Differences/similarities between marxism and anarchism?
I have a general idea what marxism is about, but only a 'pop politics' idea. I did study it as a module in university but that was almost two decades ago and was also not going very deep as only one, iirc, essay we did on him before being whisked to the next topic.
Anarchism I have a much less clear idea on, again except for the popular stereotypes.
I was on a bit of a clicking spree on wikipedia earlier today beginning at anarchist-communism and saw there have been several movements in this direction both past and present.
I want to dig deeper into this and my reading list is going to be of both as my next priority.
Initially I came to the thought of questioning communism, having gotten more interested in it, when I got to thinking that all states end up getting corrupted so the legical next step was anarchism.
I am not implying it necessarily has to be like that and maybe 'real' communism wouldn't? I am not informed enough to say.
Soon after I learned of the intermingling of the two in anarchist communism.
I have too much of a dim perception of either at the moment to really be able to formulate any kind of cogent questions on the subject matter but I merely say I am hungry to know more so that I may and would like to be guided on the matter.
If there is enough there for anyone to grab hold of and make some kind of reply I might be able to then impute something better. I feel that if someone can outline the main beats of each this will then act as kindling add more myself.
Hopefully it is not too 'low quality' as my first post but I am struggling how to express myself given my lack of knowledge but showing a keen motivation to improve in that department.
Anarchism I have a much less clear idea on, again except for the popular stereotypes.
I was on a bit of a clicking spree on wikipedia earlier today beginning at anarchist-communism and saw there have been several movements in this direction both past and present.
I want to dig deeper into this and my reading list is going to be of both as my next priority.
Initially I came to the thought of questioning communism, having gotten more interested in it, when I got to thinking that all states end up getting corrupted so the legical next step was anarchism.
I am not implying it necessarily has to be like that and maybe 'real' communism wouldn't? I am not informed enough to say.
Soon after I learned of the intermingling of the two in anarchist communism.
I have too much of a dim perception of either at the moment to really be able to formulate any kind of cogent questions on the subject matter but I merely say I am hungry to know more so that I may and would like to be guided on the matter.
If there is enough there for anyone to grab hold of and make some kind of reply I might be able to then impute something better. I feel that if someone can outline the main beats of each this will then act as kindling add more myself.
Hopefully it is not too 'low quality' as my first post but I am struggling how to express myself given my lack of knowledge but showing a keen motivation to improve in that department.
Comments (229)
Good questions. One's I still reflect upon.
For Marxism I recommend www.marxists.org as a resource. For anarchy I recommend An Anarchist FAQ.
The wikipedia entries are good fodder for names and dates and historical events. Some of the "differences" between the two are more historical than conceptual, but still articulatable. There are times I think it comes down to almost nothing, though the popular conception is that they are opposite, so things become confusing as we rely upon our common notions.
Which is why I like the texts to begin getting at a difference.
But a rough-and-ready differentiation I could provide would be -- both are radical political philosophies. By "radical" I mean that they posit some underlying mechanism that is the result of many problems within current society. For Marx that radical center to society is the mode of production of a given society, which in turn is defined by ownership relationships to wealth production through labor-time, and so changing this mode of production is its goal for a classless society. For anarchy the radical center to society are hierarchical social relationships, so in order to develop an anarchist society we change our social relations such that we no longer hold hierarchical positions towards others.
The end-goal is where they look similar, but a lot of the things they care about along the way shows they have relevant differences to them too -- and I think those differences are best found by reading the thinkers of each.
I don't have much to offer in reply right now, so I'll leave that to others. I'll just say one thing: it's probably important to see that the differences between these two traditions of political thought are about both means and ends. That is, Marxists and anarchists disagree not only about the end goal (although quite often they agree about that, and call it communism), but also, I'd say primarily, about how to get there: can we overthrow the rulers and transition to a communistic society by taking control of the state, using the institutions, hierarchies, and powers of government, police, education, the legal system, etc.as Marxists usually believeor does it have to be a ground-up, grassroots revolution, as the anarchists believe.
A good place to start with anarchism is Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread. For a modern overview, I can recommend Ruth Kinna's Anarchism: A Beginner's Guide.
I treat anarchism as left libertarianism unless it's otherwise qualified. Even though the word 'anarchy' literally just means without a leader or without government, the historical actuality is that anarchism as a political tradition is left-wing.
Thanks for the welcome and other replies so far. I will give more fulsome comments to the others in due course but this naturally leads me to another question I have posed around this same subject:
What are the differences between libertarianism and anarchism as prima facie they seem to be aiming at a similar target of 'do not interfere with me!' but I think upon inspection they would quickly part ways? similar to how far left and far right extremes of the spectrum might both have a hatred of government but that may be where the similarities end.
From the little I have read, especially some of the snips I have read where is does seem much more than the childish (punk) rebellion for rebellion's sake it is make out to be in pop culture, it does seem to 'vibe' well on the far Left, even though anarchists might say they are nothing to do with that common axis. Again, I cannot qualify that statement properly, yet. :)
Anyway late in the evening now so don't feel I have the capacity to do things justice at this time. Will come back afresh to this thread on the morrow. A good start though! Cheers.
First some historical context: Socialism, communism and anarchism all predate Marx, and can be argued not really have traceable historical origin but have been points of view developed way back in pre-history, along with traditions that result in monarchy, feudalism and private ownership etc.
In other words, as soon as their were chiefs there were people who had issue with chiefs and as soon as there was private property there were people who had issue with private property (or then issue with who happened to own it).
So there's already a lot of traditions, schools of thought, movements and material on these topics by the time Marx is born.
Probably the best place to start in terms of insight into the cultural conversations is Thomas Moore's Utopia, which is one of the corner stones of the kind of conversation that socialism, communism, and anarchism represent. Thomas Moore's Utopia is both a synthesis of political critique available at the time (in 1516), somehow managing to satirize both feudal power and alternatives to it simultaneously. It's a comedy, but written to be as thought provoking as it is hilarious. It's a sort of "why not? why can't things be better" book.
