Not All Anarchists Are Equal.

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
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There are a variety and many factions of anarchism.

It is a mistake to claim all anarchists are the same.

All of them believe in decentralization and zero government but disagree on the means of achieving that where there is all sorts of beliefs that seperate them too.

One of the biggest differences are those anarchists that prefer all out violent methods of achieving their goals versus the pacifists who believe nonviolence is the method of attaining a existence of ‘peaceful’ anarchy. It is one of the greatest disagreements between anarchists themselves.

From my own study there are six very different factions of anarchism.

I shall try to outline them here briefly.

The individualist anarchists- These anarchists are followers of Max Stirner also known as Johann Kaspur Schmidt. They are the oldest school of anarchist thought since Max Stirner was one of the first anarchist thinkers recorded atleast in Europe.

His American equivalent was the anarchist writer James L. Walker who’s name I take here on ILP.

Individualist anarchists believe in the power of the individual and maintain that individual sovereignty to be the foundation of anarchy.

What is unique about individualist anarchists is that they seek to understand selfishness, egoism, and competition instead of trying to wish it away.

I think it is because individual anarchism tries to understand the general destructive tendencies of human beings.

I myself am a individualist anarchist.

The anarchist collectivists- This version of anarchism includes all the anarchist socialists, communists, marxists, and syndicalists. Thinkers like Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Bakunin, Noam Chomsky, Zizek, and Proudhon dominate this version of anarchism.

For the anarchist collectivist the individual must succumb or be sacrificed for the majority collective. This has cause some animosity between the individualist anarchists versus the collectivists.

The reason communisn is popular with this faction is because collectivized communes are the goal.

This faction of anarchism is all about egalitarianism even if it means forcing people to be equal. In contrast individualist anarchists accept inequality as just natural phenomena which further causes seperation between the individualists and collectivists.

Religious anarchists- This version of anarchism centers around religion.

It is led by thinkers such as Leo Tolstoy or Kropotkin.

This version of anarchism prides itself on religious devotion.

Green anarchists- These anarchists pride themselves on ecological and environmental preservation where they view the state to be in direct opposition to.

Unlike anarcho primitivists who reject the virtues of technology green anarchists view technology as a means to their environmental goals.

Anarcho primitivists/ anarchist primitivists- This faction believes in the absolute rejection of technology and modern industrial society for the decentralized living of humanity’s ancient past.

They view technological and modern industrial society as tools of the state needing to be resisted. Thinkers that support this version of anarchism are John Zerzan, Jared Diamond, and many noticeable others.

While I would not call myself a full fledged anarcho primitivist I certainly can sympathize with many of their perspectives as a individualist anarchist.

Anarcho Capitalists- This version of anarchists views all forms of government as a hindrance to the free market and capitalism.

For them anarchism is the goal for fully functional capitalism.

Thinkers that support this would be Murray Rothbard.

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So you must have taken it seriously when I told you in a previous thread that you don’t know enough about anarchism to speak for everyone. Glad you took the time to familiarize yourself with the wider world of anarchism, good for you.

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Actually it was you who assumed that I didn’t know anything as I seem to recall.

I am more intelligent than what you give me credit for.

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Yeah, I know, who did you think I was implying assumed you didn’t know? You?

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I might have to make a thread like this, but in relation to those that support government.

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I would actually be excited to read that.

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I was going to write what Pezer wrote, but then he wrote it, so I don’t have to anymore. However I just wrote a longer sentence than his, which leads me to believe I’m wasting my time by writing my thoughts out here. :banana-linedance:

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Means are so much a part of temperment, I would guess often people think their means are a necessary evil but in fact it was what was most appealing about the ends they chose.

Means lead to transition states. Violent means lead to a hypothetical point where people stop using violence as a rule. But it tends to become part of governance.

And who decides when that transition point is reached?

What means does one use to maintain a lack of order?

One could look at the various anarchies as conceptions of ongoing means, rather than ends. For Chomsky, the means of maintaining anarchy would be collective patterns.

Means are intimately connected with ends, not that it is simple. The Sandinistas ‘let’ themselves get voted out of an office they achieved very much through violence. (not saying they were anarchists, just that the means do not necessarily lead directly to the obvious ends. Of course the Sandanistas based their violence on the collective and probably were sincere, so when rejected by the collective they had little choice if they wanted to maintain integrity) They did, however, move from revolution, to being a state, and a state has lots of way of maintaining ‘structure’, many with implicit violence, generally spread out.

How anarchists can set predecence with violence and then relinquish this mode of being social seems very tricky to me. How is the no law law to be enforced?

and then peaceful methods, at least the traditional marches and reform-based stuff and dispersal of ideas sounds hysterically ineffective to me.

I think left field is the only way to go.

How can one shake people up without violence and without being nice in the street with signs or engaging the machine of the current system?

and wouldn’t both violent and peaceful approaches tend to share a collectivist set up as means?

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Go for it.

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Moreno I look at anarchist guerillas as voluntary “freedom fighters”.

Once the enemy is defeated the voluntary pact is broken where all fighters in consensus voluntary relinquish their military might for civilian living once again.

It would be like a village full of people that only take up arms to defend themselves where when they were done they would go back to farming and their families toiling in the soil.

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Perhaps they would train themselves enough that they would look forward to, anticipate the attacks, making it a hobby to develop possible strategies for different kinds of attacks.

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Sure.

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In contemporary postmodern anarchism you will notice there is a sizable difference between the anarchists individualists and the anarchist collectivists.

The individualists tend to be nihilists since nihilism is a individualistic philosophy whereas the collectivists are egalitarian or communistic.

Anarchist individualists can roughly be translated as anarchist nihilism or anarchist nihilists.

This is why you will see animosity between the individualist and collectivist anarchist factions.