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I have seen many online debates going back years where anarchists retreat and admit that some government MIGHT be needed to keep the world working.
Out of interest, did they actually say government or were they talking about coercion? Because I've heard very few anarchists argue the former, but the majority would seem to accept the latter. (Generally in the form of social coercion).
I also think that many anarchists accept the possession of personal (which they generally prefer as a term to private) property, but that they see it very differently than the libertarians.
Anarcho-syndicalists often accept that people may want to live in houses of their own, have record collections etc. but are generally utterly opposed to the market economy, being in favour of the means of production being owned collectively. They also strongly condemn making money out of lands, rent, interest etc.
The mutualist and the individualist anarchists differ somewhat in that they're in favour of a market economy. They still differ strongly from the libertarians though. Firstly, they accept the labour theory of value which isn't common among libertarians. And while libertarians accept making money through the ownership of land, they're generally opposed, prefering conditional ownership of land that only lasts while the land is in use or occupied for residency. And the mutalists in particular tend to favour worker owner cooperatives as opposed to individuals being the owners. There's some disagreement among themselves as far as the ownership of non-land means of production are concerned.
Almost all anarchists would recognise the need for a total social transformation to implement their ideas. I think that's crucial. Not only do most libertarians not recognise that, but it seems to me to be a major flaw with libertarianism as an ideology.
As Flyboy has pointed out, most libertarians seem to come from relatively privileged backgrounds. So, what we have here is the spectacle of those people criticising the current society for being unjust, but not being prepared to even address the question of how that impacts on their privilege, let alone argue for that to be rectified in order to implement libertarianism. So I don't think it's unfair to suspect that their major issue is not being able to use their privilege enough.
In terms of experiences of libertarians, I think Barbelith has possibly had bad luck in terms of the representatives of the ideology.
On an American politics board I used to post on, it was certainly the case that the resident libertarians were a lot stronger on issues like abortion rights and gay marriage. While I obviously disagreed with their economic views greatly, on those issues they were good and vocally so. However, this was a board set up for liberals and leftists, that later made a decision to allow 'opposing views'. So I think there's a good chance that it was more likely to attract those members of the libertarian community who were looking for a place they could discuss those kind of issues. And may not have been representative of the libertarian community as a whole.
There was one guy on there who took that further. He was a radical libertarian (describing himself as an anarcho-capitalist) who did call for a social transformation and was very critical of the current economic system for the special rights it gave corporations. He also believed in the labour theory of value.
However, I'd see him as extrememly atypical indeed. While he disagreed with them somewhat on land ownership, I still think he was closer to individualist anarchism than he was what is generally called libertarianism. I think there's a good chance he wouldn't have considered himself a libertarian if he hadn't been from the US.
As with the Greens, I'll take political Libertarians seriously when they can win a city, a county or a state and not run it into the ground. It'll prove they can actually do politics and not just ideology.
I think that, and particuarly the second part, is a dubious way of looking at a political theory's validity. It ignores the question of things like the influence of money on politics and the fact that there isn't a level playing field for small parties. To take the example of the Greens, it is the case that when Nader first ran the rules on candidate debates were changed specifically to exclude him. |
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