Essentially omnipresent to the development of what we include in the "philosophy cannon" such as Thomas More are all sorts of Christian schools and orders, already under Catholicism, that explode into far more sects and cults and churches during the reformation. Christian communism is a constant theme of Western society since basically Christ. The difference being that the various mendicant orders of Catholicism are doing communism for religious purposes and avoiding commenting on "worldly affairs" (even if they do essentially say everyone should be christian communists like themselves, it is not taken as dangerous political philosophy by kings or philosophers).
To make a long story short there's a rich history of all sorts of people trying out new things, making "ideal farms", or founding "more perfect" religious communities in the US and New Zealand and so on, in parallel to European states taking over the entire planet, subjugation or eradicating people as they go. Then capitalism starts to develop out of feudalism and globalized imperialism and along with that discovery of political instability of this new economic-political order, into which these new Utopian ideas suddenly take hold of the public imagination and inspire revolution.
All this context is necessary as Marx is one thinker in thousands of years of development of all these sometimes competing and sometimes aligning political ideas, and then Marx himself famously says "if this is Marxism then I'm not a Marxist" so there's then further distinction between Marx himself and Marxism as a school referencing Marx as a foundational figure.
However, in terms of broad comparison, the fundamental difference between Marxism and Anarchism I think can be reasonably found in Marx's work.
What Marx attempts to do is develop a science of history. Historical materialism just means science of history; science was a more nebulous word (astrology would be an erudite science for example) and if you wanted to talk about what we call science today you used the word materialism (that causes to effects were to be found in matter).
Long story short, Marx discovers a lot of, if not actual scientific laws, then useful guide rules (and far more "law like" than what passes for sociological peer review today). His foundational insight is that the technological development of society determines (although a modern equivalent would be constrains) a society's political organization and ideas. This is obvious to us now, but it was not really obvious at the time. Anthropologists are direct descendants and users of Marx's theory, immediately informing us of some ancient tribe's organization, religion, general world view, based on the material artefacts they dig up. This is exactly what Marx is talking about. Out of this technology based analysis of historical Marx undertakes an analysis of capitalism and how it develops from and is different than feudalism.
His second main insight is that technology progresses, and so a society's political organization that was suitable for the technological situation when it started could be no longer suited due to technological improvements. When Marx talks about revolution in his works he's referring to periods where there is tension between the political organization and the new constraints of technology. Again, in anthropology this is completely obvious, for example bureaucracy developing due to the problems that farming creates on a flood plain (both to keep track of stored grains, keep track of debts paid off by the next harvest, and also keep track of who even owns what land), a problem created due to agricultural success and reaching carrying capacity (people were obviously farming before bureaucracy was invented, so having no maps or anything they could either just go out and "find a spot" or then eyeballing / moving a rock to settle disputes, was sufficient when there was plenty of extra space anyways). So bureaucracy is a Marxist revolution in Marx's theory, followed by consolidation of state power to manage this bureaucracy, and then either slave-based Empires (such as Rome) or surf based feudal systems (such as Western Europe after the collapse of Rome).
As you may imagine, there's a lot more Marx has to say about capitalism and revolution: that capitalism is both simultaneously in continuous revolution of itself (as it constantly seeks to intentionally innovate; a stark difference to most previously political orders which were by nature conservative) while also hurtling towards a revolution of political relations due to the irresolvable internal conflicts capitalism creates through the concentration of wealth and power. To be complete, Marx does not say revolution is inevitable, only that when conflicts between political order and material conditions arise, either there's a revolution that creates a new political order adapted to the material conditions or then the system collapses.
Enter Marxism. Marxism, and certainly the grain is planted by Marx in his writings, central belief is the manipulation of history through this science of history.
Why you end up with things like "avant-guard" and "accelerationism" in Marxist traditions is that it's not exactly clear how exactly a science of history can manipulate history to begin with as well as what the point is. For, one poignant question is that if the revolution is inevitable ... what exactly is there to do? And from this starting point one can as easily argue attempts to cause a revolution could as easily backfire and in fact help state power.
A debate that can go on for quite some time, but it's the whole framework of manipulating history that anarchists generally reject and the main difference with other socialist-communist schools.
What Marx does not develop is a moral theory. That's why there's so much focus on who exactly causes what profit in Marxist discourse and debate, as Marx basically just assumes the general humanist ethics floating around in the enlightenment, of which the central ethical cornerstone of reformation is the idea that the benefits are due the producer (not at all obvious idea at the time, as what was previously totally obvious is that benefits mainly go to lords, kings and priests, and normal people should suffer quite a big deal actually to make amends with god).
So where socialists, communists, Marxists, anarchists and capitalists all agree is that the benefits of economic activity should definitely not be mainly going to lords, kings and priests, but amongst themselves. But who exactly, that's another question. The Marxist-Capitalist debate arises in that they both assume that if the proceeds of some economic activity can be attributed to themself, then they should get that share of the bounty. Fairs fair.
Anarchists generally reject this entire moral framework and view life and the value of life from a much broader perspective than economic production.
The purpose of the human enterprise for anarchists is not efficient economic production, with only who gets what as to be worked out, but rather love, mutual caring, and both creative self expression and creative community expression.
Where this creates differences is that anarchists were and still are highly skeptical, if not hostile, to the Industrial Revolution and destruction of both nature and the human spirit it entails, whereas for Marxists the Industrial Revolution is generally considered an important, necessary and good step in the development of man's productive capacity. For anarchists if it does not make people more creatively engaged in their surroundings, with their fellows, with their work and nature, then it's not progress, but subservience to state power.
Due to this focus on individual and collective creativity, anarchists are more political flexible and open. What anarchists generally want politically is equal participation in the political process (so that each can equally contribute their creative spirit to the collective project) and due to this focus anarchists simply don't know what such an equal people in terms of political power would do. They may very well vote that some people can have a hundred or a thousands times more wealth than others.
To summarize, the project to control history reduces to the project to control people (cue the Soviet Union), whereas the project of equal political participation is the project of a single individual and what they think they can contribute to the world, and what other people do is outside our control.
Now, Marx would disagree with most if not all the policies of the Soviet Union, but the basic framework as some sort of historical scientific mastery is rooted in Marx; famously saying "philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it".
The resurgence of Marxism today are generally not of the historical mastery school, but generally using Marxism as a sort of brand recognition as an alternative to Neo-liberal economics. For example, Yanis Varoufakis may reference Marx, but also clarify that not in a Stalinist way.
