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subrosa wrote

Reply to comment by Tequila_Wolf in by !deleted39333

Seems to me you're more interested in stating your own preferences, about who you would welcome into your affinity group or whatever, and in interrogating my hardly existent sympathies for capitalists. You're not giving me much to engage with.

Maybe this will clarify my point, where I'm coming from:

  • OP's meme boils down to a simple, slogan-like position, a daily mantra of sorts. Capitalists are not anarchists — who knew — might as well say "statism is bad" and pat each other on the shoulder for that. I wanted to add something with a bit more flavor, an issue a bit more contemporary.

  • My own 'radicalization' and trajectory towards anarchy got started with a serious problem I had with democracy and my search for the most coherent version of it. Despite my early communism I was long hesitant to call myself anarchist or dig deeper precisely because Occupy era anarchists kept insisting on direct democracy.

  • After the Russian Revolution English-speaking anarchists started using "libertarian" much more prominently than before while being rather silent on the whole "socialism" thing. Which I'm not sure will ever recover. Anarchism as a barely existent libertarian anti-statism, as an alternative to the Marxists' "socialism = totalitarian government + planned economy" shit — it's almost funny how perfect of a set-up that was. If we want to move past anarcho-capitalism for good, it's not in choosing sides in Cold War binaries (true communism pls!, true capitalism pls!), but in rediscovering the more thorough critique of archy, which I'll insist is most easily found in the early anarchist's anti-governmentalism and anti-absolutism, in the neglected anti-political current that became a whole lot more available to us in the past decades. Graeber didn't bother with any of that, while he had plenty of time to promote Universal Basic Income. Because, basically, it's a policy that would reduce the size of government. Now where have I heard that before...

  • I'm currently reading two old books with "war and peace" in the title, forgive me if I'm hesitant to have any strong positions on war or what it is.

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Tequila_Wolf wrote

Seems to me you're more interested in stating your own preferences, about who you would welcome into your affinity group or whatever, and in interrogating my hardly existent sympathies for capitalists. You're not giving me much to engage with.

Really? Surprised to hear that.

I agree with you about the meme. I'd prefer if we never saw ancap memes on this site. I see where you were going with adding flavour, and was trying to do the same kind of thing with my own engagement with you. I wonder if I take people too literally, or with two specific a meaning, sometimes.

I'm pretty sure we're mostly in agreement on the relation to archy stuff.

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subrosa wrote

Probably. Whether we agree or not, I almost always appreciate your presence and comments on here. But the way you inquired in this thread felt a bit presumptive, almost as though you were baiting me into a gotcha moment.

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Tequila_Wolf wrote (edited )

I see. I'm rarely doing that. If I bother to engage people it's usually because I'm interested in the possibility of changing my mind, together with an opportunity to articulate myself in engagement with people who can meaningfully engaged. I also appreciate your comments and participation here.

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