this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
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Anarchism is left. Anarcho-capitalism is a meme ideology that is mostly an offshoot of liberalism, while actual anarchism has a rich history on the left, as the other major umbrella of leftist thought compared to Marxism.
This is a pretty biased way of putting it. The concept of anarchy predates the interpretation used by modern left-leaning self-identified anarchists by a couple of thousand years. In online circles such anarchists often seek to monopolize the term (like you are doing right now), but they factually weren't the ones to coin it; when it was originally coined by Plato, nobody had any idea what the fuck capitalism or socialism even are, and in fact Plato used it as a cautionary example.
I am guessing your gut reaction will be to recoil at this grave attack on your ideology. I implore you to stop and consider that most people are not in fact at all familiar with left-wing anarchism as defined by Proudhon etc., but are vaguely familiar with the concept from many other sources. Therefore when you talk about anarchism without a qualifier to mean anarchic socialism, most people will assume you are talking about some Mad Max law of the jungle nonsense and then summarily dismiss anything you say as insane rambling.
I'm not an anarchist, I'm a Marxist-Leninist. Not sure where you got the idea that I'm an anarchist from. Secondly, I'm not referring to what the random person thinks anarchy is, but what actual anarchists believe, and among anarchists anarcho-capitalism is fringe, and an offshoot of liberalism. Plato having talked about anarchy at one point doesn't suddenly mean that the entirety of anarchist history suddenly doesn't matter.
You're doing the monopoly thing here again. When by "anarchist" you refer exclusively to left-leaning anarchists, of course anarcho-capitalism is going to be fringe among them.
Not to mention the fact that free-market anarchism is a distinct ideology from anarcho-capitalism and, to my understanding, much less fringe among self-described anarchists. The primary distinction seems to be that anarcho-capitalism exists at a lower energy state, a sort of a decay product that free-market anarchism would likely almost immediately decay into upon contact with the real world.
One ideology misappropriating the term also doesn't mean that all other meanings of the word suddenly don't matter. Don't get me wrong, I sympathize with many of the ideas of left-leaning anarchists, but they do suck at naming things. When the same concept covers both extreme right-wing libertarianism and extreme socialism, you really should be qualifying it with something to avoid confusion.
No, I mean among all anarchists. Anarcho-capitalism is fringe within anarchists, and has no real presence historically outside of a few extreme libertarians. Anarchism historically is tied to communalized production, and while I don't personally think it has staying power practically, I also recognize it as a thoroughly left-wing ideology historically.
If you think it's thoroughly left-wing then I think you must not be familiar with individualist and libertarian anarchist thinkers. I don't think free-market anarchism involves much social production for example. In American political theory anarchism is what gave birth to libertarianism, which is pretty much a right-wing ideology.
I'm aware that they exist, being fringe implies that they do exist but are an extreme minority. Libertarianism is an extension of liberalism, and the anarchist offshoot of libertatianism is as such a more extreme offshoot of liberalism.
People like Thoreau and Emerson aren't fringe; they are extremely influential in American political philosophy, to the point where there's a long-ass Wikipedia page about them.
Now there's a lot that could be said about them and I don't want to start writing essays here, so to cut to the chase I will just write down a couple of bullet points.
As we can both see, that page considers itself "part of a series on socialism", which I believe is because these thinkers courted socialist ideas at their time, seeking to come up with an alternative more along the lines of their personal very American individualist philosophy. I think it should not be contentious to say that time has proven that individualism and socialism are not compatible ideologies.
I think time has also proven that this brand of anarchism did not survive contact with industrialization -- this is what I meant by it giving birth to libertarianism, because the same (very American) principles of individualism underpin both.
Nonetheless, this philosophy is a school of anarchist thought. They themselves called it that, other people at the time called it that, and scholars that came after call it that. Ergo, anarchism is a far broader category that contains more than just the clearly leftist schools of anarchist thought like anarchist communism, and therefore using just the word "anarchism" to refer to contemporary leftist anarchism is incorrect and going to confuse people.
I'm aware that it exists in the fringes of anarchism, the existence of an ideology doesn't care about how many follow it or its practical implementations. However, it remains true that anarchism historically has been dominated by leftist ideas and practice. I'm aware of the connection between individualist anarchists and the broader libertarian movement, however the influence of anarchism on the libertarian movement pales in comparison to liberalism. I'm not denying the existence of the fringes, just that the fringes matter as much as you posture.
Following this to its logical conclusion, we don't have democracy because only Athenian democracy is democracy, they articulated it first.
What? It's possible for both modern democracy and Athenian democracy to be democracy, because it is an umbrella term that covers many different implementations of rule by the people.
The exact same thing applies to anarchy. It is possible for both The Culture and Lord of the Flies to be anarchy, because anarchy is an umbrella term that covers many different situations of "no rulers".
and the concept of height predates the metric system. does that mean you cannot measure height in metres?
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here? But to go along with what I assume your analog is, if you're talking about height then you need to say you're talking about height regardless of what unit you're using. "Two metre box" means constrains only one dimension, much the same as the word anarchy by itself does.
just because an ideology predates the left right spectrum (quite flawed as it is but this isn't the problem), doesn't mean it can be put in there.
fascism and democracies predated the left-right spectrum, would you say they can't be there
The political compass has both an X and a Y dimension, you know. As it happens, the Y dimension exists almost specifically because of anarchy.
The political compass isn't a good way to view political ideology in any way. You can't distill ideology into 4 vaguely defined quadrants.
oh god, don't bring even more BS into here.
oh god, don't bring even more arbitrary BS into here.
the phase space of vague stuff like political ideology would have an arbitrary large number of parameters, not whatever 2 you see in memes.
Is the society so painfully brainrotted that people genuinely think memes are realities?
Weird to hear this from the person who moments ago was arguing that there's no problem projecting this concept on an even smaller number of dimensions.
not sure what you're reading.
I've been saying that it's a vague oversimplification. and it's useless when comparing certain ideologies.
you can't put categorically complex things in a line, if you do. if you do, like any dimensionality reduction. you will lose a lot of information in the process