If both these movements hold dear a desire to restrict the interference of the state on the individual, where is the departure point that separates the two things?
This always confuses me, liberalism doesn't like the state/anyone else interfering in their affairs but relies upon it to protect their property, anarchism don't like the state/anyone else interfering in people's affairs, but would presumbaly interfere to redistribute people's property
can this be explained to a layman?
Altho, to be honest, Kropotkin (and others) have described anarchism as the ultimate fusion of liberalism and socialism. But then they're fucking stupid.
..... as does Rudolph Rocker. 
Obviously what these characters fail to appreciate is that the liberal subject is in itself a moment in a process of subjection.
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oisleep wrote:
If both these movements hold dear a desire to restrict the interference of the state on the individual, where is the departure point that separates the two things?I think the philosophical basis of liberalism lies in Locke or Hobbes or some other old guy and the idea that the natural form of society would be a war of all against all. The state is thus a necessary evil to liberals which should interfere with the liberty of individuals only in order to protect other individuals. This I think is the 'social contract' which theoretically developed out of the need to prevent the war of all against all.
Anarchism on the other hand would insist that you can't talk of society but have to talk of the classes that make up society. There is no 'social contract' rather the form of society we have was established by class conflict. I'm pretty sure Bakunins 'God and the State' is actually written at least in part in answer to Hobbes 'Social contract'. The only online sites its on are down at the moment.
I'm sure there must be some philsophy student around who can confirm or deny this.
Cheers for that Joe, I understand the social contract bit (there are others though are there, roussau and that?), does this mean liberals view human nature as defined and unchangeable by conditions, if left to themselves they will be selfish regardless if they were living in an utopian anarchist society? does this mean that anarchists are more optimistic about human nature?
Not sure about the human nature bit. But the main thing is the insistence on the sanctity of private property. American Libertarianism is like this (and some of them are completely anti-state), as is Henry George - a flat (LVT) taxer who wanted minimal government but had no argument with capitalism.
The main problem with it is that to compare the two, you have to think of anarchism as a philosophy. Some writings by anarchists are philosophy, anarchism isn't really.
if it's not philosophy what is it political?
is the view of/on human nature not at the heart of any political ideology?
i wished i'd stayed on at school now and actually learned something 
OK. Philosophy - understanding the world.　Politics - changing it. Anarchism - to an extent a way of understanding the world, principally a historical tendency amongst the working class emphasising self-management, and with the aim of moving towards a stateless, communist society.
Human nature. I personally don't think there's a particular good or bad human nature. Here's my own views on the differences, trying to keep it fairly practical.
Anarchism/libcom - people are more likely to make rational decisions when they relate to their everyday lives and are made in face-to-face discussion with the people around them, who'll also be effected/involved; it's best to restrict the impact any individual can have on society by not allowing for institutional authority. Central to libcom is the idea that individual freedom is best guaranteed through the support, solidarity, interaction and material security offered by social groups. The restrictions on absolute individual liberty aren't really restrictions but are the natural outcome of living in groups.
Liberalism - individuals should be entitled to the most individual freedom possible, including private property. Decisions are best made by the market, which is the sum-total of individual desires and works best when self-regulated. To protect the individual freedom of everyone, it's necessary to restrict the individual freedom of everyone using a minimal state, to stop them restricting each others's freedom willy nilly. Although people aren't to be trusted to regulate themselves via public discourse, we should trust them to elect people to do that for them once every five years, in secrecy/private.
Altho, to be honest, Kropotkin (and others) have described anarchism as the ultimate fusion of liberalism and socialism. But then they're fucking stupid.
what they probably mean is the ultimate fusion of libertarianism and socialism...
admittedly libertarianism is only really distinguished by degree from liberalism, but there are discernible differences - "classical" liberalism still requires a state, and certain forms of state repression/limitation.
the thing with guys like JS Mill is they would be anarchists, or at least libertarians, if they actually took their premises to their logical conclusions... but they don't 
Cheers for that Joe, I understand the social contract bit (there are others though are there, roussau and that?),
I'm sure - my rather limited understanding mostly comes from trying to understand WTF 'Empire' was about and reading Bakunin. Hence the dis claimers.
does this mean liberals view human nature as defined and unchangeable by conditions, if left to themselves they will be selfish regardless if they were living in an utopian anarchist society? does this mean that anarchists are more optimistic about human nature?
