Ask Lemmy

Note: Yes, this post is technically against the rules. But it's generalized enough that it sparks an interesting discussion removed from contemporary politics, so I personally don't mind. I'll defer to any other mods if they want to remove it.

Stay classy

The way libertarianism (the property rights focused version) has marketed itself appeals to people who believe the other major political viewpoints they are aware of do not value human freedom highly enough. Anarchism also appeals to that sentiment. So it's going to be similar kinds of people adopting these viewpoints I think. Maybe which you land on will depend on what sort of people and information you are around, or your willingness to reconsider your beliefs when exposed to new ideas.

No.

Anarchists don't believe in private property, especially government backed property rights. They are against the system of private property ownership and think ownership is a collaberative/shared process. Their stated political goal is the abolishment of private property rights. No individual can own land in a anarchist society/government.

Libertarians believe the only role of government is to protect private property and property rights. It's their fundamental premise of their entire political system, as in government is constructed solely for the purpose of protecting individual's right to their property and this is sacred. There is no legitimate government in libertarian thought unless individual private property is protected by that government.

That's the massive difference and what makes them left vs right. Where they agree is that the government shouldn't be dictating to you own you live your life or what you do with your property. They reach similar conclusions, but their premises on which they drawn those conclusions are radically different if not straight up contradictory.

the one driving factor behind libertarianism is the non-aggression principle, or the NAP. the idea is that the only justified use of violence or force is to respond to someone else's violence or force. in simpler terms, "do no harm, take no shit." the problem is how you define "harm" and "shit" which is how you end up with right libertarians and left libertarians who each see the other's "taking no shit" as the initial "doing harm"

if John Nestlé (name chosen for no particular reason) comes to town and takes all the water in the lake, bottles it up, and sells it, and then people start dying of thirst and fight to get their water back, who is doing harm and who is taking no shit? left libertarians say that the townsfolk are well within their rights to get their water back, but right libertarians would say John Nestlé's business is well within it's right to defend itself from them. both of those viewpoints come from the non-aggression principle, just going in with wildly different postulates. right now in america the capital-L Libertarian party is mostly right libertarians, so the term has come to be synonymous with them here

if you consider hierarchies to be a form of violence and believe that the only justifiable use of hierarchy is to destroy hierachy, then you are an anarchist and a libertarian. but with the conmotation the word has come to take on, they would certainly avoid calling themselves that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism#Definitions

Although libertarianism originated as a form of anarchist or left-wing politics,[27] since the development in the mid-20th century of modern libertarianism in the United States caused it to be commonly associated with right-wing politics, several authors and political scientists have used two or more categorizations[9][10][28] to distinguish libertarian views on the nature of property and capital, usually along left–right or socialist–capitalist lines.[11]

Relevant diagram: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism#/media/File:Libertarianism-groups-diagram.svg

"Little to no government intervention" is the one thing all the self-described libertarians I've met seem to agree on.

"No oppressive power structures" is the thing that the anarchists agree on.

Anarchism has the critical difference from other political factions in that, in one way or another, they don't believe that a government with a monopoly on the use of force is necessary.

Libertarians usually think something needs to take on that role, if maybe at a minimal level, although if you add no government to a libertarian you get an anarcho-capitalist. If you subtract it from left-wing anarchism, you probably just get a vaguely progressive person.

I thought you said librarians and was very very confused.

No they do not, I run into 'libertarians' all the time and they're always fundamentally pro capitalism + private property. That's pretty fundamental divergence in world view.

"Libertarian" is a pretty broad category that gets used in a few different ways. Most anarchists could be considered some sort of left-libertarian if you're working off of sort of a "political compass" model where the two axes are left/right, and libertarian/authoritarian. The people and organizations (in the US at least, can't really say much about the rest of the world personally) who call themselves libertarians tend to skew more towards the right end of the spectrum (and often aren't actually all that libertarian and skew more authoritarian)

Because of that, most anarchists probably aren't too keen to label themselves as libertarian (barring some outliers like anarcho-capitalists, InB4 "those aren't real anarchists")

Since neither side has an actual working government in place, it's all just theory and conjecture.

You can find plenty of writing to support any idea, but imho, the thing to study is what the government in power is doing, and how to influence it.

Libertarians tend to love corporate hierarchies.

Both have a somewhat idealized view of human nature, specifically vis-a-vis power vacuums.

But there are in fact both right- and left-libertatians. Right-libertarians more-or-less see people as a kind of business and think the government shouldn't get in the way of businesses unless they're engaged in unfair anti-competitive practices, because competition is the highest good. Left-libertatians see corporations as more-or-less hostile but useful entities that should be yoked to human interests, and that this kind of regulation is the role of government while leaving human individual behavior completely unregulated, because human liberty is the highest good.

Whereas anarchism is pretty much orthogonal to any economic axis. Ideally, there's no entity to regulate economic forces and there's no central currency, so who gets regulated and for what reason is an absent question. Corporations can't exist under anarchism because they're so clearly a predatory hierarchy that frankly I'm surprised we even allow them in regular society.

So, uh, teal dear long-story-short, no, they're incompatible world views because libertarianism presupposes power structures abhorrent to anarchism.

Edited to fix a typo that significantly changed the meaning of a sentence.

I think their views are similar (and similarly naive, in my humble opinion) as they both emphasize the idea of personal liberty to do whatever they want to do.

The big difference is that the libertarian generally has more assets and thus a stronger belief in property, whereas the anarchist doesn't.

But I'm neither, so I'd be curious to hear what people who consider themselves these things will say.

Lmao I misread it as "Librarian" and was like Librarians are anarchists? 🤔

Like I just had the image of a librarian throwing molotov cocktails 🤣

I’m not expert but generally the difference is allowing some hierarchy to enforce the personal property rights.