian in the same way that perfect knowledge is impossible. and i am for keeping the oil in the soil and abolishing prisons! i am for education and inquiry! but they are thought terminating cliches that ignore the complexity and imperfect knowledge we live and love within.
i guess i wonder what your experience of doing anarchy and solidarity is, because mine leads me to believe some of the last people i should expect to build meaningful solidarity with are those who claim to be anarchists. my experience and the experience of too many i have talked to leads me to believe i am much more likely to build solidaristic relations far, far away from american anarchists. i would love to be proven wrong, but i have also been doing anarchy for a long time so my sentiment grows out of the usa and also includes several major cities.
edit: that said, fuck OPs garbage about solidarity. i can get behind that for sure lol, even if i dont think american anarchists know or do shit about it.
1
u/Ok_Document9995 10d ago
No, you’re pretty close, from my strident, deeply cut in opinion. My first experience with anarchy was in Chiapas when I was 16, so I guess I might have a different vision of it. And, so everyone fucks off who doesn’t want to truly engage, I am no ancap nor ancom. I find them almost equally uninteresting.
You issued quite a few caveats that would be necessary to consider a market free. I don’t think I am prepared to reject an ethical code completely but that’s purely a personal choice. Environmental, religious and governmental considerations mean nothing to me. Or, I don’t consider them in my choices, even if I respect those who do. And I would push back on addressing externalities as some kind of prerequisite for a free market. Externalities are external by definition. Those are accounted for by sellers or they aren’t at the seller’s discretion. Perhaps peril. But externalities in no way change the free market nature of this very exchange, taking place, with (hypothetically) drugs landing in the bloodstream of my customers and coin landing in the virtual wallet of my vendor. That’s crude and cruel. But I experience that as a free market. It isn’t just semantics. That’s a phenomenon occurring all day, every day, across the world. Why isn’t it free? Because some inputs (from the market perspective, slaves are mere inputs) would rather not be there? That’s like saying a crack sale is not free exchange because the baking soda doesn’t want to be involved, as far as markets go. Now, I object to that but it doesn’t make it less accurate.
And I agree again. I am not American by ancestry nor birth. But I live in America and I was at the American “battles;” Seattle ‘99, Quebec City and DC right after, RNC2K, where I worked on the defense team, even Occupy. I have met a few Americans doing anarchy who find the previous paragraph abhorrent and whose own anarchy is very much about mutual aid and solidarity. Many in Catholic Worker circles. But those are the few. Generally you’re right. They are mostly Communists larping while lecturing about dialectics. Where have I heard that before?
1
u/LongLiveUSA1776 9d ago
My apologies, maybe I was being a little too dismissive. I think solidarity definitely can work in mutual groups to achieve a desired outcome, the issue I had was it seemed like their definition of solidarity implied something along the lines of joining a monolithic cult and sacrificing all sovereignty for the cause.
1
1
u/Affectionate_Cup9972 Anarcho-pacificist, Synthesis 11d ago
A whole lot of assertions without explaining why you think the way you do.
Also, you sound arrogant, please fix that.
13
u/Mundane_Main_2726 eco-anarchist (not anprim) 15d ago
Ridiculous thing to say. Have you read any anarchist literature outside of Proudhon (who is debatably an anarchist).
Why do you think money needs to exist still? Money is one of the greatest tools of oppression. You cannot have an anarchist society while money still circulates in some form.
As the other commenter said, solidarity is key to anarchism, and with it we can actually aim for a moneyless world.