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Are you an anarchist but not a member of an anarchist organisation?

Anarchist organisation involvement poll


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Tbf many anarchist movements (especially European) have historically drawn from the Enlightenment well and had parallel trains of thought to liberalism, even while rejecting it in sum.

That said, AA/GS/blackred is mostly just exhibiting a form of Dickheadsianism here.
 
Not convinced blackred is part of the autonomous individuals affinity group btw, their previous two posts from 2020 both sound like an ex-DAM person. Actually their first post on here was them being nice about someone, so I'm pretty confident they're not AA/GS.
 
Could you please explain this bit to the crap student here. Cheers!
Well, there are two basic schools of thought within ethics. The deontological school says that you start with fundamental principles and act only in accordance with those. The consequentialist school says that it’s all about the effect of your actions, and you should focus on that.

The Enlightment was really defined by Kant, who was in many ways the OG deontologist. He said that there is a transcendental and universal “reason” that exists separately to the human mind. The job of the moral actor is to identify and act according to reason. This was popular, and led to the popularity of empiricism and rationalism. But Kant was influenced by Hume and Locke and Rousseau and Paine, who also banged on about nature and reason and the Rights of Man and shit like that. This is the bunch of wig-heads that built liberalism — gave us the basis of the US constitution and top-down science and so on. You can’t really divorce deontology from liberalism, is how I see it.

Anarchism has always struck me instead about being culturally situated in whatever particular time and place it is related to. You don’t have some top-down idea of natural reason. You just worry about making sure that you don’t do things that fuck things up for the people around you. You work with local ideas of morality and priorities and community in order to produce outcomes that fit those local mores.
 
The foundational figures of anarchism did tend to have a root in the ideal of scientific reason - they were part of the same milieu of social change that produces Marx. A lot of that bleeds into the thinking of red anarchism today, which is often where you get the angry response to lifestylism from. It's not really a case of either-or though, both exist within the movement, in a messy sort of way.
 
I tend to disagree with kabbes here. I see anarchism as a modernist ideology, with universalist principles that can be applied regardless of time and place: Columbus was a greedy, robbing, murdering despot; slavery was wrong in the 17th century as well as in Biblical times; patriarchy was bad whenever it began; etc. We must judge.
 
The foundational figures of anarchism did tend to have a root in the ideal of scientific reason - they were part of the same milieu of social change that produces Marx. A lot of that bleeds into the thinking of red anarchism today, which is often where you get the angry response to lifestylism from. It's not really a case of either-or though, both exist within the movement, in a messy sort of way.
I always found Marx to be more of a reaction to deonotological ethics rather than a proponent of it. He is saying that commodity fetishism and the separation of people from their productive efforts leads to alienation. That seems like a rejection of the top-down nature of a society organised by transcendental reason, and a call to recognise the importance of grassroots lived experience. Like I say, though, I’m no student of this particular area of political philosophy. These are just thoughts from the outside.
 
I tend to disagree with kabbes here. I see anarchism as a modernist ideology, with universalist principles that can be applied regardless of time and place: Columbus was a greedy, robbing, murdering despot; slavery was wrong in the 17th century as well as in Biblical times; patriarchy was bad whenever it began; etc. We must judge.
Consequentialism also requires you to judge, though. It’s just that the basis of judgement is recognised as having been formed as a result of some situated and embodied process, not coming from a transcendental reason.
 
Consequentialism also requires you to judge, though. It’s just that the basis of judgement is recognised as having been formed as a result of some situated and embodied process, not coming from a transcendental reason.
Yeah, sure. I was simplifying the post-modern relativist anti grand narrative view as “mustn’t judge” and opposing rationalism to that. It was flippant bulletin board ism.
 
Yeah, sure. I was simplifying the post-modern relativist anti grand narrative view as “mustn’t judge” and opposing rationalism to that. It was flippant bulletin board ism.
There is a revolution in philosophy that derives from cognitive psychology, which drives a highway right through both sides of that argument. There are one or two people in this world that I would very strongly recommend the book Philosophy in the Flesh to (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). You are one of them, and so is Rob Ray

It’s not a short read but it is very readable. Much more readable than me. If you’ve got a bit of spare time, I’d really give it a go.