This difference is also one of historical period. The idea of "changing history" made a lot more sense in the 19th century. New natural-philosophy (aka. materialism, aka. science) is being discovered all the time, wondrous reports from around the world, new technology that is essentially magic to people (such as electricity and the telegraph and so on) while the Reformation and then American Revolution proved that turning the religious order on its head was possible and the democracy was possible (previously a Utopian dream), after literally a thousand years of things staying basically the same, so there was this sort of "anything can happen vibe" and if we can master steam power, and then the electron and discover where continents and species come from and so on, why couldn't we master history?
So Marx is as much the product of the erudition of the 19th century as the naivety about what was possible.
Where socialists, communists, marxists, anarchists, leftists in general, agree is that people suffering is not a necessary evil and it's wrong to exploit people through system of coercion and manipulation (such as state power) for profit.
In terms of relation to libertarianism, all European renaissance and enlightenment philosophies that maintained any relevance are libertarian. Libertarian is in opposition to the surf and vassal system of feudalism. If feudalism simply doesn't exist anymore and there basically not adherents trying to bring it back, then all philosophies, including religious philosophies, are libertarian. All Western states and all Western parties promise liberty.
Liberals (from the leftist perspective) view liberty (in the you're no longer a surf sort of way) as the only necessary value and if poverty persists that's the poor fault for not using their liberty wisely enough, whereas anyone left of centrist liberals views poverty as a social ill that can be remedied (through various degrees of redistribution of wealth).
US libertarians are not anarchists, and not even liberals, but are basically in a philosophical psychosis of believing you can have private property without state power enforcing property rights. This just doesn't make any sense from the get go, but comes from American elites existing in a sort of philosophical vacuum in need of an ideology that backs them up. Wheres European elites can position themselves in a tradition of symbolic aristocracy and go rub shoulders with actual royalty and remark to themselves that this prince's balls are hot as fuck, and therefore all is well in the political order and so do not need to go around calling themselves philosophers to satiate their anxieties.
:up:
Means/Ends reasoning definitely differs between the two. I like your notion that communism is the theoretical they aspire towards, but maybe that's just the only idea they relate on, given the differences in material struggle.
The "dictatorship of the proletariat" was a criticism of the idea of democracy by its detractors at the time; democracy being a horrid thought for aristocrats. It was common sense for some thousands of years that poor people should never be able to participate in politics as they would just vote themselves more money. Even the original and archetypical democracy in ancient Athens had a wealth check for citizenship and the Roman republic system had weighted votes.
The dictatorship of the proletariat referred to regular people being able to vote (i.e. dictate governance rather than the Lords and kings, which was the system at the time), not that socialism / communism would need a dictator, such as Stalin.
Quoting Ludovico Lalli
Anarchism is about equal participation in the political process, without a moral or class hierarchy.
The general goal of most anarchists, such as myself, is genuinely accountable and decentralized governance. A stateless society in the sense of not having a class of bureaucrats organized in a hierarchy of essentially totalitarian control for all intents and purposes.
Quoting Ludovico Lalli
You seem to be talking about US libertarians who love private property but hate taxes and government. They sometimes randomly call themselves some sort of anarchist school, but that's just ridiculous. Their patron saint is Ann Rand who is not in anyway an anarchist thinker.
Looking up and unpacking all the points would take days which stymies an active back and forth debate.
We were taught in essay writing to make one point and hammer it home well. Not trying to tell you how to write, and hope it does not sound preachy, just that it is my experience that that is easier to digest.
Again not trying to be ungrateful as it is clearly a well written reply but I am just saying that it is a wall of information and would take me a long time to climb it!
Hopefully it does not come off as disrespectful, I was just saying it was very challenging and puts the brakes on active debate, which was my intent of the thread.
Indeed, this is what led me to an interest in anarchy over communism, where the thought of communism being centralized control, albeit by the proletariat, seemed less than ideal.
How are things like law enforcement or everyday services like roads and healthcare handled under this system?
The question is one of effective power.
Liberal democracies are constructed specifically to avoid anarchy through the principle of "consent of the governed": there's a totalitarian state built-up by kings, popes and emperors over many thousands of years, and that OK as long as people vote for the shiniest head of the hydra (aka. the president, prime minister, or what have you). Once a tiny handful (among thousands of bureaucrats) are elected it is essentially impossible to recall them, they need keep no promise, and the most critical governing institution that effectively controls society, law-enforcement and the judiciary, are kept "independent". What does independent mean? Independent from any democratic oversight whatsoever, even the paltry amount of oversight of managerial policy that does exist.
Our law-enforcement and legal system is for the most part simply a direct continuation of the feudal institutions with essentially zero democracy.
The first people to experience what we now call state power correctly identified police as a de facto hostile occupying army there to protect the interests of state power and not regular people. Of course, people had a justice system before police, which of course the merits of one such system over another can be debated, but it at least aimed to protect the interests of the people of that community and not state power in a far off capital.
So this is the sort of state power anarchists take issue with. A rebranding of the anarchist principles (or at least direction anarchist want to go in) of governance is direct participatory democracy, with immediate and easy recalls of any elected agent of the community.
Ok reading this on a new day I see this looks to be a good summation and what Boethius also echoed.
So marxism the revolution is economic and the rest sorts itself out and anarchism is social structure and the rest sorts itself out?
It is interesting to question which is 'right', perhaps there are more than one way to skin a cat? I have often thought much of the ills of society are the product of rapacious greed and self centeredness, only think of number one, which I feel is a product of the underlying model capitalism.
Capitalism is only really discussed as an economic model yet clearly has effects on social structure. Most people are only interested in helping out those who can do something for them or otherwise in their small network of allies.
If thinking of the remedy, from your description above, I could imagine either could ameliorate it. Perhaps the question on which is better is which would bring least ills of their own once enacted.
Then focus on one point if your mind and education is only able to deal with one point at a time.
Your OP question here is wanting to know the difference between two quite large historical movements, that overlap and are similar in many ways and sometimes allies and sometimes killing each other, each with a myriad of sub-factions, often mutually exclusive.
The kind of answer to this kind of question can only make sense to people who are actually familiar with the history and major works, and polemics, of the intellectual traditions addressed.
