Anarchism is questioning authority for authority sake. If you put yourself in the place of authority to tell other people what's anarchism you are in for a bad time.
The disagreement is the key value of anarchism. The dialectical pendulum, the exchange of ideas. Disagreeing is expressing anarchism, even if you disagree with the other party's understanding of anarchism.
My explanation is in line with the community maintained Wikipedia articles and their sources based on a long history of anarchist history and writings, and none of it seems to be under any significant dispute.
One does not need to be in a position of authority above others to help ensure discussions are grounded in common definitions of what words mean.
The irony of you pulling credentials to illustrate how right you are about anarchism tells how much you don't understand it even if you understand the definition of the word. Anarchy is negative self-referential, you can't really define it universally without creating a paradox. For instance, even in this case that I might be right in explaining this to you, I'm wrong if I say this is anarchism categorically.
What credentials? I just pointed to supporting evidence I used the word in the way it is most commonly and publicly defined.
Meanwhile you shared your own meaning as correct with no supporting evidence it is a definition commonly shared.
You are free to make up your own special definitions of words that few if any share if you like. You can use the word cat to refer to a dog, for instance. It is not going to help you communicate with the majority of people who speak a mostly shared dialect of written english where words have well documented common knowledge meanings though, but you do you.
So in good faith I went to dig a bit what's the holdout in our debate here, and it's because I didn't understand two separate uses of anarchism, the one that's epistemological, anarchism as anti-foundationalism, my point, and your point that's political. In political anarchism we don't have this pressure to question every single thing, so when you said Socialist Anarchism I should have gone and read what that is had I known this distinction beforehand.
TLDR, you are right and I'm not necessarily wrong, we were just talking about two different things.
I just wish I had a less aggressive or snarky style of writing. Maybe then I'd invite people for a discussion and not for exchanging heartbreak, but we are products of our context and certainty is what's currently rewarded, not doubt.
> I just wish I had a less aggressive or snarky style of writing.
You and me both. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard variations of "you are way less of an asshole in person"
Complex asynchronous communication always has a way of forcing the temperature higher than it needs to be because we have more time to wordsmith and the cost of feeling stupid can be multiplied by the size of the perceived audience.
Often the same two people would have had a much better interaction in person where each sees the other as a human being speaking with their own voice and facial expressions.
indeed, the context here is political/organisational rather than epistemological
anarchist organisational practices are real
people have been creating solutions to counter "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" for many decades now
coarsely put, anarchists (and work/housing co-ops, and protest groups) most generally favour consensus-process with proper anti-slow facilitation and role rotation, vs the [usually] majority voting systems and power dichotomies that are the style of communism (see democratic centeralism)
though many places just don't mention this essentially counts as anarchism (or libertarian socialism), cos a) the stigma, b) they just don't need to or know to, c) they do, just behind closed doors
"horizontalism/horizontalidad" has been a good descriptor
Not necessarily I think, because socialism need not be authoritarian, I don't know how, maybe in a thousand years when the society collectively reached higher levels of moral development. But my intuition is that for libertarian socialism to exist, people need to agree and desire to converge to a golden mean ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_mean_(philosophy) ) instead of being incentivised to accumulate as much wealth and power as possible.
True socialism is the opposite of authoritarianism. Simply put, it's taking care of everyone. Just because the label has been misused doesn't change the goal of those of us who identify as socialists. USA propaganda made it a bad word.
> As one of the main ideologies on the political spectrum, socialism is the standard left-wing ideology in most countries. [0]
True! But at some point the rubber needs to meet the road and we haven't seen this materialize in practice, so for all intents and purposes, when we talk about realist socialism we need to account for the various forms of authoritarianism that comes in the package, I think
I don't know, I don't care about capitalism, I prefer to reserve my attention for things that could work long term and let it wither and die.
Having said that, I don't subscribe to capitalist propaganda. When I say realist socialism that should refer to the inherent structures of power that need to exist in order to organize large groups of people and how to manage greed and ambition so it doesn't eat society from within. It's important to idealise true socialism, but just as much as the Ubermensch can't materialize, that is also just a compass, a guiding star.
Neither making up words nor shoving their definitions in people's faces will help neither of us communicate with anyone else. These types of conversations have to happen in good faith where you assume the other party isn't a moron and conduct a productive conversation, like this one.
The fact you address little to none of my points is an indicative that while you are a very good thesaurus, you don't understand much hermeneutics.
Your disagreement here is not the typical understanding. And correcting people is not pushing hierarchy. The parent poster isn't standing over you, they are standing beside you offering to educate you.
You can call anarchism whatever you want, just... if you invent your own notion of the thing don't be surprised when no one understands you.
Edit: I see your post much deeper on, you can ignore me.
The disagreement is the key value of anarchism. The dialectical pendulum, the exchange of ideas. Disagreeing is expressing anarchism, even if you disagree with the other party's understanding of anarchism.