Yeah I think the basis of liberalism is that without some form of social contract we'd all be raping and murdering all day. And from what I can make out early anarchism was in part defined by arguing against this view of 'human nature' for one in which co-operation (mutual aid) was a defining force. I'm sure of this in relation to Bakunin but from having read an article on Kroptkin this seems even truer of his argument.
Looked at in this way liberalism actually appears closer to the Engels version of marxism then it does too anarchism for what that is worth. But both of them were over influenced by the scientrific determinism and social darwinism of their period so this is no surprise.
I'm not too sure of arguments that attempt to define 'human nature' in a rigid biologicial way. But primate biology in general would suggest that co-operation plays a very much more central role that the early Darwinists gave it.
cheers again it's a fuckin minefield innit
admittedly libertarianism is only really distinguished by degree from liberalism, but there are discernible differences - "classical" liberalism still requires a state, and certain forms of state repression/limitation.the thing with guys like JS Mill is they would be anarchists, or at least libertarians, if they actually took their premises to their logical conclusions... but they don't :(
Think you might be getting confused about what sense of the word "liberalism" is meant here.
The original post and what Kropotkin was talking about is liberalism in the sense of anti-statist free market capitalism e.g. Thatcherite "rolling back the state" type ideology.
Whereas you seem to be thinking of liberalism in the well-meaning reformist, give-peace-a-chance, "love me I'm a liberal" sense of the word, no?
Karl Marx tells it like it is, on the limitations of liberalism:
This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simply owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all.On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the "Free-trader Vulgaris" with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personæ. He, who before was the money owner, now strides, in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but—a hiding.
Especially that last paragraph. I think it's the closest that Capital gets to humour.
Sorry about the long C&P, but this bit of Marx was very handy for me in my own thinking on this topic.
within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man
did the marquis de sade not use a similar argument, that it was his right to have his wicked way with other people?
Think you might be getting confused about what sense of the word "liberalism" is meant here.The original post and what Kropotkin was talking about is liberalism in the sense of anti-statist free market capitalism e.g. Thatcherite "rolling back the state" type ideology.
Whereas you seem to be thinking of liberalism in the well-meaning reformist, give-peace-a-chance, "love me I'm a liberal" sense of the word, no?
well, the first sense of the word "liberalism" is closer to the libertarianism of Nozick et al than to either classical Mill-type or present day Lib Dem etc "liberalism", and in a context of currently used terms i'd say it's better to call it "libertarianism", and reserve "liberalism" for the fluffy reformist statists... then again, i was educated at up-its-own-neo-liberal*-arse Warwick...
*neo-liberal is yet another thing, but it's closer to a weird hybrid of right-wing libertarianism and some sort of corporatism...
Quote:
within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of mandid the marquis de sade not use a similar argument, that it was his right to have his wicked way with other people?
In which case, the abbreviation C&P was all too relevant (without the "&").
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Anarchists - a bit like freedom fighters without the revolutionary discipline, but I like you.. I am glad you did not reply.
We're all different depending on our experiences (and aaaargh, class)
Love Joe
and minus most of the freedom fighting......
"These ideas [of anarchism] grow out the Enlightenment; their roots are in Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality, Humbolt's The Limits of State Action, Kant's insistence, in his defence of the French Revolution, that freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved . . . With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order. In fact, on the very same assumptions that led classical liberalism to oppose the intervention of the state in social life, capitalist social relations are also intolerable. This is clear, for example, from the classic work of [Wilhelm von] Humboldt, The Limits of State Action, which anticipated and perhaps inspired [John Stuart] Mill . . . This classic of liberal thought, completed in 1792, is in its essence profoundly, though prematurely, anticapitalist. Its ideas must be attenuated beyond recognition to be transmuted into an ideology of industrial capitalism." ["Notes on Anarchism", For Reasons of State, p. 156]
teehee, the Anarchist FAQ is so handy. It also gives part of Rocker in "Anarcho-Syndicalism" where he says that the fundamental beliefs of democracy, "with its motto of 'all citizens equal before the law,' and Liberalism with its 'right of man over his own person,' both shipwrecked on the realities of the capitalist economic form". So yeah Classical Liberalism has a deal in common with anarchism, much of our tradition grew out of it. But post-capitalist, apologist "liberalism" is something quite contrary to anarchism.