If you haven't read Marx you won't be in a position to understand what the difference between Marx and other thinkers you haven't read are. If you haven't read Utopia and aren't familiar with the pre-Marx utopian thinkers (and doers) that eventually give rise to political revolutions such as in American and France and Russia, then where Marx is situated in this intellectual and historical development isn't going to make any sense.
I realize it's popular today to perceive oneself to be an intellectual without having read anything concerning the topics at hand, but that's really not how it works.
A beginner wont have the time to get through Marx if they feel obliged to read your rambling mega-posts.
Ok, seems you did take umbrage with that passive aggressive quip at the end.
I said in my OP I was eager to know what to read and never implied to be an intellectual. I bore my soul that I know nothing and want to learn more about the topics.
You may have a vast knowledge in the subject matter but perhaps not the best skill to impart it. That was all I meant by the comments.
Of course you can just say 'gtfo, do your own research and come back to me' if you want. No one is paying anyone for professional services. Those are just my comments.
:smile:
With all the talk of the differences where then where does this mixing of anarchist communism come from? Maybe it will naturally reveal itself as I read more about the roots of these movements but perhaps a preface?
EDIT: Oh I see that anarchism seems to be labelled by default as anarchist communism is that right? in that vanilla anarchism is interchangeable with anarchist communism? as I have just downloaded The Conquest of Bread and it is labelled as anarchist communism.
EDIT2: Oh no, it seems by chance this book just happens to be about anarchist communism, with other flavours also existing. From the wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conquest_of_Bread
How exactly do we go about comparing Marx to Anarchism if reading any thinker in each, not to mention Marx himself, is off the table?
Obviously no one's obliged to read any of my posts.
However, anyone who wants some insight into the OP's saught after knowledge, in my opinion, would need to read Utopia, Proudhon, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Emma Goldman, Bakunin, Lenon, Trotsky, a history of catholic mendicant (aka. communist) orders and their thinkers (as the early anarchists, socialists, self described or lambasted as "utopians", were all Christians familiar with these works as well, as well as the actual practice of monastic or friarly communal living), as well as obviously Marx, history of the American Revolution, French Revolution, Russian Revolution, and also feudalism in Europe. Ideally also with a pretty clear understanding of Ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, renaissance and enlightenment philosophy and the general trend of the whole culture that results obviously with liberal democracies (and not socialism or communism, much less anarchism).
All that would be a bare minimum.
Otherwise, the question is basically "I don't know what this is and I don't know what that is, but please someone tell me the difference between this and that".
However, the question is still interesting either for those familiar with the material the question is about or then who plan to read that material in the future.
The short answer to questions about thinkers from people who haven't read those thinkers is of course "go read those thinkers first", but that's hardly a discussion.
And in general, I just really don't get anti-book intellectualism and why you, or anyone who's read books, would foster and nurture the notion.
It's like being an anti-stick hockey player ... what ... exactly is the idea here?
You got the wrong end of the stick.
You're saying having read the thinkers the OP is asking about is akin to playing hockey with an upside down stick ... or in other words the noble craft of ringette?
But please oblige me, how exactly do you go about comparing historical movements over many centuries, if not millennia, that include many intellectual sources and many differing schools of thought, often mutually exclusive but each insisting they are "the real one" doing many different things, sometimes allies and sometimes murdering each other ... without reading anything?
How is it a "beginners" step, to use your language, comparing Marx to Proudhon (a tiny part of the subject at hand) not having read Marx nor Proudhon, and my advise to go read them first and then perhaps start by just comparing these two, somehow doing it wrong?
Don't be a bore. All I did was mock your post for its excessive length, and implied that reading Marx instead of reading your posts is a better use of time. I felt justified in doing so because of your pompous rudeness in response to a post rightfully criticizing your verbosity.
Sure, obviously, definitely reading Marx is a good starting point in a discussion that includes Marxism ... but then what's to discuss here?
As for verbosity, Marx and Marxists are verbose; it's impossible to discuss their ideas without using their language. It's one issue I have with them in that insisting on using 19th century agitation tradecraft lingo loses most people.
We haven't even gotten to Hegelian dialectic and Marx's antithesis (and dare we say synthesis) to that.
There is first a christian communist movement during the Middle Ages, with all sorts of variations and re-emergences over the centuries, sometimes by clergy and sometimes lay people, often involving both.
Then there starts a Utopian movement emerging self consciously from fans of Thomas Moores Utopia, which is a satire (both of existing society and attempts to improve it) but adherents view it as a call to creativity, of sort of playful social design, which at first is all "micro". The reformation, going on at about the same time, mixes all this up a great deal resulting in things like the Pilgrims sailing across the Atlantic on the Mayflower to found the Plymouth Colony. So these religious (both catholic and protestant) and secular utopian ideas floating around and mixing in all sorts of ways, have very real consequences in history.
These early "micro level" utopians, "socially innovating" in one form or another, were at first not so interested in what internet denizens would call "macro" issues today.
"Utopia" is both simultaneously referencing a radical ambition, while at the same time a humorous self effacing dodge to avoid being executed. These early pioneers do genuinely want to practically make a better society, while at the same time be viewed as impractical and harmless day dreamers (so as to remain alive).
However, both these social innovation experiences, scope of analysis and movements grow with time to the point of challenging the existing political order (early pathfinders were quite aware the king would just chop their head off if they were too ambitious in their analysis; what literally happens to Thomas Moore for being the first, a lesson not lost on subsequent followers; so these movements grow slowly over time until the existing power can be challenged openly).
There's a series of revolutions starting with the American revolution. These revolutions are powered by utopian slogans with the hopes of practical management at least better than what existed before; democracy the core mediating principle to make things work out in practice.
Marx is born and works in this time of political change from absolute monarchies to secular liberal democracies. Nearly all the core ideas, slogans, rights, organizing principles, and so on have their roots in utopian thinkers in the previous centuries.
Of course, what emerges at the same time to this political transition is a new economic order we call capitalism.
It is clear there is a tension between liberal democracy and capitalism, as concentrated wealth undermines democratic institutions.
