Have a habitable moon then demonstrate anarchy will never work.
The path to our goals lies in its direct implementation.
The answer is simple, you don’t “immediately” transition 😁
Why would you want that? That would just hurt people. Too fast.
This is bait.
Rolling up my sleeves to fight for both anarchists and MLs, effectively alienating myself from both.
Ending capitalism would be the easy part. It would be cutting off a hydra head from the body of hierarchy. The forces to recreate the system would be stronger than the forces to invent a new one in a time of chaos. Daydreaming about violence is childish and probably the result of watching too much military propaganda as a kid. People have to want to change before they change, making them change suddenly makes most people reactionary.
I feel like we’ve been doing pretty great lately with leftist unity on Lemmy; this is disappointing to see
I think things are mostly settled down. There’s the odd jab or two, but Lemmy.ml mods have taken a harder stance against provocation of anarchists. At the same time, dbzer0 has taken a softer stance against “tankies.” The ones on dbzer0 that find that unacceptable have generally left already to the more liberal-aligned instances.
Changing a system is an evolutive process through generations and education, no one of revolutions. Revolutions can change the system but not the mindset of the people, because of this it’s corrupted and betrayed in a short time, always. See history. Human society is very young, with the equivalence of a child in puberty (current human behavior with wars and conflicts shows it). An anarchic society requires a mature population with self-responsibility to work, if you don’t want that it is turned in an opressive dictatorship (result of a lot revolutions before). The society is converging towards to more freedom and autosovereighn, but not through revolutions, but generations.
What you’re calling a revolution, is a coup. A violent one off that amounts to a power grab of one affinity group over an entrenched power.
What a revolution actually is, is a fundamental change to the social structure of society, it is the “evolutive” process that you describe.
This is a widely adopted paradigm all over the revolutionary left that includes anarchists, Marxists, and left socialists. The revolution of capitalism took hundreds of years, and occurred unevenly all over the world. There were wars and coups, sometimes those wars were progressive, sometimes regressive, sometimes a war starts progressive and ends regressive, and sometimes the opposite occurs. The mindset of the people must be changed, but often these changes occur in messy ways. The mindset of the masses is not something that happens only in peoples minds, any more than a “evolutive” change can’t occur as a legal legitimacy. I’m not sure why you want to reframe revolution as the conservative definition.
The part of your comment I’m most critical of, is that it amounts to a gradualist theory of change. This really isn’t descriptive of progressive movements which assert themselves on history, dragging along the regressive elements kicking and screaming. Often this elicits a counter reaction, but this doesn’t indicate a historic failure of progress. It is IMO a failure of progressive movements to not push far enough into their demands, accepting compromises from the center that amount to huge losses for the mass movement.
I agree that there is an incredibly important role for our movements to try and educate the masses, before, during, and after the revolution. Some of the great failures of revolution, such as the German revolution 1917-1925ish, was a failure to educate, which led to a tendency for movements to become coopted, or putsch, which definitely demonstrates the parts of your comment that are correct. Other revolutionary moments, such as the self-emancipation of black slaves during the USAmerican Civil War, are much more complex. The planter class was effectively abolished, but Reconstruction was halted and partially rolled back by extremist reactionaries. You wouldn’t advocate a policy of gradualism against the KKK.
Decolonization is inherently a violent process that is messy and fraught with contradiction. The indigenous people are absolutely justified to fight for their freedom and sovereignty against colonial forces which dominate and rob their lands directly. How these movements degrade into neo-colonies is a subject in and of itself, I’d only mention that the imperialism of capitalism has a persistent character of violence and class war that victimizes the masses every day. The gradualist approach is nakedly ineffective against this persistent hegemony and dominance.
I’ve never met an Anarchist with views quite like yours, I know Anarchism is not a totality but a plurality by nature, and though I am not an Anarchist I admire this kind of commitment to plurality and individual freedom. But I’ve never met a non-revolutionary Anarchist on the left.
Agree mostly with you, I’m not an Anarchist nor fitting in other boxes, I’m very old and know well the human nature, this made me, well, an maybe somewhat fatalistic common sensist.
