Comment by nirvana | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nirvana | Hacker News Reader

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I find it endlessly amusing that communists or socialists would call themselves anarchists. I think this is just an example of socialists attempting to coopt another movement.

Libertarians are often anarchists because they believe the state cannot exist without violating the NAP. The state (By definition as an entity with a monopoly on the use of force in a geography) thus uses violence to conquer a land and takes for itself rights that naturally belong to the people.

>You mean to say that a workers' occupation is an act of aggression or force,

I don't see how this follows from anything I said. I can't connect it so, I can't respond.

>You're also insisting that "libertarianism"—a political philosophy—tells us anything about morality or ethics. That's a much stronger position than what, in my experience, even U.S.-style libertarians tend to espouse.

I'm not insisting anything. I'm giving you the definition. I'm a Libertarian, and that is what we believe. This is consistent across the US, and in my experience, among libertarians across the world. This is consistent with the founders of the Libertarian party in the 1970s, Rothbard and Nolan, and with the philosophical groundwork and economics that they took inspiration from.

FWIW, wikipedia is a crowd sourced entity. It is not authoritative, and it is often quite biased when it comes to political topics that leftists have a strong opinion about.

> I find it endlessly amusing that communists or socialists would call themselves anarchists. I think this is just an example of socialists attempting to coopt another movement.

You'll be glad to know, then, that Proudhon, the first to self-describe as an anarchist, is also perhaps most famous for coining the phrase "property is theft". It's hard to imagine how socialists could be co-opting anarchism, given that both ideologies were born in the same intellectual climate and have, as a matter of historical fact, been associated time and time again.

You said: "The workers taking over a company and kicking the owners and managers out to run it as a 'workers collective': Immoral. Using force to take property from others violates the NAP." Am I wrong in taking this to mean that you consider a workers' occupation an act of force?

> I'm not insisting anything. I'm giving you the definition. I'm a Libertarian, and that is what we believe.

I cannot apprehend the confusion of ideas which lead you to believe that defining a term, enumerating your own beliefs, and speaking for an entire political movement, are one and the same.

> FWIW, wikipedia is a crowd sourced entity. It is not authoritative, and it is often quite biased when it comes to political topics that leftists have a strong opinion about.

Do you object to my using of Wikipedia to simply note the existence of a leftist journal calling itself "The Libertarian" over a hundred years prior to the founding of the U.S. Libertarian Party? If so, feel free to read the French yourself:

http://joseph.dejacque.free.fr/libertaire/libertaire.htm

No engagement with my second-to-last paragraph, I see. I'm sorry to find that you're no more serious about your politics that all the other libertarians I've encountered. I had hoped you'd be willing to engage with the content of my argument instead of its dressings. I am disappointed to find that you are not.

Edit: spelling.

"I'm sorry to find that you're no more serious about your politics that all the other libertarians I've encountered. I had hoped you'd be willing to engage with the content of my argument instead of its dressings. I am disappointed to find that you are not."

The entirety of both of your responses consists of either inaccurate characterizations of what I've said, of history, or of me. You have, on more than one occasion made derogatory characterizations of me, and you close with the above ad hominem. This is a form of anti-intellectualism which I will not indulge further. I shouldn't have given you the benefit of the doubt, but unlike you, I am generous that way.

I'm genuinely sorry that you feel that way.

Those are not my feelings, they are the objective fact of reality. I'm sorry I wasted time giving you the benefit of the doubt when your only intention was to engage in personal attacks.

If you were "genuinely sorry" for your actions, you would apologize for them.

Quite frankly, I don't see too much to take offence at in cmhamill's words.

It really doesn't appear to me that there was an intention to attack you personally, although it was perhaps blunt in places.

If you want to raise the level of discourse on the internet is it your obligation to object to people's core statements, rather than ancillary fallacies that might surround them.

Did you ever answer this from cmhammil?

    I simply ask you this: if the taking of property via force is a violation of your "NAP," what do you say to the implicit threat of force which establishes the principle of property in the first place?

If I make a chair, and I claim it as mine, where's the force?

If I take the chair from you, you'll force me to give it back (or rather the police will, on your behalf).

...which sounds reasonable enough to non-anarchists. But consider something closer to our hearts:

If I design an algorithm and patent it as mine, where's the force?

> If I design an algorithm and patent it as mine, where's the force?

Ultimately, in the legal system implementing patent laws. However, as you well know, patents and chairs aren't the same kind of property, in that chairs are a rivalrous good and patents are not.

Nowhere. But that's not property, right? I mean, that's a man claiming he owns a chair.

Now let's say I steal your chair. This is the moment in our narrative where we get to see whether you and I live in a society that adheres to the property principle.

If I steal your chair, and everyone gets sort of angry with me, and I say shove off and sit on my new chair, then we live in a society where the property principle is at most weakly enforced.

Let's say I steal your chair and get arrested. That implies that there are police, who are funded by some kind of entity which has taken it upon itself to enforce property rights. Which means that the means by which property becomes a real social fact is force enacted by, say, the state, against those who choose to disregard the principle.