The anarchist movement, that has both successes and failures during all this time (including things like "radical anarchist experimentation" of proving children can learn without beating them), by and large views the problems of democracy as resolved by more democracy, and if people aren't convinced then the only thing to do is convince them harder and try to set an example of whatever it is.
The Marxist movement (which is highly debatable what Marx actually thought about it) is distrustful of liberal democracy to the point of viewing it as essentially irrelevant.
Many anarchists, liberals and social democrats (largely founded by rebranded anarchists), form the consensus that political violence is legitimate against tyrannies (such as the absolute monarchs they deposed) but is illegitimate if there's enough democracy that "the people" can obviously change things at the ballet if they wanted to (even in a process in which there is much to be criticized). A pretty reasonable argument and why political violence goes from a truly remarkable level of random assassinations of bureaucrats and blowing shit up regularly (including the suffragettes even though there is some democracy already, just not enough) to non-violent protest, where police tell you that you can protest, being the courageous maxima.
This movement culminates in the welfare state in Europe (free education, free health care, rehabilitation based justice system, labour protections, environmental protections etc. are all core anarchist, socialist, communist, liberal, utopian goals generally speaking, and so if they can be achieved piecemeal, and revolutions turn out to be super dangerous, then why not just do things piecemeal with the hard fought democrat right), and significant tensions in the Unites States due to capital managing to avoid that happening. Liberal democracy does little to tamp down on globalized Western imperialism.
Marxists, especially the kind of Marxists that found and manage the Soviet Union, are like "how about, no" and develop what is basically a Dune like science of historical management. Long story short, obviously didn't work out, while at the same time Marx's prediction of what would happen to capitalist liberal democracy seems to be proven correct (just about a century off in accuracy - not great, not terrible).
Important Marxist schools still exist, such as the entirety of China, presenting itself as socialism with Chinese characteristics. I do not know enough to say what the Chinese Marxist school is, how it differs from the Soviet conception, what exactly it's doing today managing the largest experiment in state capitalism the world has ever seen in order to produce a significant proportion of the world's satisfaction of bourgeoisie wants and desires, but would definitely be interesting if someone here did know.
Anarchism was the only way of living that humans have known before the rise of civilisation. Yes, times could be rough, but compare it to our modern society. Addiction, mental illness, inequality, pollution, nihilism and hedonism are rampant. Almost everyone is addicted to something (to cope with the fact that they are stuck within the system), mental illness is rising, the planet is dying (due to massive overproduction and -consumption, and the relentless extraction of resources), inequality and absurd competition are at an all time high (good luck getting a home), and so on.
More people can feel it now: this quiet sense of dread. We refuse to admit that our way of living has been a colossal mistake; we have built a castle on a foundation of quicksand. If we are truly honest with ourselves and we look deep into the mirror, we see the truth. Our way of living is not right. We are stuck in jobs we'd rather not do, endlessly bombared with advertisements, deadlines, and noise, we rely on hedonistic activities or substances to get through the day, it's getting more difficult to form meaningful relationships (mainly due to economic pressure and lack of time), and few of us truly see a way out.
The key pillar of anarchism is a lack of domination. We don't want to be told what to do, and we don't want to spend our energy towards activities that don't benefit us or our community. We want to be free, really free, and live in harmony with nature and our fellow humans.
So to put it simply: communism is different because it still clings to the root of the issue: the need for dominance. So long as we have forced schooling, forced employment, the state, institutions, the judicial system and as long as we are unable to take care of ourselves in a meaningful way, we will always remain imprisoned. Could we get rid of all of this? To most people, it sounds absurd, yet to our ancient ancestors this was all there was.
I second your message.
Oh, for sure. At least my experience says the same of the modern tendencies, though I've been out of the game so I couldn't say what things are like now now.
But, on the other hand, Marxists did build longer lasting institutions, or at least more of them that had an impact in national affairs. From the anarchist's standpoint that may be a demerit, depending on how idealistic the anarchist is.
For myself I just see capitalism as a problem which Marx describes well -- I don't think that politics will end if we manage to create a new socioeconomic way of life, but perhaps the problems of capitalism will wane if done correctly. Similarly so with anarchy -- if we manage to find a way to organize ourselves sans hierarchy I'm certain that politics will continue, that we will continue to have to decide things together and confront challenges and that people will continue to be people for all that. But we may still be better off if we overcome the challenges of hierarchy.
I tend to think of these as central problems that cause a lot of suffering rather than fixalls that bring about a utopia.
Where I think utopian thinking makes sense is in imagining a world we might want to live in. But I don't think it makes sense to base a political philosophy entirely on that world, which is why I like Marxism -- it has a more practical edge to it which allows one to enact the political mechanisms that exist today rather than inventing them wholesale as a counter to the hierarchical systems. The latter are far more like what I'd prefer to live in, but the former tend to fair better against hierarchically organized states since they have no qualms in utilizing hierarchy, which is good at orchestrating people towards winning, if not towards making them happy.
So I feel an attraction to both, and often try to think of blending the two into a coherent political philosophy.
Yup -- that'd be the utopian version of both, but in terms of differentiating them and trying to wrap your mind around it that's a good simplification.
Literally no Marxist or anarchist would ever say either of these idiocies.
How exactly would you go about changing economic conditions without changing the social structure (aka. political power)? How would you go about changing the social structure without being concerned with the economic implications or the economic means required to the change in the first place?
And what is "the rest" that "sorts itself out"?
Socialists, such as Marxists, are primarily concerned with the ownership of the means of production, that's pretty much their tagline, which is a social structure change leaving the economic system otherwise largely intact.
It would be far more anarchists that have issue with industrialism full stop, and would want to get rid of it.
Nevertheless, anarchists, as expressed both by myself and @Martijn, view both social structure and economic structure as mostly a consequence of what regular people believe. For example, no Anarchist likes to see people licking boot, but 99.9 % of bootlicking episodes is entirely voluntary. People by and large choose to lick boot and very much like licking boot, and changing the feet in those boots may change the beneficiaries of the boot licking but hardly anything else.
For the vast majority of anarchists, all you can do in the face of such rabid and rapacious bootlicking is simply not lick boot yourself, and go do something else; hope for people to emancipate themselves from the bootlicking.
Point being, there's no taking control of history with our superior intellect and directing the state to create a new and better citizen worthy of our ideology.