yeah, that was the kind of things i was thinking about upon starting the threas (honest!)
classical liberalism wasn't the nicest of things was it though, malthus and spencer and all those dudes, kinda darwinian was it not?
Worse than Darwinian. Malthus anyway.
Spencer as well. He pretty much invented social Darwinism, and he's the main reason you say 'Darwinian' as if it were a bad thing. Kropotkin's work was Darwinian too, but diametrically opposed to Spencer.
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Why thank you. (No web access at weekends)
Anarchism is no doubt different to liberalism. But the very basic ideas that liberlaism originally had, we share. We are not Red Fascists Comrades. We should never forget it. We are Libertarians and Libertarian Socialists; there is nothing liberal about capitalism. How is capitalism liberal or even libertarian? I don't get let bolshevik/capitalist lie. The bolshies think capitalism is a product of freedom, the capitalists think that capitalism equates to freedom; I think the red fascists have more of a problem with freedom than they do with Capitalism and the right love capitalism more than freedom. With them wew might just become wage slaves without a wage. Hey ho! Never forget brothers how fucking evil the authoritarian Left hbas been and can be. We are libertarians but unlike the right we want freedom for the working class and not just the ubber rich. Anarchism is socialist precisely cause capitalism does not give people freedom. No one can be given freedom, they have to claim it themselves. Fuck Capitalism, fuck Bolshevism! Bring on real freedom!!!
by the way u can email ur agrievances at teddythomas83@yahoo.co.uk
lovin it comrades. xxxx
Classical anarchism and classical liberalism have much in common because they come from the same stable: individual, small-scale commodity-producers such as dominated urban production in the first half of the 19th century and who wanted to be able to produce and exchange their products without any state interference , especially not taxes, which expressed itself in, as you put it, "a desire to restrict the interference of the state on the individual" (though I'd say rather "a desire to restrict the interference of the state on individual, independent small-scale commodity-producers" aka, in French, the petty bourgeoisie). Proudhon (dubbed by Kropotkin as "the father of anarchism") simply went further than the classical 19th Manchester School liberals, who accepted a miniminal nightwatchman role for the state, and argued that the state is not needed at all to regulate the production and exchange of goods between commodity-producers. This could all be done, he preached, by means of voluntarily entered into (commercial) contracts between individuals. An idea that has been resurrected by those who openly admit that they are "anarcho-capitalists". Some anarchists are proud of the fact that a philosopher like Robert Paul Wolff defends anarchism (in his book In Defense of Anarchism, but he does so by, precisely, taking liberalism to its logical conclusion of denying any legitimacy to any state.
In less than two weeks time hundreds of neo-Nazis and racists will descend on the coastal town of Dover calling for Britain to “close the border”. It is vital that anti-fascists and anti-racists...
A short account of the West Siberian uprising against the Bolsheviks.
Michael Heinrich argues that Marx was not after a “Marxism” as an identity-defining “truth.” Rather, he was more interested in the critical business of undermining certainties.
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I think the philosophical basis of liberalism lies in Locke or Hobbes or some other old guy and the idea that the natural form of society would be a war of all against all. The state is thus a necessary evil to liberals which should interfere with the liberty of individuals only in order to protect other individuals. This I think is the 'social contract' which theoretically developed out of the need to prevent the war of all against all.
Anarchism on the other hand would insist that you can't talk of society but have to talk of the classes that make up society. There is no 'social contract' rather the form of society we have was established by class conflict. I'm pretty sure Bakunins 'God and the State' is actually written at least in part in answer to Hobbes 'Social contract'. The only online sites its on are down at the moment.
I'm sure there must be some philsophy student around who can confirm or deny this.