this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
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True, but is the A for anarchists? Anarchists are not left.
Edit: oh, I'm on .ml. I didn't know yous had a thing going for anarchism as well, now I know.
Anarchism is left. Anarcho-capitalism is a meme ideology that is mostly an offshoot of liberalism, while actual anarchism has a rich history on the left, as the other major umbrella of leftist thought compared to Marxism.
This is a pretty biased way of putting it. The concept of anarchy predates the interpretation used by modern left-leaning self-identified anarchists by a couple of thousand years. In online circles such anarchists often seek to monopolize the term (like you are doing right now), but they factually weren't the ones to coin it; when it was originally coined by Plato, nobody had any idea what the fuck capitalism or socialism even are, and in fact Plato used it as a cautionary example.
I am guessing your gut reaction will be to recoil at this grave attack on your ideology. I implore you to stop and consider that most people are not in fact at all familiar with left-wing anarchism as defined by Proudhon etc., but are vaguely familiar with the concept from many other sources. Therefore when you talk about anarchism without a qualifier to mean anarchic socialism, most people will assume you are talking about some Mad Max law of the jungle nonsense and then summarily dismiss anything you say as insane rambling.
Following this to its logical conclusion, we don't have democracy because only Athenian democracy is democracy, they articulated it first.
What? It's possible for both modern democracy and Athenian democracy to be democracy, because it is an umbrella term that covers many different implementations of rule by the people.
The exact same thing applies to anarchy. It is possible for both The Culture and Lord of the Flies to be anarchy, because anarchy is an umbrella term that covers many different situations of "no rulers".