tray5

I wish I could afford an apple phone. As much as I love open source software, I am willing to shift over to Apple as my android manufacturer doesn't really actually care, and I hate how much access googles tentacles have into my personal life. Apple seems to actually give a shit about privacy, now if only they were affordable!

> Left-anarchists assume that if you get rid of the government the world becomes a left-wing utopia, while right-anarchists assume that if you get rid of the government then the world becomes a right-wing utopia.

I'd say you're strawmanning both sides here, left anarchists know the state grows out of the conflicting class interests of the working class and capitalist class, and that abolition of the state necessarily requires abolition of capitalism. Propertarians believe that if you got rid of the government, the free market will sort things out because it's the gov. interference in private enterprise that causes societies conflicts. Neither believe in a magic switch or anything.

Sure it is, leftism occupies a spectrum of economic and social ideals, which the US left (led by the DNC) falls uniformly outside that spectrum. I mean Monarchists are left of fascists, but that doesn't make monarchists leftist just because you compare them to something further right.

Just because your system is dominated by capitalists doesn't make the rest of the spectrum irrelevant, and redefining the conversation to fit into your narrow band is what has led to the frustrations with the American situation.

The American left is not left when considering the entire spectrum of left-right political ideas, and you don't get to suddenly chose to define something as leftist within the context of your narrow window of acceptable thought, it must encompass all ideas.

Actually if you look at the history of anarchism you'll find it was the ancaps who tried to redefine the word, not the other way around. Murray Rothbard, one of the founders of anarchocapitalism literally says this almost verbatim.

‘One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, “our side,” had captured a crucial word from the enemy . . . “Libertari­ans” . . . had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over. . .’ [The Betrayal of the American Right, p. 83]

>I think he's _wrong_ about Ancaps not being "true" anarchist

I don't believe they aren't "true anarchists", I believe they aren't anarchist at all. They aren't even in the realm of consideration of what constitutes anarchist. Their ideal society would end up corporate feudalism.

That's not true at all, anarchism is anti-hierarchy. The state is just one (and the second most prominent) hierarchy that anarchists oppose.

Personally I'm a fan of a workers run syndicalist economy. There are other options, like a workers run market economy, or an outright collectivist gift economy.

If I'm being honest it's because the American left really isn't leftist at all, and I think that Americans are becoming aware of it

The entire democratic party really isn't leftist, outside of the heavily skewed American ecosystem, they're centre right.

They never were TBH, capitalism is inherently hierarchical and a system of entirely private enterprise would resemble corporate feudalism, not an anarchist society.

Did you read the rest of my comment?

Your free market part is where you'll find the clash. Any anarchist would say that a free market is inherently oppressive. The only place a "free" market would work is in a mutualist economy, and even then, that requires worker ownership over the means of production.

I'd recommend you check out those books because they explain it far better than I or anyone else could hope to in a single comment, but it essentially comes down to the capitalist/worker divide. The capitalist will always be on top, and the worker will always be subservient to their interests. That is how it is hierarchical, because there will always be the capitalist class imposing it's will on the working class, and so anarchists and communists hope to abolish the class system. However the two groups disagree massively on how to achieve that abolition.

This is very much the truth, anarchists and communists want the same thing, a communist society, they just disagree fundamentally on how to do it. That's why you see them join forces and fight together, like in the Russian Revolution and Spanish civil war