Contemporary anarchists use the word "co-creation" a lot (like really a lot) to describe this framework of simply being one among many in a process of creating the future together with few guarantees of what's actually going to happen.
At the same time, seeing the burning flesh and screams of children scrolling through my social media feeds, the Marxists do have a point or two concerning the current system worthy of serious consideration.
There's a thing called "simplification" that we do to get the gist of an idea across. If someone doesn't know what a representative democracy is we don't rush into make sure that someone understands the nuances between a federal or a confederate or a singular state, whether one utilizes a first-past-the-post or other electoral mechanism, etc. You start with Locke, the state of nature, and so forth, and attempt to simplify the complex so that people can branch out on their own.
It does root it a lot better now right out the gate and can now have a better foothold of which avenues to further my research.
"Takes care of itself" would be a kind of doe-eyed utopianism, which I can see wanting to reject, but the gist of what they care about in your summation is a good starting point, IMO. One focuses on economic exploitation and overcoming that, the other focuses on hierarchical exploitation and overcoming that, and sometimes their endgoals look really similar and you wonder why it is we're fighting, but then that's the nature of politics. And as it turns out the differences are substantive, i.e. difference between building a union vs. building a party, or what-have-you.
Sure, but the simplification shouldn't be the opposite of a true statement.
In this case, it's socialists by and large and in particular Marxists who don't seek to change the actual economic system.
Marx is super clear that he views capitalism as a good and essentially inevitable development of the productive powers of humanity. Industrialism is not a problem as such, and if you're not trying to change industrialism as such then you aren't really seeking to change the economic system.
For socialists, and particularly Marxists, the question is who owns this productive equipment, who benefits from the profits.
Anarchists, by and large, reject entirely industrialism as well as any top down social structure or economic change as likely to result in much good. Anarchists criticize socialists (especially the kind that makes things like the Soviet Union) for having the delusion of capturing the state and wielding it for good to "make people better" (USSR style socialists are Denethor II, Steward of Gondor, would use the one ring to fight the enemy that created it; Anarchists are Gandalf, knowing it cannot be used for good even by the wise, and so seeking to destroy the one ring by guiding a fellowship of misfits, and also hanging out with Radagast the Brown, exemplifying the harmony of humanity with nature).
Any good and long lasting change, economic or social (to the extent these are separate), is a bottom up development in most anarchist frameworks.
For example, most anarchists would agree that they want to see a world where a large majority of people are gardening in their own personal gardens as well as communal.
Well, what's stopping that from happening right now? Not much, not even the state is standing in the way for most people on the planet.
So, what to make of this situation? Should we create a state program to force people to garden? The anarchist answer is no, zero need: they will learn to garden when they're starving.
I'm gathering that you're speaking from the anarchists perspective in this. In which case "the economic system" does not mean the same as it does in Marx -- whose goals are also clear in a desire to change the means of production in order to change society.
Yes to who owns what -- but the idea really is that the state would wither away once classes were abolished. And so we'll get later adaptations of Marxism which are more nationalist in character, which justify hierarchies, and so forth, on the basis that it's overthrowing the capitalist mode of production, the real Big Bad.
So, yes, there will be differences along the way. And they will be important at times.
One of them here being even an understanding of what constitutes "the economy", since it seems you're in favor of some kind of anarcho-primitivism, given your comment that hunger will teach people to garden
****
But just for a moment try to crystalize what you understand of both philosophies into a single sentence. What would you say rather than what I've said? Try to simplify it, rather than cover every nuance through several paragraphs.
What would you say the difference is, when you keep it simple?
On gardens, I was having a discussion at one time about that with someone I used to volunteer with, on a garden.
I think we were discussing communes and the positives of alternative communities and I suggested they would be pleased at someone buying a piece of land and working on it but then he said on the contrary they would not like it as they rather want communal living centralized to save on resources and that a self-sufficient person would be deemed as wasteful compared to collectivism.
If you look at the dispute between Marx and Bakunin, both of whom admired the Paris Commune, the schism was about the trust in and usefulness of authority. Marx foresaw a dictatorship, a transitional state, while Bakunin wanted no such thing. Historically speaking and in practice, the communist parties have a deep desire for authority.
We are on the same team, wanting to know more about things.
Quoting Moliere
Marx aims to change the ownership of the means of production.
For Marx the development of the means of production (the technological know-how) is essentially linear, happening all the time and in some sense in the background. Which for much of human history is certainly true.
Marx is very much pro-capitalist in assuming capitalism was necessary in creating the immensely powerful technologies already of the 19th century. In seeing the poverty and misery that the Industrial Revolution and continued Imperialism creates, Marx's proposed solution is that the workers should own the means of production.
This is the central objective of Marx and I think safe to say Marxism in general.
In Marx's framework, who owns what is a superstructural symbolic change (words on a paper) and not the material reality of production. Keeping in mind revolution happens when the superstructural symbolic world (who's a priest, who's a king, who owns what, who can do what) becomes disjointed and incompatible with the new reality of how things are actually being produced.
For capitalism to develop further it becomes necessary to destroy the feudal system of Lords, rents and estates, and so various revolutions transform feudal institutions into ones suited for the capitalist mode of production; aka. liberal representative democracy with "independent" institutions of justice (aka. that part of the feudal system of property and contract resolution capitalism is built on-top of).
Anarchists, by and large, appreciate this analysis but tend to reject industrialism wholesale. If anarchists had our way (i.e. everyone woke up suddenly with a penchant for anarchism) the entire industrial system would be dismantled and production localized and power decentralized as much as possible.
However, the biggest difference is anarchists usually reject the framework of "social design" at the beginning. Society will be better when people are better, and that may take a long time.
I can think of nitpicks, but I can't see how what I said is at odds with this.
Also, is that the shortest version you got? :D
Can you answer the question I posed earlier: how do anarchists propose to manage things like law enforcement, healthcare and the like if there is no government or is there government just only local government so it would be just all grass roots, cottage industry type of companies locally for all human public services?
EDIT: Also there has been talk of anarchy being about decentralization. I recently learned, when I asking whether cryptocurrency could be thought of as communist at its roots, that crypto is squarely in the realm of Libertarianism. So with that in mind, how does Libertarianism and Anarchism differ bearing in mind both want decentralization and general agreement for small government?
