I'm aware this term has been around for a while, but it has spiked in usage during the george floyd protests and now again with the arrest of the bodega clerk in New York after he stabbed someone trying to rob him, and was subsequently charged with murder. It's defined as "A stage of governmental dysfunction in which the state is anarchically hopeless at coping with large matters but ruthlessly tyrannical in the enforcement of small ones".
The term was coined by Samuel T. Francis (a noted racist and hate group member), originally relating to how violent gangs were not prosecuted while other, smaller crimes were, particularly against the people who would be most affected by gang violence.
I think that there is also a missing thread here, in that in the anglosphere "Anarchy" has long been used as a synonym for "Lawlessness", or "No Rules", which everyone understands to ultimately mean "Rule of the Strongest/The Mob". That goes at least as far back as the English Civil War, in fact.
This gets racialised in the US due to our historic, & often still present over-reliance on the subject labor of people of color.
anarcho tyranny is when no laws but still bedtimes :le-pol-face:
They’re discussing collapse politics and throwing in the term anarchy because to them it just means “bad.” The phenomenon they’re discussing though is a real and interesting one. To me it’s the result of system collapse or at the very least decay as large scale political projects become non-viable and thus the political apparatus begins to lose its legitimacy. A key part to legitimacy theory is the understanding that the veil of legitimacy that is placed over power is there to protect power from having to exert itself (and therefore exhaust itself). As legitimacy crumbles and the bare power - ie violence - structures remain they exert their power with more and more vigor to make up for the lost ‘soft’ power of legitimacy. ‘Anarcho-tyranny’ is the state (or whatever political project) reaching its limits and receding, more and more violently over time. It’s collapse politics, I imagine it’s what many great empires experiences on their deathbeds as well
Fair point though I still think it’s a misapplication here. Anarchy defined that way might be a rising trend in these collapse states but it’s the dialectical other the collapse politics are forming in response to rather than the formation itself
i wouldn't issue a blanket ban on cribbing concepts from the right, but if we do, i don't see why we would change the name. on the other hand, if the right does innovate something, maybe that's a sign that it's not particularly useful to left analysis.
in this case, it sounds like special pleading to explain the obvious fact that the larger punitive state fascists demand has not and will not result in a safer society. "empowering pigs to execute people in the street is obviously good, but because of the :sicko-queer:s they are currently only doing this to white nationalists and small business owners and my son Rupert Horseteeth IV, and not perverts and drug dealers like they should be doing."