Peoples mindsets change gradually to align with changes in the way they live, produce, and distribute, because our ideas come from out material conditions. Revolution changes the mode of production and distribution, it changes which class controls society, but people’s mindsets change gradually after this. There is no way to this without revolution.
Secondly, socialist revolutions have not turned into “oppressive dictatorships” except from the perspective of the former ruling classes. Capitalists always see worker control as despotic.
damn MLs apparently really need to constantly find new strawmen to dunk on anarchism with. to cope with the cognitive dissonance of ignoring valid criticism of their perfect and infallible ideology maybe?
What valid criticism do you have of Marxism-Leninism?
🤡
Strawman most anarchists acknowledge that it takes a transitional period to get from capitalism to communism. Any ML who claims that (all) anarchists refuse to accept that just didn’t bother engaging in anarchist theory.
The main difference to authoritaian socialists (as opposed to libertarian socialists) is that they take means-ends-unity into account.
Marxists take means-ends-unity into account as well, though. The Marxist concept of the withering of the state isn’t the fantasy of a strong central body willingly decided to abolish itself, this actually goes against how Marxists understand social class and administration under socialism. The withering of the state is a process that coexists with the gradual collectivization of all production and distribution, and because anarchists often see hierarchy as synonymous with class, they think this administration forms its own class. In reality, administrators in socialism are not a distinct class from the working class, but a subclass of them, with class interests aligned with the rest of their class.
I would not dismiss the concern of an administration being seen as a class onto itself, with its own discretionary powers and interests, out of hand. This isn’t too distant from clerics that were/are the law, and acted in their own interests in times present/past. They speak for their gods, so of course they must be right in their righteousness.
By using definitions to declare that an administrator or other principle executive of an organ of power, as being a member of the working class (therefore: you see comrade, they cannot possibly be a class on to themself as they are part of the working class) skirts around the concern of the anarchist.
It seems to trivialise the notion that others can act in their own interest, in the interest of their office, or even in the perception of their office, or that responsibilities and powers given to those bodies, and the corruptibility of those powers, and the entrenchment of those bodies against the perceived enemies of those offices, can never be used against the interests of that of the working class as naïvety is itself naïve.
The model is obviously Russia. In Russia, something very instructive happened: the working class legit overthrew the Tsar but was very close to giving in to moderates who were unambiguously going to reinstall the tsar as part of a constitutional monarchy, and carry out violent martial law via Kornilov to accomplish this.
The revolutionary leadership of the Bolsheviks was able to to defeat the capitalists and the tsarists, to “finish” the revolution, but what came after was a horrible civil war that destroyed what little productive capacity Russia had developed. Without factories, there’s no workers, without workers, there’s no workers councils (soviets) to hold power. What was left over was the bureaucracy that developed during wartime. This is the class that developed their own interests apart from the working class, effectively becoming a new bourgeois to administer the mixed economy of Stalinism.
Yes Anarchists should be wary of this, and yes “authoritarian statists” are IMO no more revolutionary than a moderate social bureaucrat. I just wish there was better discussion around the practical history of these movements. Even Paul Averich, the anarchist historian, blames events, not ideology, on the degeneration of the Russian revolution.
I think it’s reductive to claim soviet administrators formed a cohesive and distinct class, without justifying this. They gained their incomes from wages, and alongside the rest of the working classes were interested in continued collectivization of production and distribution. The problem wasn’t “Stalinism,” but instead the reforms under Khrushchev that facilitated the growth of a private economy that was not acknowledged by the state the way it is in China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc, which led to the growth of bourgeois classes after Stalin.
Cowbee my friend, we are probably not gonna see eye to eye on this. Still mad respect.
The justification is also an accidental quirk of history. The administration of national sovereignty, especially during wartime, requires a layer of administrative workers. The og Bolsheviks were a pretty distinct org with their own character, made up of bourgeois educated intellectuals, a large bellicose element from Russian society, and since the Bolsheviks had the best penetration into the lives of the workers a significant proletarian membership that kept the party afloat during the years of severe tsarist repression from 1907-1912ish, that was itself blended between urban proletarians and peasants transitioning toward proletarianism. But when the time came to administer the Russian state, the intellectual Bolsheviks were spread extremely thin.
