Chomsky on why we need to define "Libertarianism". Archived Message Posted by Der on August 11, 2020, 8:19 am We collude when we call them libertarians. Yet, I see it frequently on this board. But, we've been conned. They stole the word. And the capitalist press went right along with it, of course. I mean, who could possibly object to "liberty"? But nobody should have the "liberty" to exploit. To rape and pillage, no less. To live a life that impinges on the liberty of others. They're capitalists. No more, no less. Libertarian socialists, on the other hand, are the exact opposite of that. Here's Chomsky: "The individualistic anarchism that you and I are talking about, Stirner and oth­ers, is one of the roots of - among other things - the so-called "libertarian" movement in the U.S. This means dedication to free market capitalism, and has no connection with the rest of the international anarchist movement. In the European tradition, anarchists commonly called themselves libertarian socialists, in a very different sense of the term "libertarian." As far as I can see, the workers' movements, which didn't call themselves anarchist, were closer to the main strain of European anarchism than many of the people in the U.S. who called themselves anarchists. If we go back to the labor activism from the early days of the industrial revolution, to the working class press in 1850s, and so on, it's got a real anarchist strain to it. They never heard of European anar­chism, never heard of Marx, or anything like that. It was spontaneous. They took for granted that wage labor is little different from slavery, that workers should own the mills, that the industrial system is destroying individual ini­tiative, culture, and so on, that they have to struggle against the what they called "the new spirit of the age" in the 1850s: "Gain Wealth, Forgetting all but Self" Sounds rather familiar. And the same is true of other popular move­ments - let's take the New Left movements. Some strains related themselves to traditional collectivist anarchism, which always regarded itself as a branch of socialism. But U.S. and to some extent British libertarianism is quite a differ­ent thing and different development, in fact has no objection to tyranny as long as it is private tyranny. That is radically different from other forms of anarchism." Chomsky on Anarchism, AK Press, p235. Message Thread: Chomsky on why we need to define "Libertarianism". - Der August 11, 2020, 8:19 am Video: Tyranny is Freedom: How the Right Hijacked Libertarianism - Sinister Burt August 11, 2020, 9:36 am All anarchists are libertarians. But not all libertarians are anarchists. - Der August 11, 2020, 2:03 pm Re: Video: Tyranny is Freedom: How the Right Hijacked Libertarianism - Raskolnikov August 12, 2020, 10:32 am   Searching