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Comment by gchamonlive | Hacker News Reader

So in good faith I went to dig a bit what's the holdout in our debate here, and it's because I didn't understand two separate uses of anarchism, the one that's epistemological, anarchism as anti-foundationalism, my point, and your point that's political. In political anarchism we don't have this pressure to question every single thing, so when you said Socialist Anarchism I should have gone and read what that is had I known this distinction beforehand.

TLDR, you are right and I'm not necessarily wrong, we were just talking about two different things.

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> I should have gone and read what that is

That is the most capacity for growth I have seen demonstrated in a while. You just gave me slightly more hope in humanity.

I just wish I had a less aggressive or snarky style of writing. Maybe then I'd invite people for a discussion and not for exchanging heartbreak, but we are products of our context and certainty is what's currently rewarded, not doubt.

> I just wish I had a less aggressive or snarky style of writing.

You and me both. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard variations of "you are way less of an asshole in person"

Complex asynchronous communication always has a way of forcing the temperature higher than it needs to be because we have more time to wordsmith and the cost of feeling stupid can be multiplied by the size of the perceived audience.

Often the same two people would have had a much better interaction in person where each sees the other as a human being speaking with their own voice and facial expressions.

indeed, the context here is political/organisational rather than epistemological

anarchist organisational practices are real

people have been creating solutions to counter "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" for many decades now

coarsely put, anarchists (and work/housing co-ops, and protest groups) most generally favour consensus-process with proper anti-slow facilitation and role rotation, vs the [usually] majority voting systems and power dichotomies that are the style of communism (see democratic centeralism)

though many places just don't mention this essentially counts as anarchism (or libertarian socialism), cos a) the stigma, b) they just don't need to or know to, c) they do, just behind closed doors

"horizontalism/horizontalidad" has been a good descriptor

https://www.seedsforchange.org.uk/guides

https://www.radicalroutes.org.uk/structure-and-governance

see also sociocracy, and Murray Bookchin

and the whole range of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism plus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_communism in general

libertarian socialism is an oxymoron

Not necessarily I think, because socialism need not be authoritarian, I don't know how, maybe in a thousand years when the society collectively reached higher levels of moral development. But my intuition is that for libertarian socialism to exist, people need to agree and desire to converge to a golden mean ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_mean_(philosophy) ) instead of being incentivised to accumulate as much wealth and power as possible.

> socialism need not be authoritarian

True socialism is the opposite of authoritarianism. Simply put, it's taking care of everyone. Just because the label has been misused doesn't change the goal of those of us who identify as socialists. USA propaganda made it a bad word.

> As one of the main ideologies on the political spectrum, socialism is the standard left-wing ideology in most countries. [0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

True! But at some point the rubber needs to meet the road and we haven't seen this materialize in practice, so for all intents and purposes, when we talk about realist socialism we need to account for the various forms of authoritarianism that comes in the package, I think

shouldn't we, by the same account, maybe even more, be disparaging of capitalism?

I don't know, I don't care about capitalism, I prefer to reserve my attention for things that could work long term and let it wither and die.

Having said that, I don't subscribe to capitalist propaganda. When I say realist socialism that should refer to the inherent structures of power that need to exist in order to organize large groups of people and how to manage greed and ambition so it doesn't eat society from within. It's important to idealise true socialism, but just as much as the Ubermensch can't materialize, that is also just a compass, a guiding star.

did Pinochet make libertarian capitalism an oxymoron?

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