On the internet I don’t see too many Anarchists give arguments past “communism doesn’t work because communists are doomed to repeat the same exploitative power structures of the capitalist state” and “we dont know what an anarchist society will look like we gotta wait til we get there!” Which like…is not convincing to me at all. I’ve engaged in what was supposed to be consensus based decision making systems and there were a ton of flaws, though that’s purely anecdotal.
So, I’d really like to have some suggestions on what to read that you think might really challenge where I stand/take anarchism more seriously. It might take me 5 years to get to them bc executive dysfunction but I really want to see if my mind can be changed on if it would be a better system from the get go than communism.
I think it would be super interesting to hear from anyone who shifted into anarchism from Marxism on why it made more sense to you
Gotta keep in mind that many internet Anarchists are angry young people who haven’t had much if any connection with Anarchist or other left movements. They still mostly trapped in a world of NATO propaganda and if you uncritically accept everything NATOstan says about communism then internet “No gods no bedtimes” no theory “anarchism” looks reasonable. I’d suggest go dig in to real shit - The old school stuff like Kropotkin, but also look up modern, functioning Anarchist projects. There aren’t a lot of big ones but there are lots of places where communities are run on either explicitly Anarchist lines or on lines that meaningfully run parallel to Anarchist thought. Try to look for projects outside of NATOstan and the Anglosphere. Places in the global south seem to be a lot less prone to being infected with NATO brainworms. I wish I had some examples but it’s been a while since I’ve looked it up, but you’re looking for coops, community self defense orgs, community infrastructure development, things like that. I’d say look up the Zapatistas as a starting point. Don’t worry too much about what the rest of the world calls them, try to dig up their own writings about their project and how it works day to day.
Truuuue that makes sense. I did watch a few videos on anarchism that seemed pretty rooted in theory, drawing a lot from Malatesta I believe. But it still didn’t really do anything for me, like it feels like I could poke holes in a lot of what was being explained about how it would work. But there’s only so much they can explain in 10-20 minute videos.
I’m familiar with the Zapatistas but not much else but they are based af. Or were, I think I read something recently where narcos have started to move in to their territory :/ I’ll definitely search and see if I can find out about more projects outside of the west though!
My understanding is that there are a number of radically different ideologies under the Anarchist umbrella. Like you’ve got chill community building people who have a solid theory of a society without the coercive and violent organs of a state, but you’ve also got dangerous anti-social edgelords organizing under the eight-fold star of chaos undivided. Both groups get lumped in to Anarchism but idk if it can be said they actually share much in the way of goals and beliefs beyond opposition to states.
And yeah, I understand the Zapatistas are facing serious problems and making changes. There’s no end to history, sadly.
Yeah, being a punk I was introduced to (mostly) edgelord/accelerationist “anarchists” lol. There seems to be a fairly active anarchist community where I live; from what I remember it was thriving in the 90’s here too. There’s a ton of share fairs, FNB, mutual aid groups, etc. During some of the bad first wildfires here a mutual aid network sprang up overnight and it was so so impressive, I helped out a bit with delivering groceries to people without transportation or who were medically vulnerable to the intense smoke. It was very cool; that’s some anarchist shit I DO like.
Um that 8 folf star is the symbol of chaos from Moorcock’s work. 40k appropriated it, in Moorcock’s stories chaos and law are balancing forces. It also saw extensive use in occult stuff before warhammer.
My understanding of why it’s popular as a symbol in like Greece, Chili etc is in the Moorcock sense. I.e. when states centralise and suffocate chaos is needed to restore freedom and balance. Similar to flying a black flag as the negation of flags.
Nothing in 40k is original and everything in it is a shallow ripoff of something more interesting.
If you want deliberate critique, the list in the sidebar has entries for explicitly anti-ML writings; the post-left (the real kind, not the Twitter kind) section also has some zine-sized critiques of the organizational methods of the “old Left”. Also lots of other good stuff to read.
