Ten things everyone gets wrong about Anarchists!

people are always asking me hey thought slime where do you come up with such creative ideas for videos aren't you afraid you're gonna run out of ideas and then you'll have to scrape the bottom of the barrel like a WatchMojo top 10 list type of bullshit anyway today we're gonna talk about the top 10 misconceptions about anarchism and anarchists all jokes aside and more accurate title for this video might be ten things thought slime is sick of explaining to people who are anarchists what do they want don't you worry your pretty little head about it I've got a whole playlist of that you can see it in the description what chaos oh boy no we don't we might find chaos preferable to the current order we may find chaos to be a useful tool in fighting back against that order but it's a means to an end not an end in itself whatever kists want generally is a world without coercive domination a world where nobody has unjustified or unnecessary power over anyone else anarchists would argue that such a world is actually less chaotic than our current one your day wouldn't be disrupted by say the police murdering you with impunity or losing your job and being forced out onto the street or by a religious institution being able to impose limits and your consensual sex life or being forced to do all of the domestic work in your household because you happen to be born a girl the power relations of our current society are dictated by the powerful having the ability to do violence and the powerless not that means that you follow the dictates of whoever happens to already be the most powerful and that's pretty chaotic because who is powerful is always subject to change the laws can change without your consent the financial institutions in charge of your money can wipe out your savings with a few keystrokes and at all times you're subject to the constant threat of random violence from anyone who happens to be above you on the power hierarchy to give you back control over your life strikes me as orderly a common catchphrase among anarchists is that anarchy is order to quote pierre-joseph Prudhomme the guy who coined the term anarchist as a political ideology as man seeks justice inequality so society seeks order in Anarchy the idea that we want chaos is just a convenient propaganda tool for the powerful their rule is the only thing standing between you and complete ruin it's an attempt to justify the power they hold over you by insinuating that without it things would be even worse the fact of the matter is anarchists don't want some Wallis hellscape or the strong rule over the weak we believe we're already living in such a hell escape and we're trying to get things back on track by putting power into the hands of people not just to select few people boosts or violent look straight up you will very seldom meet an anarchist who categorically rejects the need for political violence there are some out there but their position is by far the minority the thing is in order to have any sort of political position that means deciding where violence is and is not acceptable politics is just the application of power so all violence is political and you may think you're against all political violence of any kind but you're probably not do you believe that there ought to be police borders prisons private security guards they all require systemic violence to operate all of that violence is political if you would argue that they are necessary you're justifying types of violence that anarchists are morally opposed to in that instance you would be the greater advocate of violence than we are anarchists believe violence is acceptable in one and only one scenario keeping people safe from greater violence to use violence in any other scenario would represent the very sort of course of authority Anika's want to eliminate we just take a broader view of safety than most people would we believe for example that poverty is violence poverty is a physical condition imposed on you with the threat of force that causes real material damage maybe even resulting in death to the poor think about it if you're starving to death what stops you from hopping into the grocery store and eating like the enormous bounty of food contained therein the fact that the police would fucking shoot you or at best arrest you which is still violent that is the routine daily violence we've all come to accept as normal anarchists view resistance to that violence as an act of self-defense or community defense passively accepting the violence of poverty or bigotry or oppression of any kind is not peaceful just like it wouldn't be peaceful to walk on by as someone was getting beaten up to quote Eriko Malatesta if you say that you reject violence when it exceeds the limits imposed by the needs of defense they accuse you of pacifism without understanding that violence is the whole essence of authoritarianism just as the repudiation of violence is the whole essence of anarchism gist's or liberal there is no word more distorted from its actual meaning in the popular political lexicon than liberal virtually every political orientation aside from some liberals themselves uses this word to just mean the guys I don't like the jerks ask a right-winger what it liberal is and they'll say anyone to the left of them everyone from Obama to Joseph Stalin ask a leftist they'll tell you anyone to the right of them until you hit fascism they'll also throw in anyone they view is ineffective wishy-washy or wrong about literally anything or just people they don't