Thus in a society where the property principle is taken for granted, that principle is in itself upheld by the implicit threat of force.

I could just as easily say that theft occurs via the threat of force, explicit or implicit: I don't resist your theft because, usually, I know or strongly suspect you have a firearm, or a knife, or a greater willingness to use your muscle mass to rearrange my organs.

So, if I resist your theft, am I asserting property rights or am I exercising my right to self-defense?

I'd personally be inclined to say that what you're doing when you resist my threat is contingent upon what kind of social arrangement we find ourself in.

In a Western-style parliamentary republic, your action will probably be interpreted as asserting property rights. If my intentions were obviously physically harmful, then we can throw in the self-defense, too.

But let's change the chair to something more consequential—a small crate of canned food. Let's say that you and I both know that you are not lacking for resources or food, and that I am homeless. And let's say that I steal this crate.

According to the interpretation of the NAP which takes property rights as a fundamental and does not admit of property already being an act of aggression in the first place, I'm the criminal, and you'll be in the right (maybe an asshole, but in the right) to resist my theft.

But assuming all the above, is it any more of an aggression to take your food (assuming I'm not off to stab you or whatnot) than for you to benefit from a societal interpretation of rights that threatens me with retaliation if I attempt to feed myself?

Perhaps it is easier to explore the limits of individual ownership when they are taken to the extreme, rather than to a minimum asshole status example.

Consider that an entrepreneur could obtain ownership of an entire nation purely through voluntary contracts that mutually benefited the parties involved. This differs from a despot only in justification of ownership being based in rights rhetoric rather than the divine. If the new king decides to shutdown all of the factories and farms so he can have more hunting land, what are the counterparties supposed to do? Lay down their plows and quietly consent to death?

At the point where individual ownership creates a power structure over other citizens' ability to use their labor to reproduce society's needs, that ownership has obligations of higher moral standing than the individual owner's whims. I tend to think preventing people from working to help themselves is even more abhorrent than merely hording resources, so better highlights the limits of ownership. Which power structures we consent to in our economic ecosystem and which individuals we offer to run them should always be up for renegotiation.

I do not believe "Ad Hominem" means what you seem to think it means. Furthermore I don't think anyone has ever won an argument by calling out the names of random logical fallacies. The purpose of them is you call them out, in your own head, to yourself. And then you use that information to explicitly examine and question the argument at hand. Oftentimes it is not necessary to point out any fallacy at all if the overall conclusion of the argument does not depend on the truth value of the fallacious statement- So the best strategy in argument then, is to first identify what that overall conclusion is, identify the premises that the conclusion depends on, discarding any premises that are irrelevant, and address those explicitly. To call out things like "strawman!" and "ad hominem" is to be pointlessly distracted, or, in a less charitable reading, a strategy intended to distract the reader, so you can avoid having to do all that hard work of addressing the person's actual argument. I believe in this case it is the latter, but I may give you the benefit of the doubt if you can come back and address the content of the argument instead of throwing a fit and refusing to negotiate with intellectual terrorists, as you have.

You're arguing on semantics. Anarchy has been split up into sub groups specifically because it can be taken to mean multiple things. Now there are Anarcho-capitalists (American Libertarians), Anarcho-socialists, Anarcho-syndicalism, etc.

Of course; virtually all arguments are semantics. I was simply looking for clarification into nirvana's intended meaning. That that involved getting into the semantics of anarchism/socialism/libertarianism/what-have-you is the nature of this kind of discussion.

If I was concerned with finding the 'right' answer, or pushing my own political ideology (which happens not to be any of those currently under discussion), then I could see why we'd need to have a discussion about what 'anarchism' with or without adjectives really is.

I was, however, only concerned with the history of these ideologies (as a former student of precisely this topic). I had hoped to probe into that by bringing up the diverging uses of the category libertarian in the broader history of European politics and the divergence of U.S. political categories from those.

Certainly never meant to upset anyone.

You are technically correct, which Futurama calls 'the best kind of correct', but it isn't really.

When you're arguing about what kind of thing a thing is, you can call that a semantic argument, but if you're trying to characterize something that exists in practice, this is different from fighting over dictionary definitions.

(Interestingly, I got into the contrapositive of this argument on HN the other day: I tried to use a math term to mean something closely related to the standard definition, and people jumped on me for misusing it.)

You're either being extraordinarily disingenuous or ignorant if you're trying to claim that socialism and anarchism haven't historically been aligned with each other. Bakunin was in the first international with Marx, Russian anarchists participated in the 1917 revolutions, etc etc. Your idea that socialists are trying to "co-opt" anarchism is probably due to a misunderstanding of what socialism is both historically and currently. Socialists and anarchists had a similar goal, which was to create a society free from coercion, whether by force or by need. While socialism failed at this rather spectacularly in practice, the authoritarian states of Mao and Stalin were never the end goal of socialists.

Also, your offhand dismissal of a quite well cited wikipedia article was rather classless tbqh. We know wikipedia is crowd sourced and vulnerable to bias, but to ignore cited factual statements because of that just leads me to believe you don't want to see anything that doesn't confirm your conceptions of both anarchism and socialism.

