Talk:Anarchism and capitalism

Problems with article

The attempts to make this article more balanced were good in theory, but rather poorly applied. The first sentence of this article indicates that its subject matter is the anarchist critique of capitalism. However, many of the passages have been greatly altered to reflect capitalist views of their own economic system, rather than anarchist critiques of it. It is fine to explicate such views here, but they need to be properly labeled as the views of capitalists, not the voice of wikipedia, and the actual critiques of the anarchists need to be put back in where they were replaced. As it stands this article is no longer actually describing anarchist views, but rather a mismash of anarchist and capitalist views which are unattributed and thus come across as incomprehensible when read all the way through. I'm tempted to revert back to an earlier version, because working to make all these passages reflect their subject matter will be silly if it is all going to be re-inserted by folks who apparently aren't willing to simply allow a description of the anarchist critique to stand on its own merits. Kev 10:28, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Okies, I'm rolling up my sleeves and starting on removing arguments that clearly are not those of anarchists and are unattributed. I'm not trying to remove content, to my knowledge all of these arguments are present in other parts of wikipedia. However, this article is not the place for capitalist conceptions of their own economics, and I don't have time to comb through each part and figure out whose voice is supposedly being used when the editors who copy-pasted this stuff in didn't do it themselves. Kev 22:52, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

On further analysis, this article has been so horribly gutted that there is nothing left to salvage. I hate to do it, but given the vast content that was removed and the fact that it was all replaced by unattributed POV, I'm reverting to an earlier version. I'm included the POV warning that was present at one point, because it still needs to be reworked, just not by partisans with an eye for destroying its content. Kev 23:05, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Surely there is some literature where left anarchists respond to the real capitalist arguments and not just their own strawman versions. Otherwise, perhaps this article's title should be, "Anarcho-socialist's misimpressions about capitalism".--Silverback 04:03, Jun 22, 2005 (UTC)

One thing at a time, please. If anarchists promote strawman arguments, then so be it, because those are the arguments they make. Rewriting the arguments to your own understanding and speculations of what anarchists would argue is original research. If you wish to update or correct the arguments, please attribute sources -- ie anarchist writers. The changes you've made sound like they're straight off the top of your head.

On another note, presenting the arguments in a technical style point-by-point would make it a lot clearer. Let's also think about how we can break up those huge blocks of rambling text. --albamuth 04:45, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I wasn't stating that the anarchists arguments were strawman, but rather that they selected strawman capitalist arguments to respond to, and then proceeded to argue against and "defeat" those arguments. I've no problem with a reorg, as long as the relative strengths of the arguments are not arbitrarily changed.--Silverback 06:20, Jun 22, 2005 (UTC)

I'm all for reinstituting the "historical" and "contemporary" critiques format. Do you agree? --albamuth 01:59, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I'm not familiar with that format? Since the discussion of the relationship between anarchism and capitalism is current. Anything historical should perhaps be deep background. I've never had much interest in invalidated or weak arguments. If invalid arguments are to be repeated here, there is no reason to allow them the appearance of validity. They should be thoroughly analyzed, the accepted refutations presented.--Silverback 08:13, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)

Well, I was thinking that Proudhon, Kropotkin, Bakunin, etc. were working with pre-Keynesian economic analysis, so some of their arguments lack the terminology of contemporary ones and may be obsolete. Showing a chronology/timeline of the arguments might make better sense, I think. --albamuth 15:42, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Sources

The anarchist FAQ may be a convenient resource for these arguments, but all of them should be bulleted and attributed to a source, rather than left as broad, unfounded generalizations. --albamuth 08:20, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Neologisms and Unresolved Issues

Because of the ongoing, unsettled debate in Talk:Anarchism, I feel it is premature to start using the neologism anarcho-socialism. However, to avoid spilling the edit war over to this page, I won't change references to "anarcho-socialists" over to "anarchists" just yet. Secondly, it only seems to matter on the section on private property -- the problem seems to be how to distinguish Tucker/Spooner and other individualist-anarchists from previous, traditional anarchists that believed in only having personal property and collective property. Perhaps we should look more closely at the Individualists' definition of private property?