I think part of the reason for a lack of substantive ML critique is that many anarchist currents are organized around creating and advancing a (often quite narrow) political project in the Here and Now, and do not necessarily concern themselves with the dissection of dead leaves. Some of these manifest as gangs, squats, ZADs, insurrectionary movements, FnB, etc. This is not to say that these groups do not or have not Read Theory, but that the digestion and interpretation of Theory is subordinate to the acts of creation and destruction.
It is also important to draw a distinction between Anarchism the Western political philosophy and anarchism the lived practice. Key to small-a anarchism are taking up space and a cognizance of cotemporality. We are Here together Now. Communal farms and living spaces, traditional ecological knowledge, communal child-rearing and education practices, and temporary affinity groups can all demonstrate these ideas. The default Western perspective on the apportionment of space by contract and the linearization and quantification of time mediates the relation of both the individual and the collective to the Here and Now. In this way, the importation of a Marxist or Anarchist body of theory and practice may grind against the principles that guide an existing current. Marxists and Anarchists are perhaps at odds since they disagree about the proper way to exploit the resources of the planet, but they are both bound up fundamentally in production relations.
On this last point, there are some extant sources regarding indigenous critiques of Marxism:
- Red Skin, White Masks
- Indigenous Peoples, Marxism and Late Capitalism
- This also cites an older paper, The Silko Road
- The Silko Road draws on the works of Leslie Marmon Silko
- Some additional commentary on Silko’s Almanac of the Dead in the context of 2008
I also found Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination illuminating.
To be pithy about it, Marxist and much of Anarchist thought place Now at the end of a line called History and Here within the long-collapsed walls of dead empires. Lived anarchist practice does not fix Here and Now beyond the immediate.
I am also obligated to say: Read Desert.
lmao of course I didn’t read the side bar. I really appreciate the response, though, ESPECIALLY around introducing indigenous perspectives. I’m just starting to encourage myself to read theory and once I get through all the old shit I really want to focus on indigenous struggle and those in the global south, and ultimately feel that I would align myself most with those ideals. Just good to be well rounded. I also really appreciate talking about the concept of time and the application of these ideologies to it, I definitely want to learn more about that too
“communism doesn’t work because communists are doomed to repeat the same exploitative power structures of the capitalist state”>
I’d love it if you expanded on this cause i’ve been on this massively ML dominated space for years and still haven’t been convinced that they’re not (though i was always an anarchist so that might not matter that much). One of the main function of a state is reproducing it’s power, that’s why it can’t wither away, especially in a world dominated by capitalist mode of production where communist states are forced to develop their productive forces.
“we dont know what an anarchist society will look like we gotta wait til we get there!”
We don’t know what a communist society will look like either, mind you, we have blueprints at best. I posted an essay a few weeks ago about revolutionary spain and how anarchists there organized themselves and they definitely were getting there. You can check out Diego Abad de Santilan’s writings to see a pretty concrete vision of how they wanted to make things work (though he’s somewhat of a pariah cause he joined the revolutionary government, which is, yeah, not very anarchist).
Apart from that Anarchy Works by Peter Gelderloos (it’s in the sidebar) is, while a pretty basic, but is another good example that shows why anarchism is anything but idealistic since it shows that the basics of anarchism together or separate were actually laid into praxis tons of times.
One thing to keep in mind tho which i see all the time is that anarchists have a different notion of what a successful revolution is than marxists, since their methods are different and i see this turning into a dick measuring contest still. For anarchists any revolution and any activity that creates stateless bubbles is a success, even if it’s crushed in two years. That’s why i specifically can’t look at the USSR and say it’s a success story, because while it existed, the state never withered.
Apart from that, what i think is also a huge and catastrophic misunderstanding is that most MLs still think On Authority is the greatest gotcha ever existed, but in my opinion doesn’t do anything apart from conflating authority and force. Anarchists have proven thousands of time since it was written that they are very willing to use force against capitalists and fascists but biting the hand that beats you in itself is not an authoritarian act. What anarchists didn’t do is setting up state structures where everyone’s every step is monitored and you’re encouraged to snitch on your friends and neighbours. Yes, i know we live in a system like that currently as well. That’s why i say, from an anarchist standpoint there’s no difference.
