4.1 KiB
title: Can ancaps and ancoms be united into just anarchy? author: 寮 date: 2022-08-16 10:25:00 tags: blog,politics,anarchy threadid: AMZP9l4f2YueGOHq52
Growing up knowing multiple people who have first or second hand experience with communism, whether it be a Japanese whose both parents fled the Soyviet Union, or Chinese, North Korean, or Vietnamese immigrants or refugees, or even nth generation Soyviet refugees, I always knew communism as a 1 massive 1 party government system having full control over each and everything/one.
Then I discovered websites like DigDeeper, Qorg, Kill-9, Spyware Watchdog, and ShadowWiki, and my views on AnComs have turned pretty positive.
I especially like their efforts of liberating technology and how big they are on self ownership.
But then I found the Web0 people, the trannies of the Fediverse, and other insane communists, and I started viewing AnComs negatively again.
I just finished watching the debate between an AnCap and AnCom, and both guys were super reasonable, and they both have adorable pets too.
Please watch this whole interview first before you read my article, it helps you understanding this article better.
Now I'm re-thinking of how we can unite AnComs and AnCaps into 1 anarchy.
Maybe I technically am already, considering my website is a mix of red (AnCom), yellow (AnCap), and black (anarchy).
AnCom technology + AnCap economy = victory
As I expressed before, the strong point of AnComs is their thorough understanding of technology, privacy, and anonymity, which is very lacking among the AnCaps.
On the other hand, AnCaps have better understanding of economics, free choice, free speech, and entrepreneurship.
And what both get a common ground on is worker independence, though the difference between the 2 is that AnCaps want individual control of production, while AnComs want a collective one.
In fact, projects like GNU/Linux have come along thanks to the efforts done by AnComs, while projects like Monero have come along thanks to the efforts done by AnCaps, and both of these projects are benefiting both sides every single day.
So if we combine powers of both sides, we win!
Stop focussing on the left-right axis, start focussing on the lib-auth axis
I already said this before, but the reason why the gap between the 2 anarchists exist is because there's too much focus on the economic aspect (left-right).
I think the aspect that truly matters is the control one (lib-auth).
What brings AnCaps and AnComs together is the absense of a ruler, we might be incompatible on how we define certain things, but we do agree on a whole lot of other stuff.
This is very different from the differences between the 2 statist versions, which have a wide gap between each other that keeps on growing every minute too.
The authoritarians all care about who's in control and by how much, which is the true difference where we anarchists shine, as we universally don't believe in a centralized power structure.
Unification is possible
At the end of that interview, both the AnCom and AnCap came to the conclusion that ideologically there's very little difference between the 2, they agree on most stuff, and the only real difference is in how they define certain stuff.
And they both agreed that their mistake was that they lumped the authoritarians into the image of the opposite side of anarchy (so the AnCom lumped the religious boomers into AnCaps, and the AnCap lumped the tankies into AnComs), and both came to the realization that this was in error.
And I really liked that realization, especially because it enlightened me just as much as well.
So perhaps if we just ditch the labels, we could actually ditch the concepts of "AnCap" and "AnCom" as well, and just group both sides under the "anarchist" umbrella.