like ask a centrist and they'll say I don't know whoever they agree with at the moment that's what a liberal is centrists are useless the question of what is a liberal is confusing because the way the word is used in North America is very different from what it historically has always meant a political ideology based around Liberty as they see it equality under the law representative democracy and capitalist free markets now two of those things should jump right out at you as things anarchists don't like we don't believe in representative democracy opting instead for direct or consensus democracy meaning we don't elect someone to govern on our behalf we govern ourselves there's a lot of disagreements on how exactly we would do that direct democracy and consensus democracy are both schools of thought they're not synonymous terms and there are certainly other views we certainly don't believe in capitalism and yes I'm getting to it we're struggling a lot of Marxists particularly some Marxist Leninist s-- think that anarchists aren't really socialists because we allegedly don't believe in liberating the working class they think we just wholesale reject class struggle in favor of individualized freedoms straight up that's just horseshit it's made up you can't honestly engage with anarchist writings and come away with that conclusion to quote Prudhomme power instrument at the collective force created in society to serve as mediator between capital and labor has become inescapably and chained to capital and directed against the proletariat to quote bakunin so long as human society continues to be divided into different classes as a result of the hereditary inequality of occupations of wealth of Education and of rights there will always be at class restricted government and the inevitable exploitation of the majorities by the minorities to quell Kropotkin it is futile to speak of Liberty as long as economic slavery exists speak not of Liberty poverty as slavery is not a vain formula it has penetrated into the ideas of the great working-class masses it filters through all the present literature it even carries those along who live on the poverty of others and takes from them the arrogance with which they formerly asserted their rights to exploitation to quote book Qin when modern industry can provide abundance for all nothing is more vicious to poor people than a lifetime of poverty as for individualist freedoms taking precedent over class struggle to quote Malatesta again I deny that that kind of individualist s' can be included among anarchists despite their liking for calling themselves so if anarchy means non government's non domination non oppression by man over man how can one call himself anarchist without lying to himself and the others when he frankly claims that he would oppress the others for the satisfaction of his ego without any scruple or limit other than that drawn by his own strength is worth noting however that most of the individualist anarchists that Malatesta was critiquing here don't necessarily reject class struggle they view it as necessary for the emancipation of the individual to quote max Turner when everyone is to cultivate himself into man condemning a man to machine like labour amounts to the same thing as slavery if a factory worker must tire himself to death twelve hours and more he is cut off from becoming man to suggest that anarchists don't support class struggle reveals a profound lack of knowledge on the subject literally any introductory anarchist acts would dispel this myth immediately so anyone who believes it and anyone who says it has not read a shred of anarchist theory and is less probably not worth taking seriously on the subject and socialism is an oxymoron this one is very frustrating because the people who say it likely don't understand what either of the words they're using mean so libertarian has historically always meant a libertarian socialist anarchism being the most popular form thereof in the middle of the 20th century the term was stolen by proponents laissez-faire capitalism essentially they figured that since they opposed the state and we opposed the state basically the same thing right in North America this meaning has been the dominant one ever since when you hear someone call themselves of libertarian at a party you avoid them for this reason when we say libertarian we just mean stateless that's all but how could that be socialism socialism means big government right the state controls industry I've seen it in movies everyone has big hats and lives under a dictator I learned it in school the state controls everything and I understand where you get that idea there's a lot of countries which call themselves socialist that sure look like that based on what we see in the media but when we use the word socialism we mean the workers owning in controlling industry and the products of industry we mean the end of commodity production meaning we want things to be made based on human need rather than profit we mean workplace democracy and the eradication of wage labor none of that junk requires a centralized state in fact if you ask an anarchist they tell you the state is actually what stops us from getting that junk the types of socialists that employ top-down or authoritarian organization actually disagree with anarchists pretty hard there's a long history of animosity on both sides between them and us socialists aren't a hive mind there is a diverse range of opinions tactics and influences them is inconsistent because you can't redistribute goods without a centralized