So yeah two critique’s of Engels i’ve found interesting is this one and this one.
Are we allowed to have discussion on these points in this thread? Because one thing I never understood is the idea that the socialist projects have to wither away so fast, I never got how anyone thought we were at any time in modern history at a point where the coordination created by socialist States could be torn down safely while preserving the gains made.
With the richest countries in the world and many of their colonies, with all the nukes and military one could imagine, breathing down on your doorstep I don’t know how it’s rational to think that you should then begin tearing down the structures which were then only created out of historical necessity to fight against these very forces. Do Anarchists (capital A) generally believe that the period for communist parties to prove they can transition towards a classless society has passed, and that they’ve somehow proven they’re incapable? Or do they think that the chance hasn’t been available yet but that if it was then communists would then prove themselves incapable of transitioning towards communism?
Anarchists generally think that state communist parties (council communists are a different question) are not capable to lead towards a stateless, classless society, since they want to use state power, whose primary functions include reproducing itself. I’m yet to read any convincing account about how, if we got there, Leninists would start to break down the vehicle they used to defeat capitalism and rallied society around.
If you’re asking my opinion, i have much of the same scepticism towards communist parties, but not on an equal level, for example i see much more potential in Latin American left/communist movements than in China. What i differ from most anarchists tho is that i’d be very happy to be proven wrong and generally won’t advocate for the overthrow of the CCP in the current context.
Doesn’t it seem reasonable that the idea of trying to create a classless society would be a task better suited for those who come after us? For example, the promise of socialism is that democracy is then increased to be available to the wider masses of people. Socialist societies have in the past, and even in the modern day, demonstrate that they’re able to make huge leaps in social progress that enable more people than ever before be able to participate in the democratic processes of a society. I guess I’m not convinced that the idea that “Leninsts would not break down their own state” is something which is provable, and thus not a useful heuristic for making decisions. So what if “Leninists” aren’t capable of the next step in the growth of humanity, it’s been shown that they’ll give up on their power much more peacefully than societies dominated by the bourgeois class ever will (even and especially communist officials who didn’t benefit from the transition to liberal governance). If we’re able to save the planetary ecosystem with cybernetic planning, end hunger, guarantee housing and work for those who’re able and a good life for those who aren’t as the “Leninists” demand; won’t we have left our children with far more fertile soil for an anarchist society than if we simply struggle directly for a classeless society today?
I’m yet to read any convincing account about how, if we got there, Leninists would start to break down the vehicle they used to defeat capitalism and rallied society around.
Lenin himself writes extensively on critiquing the existence of the state, so any real leninist would align with this position. Mao himself also was quite anti-state, see the cultural revolution. Both of these incredibly important figures were anti state but saw it as a necessary tool to defend against extreme capitalist agression. there is little doubt in my mind that if capitalism fell, many would start critquing and deconstructing the current power structures.
Many would see it in their best interest too, because every head of Marxism leninism has shouted to the stars about the bureaucratic state apparatus corrupting Socialism and causing capitalist restoration.
whose primary functions include reproducing itself
Mind expanding on that since it seems like in the us its doing a piss poor job of it. In fact I’d say that a capital dominated state wants to do away with itself via privatization.
Engle’s makes a pretty convincing argument that the state arose to mediate class conflict in favor of capital and that it cannot be destroyed until that class conflict is resolved.
Take the landlord tenant relationship. In order for this to exist then the landlord must exercise their property right through state mediated violence and the tenant is offered some rudimentary protections. If the state simply no longer recognized the property right of the land lord the state would wither and class conflict would resolve a bit.
Anarchists have proven thousands of time since it was written that they are very willing to use force against capitalists and fascists but biting the hand that beats you in itself is not an authoritarian act.
Ok I can agree there but about counter revolutionaries after the revolution? Do you let them organize and gather support in the name of free expression? Do you engage them only after they start shooting at you?