The period after the revolution saw a massive influx of members into the Bolsheviks. Were these members revolution hardened Marxists? No. The Bolsheviks were a micro minority up until the April thesis. They swelled in membership immediately prior to the revolution, but these new members were among the workers and soldiers. But after the revolution, they included intellectuals from all stripes: former Mensheviks, SRs and moderates (that is moderate toward the Tsar.) Many people resumed their former posts within the Russian government out of necessity for the state to function. The contradictions during this period were compounded again and again because of the civil war.
This moderate, self interested administrative body is what I refer to as “Stalinist”, since I don’t really consider the post revolutionary Russian bureaucracy a product of Stalin so much as I consider Stalin a product of this bureaucracy. Stalin and the bureaucracy became dynamically fused to one another via mutual self-interest. The banning of factions, one of the major fuck ups of the revolutionary government in 1921, only heightened these contradictions as the Bolshevik party became the primary avenue for naked opportunism.
The Russian revolution was revolutionary and proletariat via the soviets, but when the productive capacity was crushed and the soviets were banned, robbed of the productive base and therefore the concrete power of the workers, what was left? There was no proletarian power represented in the government, especially as Stalin started replacing the old Bolsheviks, who at least had an ideological commitment to worker power, with people loyal to him and the wider project. This bureaucracy had a bourgeois character because it was a middle administrative class ascentionist project, like we’ve seen historically overthrow and maintain power over aristocracies. And honestly I don’t hate this. Lenin would have accepted a bourgeois revolution that completely overthrew the Tsar over a socialist revolution that regressed back into Tsarism. Stalin was extremely moderate toward bourgeois revolution, and Trotsky would have been fine with it too if he had taken leadership. That was what existed, that was all that was left, and that is what persisted into the future. The ideological commitment to socialism was admirable but mixed in that where there was no material basis for socialism it could only exist ideologically.
Here we may run into conflict between definitions of socialism, since I know you define socialism in an AES kind of way, where as I define it as a practical progressive struggle. We’ve discussed this before. Socialism is a movement of the mass base for the class interests of this base, demcent is a way for the masses to appoint leaders in a transparent Democratic way, and communicate material conditions across the uneven development of the proletarian movement, not for leaders to institute top-down discipline. The leaders submit to the discipline of the mass movement, not the other way around, which is bourgeois centralism. In Russia, the proletarian mass movement was crushed by the Capitalists and Tsarists, and what was left over was admittedly much better than what would have come without the revolutionary leadership of the Bolsheviks. But when the base was crushed what was left was a deeply troubled state apparatus that had a distinct class character that could never have been proletarian. Like I said, this is a quirk of history, a consequence of a socialist worker revolution in a country that was deeply blended between peasant and proletarian in character.
My understanding comes from Trotsky’s works, so HRR, HRR through Brest Litovsk, and Revolution Betrayed; Paul Averich’s Kronstadt 1917; essays by Loren Goldner, and other sources. I find it a little annoying that you brought up the “justification” as if I’m just making shit up. I understand that my “left Trot” political orientation probably auto disqualifies me from a certain perspective. But I’ll def consider any other justifications, articles def appreciated if they pointedly address some of the points I’ve made.
There are more than a few problems I have with your portrayal of events and class composition. I respect your sticking to your principles, but I have some heavy departures, both theoretically and historically.
First, I am well aware that the composition of Bolsheviks became very mixed in a tumultuous wartime environment. This cannot really be denied, nor would I want to. What I want to push back on, however, is the notion that this resulted in a bourgeois character. The industrial base was destroyed, correct, and so it was rebuilt, first focusing on agrarian production, and next on industrial production. Soviets became the basis of the Soviet Union, and by 1936 the Soviet Union had established an industrial and agricultural base that far exceeded pre-war levels.
What happened was that soviet democracy was implemented, and the party became integrated and was composed of the working classes and the newly rejuvenated workers and peasants. Stalin was not some bourgeois figure, nor was the party in opposition to socialism. The bourgeois character did not appear until Khrushchev’s era, growing under Gorbachev and then succeeding in counter-revolution.
Second, the banning of factionalism was necessary and correct. Undermining democratic centralism and establishing wedges by which to break apart the unity of the socialist system would have been catastrophic, and the fifth column elements that existed within the Soviet Union represented a very clear demonstration of such a danger.