state ok well this is one I hear a lot from endcaps and there's a lot to unpack with it firstly let's tackle the idea that anarchists or socialists more generally want to redistribute goods so it's true that if we wanted to take all the goods in a society into a big pool and then allocate equal portions of that pool to each citizen we'd probably need a state to do that absurd thing but that's not what we're suggesting because that's ridiculous the goal of socialism isn't that everyone has an equal amount of things it's to make certain that everyone has equal access to the things that they need to live like food medicine housing etc we don't need to make sure that if one citizen has like a guitar that therefore everyone has an equal amount of guitars some people don't need guitars I can't play guitars I don't need a guitar more generally I think this talking point speaks to the idea that it's difficult to accomplish large tasks without a centralized government setting the rules and I agree it is definitely more difficult but anything worth doing is difficult imagine two groups wanting to trade pokemon cards without a centralized state one group is very rich and the other is poor the poor people suggest a fair trade where the cards that are traded are of commiserate value the rich people demand that the poor people hand over all their foil charizard's in exchange for like energy cards I don't know why I went with pokemon cards as an analogy no one can relate to this the poor people will be like fuck no give us a fair deal or we walk they have to work out a compromise that's beneficial to both parties if they want to proceed imagine the same scenario with the centralized state the rich group would naturally have more power and influence over that state and use that to pressure it into acting on their behalf they'd be able to get all of the foil chars arts and they wouldn't have to pay taxes on them the latter is certainly easier in the sense that the trade is smooth and doesn't take as long but it's not fair so how would far-reaching decisions be made without a centralized state the most commonly proposed solution is a forum of delegates who are not able to make decisions themselves but instead represent the choices made by their community such delegates would act as liaison between their community in the larger Federation of free communities such a situation might make decision-making slower but it's more likely to result in fair outcomes that represent the will of the people rather than the whims of the powerful if any differing groups need to reach a decision quickly maybe there could be some sort of temporary solution put in place like arbitration by a neutral outside party you just use common sense such an organization would not be a state as anarchists understand it a state is a centralized top-down organization that maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence that grants itself the sole power of legislating law that all others must obey the federation we propose cannot imposed a centralized law and therefore must seek compromise between all parties in any negotiation anarchism is just for young idealists you don't understand the real world this is an ad hominem attack I just tries to dismiss our ideas out of hands by insisting we'll we're gonna grow out of them and that's very frustrating because like how do you argue with that like yeah I might so might you so might anyone I'm 34 years old I am not young I don't know what Joule pods are no one will tell me sure you can argue that I don't understand the real world whatever that is but like I pay my bills that do my taxes and I came to anarchism in my 30s I spent most of my life as a reasonable liberal or social democrat or whatever I would argue that I outgrew that Noam Chomsky is a pretty solid grasp on the realities of the world though I may not always agree with his conclusions he's 90 years old he's old as shit he's also a self-identified anarcho-syndicalist most anarchist writers are very very old so old so unbelievably old I think a lot of this criticism boils down to the idea that anarchism is utopian which it is in the sense that it intends to create a utopia but not in the sense that we believe will actually accomplish that anarchism isn't a set of rules to be followed it's a method of analysis it's not just a system we can set up and then forget about anarchy is never done there is always more injustice to eliminate there's always inequality to be addressed we try to make society better like everyone does that doesn't mean we think we can actually make a perfect society when we call a society or hypothetical society anarchist we don't mean that it has achieved perfect anarchy or that even that it will we mean that it's organized around anarchist principles namely that it's a stateless society organized horizontally Newark ISM has never been tried yet has there's been plenty of Anarchy societies though not all of them would necessarily call themselves anarchists the most famous examples include revolutionary Catalonia from 1936 to 1939 anarcho-syndicalist sailed the territory with the population of 8 million people and despite a bitter war against fascist incursion control over production was given directly to the workers resulting in a doubling of industrial productivity and a 30 to 50 percent increase in food production the free territory of the Ukraine from 1918 to 1921 where anarchists held the territory with a population of 7 million and organized it into a stateless Federation of free communes the zapatista army of national