Another question I have is how do you handle defense of the revolution from outside forces? Sure you could have militias with elected officers and whatnot, but what if part of your anarchist territory does not want to fight to defend the revolution? I could imagine the people further away from the frontlines would be less inclined to go and fight and I’d also imagine drafting people would be too authoritarian for anarchists.
I got in to it with some internet “anarchists” about using force to disarm Nazis and keep them from organizing and arming. I was shocked that they were stridently against any attempt to control Nazis with force until the fash were breaking the door down. I just could not and cannot make sense of extending “live and let live” to fascists whose explicit goal is to kill you and everyone around you. It was an extremely strange, uhh, discussion.
Well if we manage to get there (and it’s a long shot now) the main obstacle to anyone who would rather go back to stock trading and widespread destruction of species is that people will see which one works more and if there’s a clique of these weirdos first they won’t associate with them and second if they infested to a point that they actually mean a threat to the new order, they would just rise up, as it can be seen in South America or Cuba or wherever there is a threat to the system. Anarchism isn’t against that.
The other dilemma is a good one and i’m yet to think about it thoroughly, though since it’s highly theoretical it’s tough to come up with a one size fits all solution. Obviously the main objective would be to avoid conflict. If it’s unavoidable (one thing to think about is what outside forces were there in a global anarchist society), i would think that the kind of general solidarity that we see in Bolivia or Venezuela or Cuba would switch on and there wouldn’t be a problem about it but i’ll think about it (note: this is my subjective opinion about the case you introduced).
That’s a whole lot of assumptions that need to be true for something like this to happen. The biggest assumption is that after the anarchist revolution the overwhelming majority of the populace will become ideologically anarchist and will refuse counter revolutionary propaganda and agitation. This has never happened after any revolution in history, in a lot of cases only a few percent of the populace were committed revolutionaries that actually execute the revolution with only the conditional backing of a huge chunk of the populace.
If anarchism can only work if most of the people are anarchists it’s not a viable revolutionary ideology IMO.
I read a story ages ago, and the premise was something like Anarchism had mostly taken hold for a long time, but some old hands got word that someone was building a state and went to look in to it. And it talked a bit about the “paradox of tolerance” present in a bunch of anarchists taking it on themselves to raid a nascent state and destroy it violently, what gave them the justification, what if anything they owed the folks in the state. I remember it being an interesting read but can’t remember the details. I want to say in the end it turned out that the person organizing the state turned out to be an ai who broke down crying when finally confronted and admitted it didn’t want to be building a state but didn’t know how else to handle some problem.
(one thing to think about is what outside forces were there in a global anarchist society)
But what of an anarchist society that isn’t global? The revolution has to start somewhere, and capitalists would try to crush it before it became worldwide and everyone sees that it is a superior system, yeah? Is this “highly theoretical”, or something that every revolution has to have a plan for?
There are two dynamics to keep in mind here.
One is that the bourgeois state has more contingencies that it depends on than localized egalitarian collectives do. Capitalism isn’t some latent universal law that resurfaces as soon as you’re no longer stamping it out. It’s a historical process; it came from somewhere; it was ushered into being with great amounts of force. It would take a great amount of force to reimpose it (and in 1991, it did take just that). To get rid of the landlord class, though, all a government needs to do is arm the working people and pledge not to prosecute violence against landlords.
The other is that there’s a bit of a cost-benefit analysis that needs to be done in order to subjugate a putative free territory. There’s a certain amount of resources or revenue that could be extracted from the territory. If the attempt to being it back under the yoke of capital was projected to cost more than that amount, there would be no material driving force to get it done. Capitalist entities have enough trouble already balancing 10-year prospects against quarterly prospects. Granted, though, this means that anarchist approaches would most easily work in less-developed, less-contested places.
The colossus is not something that categorically hates you, it is something that sees you as a threat to itself and also wants to exploit you.
So for the case of counter-revolutionaries, all flesh is grass, they bleed as easily as any plebeian does. For the case of “fighting to defend the revolution”, I’d be interested to see a concrete example of what that would look like, situationally.