"You're either being extraordinarily disingenuous or ignorant if you're trying to claim that socialism and anarchism haven't historically been aligned with each other. "

I find it amazing that you're using a strawman- something I've never said, and don't believe-- as an excuse to call me names.

Anarchism is incompatible with socialism and communism. That is what I pointed out. You can't enslave people and make them act against their nature without a central government, and if you have a central government, you have no anarchism.

"is probably due to a misunderstanding of "

You're projecting on me....

" was rather classless"

... and characterizing me based on YOUR characterization: "offhand dismissal " and then you outright lie: "to ignore cited factual statements" (two lies by my count there) is used as an excuse to rationalize more ad hominem: " leads me to believe you don't want to see anything that doesn't confirm your conceptions"

Why is it, so often, people refuse to argue to the points and instead insist on arguing to the person?

I made my points in my original comment. All of these references to history of socialism are completely irrelevant to my point, I wasn't even talking about socialism, I was talking about libertarianism.

You two are bringing it up as an opportunity to manufacture rationalizations to engage in ad hominam, nothing more.

Look, I'm not trying to attack you personally, I'm trying to say that the way you are arguing is detrimental to discussion. This includes things like making controversial statements ("I find it endlessly amusing that communists or socialists would call themselves anarchists") without expanding on them, dismissing other peoples' attempts to refer to outside sources ("[wikipedia] is not authoritative, and it is often quite biased...") without providing any of your own, changing your definition of what you are arguing (you say "I think this is just an example of socialists attempting to coopt another movement", and later claim that "I wasn't even talking about socialism")and getting overly defensive and refusing to engage with people because of perceived insults.

Any discussion about something important is going to get a little hot, taking your ball and going home anytime someone says something sharp is not going to be conducive to convincing others of your position or learning something yourself, dorkburlger.

> This includes things like making controversial statements ("I find it endlessly amusing that communists or socialists would call themselves anarchists") without expanding on them

The phrase you cite is "endlessly amusing" because it is a contradiction in terms; communism/socialism is predicated on the presence of a government, and anarchism is predicated on the lack of one. If you need that explained, I'm not sure why you're participating in this thread.

> communism/socialism is predicated on the presence of a government

It's really not. Socialism is about collective ownership of property, state socialism is only a subset of socialism. But perhaps you could explain why prominent anarchists like Bakunin aligned themselves with socialists when their ideals were so diametrically opposed? It seems like you're using rather ahistorical definitions of anarchism and socialism.

All communism or socialism directly imply is that the means of production is not held privately, but by some kind of collective communal or social entity. This is often the state, but was often imagine to be some kind of community council or representative entity.

The distinguishment between that hypothetical entity and the 'state' as we know it is certainly up to debate, but I wouldn't therefore say that anarchism and communism or socialism are therefore contradictory.

> The distinguishment between that hypothetical entity and the 'state' as we know it is certainly up to debate, but I wouldn't therefore say that anarchism and communism or socialism are therefore contradictory.

How can we debate the necessity of the existence of government when we can't even decide what a government is?

We can't, really! But we try anyway. That's the nature of political and social problems: there's no specification that we can refer to to clarify our terms.

Anarchism is not predicated on the lack of government. Anarchism only requires non-hierarchy. It is entirely possible that a government be composed in a non-hierarchical way.

> It is entirely possible that a government be composed in a non-hierarchical way.

A government can only exist when it has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in most situations. How can that, where only one group can use violence without being punished for it, possibly fail to impose a hierarchy?

Well what if we say that government is the means by which a people organize their business and a state is that entity which maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of force?

We can have a government because we can set expectations and behavior. Only when we have police and a state apparatus do we then become a society whose mode of governance is via the state.

> Well what if we say that government is the means by which a people organize their business and a state is that entity which maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of force?

I'd say that 'government' would be nothing more than a debating society, like the League of Nations, and just about as useful in preventing, say, homicide as the League of Nations was at preventing WWII.

>dorkburlger.

I don't engage with people who are begin dishonest, as you are, or people whose only form of "debate" is to characterize their opponent, or call them names, as you have.

Elsewhere several people have disagreed with me, attempted to show contradictions in my position, and surprisingly enough, they didn't need to resort to ad hominem or dishonesty to do it.

You can't enslave people and make them act against their nature without a central government

Uh, of course you can. Slave owners of yore relied on paid guards and bounty hunters to keep their slaves. Sure, they were legally protected by the state, but they didn't need its actual interference. In fact, even after the importation of slaves from Africa was illegalized in the US, thousands continued to be imported just because the ban wasn't enforced.

Even in modern times and in countries were slavery was abolished, this is still true. For example, the Brazilian government had to free 4500 slaves just in 2008: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/03/brazil-slavery-p...

There's also the hundreds or thousands of women who are forced to marry in their teens by their own parents and husbands-to-be, without the government doing anything except letting it be. It's a major problem in India, Pakistan and even in Britain.

> Slave owners of yore relied on paid guards and bounty hunters to keep their slaves.

I think an Anarchist would call this a kind of de-facto government. It certainly had a monopoly on the use of force.

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