liberation which has controlled a large area in Chiapas Mexico since 1994 the zapatistas would balk at being referred to as anarchists but most anarchists support them anyway because like their a stateless society with participatory democratic decision-making and that owns bones also it's worth noting that a bunch of North American indigenous nations operated on anarchist principles anyway then sy tous came over and ruined it for everybody and then we pretended like we invented it once again this is not to say that any of these societies achieved perfect anarchy none of them eliminated all inequality that's probably impossible but they all demonstrate that anarchism can work even across huge areas or over long stretches of time most anarchist societies don't end because they fail economically they end because somebody crushes them there's a white male movement white men definitely get the most attention in the anarchist movement no doubt about that historically we've also failed minorities and women in pretty much every conceivable way and when I say we here I mean white anarchists not necessarily you in particular I'm not lumping you in with me Bakunin and Prue Dahl for example were famously anti-semitic but when it came time for me to quote a bunch of anarchist philosophers and in an earlier entry on this same list I still thought of them before I thought of like Kim Trojan or Virginia Bolton and that sucks this is a movement dedicated to the eradication of unjust hierarchy that itself perpetuates an unjust hierarchy consciously or otherwise within its own ranks that being said there is a rich and storied history of anarchists of all kinds I mentioned a few in the previous section but there's also a long tradition of Korean anarchism black anarchism Latin American anarchism I got this book on Latin American anarchism just look how long that is I had to stop reading it because there's literally too much Latin American anarchist history for me to process there are anarchists everywhere on this godforsaken earth as for women you have figures like Emma Goldman Lucy Parsons voltaren de Clare and even sort of Margaret Sanger the founder of Planned Parenthood but also she was a eugenicist so kind of a mixed bag on that one the fact of the matter is anarchists were inexorably tied to the early women's movement Mary Wollstonecraft an early feminist philosopher was even married to William Godwin the man usually cited as the intellectual for bearer to modern anarchism so does that history absolve anarchists of sexism and racism obviously not but to treat the entire movement as though it's the domain of white men erases centuries of hard work fighting and writing by women and people of color and women who were people of color within the movement it should go without saying that literally any intellectually consistent anarchist who would by definition be a feminist in an anti-racist not to say we always act like it because you can be capitalist what no it can't that doesn't make any sense who put this on the list it's is this a joke those words don't make any sense together it's like saying bees can be foxes the fuck are you talking about anyway I already did all fucking video about this go watch that hey I hope do you like this video that I did I'm recording this in advance so I don't know if I have done all the patron drawings for June but I'm trying to it has been a very busy week for me I've had a lot of things to do and kind of let that slide a little this time it's not because of Mario maker too it's because I'm planning a camping trip and that required a lot more of my focus than I thought it would also if I'm being honest there were there were some mental health concerns this week I'm fine now don't worry about your old pal thought slime but I had a bit of a rough patch there that happens to people don't forget to subscribe to the video and like my channel hey have you ever been to patreon.com slash thought slime they got all sorts of knickknacks and paddywhacks over there all sorts of jolly japes and also you can give me money so that i can keep making videos hey also I am sorry that I made fun of the name Owen in the past video I did not realize that that was just the Irish spelling of Owen obviously I did not mean to pick on Irish people I meant to pick on junior Tolkien but it was insensitive of me I see that I'm sorry I will find more culturally sensitive ways to mock junior our Tolkien that is my vow to you you

Channel: Thought Slime

Views: 194,195

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Id: 1-8DtU595dQ

Length: 21min 57sec (1317 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Cranyx]

"Anarchists are against unjustified hierarchies."

I've never been a fan of this as a description of anarchism because it's not really a philosophy, is it? Literally everyone is against unjustified X, it's just a matter of what you think is justified that differs. Literal Nazis are against unjustified hierarchies, they just have very different ideas of what kinds of hierarchies are needed.

Like I get it, you can't make your philosophy "no hierarchies of any kind, ever, under any circumstances" because even the most anarchist of societies have some form of it sometimes, even if they're democratic and horizontal. I just think you need a better elevator-pitch slogan that describes anarchism in a way that dispels the "lawless hellscape" misconception.

Also, like the American idiot I am, this video taught me that "Proudhon" is pronounce "Proo-don" and not "Prowd-hahn"

[u/Ryuutorak]

thoughty is best slimerchist