(Temporary moratorium on main rule to encourage more posting on main. We reserve the right to arbitrarily enforce it whenever we wish and the right to strike this line and enforce mainposting with zero notification to the users because its funny)
A hexbear.net commainity. Main sure to subscribe to other communities as well. Your feed will become the Lion's Main!
Good comrades mainly sort posts by hot and comments by new!
State-by-state guide on maintaining firearm ownership
Domain guide on mutual aid and foodbank resources
Tips for looking at financials of non-profits (How to donate amainly)
Community-sourced megapost on the main media sources to radicalize libs and chuds with
Main Source for Feminism for Babies
Maintaining OpSec / Data Spring Cleaning guide
Remain up to date on what time is it in Moscow
This is in response to me basically saying bickering over what to do with the state right now is pointless given how far away we are from ending capitalism in the imperial core. I think this was a thread from like 2 weeks ago, I legit thought my comments would be lost in the ether but apparently not lmao.
A while back I got into a pretty pitched disagreement with a then-anarchist creator who disagreed with me that the concept of natural rights was a liberal concept that is predicated upon the existence of a state to determine the nature and limits of rights which its polity are entitled to and that rights are thus inherently something that does not fit within anarchist principles.
What determines and defends (or limits and violates) a person's rights if not a state?
I think because we are in a deeply within liberal cultural hegemony it makes sense to refer to rights conceptually as a shortcut term but your ideological position can't really rest upon the bedrock of natural rights without smuggling philosophical liberalism in through the back door, intentionally or otherwise.
Oh well. That point of disagreement is moot since they turned ML.
Yeah, I'd identify liberalism as a cultural movement as emphasizing mainly two political ideas: democracy and natural rights, which are in contradiction, and many anarchists and most Marxists have (correctly) taken the former and used it as a basic organizing principle, but some anarchists definitely take natural rights as the most basic principle and that leads them to many mistakes.
It's probably a factor that in American education, we are given a litany of emphatic warnings about "too much" democracy in so many words, whether the Founders' criticisms of "mobs" or works like Lord of the Flies or whatever else, but with natural rights no such criticism was ever presented (at least to me), and of course there is much ado about these rights being "inalienable" and so on (despite that being manifestly untrue in how the government professing that operates). Given this, it makes sense that some well-meaning people would mistakenly view natural rights as unshakeable and democracy as a vector of tyranny, but they cannot escape the fact that any legal rights that don't exist based on the will of the majority can only exist based on the will of a ruling minority, nor can they escape that there's no way to definitely do some "cogito" or "categorical imperative" thought experiment to make the natural rights that they want to stipulate actually self-evidently true, because it's fundamentally just an arbitrary moral claim.
It sounds like a quip, but I really sincerely mean it when I say that natural rights made a lot more sense when one could claim that God decided what those rights are, and in a circumstance where you can't say that, it just looks ridiculous. Obviously this invites a Euthyphro problem and so on, but at least that's better than being blatantly absurd.
This is such a good reply, thanks for sharing it.
I know that my bias is motivating me to say this because I do genuinely love this stuff—call me a cracker and waterboard me with mayonnaise—but it's discussions like these that convince me that even just a foundational understanding of philosophy is so critical to approaching matters with a clear-headed perspective.
I think, at its worst, if that then-anarchist led an anarchist revolution and they drove the post-revolutionary reconstruction then they would have done a liberalism speedrun. I know that sounds uncharitable ("Har har, anarchists are all liberals!!") but if you're starting from the principle that natural rights exist then the logical conclusion is to implement mechanisms to safeguard and defend these rights, which sooner or later leads to creating these apparatuses that merge together and eventually form what resembles a liberal state. Yeah, the exact contours will differ but if it goes on uninterrupted then you're gonna find yourself with a recreation of liberal state eventually, at least imo.
Coincidentally, this is where I arrive at my own Euthyphro-like problem because for me this about understanding class conflict and this is rooted in dialectical and historical materialism. My answer to that problem is that I arrived at DiaMat etc. because it led me to the right conclusions and not that it's the right conclusions because DiaMat concurs with it (but I'm lucky because I was an anarchist for a long time so I'm confident that it's not just a case if "this agrees with a DiaMat view of the world so therefore it's right" because I've seen the way that this plays out on an infinitesimal scale within orgs where the foundational hypothesis of liberalism exists like a seed crystal that creates conditions for its inevitable growth until it creates something almost identical to what liberal political philosophy always creates.)
Don't take this as me dragging anarchism unfairly though. I've gnawed away at this problem for a long time and believe me when I say that I regularly turn the matter over in my mind about how revisionism and liberalism creep into revolutionary movements - you don't get to reinstate liberalism in a nation like the USSR without it being a pressing issue for communists just as equally as it is for anarchists.
I think this also applies to a lot of western leftists in general, not just this specific anarchist. If someone refuses to truly examine, understand and challenge liberalism they will just treat it like the "background noise" of their life and would recreate it after a revolution without even realising that is what they are doing.
Hard yes
GOOD post