Socialism

I'm impressed by the research you're doing. I think this is a fruitful exchange for both of us.

I'm not familiar with Peter Hain, he seems to be a Labour Party MP with a history with Democratic Socialism, like an Irish Bernie Sanders. I wonder what he would think of the Wikipedia author labeling him a minarchist. I'm a little more familiar with Nozick, but I've never seen the term minarchist in his writing.

Language is fluid and labels are for conveying ideas. I don't think left-minarchism is a concept that deserves much currency. Regardless of labels, you could do worse than pick Hain or Nozick as role models. But unlike Chomsky, I don't think they're anarchist, and worse, their methods are likely to be counter-productive to their benevolent goals. I'll explain this wrt to Hain here. The Night-Watchmen state as a 'leftist' construction deserves its own thread.

Hain has squarely placed himself in the 'reform from within' camp. I'm basing this on the Wikipedia summary and one of his articles for the Chartist so I may be speaking out of ignorance here. His characterization of anarchists (not bolsheviks) on the edge of the revolutionary axis, while refreshing, is troubling. Martin Luther King Jr., a very successful reformer who said "freedom is never given voluntarily by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed," did not seek government position, and gave nothing to politicians who did not concede his movement's demands. It wasn't sympathetic civil rights politicians that wrote the legislation that King is famous for inspiring, but the ambivalent and enemies who were forced to concede due to the civil rights movements' economic and social power. It's a common trope that revolutionary groups' sacrifice and achievements are re-appropriated by opportunist politicians whose role should be described as 'more pliable obstacles.' For example, Lyndon Johnson in America is celebrated as the civil rights president, when it was King that pulled him kicking and screaming out of the American apartheid. This re-writing of history creates the false narrative that what we need most is more progressive politicians, and that all this rioting and chaos is just the result of fools who don't know how to work the system. From the political spectrum statement, it seems Hain views his goals as similar to anarchists, while rejecting the methods that have historically achieved those goals. Meanwhile he has placed himself in a position that is leveraged to take credit for those goals if they are ever achieved. It has the stink of opportunistic cynicism.

While I don't mean to imply from the previous paragraph that MLK Jr. was an anarchist, he was a socialist. Most importantly, he was the kind of socialist that anarchists can (and did) work with for the mutual achievement of their goals.

On the other hand, politicians like Peter Hain, Bernie Sanders, and AOC should be viewed as window dressing advertising the power of the political movements that put them in place. Because the structure of the capitalist political system, placing and keeping politicians requires much greater sacrifice on the part of the left than it does on the right. Their existence within the political system helps to falsely legitimize it as a diverse forum, while blunting the progressive politicians' potential as social leaders and draining progressive movements of resources that they could be using on tactics better suited to their natural methods of power.

Anarchists don't want small government; our typical goals could paradoxically described as simultaneously wanting both no government and the largest government possible. We want something that is so different from modern governance that it can no longer be called government: the liberation of everyone to participate in directing society.

Anarchism is old, and the internet is new. Younger people's views on the subject are severely over-represented on internet forums, and lack the experience and gravitas of a longer life of living anarchism.

Anarchism is both a theory and a practice, and while I don't agree with Chomsky on all counts, I deeply respect his practice of the philosophy throughout his life. He was a champion of anarchism at a time when it was even more unpopular and repressed, and his tireless advocacy had given it stronger roots that bear fruit to this day.

I wouldn't say that Chomsky-anarchism is watered down; only that Chomsky saw anarchism not as a terminal goal, but a means to end war, poverty, and systemic injustice. Defining specifically and succinctly what that anarchism looks like takes a back seat to identifying and critiquing the systems of control and power that were obstacles to those terminal goals. It's very easy to determine what anarchism is not from Chomsky's corpus; but it will leave you unsatisfied if you're looking for someone to describe exactly what is the perfect Anarchism. I don't think Chomsky was wrong in his focus.

I don't mean to denigrate anarchists that only seem to exist on the internet, what is theory today may be practice tomorrow. But it's helpful to study lives, societies, and groups that are practicing anarchist ideas and doing anarchist work.

Anarchists during the French Commune, Spanish Civil War or the Russian Revolution formed militia, rationed resources, distributed land. They built mutual agreements similar to constitutions, and created incentives to keep those agreements. They created laws by popular assembly, and enforced those laws. They made a lot of mistakes we can learn from, but it was the overwhelming forces that opposed them rather than the flaws in their beliefs that doomed their movements.

The lesson I think you're picking up is that they're a lot of diversity in Anarchist thought, and no single authority on what is or isn't anarchist. While enforcing the ontological boundaries of anarchism isn't a worthless endeavor, living anarchism is much more difficult and meritorious. You could pick a much worse model than Noam Chomsky.