The actual class character of the CPSU was proletarian. The bourgeois elements of society, including kulaks, had been liquidated as a firm class by 1936 or so. The devastation of World War II severely weakened the Soviet Union, however, and these cracks grew into weaknesses exploited by the bourgeoisie that had risen again under Khrushchev, resulting in counterrevolution.
For recommended reading, I have 2 good, wildly different options. The first is This Soviet World, written in 1936 by a Statesian journalist named Anna Louise Strong. The earlier chapters are enormously beneficial for understanding the class composition of society and the party, how it integrated with the masses, their relationship, and more, though the whole book is great (mind the dated language surrounding ethnicity, though). The second recommendation is Losurdo’s Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend. Written after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Losurdo gives a very compelling analysis of the legend of Stalin, moreso than a history of the figure himself. Through this framework, it becomes much easier to see a retrospective on the entire Stalin era of the USSR. Both taken together give a multi-sided view.
Administrators absolutely have privledges, even within socialism, that can and are abused. This, however, is not enough to designate them a class. The primacy of class analysis is not in how abusable a position is, but instead the actual class interests and relations a class has with others. In the Marxist view of class, the upper class in a given society exploits the lower class, and exploitation specifically relates to the economic control of the surplus created by the lower class.
This has profound implications when it comes to administration. Marxists understand that mental labor is still socially necessary, and this includes administrative labor. Administration is therefore a job, not a class. The form of class of administration therefore depends on how this group actually gains their means of life, through wages, or through exploitation?
In socialism, administrators receive their pay through wages, not through deploying capital through an M-C-M’ circuit. This is not a mere technicality, it’s the entire basis of shared, collective class interest. This does not mean administrators are infallible, corruption definitely exists, and it is easier to be corrupt with an administrative position, but because it does not form its own class it does not actually make any sense to abolish this job position, as it is socially necessary for expanded production and distribution, which forms the basis for lowering working hours and educating the entire working class to a far greater and more equalized level of participation in society.
i wonder how fast you would get banned if you posted this on dbzer0. lol
You probably wouldn’t. We’re pretty reasonable over here and don’t really censor people unless there is a victim of your behavior. I just reread our rules and this post doesn’t seem to violate any of them.
Communists projecting their insecurities into anarchists isn’t something new
@[email protected] this is why i shared my comment – posting anti-anarchist content on a socialist platform is as pointless as liberals sharing anti-communist content w each other.
if they want to get their anti-anarchist lols out – then it’s better to post it on a liberal platform like reddit or lemmy.world who are already conditioned to believe that anarchism and communist are the same thing.
if they want to spark discourse – then it’s better to post it on an anarchist heavy platform like dbzer0 that has a significant communist population where it can be debated in good faith.
posting it here has little to no impact or use other than to drive a wedge between leftists.
Luckily, this seems to have brought us together rather than driving us apart.
@[email protected] is a pretty clever guy, and I would love nothing more than to see his well thought out response to this meme. OP, since your meme does not seem to break our rules, I would like to cordially invite you into our lions den for the educational experience of a lifetime…unless you’re too chicken.
since your meme does not seem to break our rules
you should address this to OP – i have no qualms nor concerns about anarchism nor anarchy.
From what I remember from readin the literature at punk shows (I know, I know) socialism and even hardline ML is the same transitional state that anarchism would use if it were to succeed past faction/warlordism on the first day after revolution. So ye as fun as it is to sling shit we are kinda all on the same team.
If we’re talking political philosophy, we have some similarities, but if we’re talking about lemmy rules between ML and DB0 (which we are), we have different approaches.
Fortunafors generalized it to communists and anarchists, not just lemmy.ml and dbzer0.
I see how you’re reading it now. Since it was in a reply about to comment on DB0 rules, I had originally interpreted it as being about the two communities.
For the record, I see the communists as allied to us politically and I see ML as federated to us socially, so I apologize if my last reply seemed like an endorsement of any one philosophy over the other. In my opinion, we’re all friends here.
Please don’t ban me, love y’all, I’ll see myself out.
Yea, it’s a bit of both here IMO. The instance debate was the original part, then it was broadened into communists vs. anarchists. I see how you read it originally, though!