Capitalism isn’t some latent universal law that resurfaces as soon as you’re no longer stamping it out.
It kinda of is right now. Unless the anarchist revolution is immediately global you’re gonna get bad actors from capitalist states trying to ratfuck your anarchist institutions, also the ruling classes that you deposed aren’t going to disappear overnight unless you outright kill them all.
Thank you for the thoughtful response, I look forward to reading your essay I’ll definitely try to get to it. I busted out the laptop to give a thoughtful response to you here lol. I apologize for how long it is, like it’s ridiculous but I can’t help but be long winded.
I guess for some background on where I’m at politically which may not matter but here goes lol: I’ve read very little theory myself. I think I got more radicalized in a communist direction after I went to college and studied Latin America and learned about colonization, imperialism, and socialist revolutions in different Latin American countries. I also was taught a tiny bit about Marx in college as well when I took some labor history classes. I have done a bit more research on my own about Cuba specifically, and over the years, kinda became more interested in learning about North Korea and wanting to break down internalized American propaganda. So I think my experience in college helped me to favor communism while I never was taught anything about actual anarchism. I’m familiar with some theorists and have done a tiny bit of research about it. I believe mutual aid and any other praxis happening on the ground now is critical and important. I am just starting to try to get myself more serious about reading theory and such, and before I slide more and more towards ML, I am hoping to kinda learn about both at the same time so I can actually decide where I stand politically. I do wanna challenge myself and be as informed as I can about both. I do agree with you for what seems like the dick measuring contest between the two lines of thought lmao. I find it really silly and that’s another reason why I want to learn for myself and probably want to take ideas from both anarchism and communism and apply them to how I think and operate politically. I ultimately wanna study indigenous struggle though and strive towards incorporating that thought first and foremost tho.
To give my thoughts on the quotes I provided, and explain my thoughts on consensus after engaging in it: I think what bothers me about those phrases is that often, I don’t see the explanations go much further than that, and I kinda find them contradictory. Like, okay, so on one hand anarchists believe that society and the way that humans cooperate together is fluid and constantly changing, and so that plays into why we don’t know what anarchism will look like. There is a base structure that’s been thought out as to how consensus and horizontal decision making can work now, during, and after the revolution, but that can and will change so the “end goal” is unknowable. What I find contradictory is that fluidity and evolution is being applied to anarchism, but not to communist revolution. A communist state doesn’t seem to operate the way that a capitalist state does, so why is it that we can’t evolve that state structure, and keep changing it, where the anarchist structure of consensus that was created is afforded that freedom? We are always learning from our mistakes, and from Lenin to Mao to Castro, no revolution has looked exactly the same and as far as I know, they try to look at the errors made and try to apply what works to their version of communism and discard what didn’t work in prior revolutions.
Another point that has probably been addressed in anarchist literature: When anarchism is talked about, it seems that it is portrayed as immune from hierarchy and certain people gaining more clout/influence/social capital, whatever it might be called. At one point, I worked at a job that based all of it’s decision making around consensus and a horizontal workplace. All positions were paid the same and every decision in the agency was discussed in individual department meetings, then consensus from that group was brought to the larger agency wide meeting where those thoughts/proposals were again decided through consensus. For a long time, anyone and everyone was able to join those larger agency wide meetings and participate. The workplace engaged in this type of decision making for probably close to 50 years.
