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An_Old_Big_Tree wrote

A lot of people have replied since I started typing mine, but this is it:

There are really a wide variety of ways to answer your question. You’re really asking us to write a book for you.

First off, often, there are a wide variety of things that ‘liberal’ means. In the US, it refers to a conservative political party and their followers and the spectacle that their very small world creates, recreates, and enforces together with its sibling party, the republicans, to the benefit of very few and the grave detriment of many. For you, it seems that when you say ‘liberal’ you’re referring to the most left-leaning of state-capitalists. And often what people are referring to when they speak of liberals here is anybody who is for state-capitalist representative democracy, which would probably include those you call conservatives.

Anarchists are anti-capital and anti-state and anti-hierarchy. Liberals are (hierarchical is implied) capitalist statists who’s every subscription (laws, police, prisons, government, money, debt, rights) even in their most pleasant forms, serve to legitimate and thereby maintain the global-state-capitalist-colonialist complex by presenting these things with a nice face, while they function in a range of ways to disempower people and create and exploit marginalised people. That is, liberals are, in a very meaningful way, complicit in the things that they themselves are against. Section B of the anarchist FAQ touches on many of the directions your question could go.

That’s really just the beginning of it, but this is all I have time and energy for at the moment. There’s an entire perspective that emerges from positioning yourself as an anti-authoritarian which really is not simple to convey in words. Hopefully you’ll have some luck in finding your answers.

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Shandy OP wrote (edited )

Thanks for your thoughtful reply.

One more question, are liberals really more complicit than you guys? Don't you guys buy the same clothes made by sweatshops and eat the same food made by cutting down the rainforests? But you're not complicit just because you label yourself an anarchist?

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Magma5 wrote

This is a concept in socialist circles called 'No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism.' This means that no matter what you buy or do, you will be contributing to someone else's oppression, even if you're fighting capitalism.

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