If the system is unsustainable, as our most erudite scientists tell us, then the system will fail at some point in the future.
If the sustainable alternative is the vast majority of food coming from local gardening, then that will definitely for sure happen if the current agricultural system, that we are assured is unsustainable by a long list of experts, crashes or then more likely discombobulates in some longer more drawn out process of collapse.
Of course, the third option (the first mentioned) is people starting to garden now. That's the preferred anarchist option of course. If that doesn't happen, then the remaining options are make the state force people to garden or then people gardening by necessity, if indeed it is so essential to the future of humanity.
However, although I have much sympathy for my genuinely primitivist anarchist comrades, I do not view that as practical. There's simply too many people to return to any previous economic system.
We consume today vastly more exosomatic energy than any previous time and there's simply no possible feasible way to go backwards in technical organization without culling the large majority of humanity, which I view as unethical and also simply impractical anyways. It can be entertained a democratic and ethical system of population reduction, but a necessary condition for that is that there really is no alternative and some agreed to process is preferable to war to sort it out (not that some consensus is likely, but presumably worthwhile to discuss before the wars start on the off-chance agreement is reached about it).
Long story short, there is a technically viable sustainable alternative to culling humanity and returning to a primitive organization voluntarily, which is solar thermal energy. It's easy to see why in that most energy required for production (which even in a decentralized system we'll still need things like hammers and nails) is thermal energy, and trees and biomass are incredibly inefficient at providing thermal energy (why deforestation has been a problem ever since we discovered mining and metal working), on the order of 0.1% to 1% efficient at transforming the original solar energy into usable heat energy. Solar thermal energy devices are up to 50% efficient and additionally their use does not send local nutrients into the air far away.
Upon such a decentralized and sustainable system, the sophisticated technologies we take for granted today could still be produced, either in local laboratories at a smaller scale, or then in some central locations somewhere on the planet. In technical terms, maybe a decentralized system could not sustain 5 nanometer processing architecture but could work out 32 or 90 nanometer architecture. So where there would be a difference in technological access, the question becomes do we really need 5 nanometer architecture if the destruction of the entire planet is necessary to achieve that?
So perhaps a few things would be downgraded, that's possible, but keep in mind also that there would be no planned obsolescence in such a sustainable system, so over time such a technical advantage (of building things to last) may accumulate far more technical sophistication than what is presently available.
For anarchists (of my school, say Kropotkin school for short, under consideration here) the key question is effective power.
For example, we do not have issue with a ship needing a captain to weather hard seas, keep things in order and navigate effectively to wherever the ship is going.
If it was efficient for ships to have no captain and everything decided by spontaneous vote then that certainly would have been discovered by now.
The issue anarchists have is if the ship's captain is some sort of god, morally or judicially. If people on the ship want to elect a new captain because the current captain has lost the trust of the people of the ship to advance the ship community's interest as a whole, then they should have no qualms in doing so.
If everyone can at anytime participate equally in selecting, deselecting, instructing, reselecting, any managerial agent required to perform some task or another, then there is no effective authority figure. The authority remains equally among the community electing the manager for the performance of the task under consideration.
A system of equal authority we obviously do not have in our liberal Western democracies. We cannot recall police officers, prosecutors, judges, colonels and generals, bureaucrats and politicians, and for the most part they are not elected at all. The state is comprised of thousands of bureaucrats and agents of various kinds, and the smallest possible set is elected (with minimal, if at all, possibility of recall) in order to pacify the population under the dogma of "consent of the governed".
Anarchists of my ilk want rather to see the governing of the governed, that we each participate with equal authority to formulating what actually happens.
As for institutions of the kind you are talking about, they are imbedded in a centralized state that anarchists take issue with. There's no "anarchist way" of managing a highly centralized state. The anarchist thing to do under such political conditions is build-up grassroots and decentralized alternative modes of living and working and being. If the super centralized state was sustainable then that would be a real intellectual dilemma for anarchists, but the super centralized state is not sustainable so it, and the institutions you refer to, will eventually collapse anyways.
Of course, in a decentralized anarchist community power based system, there would be analogues to accomplish all the same tasks you mention, but mostly on the smaller scale, whether the label institution is retained or not, the answer to who has the authority is always people in genuine equality and deliberation. For example, hopefully we can still afford to have medical doctors in such a decentralized world and communities see to ensure that happens in one way or another and make the resources available to maintain the health of the community. And similarly for anything of genuine utility.
As for the retort that what if people are foolish and enact policies of self-harm, the answer is that they will need then to learn from their mistakes just as humanity as a whole is learning from our mistake of having created the state in the first place.
They don't. They want to undo thousands of years of human social progress simply because their lives didn't turn out as they desired them to be, in spite of the clear and blatant reality that their lives are actually much, much better than they would be without and infinitely better than they deserve.
They want blood in the streets, people who are born larger to control and enslave those born smaller (the so-called weak in their eyes, despite it clearly being them who are the weak ones morally and intellectually, the only things that matter and differentiate men from animal). They'll see woman taken advantage of as property to be raped and abused and killed on a whim, children abused and enslaved wholesale if not killed off entirely because "my group is bigger than yours so your resources belong to us."
They want to remove the single thing that every single great civilization and society, through unfathomable amounts of suffering and constant vigilance and toil, has been able to exclusively offer its citizenry that mankind has never been able to achieve since the beginning of time. Would you like to know what that thing is? Consistency. Stability. Predictability of what to expect from one day to the next. The very culmination of every single earnest and noble human effort, every single good man who died for a better future of not just his own but for all of humanity since the beginning of time. Gone. Why? For no other reason than "because."
They want to (or at the very least, will, if not stopped) take us back to a dark time of entire families and ethnic groups, men, women, and children slaughtered en masse. Entire villages and towns. A time where the darkest desires of humanity run rampant, unrestricted, and unabated with nowhere for good men who desire peace to lay their head. They have no understanding of human nature and what it inevitably results in absent of structure. Or at the very least, they don't care. Many, and you can ask them they'll tell you flat out and point blank if it's not tattooed on their flesh already, want to, and I quote: "Watch the world burn." That's not a political or lifestyle alignment or choice. It's clinical psychopathy and nothing more. These people are a danger to children and should not be allowed around them or be allowed to have them in any capacity.