There were many things that ended up happening that I felt replicated social hierarchy and what made it feel like not truly consensus decision making. Even when taught how the consensus model worked and when people were encouraged to participate, there are many people who did not engage. That could be due to apathy, anxiety, feeling that their voice would not echo as loudly as others, etc. So, people who felt more confident, were better at public speaking, or had more knowledge about the process and the work were often the most influential in the group. Sure, we would come to consensus, but there were many people who just kinda went with the flow, even if they didn’t necessarily agree with whatever decisions were made just because they didn’t care enough to participate or any of the other above reasons. The “social capital” piece also felt very inequitable; if someone came to the meeting with a personal request, or any kind of proposal and they were very well known, charismatic, well likes etc etc, they would often get the most feedback, more people would participate and they would also get decisions that would work in their favor. At the same time, other people who did not enjoy those qualities might not get equal treatment. The inequity was not a conscious choice but that was just the nature of the group. So through this, the very hierarchies that anarchism wants to abolish seem to replicate themselves. There are people who hold knowledge who try to raise the consciousness of others, there are delegates and representatives for group decision making, the charisma and ability to make social connections influences the direction of the groups. Now, I recognize that there are failsafes in place that could probably discourage these problems, and this was not called anarchism in name, so I do see how it’s different but the way the discussions were structured were the exact same way as our local anarchist collective structured them, so I feel like it’s an apt anecdote. Considering all that, it makes me feel like criticisms lobbed towards communism for its faults are also faults that exist in the anarchist system, and that anarchy can just as easily replicate systems of inequality.
ANYWAY thank you for coming to my ted talk I’m so sorry for the length lol if you stuck around this long I’m stoked to hear your thoughts on this.
Thanks for your response! I’m gonna do a brief response to each topics:
First: I support your method in engaging in both side’s theory, that’s the way to do it imo, so good on you for that! I’m not against marxist criticism if it’s informed by the knowledge of anarchist theory (lots of the shitthrowing around marxism and anarchism comes from people not engaging with source material from the other side only criticism of said source material which i try to avoid, that’s why i read marxist literature as well).
Second: What you say is true, there’s a lot of anarchists (especially on the internet) who are applying this double standard (they generally come from a place that the two ideologies can’t be synthesised at all) but there are some who think there can be a synthesis between the two ideologies, apart from the essay about Spain i would also suggest Daniel Guerin’s For a Libertarian Communism (and Guerin in general, i think he’s pretty underrated) to see where it could end up. Hell i’ve even read texts praising Tito on The Anarchist Library.
Third: You’re right, informal reproduction of social hierarchy is a problem that anarchists are grappling with, since some people will be more confident and less anxious in these situations. I’m not that well versed on the theory on that but one essay i found helpful is this one. Apart from that what i can advise you is to, if you are in a situation like that is to ask the people organising, what they will do in order to avoid this happening, like, will the people who seem more withdrawn given a platform deliberately? Will the people who tend to get asked everything willingly step back? I think this is an important problem to grapple with especially in the mentally gripping system we live in, but also i think that there could be (and maybe there are i just don’t know about them) methods to reverse it.
This is a valuable insight.
Formal power discrepancies do not spring into being out of nowhere; it usually emerges organically from informal power discrepancies. The main focus of anarchists has been to decry the formal sort, but they are largely silent or inept or even complicit when it comes to the informal sort.
Any anarchist praxis, which does not include mechanisms of preventing or narrowing informal power gaps, is going to be crucially deficient.
The EZLN does not identify with the western political paradigm and thus they are not anarchist and they openly reject the label, but they are radical and they are opposed to MLism, not in an absolute opposition sort of way but in a strongly critical sort of way.
Subcommandante Marcos has written criticisms of MLism and similar stuff. One of his big communiques in this respect is the unequivocal I Shit On All the Revolutionary Vanguards of this Planet which is a response to criticisms leveled against the EZLN.
For something a bit more dry and measured is Listen, Marxist! by Murray Bookchin, who is a contentious figure in anarchism as he too doesn’t truly fit within anarchism as he broke with it later in his life, although this piece was written prior to this development in his politics so I’d say it’s a decent example of an anarchist counter-argument to what MLs argue for.
For a longer-form defense of the anarchist position in a more general sense, one that addresses ML criticisms without necessarily responding directly to them, is Anarchy Works by Peter Gelderloos. It’s not really something that attempts to deconstruct the ML position but I think that it will still be valuable in challenging your beliefs.
Check out the work of Wayne Price. Pick whatever seems interesting https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/wayne-price
