Anarcho-Socialists and Anarcho-Capitalists — Friend or Foe?

Editor’s pick. Written by Darrell Anderson.

Exchanging ideas is a challenging process all humans face. Words and language are imprecise and because all knowledge is a result of an interpretive process, exchanging ideas requires much patience between participants.

One of the divided areas of ideas are those shared by people calling themselves anarcho-socialists and anarcho-capitalists (for brevity, hereinafter called ansocs and ancaps). Browse any literature, online discussion group, or bulletin board where the ideas of each philosophy and political theory are discussed and one likely will find some hostility between the two groups. This is unfortunate, because the primary motivator of both ideologies is the philosophy of anarchy. Despite differences in perspectives and approaches, an outsider initially would think that the two sides would and should have much in common.

The two groups do indeed have much in common, but because of the challenge of language and words, the two groups maintain polarizing definitions that keep the two camps opposed instead of helping one another. Their arguments are in many ways substantively similar, but their opposing definitions tend to create games of rhetoric and semantics. I grieve over that opposition because the common enemy are people who embrace the ideology of statism and like the marriage that goes sour, ancaps and ansocs focus on their differences instead of embracing each other to end the destructive forces of statism.

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