And tbh you don’t need to worry about being banned so much. Lemmy.ml has a bit of a reputation from the loud squeeky wheels that get banned for bigotry, chauvanism, Zionism, etc, who then frame it as “criticizing xyz socialist state.” In reality, Lemmy.ml doesn’t really overstep rules, and most bans are temporary, with short sentences.
In practice, all explicitly anarchist revolutions, such as in Catalonia, have either created states or dissolved. In Catalonia, towards the end of the war, the anarchists began to adopt more hierarchical structures of workers. They willingly conceded their ideals for the practical advantages in combat that they needed, but it was unfortunately too little too late.
That isn’t to say that no anarchist has ever done good work, to the contrary, anarchists have been very progressive at many times. However, I do think that experience of anarchist practice does lend more credence to the Marxist interpretation of the world than anarchist.
Bingo. As always, beautiful explanation of something I’m too tired (and stupid) to put into historical context 😂😅
Nah, you’re not stupid at all! But I can relate to being tired, haha.
This. What’s to stop society devolving into a bunch of mafias? They’d stabillize into an oligarchy and then you’d eventually get to where we are anyway.
Yeah it’s much better to directly go to the oligarchs stage with an ml society
The USSR achieved the lowest levels of income inequality ever seen in the modern era. Top 1% population owned 3-4% of total wealth and Top 10% owned 20-25%.
What do you mean by “oligarch stage,” and what does that have to do with Marxism-Leninism?
Salient.
Ahahah, anarchist are stupid, right?
Come on, I am no anarchist, but you should give them credit they have worked out how an anarchist society could work a bit more in depth than the writers of that sketch.
Can we see this anarchist society actually working anywhere?
Not that I know of, which is one of the reasons why I’m not an anarchist. But the society anarchists imagines is quite more elaborated than what that demented sketch depicted.
And I get it, it’s a tv sketch, not all of them can be smart and witty. I just resent it being used to make a political point.
Simply being elaborate doesn’t make it any more realistic than the sketch. What the sketch gets at is the problem with rejecting hierarchies and authority which is at the core of anarchist ideology. There is a reason why societies inevitably converge on these mechanics as they grow, or go extinct.
No one forces you to study anarchist theory, but maybe you could refrain from explaining it to me as of you had.
Besides, all anarchist societies I know of did not fail of their own accord, but were military repressed, which is why I would still give anarchy a chance.
As a scholar of anarchist theory, feel free to correct what it is I got wrong about it.
Meanwhile, the fact that anarchist societies have to contend with both external and internal pressures like any other society is the whole point here. If a society is unable to defend itself against external threats then it is not a viable society.
Okay I feel like the more basic question of “who washes the diapers at the assisted living home” in anarchism is more the thing, less about the “upend the system” stuff with every other revolutionary philosophy.
Believe it or not but actually a fair number of people enjoy taking care of other people.
The issue is not the job in itself but how it is devalued by the current society, ensuring low status and poor working conditions.
Just go talk to some nurses, they’ll tell you the bad part of the job isn’t changing diapers but rather how management keeps shortening the time they have per patient or how their family wishes they’d been a doctor instead.
When my neighbor was dying at the nursing home, he frequently was urine soaked. They won’t let visitors help either, “liability reasons.”
The parent company will dump a bunch of money on sign on bonuses, over work and under pay, firing any for violations that are actually caught, and see who is desperate or compassionate enough to stay and throw then when the inevitable violation is caught, throw them under the bus, too. This also results in the revocation of the employees’ credentialing, and they are blacklisted from ever working in their field, again. So yeah, that’s why care homes call the fire departments to lift a fallen resident.
Well, there is also logistics.
People, like nurses and doctors, do enjoy helping and taking care of people.
But to do that you need a pretty robust logistics system just to get those people to the people in need, and the supplies needed to help.
You got to get the doctor, with the medicine, to the mountain or you got get the person off the mountain, to the doctor and the medicine.
Now you need all kinds of infrastructure, not to mention what it takes to produce the medicine, or educate the doctors and nurses so they’re not just doing bloodletting and snake bites.
Right. This is why my example wasn’t the caregivers at the nursing home, it was the diaper laundry at the nursing home.
