Quote from: BlackSheep on April 08, 2013, 12:07:34 AM

I find it funny that this technology has attracted anti-capitalists.

Quote from: myrkul on April 08, 2013, 05:41:12 AM

Why the hell an anti-capitalist would be attracted to Bitcoin is beyond me.

Is not bad to work with the tools you are given - this is even more true with Bitcoin which is a powerful tool that empowers people, freeing them from the banker's slavery. Some anti-state libertarians would still vote in local elections to a candidate that could really improve what they believe fundamentals aspects of their immediate surroundings - corect?

Quote from: Mike Christ on April 08, 2013, 06:03:54 AM

Quote from: BlackLilac on April 08, 2013, 05:25:57 AM

This is something that I've always laughed about, right wing capitalists calling themselves libertarian. The term that they came up with, "anarcho-capitalist", is a hilarious oxymoron. They have even taken to using the anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist flags, replacing the red with gold. I'm not making that up. As explained by the OP, to the libertarian the free market is wage slavery, which is directly equivalent to chattel slavery.

I don't have time to read it, but I can imagine the amount of ignorance that is displayed in this thread from those who misuse the term. Page one was bad enough.

Where exactly are you getting this from? And I don't mean this as a hypothetical; there must be some publication somewhere which has mislead you. You should take a moment to actually understand; nobody who identifies with AnCap considers themselves anywhere close to either "wing". If you've always laughed about it, it's troubling knowing you've been under a misconception for some time. I'm well aware the current system we're under is slavery, which is why I advocate anarchism to begin with. There's nothing I despise more than wage slavery; if the government sanctions on monopolies and oligarchies are torn down, you'll see the poor and the rich classes coincide and melt into one another; people work for themselves, not a boss, or their boss, or their boss. The free market is exactly that: a market without government intervention. How this translates into wage slavery is beyond me.

1) Right and left wing are still valid terms, even tough modern politicians tend to say that these are obsolete terms in an attempt of erasing all historical memory, class consciousness and revolutionary spirit.

2) The fundamental difference between right and left is not very clear for the majority of the people nowadays due to a lack of political culture, yet it is very simple: it's just a philosophical position on equality and inequality.

For left, inequality is an artificial construction of men; therefore left will work toward abolishing/diminishing the inequality in society (inequality of wealth, not physical inequality).
For right, inequality is a product of nature, thus is not only not negative but its necessary for people to "work their asses off" in order to improve their condition. In fact, what would be a capitalist system without inequality fueling competitiveness?

This is of course linked again with Rousseau, who thought that the only natural inequality was the physical one: one man being taller than the other, etc.

And yes, according to the traditional sense of the words "left" and "right" a capitalist supporter will always be right wingish, while an anarchist will always be left wingish. As explained above, the terms have nothing to do with being more or less authoritarian, pro-state, etc. They are just related with a position on what's the natural outcome of nature: equality or inequality.

And now just a short quote from Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes (Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men)

Quote

The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.