(With apologies for the Amazon link! But it’s not necessarily that easy to track a copy down)

Beginning of it here:

 
Well, there are two basic schools of thought within ethics. The deontological school says that you start with fundamental principles and act only in accordance with those. The consequentialist school says that it’s all about the effect of your actions, and you should focus on that.

The Enlightment was really defined by Kant, who was in many ways the OG deontologist. He said that there is a transcendental and universal “reason” that exists separately to the human mind. The job of the moral actor is to identify and act according to reason. This was popular, and led to the popularity of empiricism and rationalism. But Kant was influenced by Hume and Locke and Rousseau and Paine, who also banged on about nature and reason and the Rights of Man and shit like that. This is the bunch of wig-heads that built liberalism — gave us the basis of the US constitution and top-down science and so on. You can’t really divorce deontology from liberalism, is how I see it.

Anarchism has always struck me instead about being culturally situated in whatever particular time and place it is related to. You don’t have some top-down idea of natural reason. You just worry about making sure that you don’t do things that fuck things up for the people around you. You work with local ideas of morality and priorities and community in order to produce outcomes that fit those local mores.

A counter to this: Rawles and Nozick are good examples of modern-day deontologists in the Kantian tradition, one of whom has a theory of justice which requires equity and redistribution above all else, while the other has a theory of rights which results in an open market of ultraminimal city states. You can prove anything with the multipurpose tool of Kantianism.

And you neglect the third leg of the moral philosophy tradition, although you do mention its strongest advocate in Hume, which is to interpret morality as nothing more than various quirks of human psychology, to be observed rather than inferred: ethics are therefore the wider set of human moral norms.

Humans tend to disapprove of oppression and oppressors, but anarchists take this instinct - which is a moral one, for Hume - and pursue it to absurd conclusions. So they look to me like deontologists with an unhealthy fixation on oppression.
 
I can’t claim to be a scholar of anarchism, but this sounds completely wrong to me. This kind of deontological approach to ethics is a fundamentally Enlightenment notion, which is foundationally the domain of liberalism. I have always associated anarchism with consequentialism, i.e., focusing on understanding the effects of your actions and acting situationally — locally, in context — rather than insisting on capital-P Principles.
Sorry but that's verbiage.Anarchism has been abused as an ideology by Opportunists and Anarchists have let this happen.The opportunity arose through à lack of concise and disciplined principles lazily put forward as non conformité,spontaneity or expression.This meant the fundamentals could be left to rot and entryists could mould their lifestylist middle class distortion towards à liberal distortion.Effectively à lack of organisation hamstring any chance of effective practices and Class politics was replaced by à monstrosity.Thats why you have Anarcho Capitalist/Markets/Individualist/Fascist etc because basic principles were not set out and laisse faire took over.
 
There is a revolution in philosophy that derives from cognitive psychology, which drives a highway right through both sides of that argument. There are one or two people in this world that I would very strongly recommend the book Philosophy in the Flesh to (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). You are one of them, and so is Rob Ray

It’s not a short read but it is very readable. Much more readable than me. If you’ve got a bit of spare time, I’d really give it a go.


(With apologies for the Amazon link! But it’s not necessarily that easy to track a copy down)

Beginning of it here:


Nietzsche gets a bad press these days, but he was pooh-poohing notions of reason long before cognitive science was a thing, on much the same grounds.
 
This kind of deontological approach to ethics is a fundamentally Enlightenment notion, which is foundationally the domain of liberalism. I have always associated anarchism with consequentialism, i.e., focusing on understanding the effects of your actions and acting situationally — locally, in context — rather than insisting on capital-P Principles.
They were saying exactly this when I was in the barber's only last week.
 
Anarchism is a parody and pathetic vista of à once great Movement.Unless Anarchists State what à concise set of principles is Re;Authority/Freedom of Speech/Dictatorship of Prolétariat etc then it will be a foil for Middle Class dirt and Lifestylist parasites

Less ‘sleeper agent’ more ‘sleeping tablet’.
 
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