"liberal" may very well be the most complicated word in the english language. it means so many different things that this question is very hard to answer.

in the united states, "liberal" tends to mean almost the opposite of what it meant two hundred years ago. and, if you take a detour a little bit north to canada, the liberal party - which has run the country for most of it's history - is probably the closest thing to a social anarchist party in the history of the western world. this is for the precise reason that it sticks closer to the old eighteenth century ideals that liberalism and anarchism both developed out of. if you swing down to australia, the liberal party is a bastion of right-wing extremism. in russia, "liberal" tends to actually mean "nationalist" - and often borders on fascism.

if you want the strictest definition, "liberal" and "anarchist" are essentially interchangeable. worse, keep this in mind: marx never called himself a marxist. he always called himself a liberal. and such is also true of a wide swath of thinkers that we give all sorts of other titles to, retroactively.

to co-opt a famous canadian saying, one could say something along the lines of that anarchists are liberals in a hurry.

don't interpret that to mean that anarchists will support political parties that call themselves liberal parties - we usually will not, or will only do so very tentatively. this, however, has less to do with anarchists disagreeing with liberals and more to do with liberal parties generally not being very liberal.

http://anarchy101.org/4250/do-anarchist-agree-with-liberals

Fa
@dtk: "if you want the strictest definition, "liberal" and "anarchist" are essentially interchangeable."

from merriam-webster's dictionary (since you mentioned "strict" definitions):

a political philosophy based on belief in progress, the essential goodness of the human race, and the autonomy of the individual and standing for the protection of political and civil liberties;specifically :  such a philosophy that considers government as a crucial instrument for amelioration of social inequities (as those involving race, gender, or class)

aside from the "autonomy of the individual" - which conflicts directly with the clear desire for "government" (to, i guess, enforce that autonomy?) - there is nothing anarchistic about that philosophy/position/political perspective. at least not to this anarchist.

i don't see any way that individual autonomy can coexist with the concept of "rights". for reasons articulated pretty well below by rice boy.

deathtokoalas
that's a definition that is lacking, though. it's less that it's wrong and more that it's kind of over-specific. and, in the end we're talking about splitting hairs. when you talk about "using government to ameliorate social inequalities", it's not clear what that refers to: parliamentary democracy, workers co-operatives, council democracy. if you restrict it specifically to parliamentary democracy, you get the kind of liberalism that exists in canada. if you're a bit more broad about it, you're constructing anarchism.

i consider the opposition to rights, as articulated, to be marxist, not anarchist. i'd actually point to this as one of the differences between anarchism and marxism, and why anarchism is superior.

nor do i think it's off-base to suggest that anarchists are hegelians or that they believe in the inherent goodness of people.

to me, the only serious defining difference has to do with private property. liberals are, of course, advocates of private property; anarchists are generally not. but, there's a spectrum, there, and degrees of support - enough that if you want to be as general as possible, it sort of fades away.

to clarify a little: what i'm trying to get across is that anarchists would support and uphold the idea that people have the rights to certain things like food and shelter, that's the entire point of abolishing capitalism and private property, but they would also argue that the state acts to restrict rather than uphold those rights. so, the idea of having this constitution that says what rights we have and don't have would strike us as the wrong approach, sure. but we do agree with the idea that these rights exist, we just don't agree the state can do anything but interfere in them.

it's marxists that look at the situation and declare the whole thing a "bourgeois fantasy" and throw it out the window in favour of some pseudo-fascist, collectivist concept of contributing to the whole - creating untold human misery.

so, it's one thing to point out that anarchists are generally going to look at the idea of a constitution upholding human rights and say "no. no. this is all wrong.", and it's another to suggest that they don't accept the existence of natural rights - of course we do. we always have. it's the major reason we're not marxists.

Amorfati
'rights' don't have anything to do with anything. in terms of food and water, for me it's about opening up the possibility that i, and others, can obtain them in a far more direct manner than we may currently under this oppressive system.

Fa
you obviously speak for yourself, but you do not speak for me or most anarchists i choose to associate with.  i do not accept the existence of "natural rights", any more than i accept the existence of some universal morality, or "god".  i surely can't "prove" those things don't exist, any more than you can "prove" that they do. it is irrelevant to my life.

i also agree with amorfati's comment above.

in the spirit of clarity, let me point out that there is no single, universally accepted "anarchist" perspective. as evidenced by the existence of folks that identify as anarcho-capitalist and others that identify as anarcho-communist. (just to point out how wide the spectrum can be, in the minds of some).

a number of the regulars on this site tend towards a perspective that diverges from the classical (radical) "left" that anarchy clearly shares some roots with. there are surely some core tenets that any conscious anarchist would acknowledge, but "natural rights" would not be one of them. being against all forms of government, and capitalism, and any other institutionalized hierarchy, would be.

edited to add: an obvious problem, from my perspective, with the concept of "natural rights" is this:  who determines what those natural rights are?

deathtokoalas
natural rights are inherently atheistic. they're erected on the framework of reason and logic, in opposition to written laws that were seen to be the results of supernatural dictates. and, historically, that's how they've been used: to overrule positive and theistic law.

again: the purpose of anarchism is to remove the state and capitalism because they infringe upon people's rights. liberalism seeks to use the state to enforce rights. anarchism claims that is impossible. but, there is no disagreement on the existence of those rights.

but, of course natural rights don't actually exist. they're just the arbitrary rules we make up and agree to abide by, because we want to, not because we're forced to. that underlying system of morality (derived through reason) is what separates anarchism from barbarism.

if you want a reference, it's basically the social contract, as articulated by proudhon. but it's really rather intuitive. and, i would claim that anarchism could only be barbarism, otherwise.

or, to put it another way: without a near-universal, willing adoption of the principles of natural rights theory, hobbes was right, and we are wrong.

