who are considered anarchists

Question

Is the Mafia and such gangsters to Thugs in there hoods caring guns around everywhere they go , rednecks, and druged out thieves . Would all these fuckers be anarchists because i dont really see any difference really . i consider my self an anarchist but i dont do drugs , i dont carry a gun on me and i am not a thief . i go to work every day , i am not a vegan . So am i the one who is not a anarchist, i dont believe in government,i believe that everyone deserves the freedom that god gave them the right to have ,PEACE is what is all about , changing the world and such things , but i feel i am not doing anything to help change the world, but my real question is if i am not a gangster or a thug am i not a anarchist ?

Comments

http://anarchy101.org/3029/what-makes-someone-an-anarchist

Answer 1

I'm not sure I understand why you think you need other people to tell you whether you are an anarchist or not, but I can say how I define 'anarchist.'

To me, an anarchist is someone who is in some way actively trying to end hierarchy and domination and bring about anarchy. This could definitely include people who lead a life of crime, people who use drugs, and people who believe in things that I do not, (such as god-given freedom or peace).

Answer 2

Anarchy is absence of hierarchies. A thug, a violent asshole and people like that are authoritarians who want to force you their will through violence. As such they are the opposite of anarchists, they are sabotaged and challenged by anarchists. Mafias and the like are capitalist businesses since they are usually run in a hierarchical form and seek profits and they are authoritarian forms since they force pèople into their will through violence. Anarchists will also fight, question and challenge mafias. Even if a mafia internally is non hierarchical, it will still be fought by anarchists since to the outside social environment a mafia by definition is authoritarian regardeless of its internal form of organization.

Guns give power over others and so the use of guns tends to be an authoritarian thing unless used in self defense. But of course in the US the "self-defense" part in this gun use is abused due to a strange local existence of a strong gun culture and so there is a US craze of loner idiots who grew up ingesting stupid hollywood action films and end up going in shooting sprees thinking that they are protagonizing their own stupid hollywood film for a moment. In such a case i will actually justify a crowd lynching those motherfuckers on the spot and afterwards play soccer with their heads and give the rest of the body to circus and wild animals to eat and that will be anarchistic since through the use of guns these idiots are endangering directly the lives of others in an almost random fashion and in this way enacting one of the worst kinds of agression possible.

I am a drug user and since i don´t force anyone to use drugs or not use drugs (such as some straight edge fascists as well as the christian right) i am an anarchist in drug use. One can also be an anarchist and reject drugs. But an anarchist can only reject drugs in his personal life but an anarchist cannot forbid drugs.

Comments

not to sound like an asshole, but you sound like a total reactionary (authoritarian liberal or otherwise) for most of this answer

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where exactly?

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"Guns give power over others and so the use of guns tends to be an authoritarian thing unless used in self defense. But of course in the US the "self-defense" part in this gun use is abused due to a strange local existence of a strong gun culture and so there is a US craze of loner idiots who grew up ingesting stupid hollywood action films and end up going in shooting sprees thinking that they are protagonizing their own stupid hollywood film for a moment. In such a case i will actually justify a crowd lynching those motherfuckers on the spot and afterwards play soccer with their heads and give the rest of the body to circus and wild animals to eat and that will be anarchistic since through the use of guns these idiots are endangering directly the lives of others in an almost random fashion and in this way enacting one of the worst kinds of agression possible."

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well. so you justify shooting sprees i guess as well as enjoying cutting and pasting with no reasons. random mass murder connects these idiots with the likes of Stalin and Hitler. Unless you explain your strange position i don´t think i can count you as an anarchist.

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i dont really have the desire to explain to someone who says they would "justify lynching those motherfuckers", a so clearly political act, why they are reactionary, something which is clearly obvious to many people who read that.  If you think Stalin and Hitler were "random" mass murderers, i dont think you know what the word random means

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well being a peasant was a dangerous thing to be during Stalin´s regime. Also reducing so many persons to a label such as "jew" for killing them is definitely getting close to random killing. in hitler´s case think 5 million people more or less

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maybe im just stupid, but to me that sounds like the total opposite of random killing, rather it sounds intentional and political.  it seems weird to "randomly" kill 6 million people of a specific categorization targeted by a political organization

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so you support shooting sprees? random killing can be as intentional as anything, who really cares if it is motivated by politics or not. anyway agression and authoritarianism occurs in microlevels as well as by things such as corporations and states. the recent idiots who have gone in shooting sprees in the US in college campuses and high schools planned clearly the surprise factor. So that is why i think in such cases the only thing they deserve is facing the justice of the angry crowd. such things go beyond an aggression to an individual, that kind of thing is clearly an attack to a whole collective.

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from merriam-webster online dictionary:
"Random -
 : a haphazard course
— at random
: without definite aim, direction, rule, or method <subjects chosen at random> "


also, what is "the whole collective" other than a total abstraction?
and where do you derive your ideas about justice from? Christianity? Judges? Enlightenment?

Answer 3

Identity is self-defined. Most of the violent people you're talking about probably don't think of themselves as anarchists but would qualify as anarchists by most most anarchists' definition of themselves. Self-identified anarachists tend to be more educated (self or otherwise) than violent 'anarchists.'

Veganism has nothing to do with anarchy.