In decades of being on the internet, I have yet to meet two anarchists who use the same definition of "anarchism". Certainly I know plenty of people who would excoriate you for saying it "means no unearned hierarchy".
It's impossible to philosophically engage with anarchism, because every anarchist rewrites its definition on-the-fly to win whatever argument they happen to be in at that moment.
Especially now when there’s often talk of criminalizing political speech and protest to, ostensibly, “protect _our_ democracy”. Who’s democracy it is is never explicitly stated, but I think it’s not mine.
There was always talk like that, but from only one side, so you probably did not hear it or take it seriously then. Now, however, it has shifted to come from the other side as well. I mused at length about this here some months ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38119795>
Great write up. However, I believe there has been a shift in what kind of people are filtered into the top. Like, there seems to be this trend selecting for "meta players" to some greater extent internally in the parties as well as quarrelsome over cooperative. I dunno what the mechanism for this is.
My pet theory is that the only major change is that there’s now much less of a filter over the information that reaches the populace. The regime can’t quite figure out yet how to deal with this without undermining its own legitimacy, flimsy as it may be. It used to be you had to go through the newspapers or tv to get anything out, and both are controlled by a very small group of people. To the extent that there was diversity of opinion it was because the two wings of the uniparty disagreed with one another. Nowadays trust in the press is at historic lows and actually reading it makes one _less_ informed than not reading anything at all. So people turn to social media and personalities they trust there. End result: an actual democracy could break out for the first time since Ancient Greece. The Uniparty can’t tolerate risking tens of trillions in money flows on some highfalutin’ bullshit like that.
I agree with this. For anarchism to be successful, the first step would be to relabel itself to something else other than anarchism, because this word is currently almost meaningless. An almost similar thing also happened to communism, every group has a different definition to the point that they cannot agree anymore on what communism is.
It's impossible to philosophically engage with anarchism, because every anarchist rewrites its definition on-the-fly to win whatever argument they happen to be in at that moment.