Amarfati
the framework(s) of reason and logic are supernatural dictates by definition precisely because they're axiomatic, that is, they are believed worthy and fitting prior to any exercise of reason and logic. circularity ensues since one would have to 'prove' them as actually worthy/fitting by the very framework they provide!

deathtokoalas
i guess you can think what you want, but you have no right to call yourself an anarchist. anarchism is a philosophy in the tradition of locke, paine, proudhon and kropotkin, all of whom placed enlightenment principles at the core of their thinking. you cannot be an anarchist and reject the enlightenment at the same time. it's like claiming you're a socialist, but don't oppose private ownership of the means of production. it's a position of utter nonsense. you need to come up with something else.

i suggest the term "lout".

traditional societies generally have very clear concepts of natural rights.

but, of course, let's remember that anarchism is not rooted in engels' racist romanticization of traditional cultures. again, that is marxism. what we call "anarcho-primitivism" is just a nonsensical stringing together of words that do not make sense together. anarchism is not and cannot be primitivist - it is the search for civility. advancement. it assumes mass societies of the type that exist in europe, and is void of context when removed from such a thing. it is not a plan to abolish society. it is a theory of how society may function without centralized control.

(deleted nonsense)

see, this is a symptom of the general problem. the principles of anarchist thought are laid out in two hundred years of writing. and, for all your own language aside, none of you have provided me with anything worth responding to further.

one of the principles laid out in anarchist writing is that we get to figure shit out as it's coming at us, relative to a set of ideals. and that's really just democracy. saying that we're not willing to write down an authoritative plan is not the same thing as rejecting the principles that have led us to that position. this is the same point as seen elsewhere: it's not the abolition of principles, it's the abolition of enforced rules. the rejection of arbitrary restrictions. it's not a total absence of thought, but a rejection of all authority in controlling that thought. if we don't have a set of ideas, we're not proposing a real system of thought. we're opening up space for ancaps and other people that would oppose our basic values. and, that's inevitably just a hobbesian world of neo-liberalism that pits everybody against each other.

but, all i'm getting at is that you're reinventing the wheel where you don't have to. all of these ideas have been worked out elsewhere. you're not going to get anywhere novel by starting from first principles. taking the time to read through the existing arguments can only broaden your understanding of things, by drawing attention to things you hadn't thought of before and presenting arguments from perspectives you hadn't previously contemplated.

making every generation start from scratch is a surefire way to get absolutely nowhere.

and, if you're going to call yourself an anarchist, you really ought to have defined perspectives, at the least, on what property is, on mutual aid and on distributive justice. otherwise, it doesn't mean anything.

do you really think the bank of canada has ever seriously been entirely independent of the pmo?

i think that the independence of the bank of canada functionally refers to the ability of the bank to reject decisions that are clearly wrong, rather than the ability to evade any political influence.

i mean, i know what's supposed to be true. but it's really never actually been true.

"Although the Bank enjoys substantial independence, the Bank of Canada Act gives the finance minister the right to issue a formal, written policy directive to the Bank of Canada if, after consultation,  disagreement on policy persists. It was the resignation of Coyne in  1961, over differences with the government, that influenced the introduction of the legal provision clarifying that ultimate  responsibility for policy rests with the government."

i think this is important in regards to the dollar. of all harper's failures, that is the one that hurt us the most - he did nothing to slow the dollar's rise. that killed the export economy, made us dependent on imports and is the ultimate cause of the inflation we're dealing with at the moment.

that oil is stranded, and harper seems to actually be the only party leader that realizes it. so, *now* he's pushing the dollar back down. it's too little, too late. and, it's left a mess.

and, you know, i'm going to be pissed if he starts taking credit for this - because he's spent the last ten years blaming the decline of the manufacturing sector on the ontario liberals', when it truth it was a failure of his own monetary policy.

http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/canadian-keynesian/2015/08/harper-jeopardizes-conduct-monetary-policy

i'm not comfortable with the liberals' position on this bill - i think they should have voted against it. but, it's disingenuous to not mention that:

1) it would have passed had they voted against it, and
2) they claim that they'll follow the recommendations of the lawyers you speak of in amending it.

the liberals actually have a pretty good track record on this issue - when they pass these kinds of laws, they insist that it's a reasonable response to an imminent threat and they insert things like sunset clauses so that the increased powers run out when the imminent threat has resolved itself.

they clearly screwed this up - it's widely acknowledged that this is the primary reason the ndp are leading in the polls. but, they claim they'll change it. and their track record on this particular issue suggests you can believe them on it.

further, it's worth noting that mulcair has since moderated his position to align almost identically with trudeau's.

http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/kgrandia/2015/08/why-privacy-matters-this-canadian-election

acs
Put them in power, and the Dippers will NOT repeal C-51. They may give another go at the 'lawful' language, which the Chretien Liberals also tried to sneak in, with their post-9/11 legislation. Only Freemen, right wing extremists, or some other bogeymen will replace the Islamists of Stephen Harper's narrative, if/when we have an NDP government. All three main parties advocate a corporatist managed democracy, along the likes of Singapore. Anyone who puts their faith in a new government to protect civil rights and freedoms is seriously deluded.

deathtokoalas
see, the thing is that we really have nothing to base any projections of ndp legislation on this topic on. there's no provincial legislation from either the ndp or mulcair. but, i really don't think it would look very different than the typical trudeauvian post october crisis language of limited action and sunset clauses. that's really my point - there's not an *actual* difference between the two parties on this issue, it's just a shady political ploy.