These people are very, very dangerous and while they live, breath, and die in a state of constant hypocrisy without ever realizing it, or perhaps ignoring it as that is what shameless hypocrites do, taking everything from those who believe in order and law (modern society, infrastructure, technology, education, convenience, etc.) they nevertheless belong somewhere far, far away where their psychotic ideals will never reach another eye or ear drum forevermore. For the good of humanity. There is literally no discernible difference from a so-called anarchist and a foreign agent sent to topple and destroy a nation as quickly and efficiently as possible so an invading army can usurp it, perhaps even by willing vote of the people themselves. None whatsoever. And governments have known this for a long, long time.
Edit: Don't confuse true, actual anarchists with simple "regime changists." Some even confuse or convince themselves as such when fed the right intellectual kitsch (ie. lipstick on a pig).
For Marx "the economy" is very much in the human realm of things, to the point that our very being is defined by the process of production.
But anarchists tend to see it in a wider sense, as embedded within an ecology, and tend to have more respect for nature than Marxists do, who are certainly part of the industrial revolution. This is because of their universal stance against hierarchies, be they socially constructed or imposed on other living creatures.
Nature is something to be exploited for human ends, in a Marxist philosophy. It's part of the Enlightenment inheritance. Further, hierarchy is a useful means to an end which the Marxist will not shun.
Yup. That's Marx/Proudhon(EDIT:Bakunin) are also a great place for getting an understanding of the distinction.
Different ways, depending on the particular anarchist you're talking to. Some general themes that emerge are an emphasis on horizontal decision making and a minimization of hierarchies in our day-to-day decisions. The basic unit of society for an anarchist is the collective, in terms of the day-to-day(individuals are just as important in this notion of collective -- there's a unity between the two such that the individual is respected within the collective). One joins a collective and shares the benefits of cooperation with its members while negotaiting with other collectives. Some collectives proposed are industrial-wide unions ran on syndicalist lines, some collectives are worker or housing coops, some are political working groups, some are bikeshares, some are childcare shares....
A major difference between how our world operates and that world operates is that there's not really a person in charge which takes on the responsibility for a task. It's the collective's responsibility, which includes every individual within the collective. Horizontal decision-making usually involves consensus-building among the group until agreement is reached by the collective, and its this willing agreement which is meant to keep things running smoothly -- since everyone genuinely agreed to such-and-such they act in concert together for the benefits of collective activity.
Ok, I am on board with this. I despise the mega corporations where you not able to get in touch with a human and only get automated responses.
What you write pretty much is what I had hoped anarchism would be. I am ready to sign up.
I am also a big advocate of open source technology which seems along the same lines of decentralization and power to the people.
Grass roots projects that work a million times better than the 'too big to fail' bloat of most capitalist garbage.
Definitely we agree here.
If we've moved past simplification to a single sentence, relationship to nature is probably the biggest cultural, motivational and effective policy difference between socialist / Marxists and anarchists.
There is quite obviously a respect, if not outright fetish, for both industrialism and industrial workers in socialism / Marxism, that is mostly absent in anarchism.
Quoting Moliere
I'm definitely not saying anything different, but if we're contrasting economy and social structure, then for me the economy is the material conditions of production (including humans) and ownership in the realm of symbols and social structure.
Quoting Moliere
We are in complete agreement here.
Thats another distinction between the statist and the anarchist: theyre assumptions of human nature. Hobbes bellum omnium contra omnes rings true or false depending on ones degree of statism.
Thats why I fear the statist more, because they believe humans require authority and absolutism to keep their wildest impulses in check. Presumably, this includes themselves as well. So if authority and absolutism were to collapse, we know who to look out for.
Not read anything like what you say there in the readings I have done on anarchy so far.
I would be terrified if the lowest common denominator were making decisions. Look at the Trump situation.
Then again maybe if it was on a smaller scale it would not be like that? For example like decision making in small towns rather than the lumbering hive mind you might see on a place like reddit.
Maybe in an anarchist state you would not longer have such idiots which is just a product of the diseased capitalist system. Not that I am proposing an old boy's club either but how does one ward against the least qualified person having as much say as the most qualified?
Example an anti-science climate change denier having as much say on policy as a career climate scientist?
Of course not! Because they've all been burned and their purveyors executed, by sheer public outcry and will of the people, mind you.
I'm not saying the descriptions I've laid out are what people interested in the purported mainstream texts desire, I'm saying that's what always, always, inevitably happens and how it works out.
If you think I'm wrong and full of it, that's fine. Sorry to interject and disrupt your discussion. I'll say this. You know what's on paper, and I know what happens when those words on paper become reality and rubber meets the road, per se, given time. If you disagree, that's fine, and we'll leave it there. Welcome to the forum. Great topic BTW. :smile:
PS Thanks for the welcome. :)
Yeah, think of it like a municipality -- but rather than voting on representatives to vote for what to do everyone represents themselves and can speak on what to do. I've heard this described as the "spokes and wheel" model of organization: where working groups are organized in accord with a central working group which deals with communications between working groups.
Or, if you'd like, think of it as a team at your workplace -- but rather than having a boss all the workers set the rules for the workplace. This would be a workers collective.
But, really, I'd emphasize doing some of the readings rather than listening to me. You'll get ideas of your own that way and the theorists explain themselves in better detail than these little maps I'm trying to make :)
You don't. The premise is that everyone has not just the opportunity to grow, but everyone is fundamentally equal in a political manner.
Isn't this the case in our present day democracies?
What keeps them in check there is that there are representatives which do the voting for them, and there's a decision-making process in place that is democratic.
The anarchist wouldn't want to deprive the idiot of their rights -- generally speaking anarchists have a generally optimistic view of human nature, and given time the idiot will either prove the collective wrong or will come around to seeing that it was right or will move onto another collective.
I just read in The Conquest of Bread some of what has been discussed here where it states that rather than collectivist systems of State Socialists the writer rather espouses small territories but with federation between them.
What is the difference between this and the trade unions that have been popular for a hundred years or so?
Quoting Moliere
I am doing both. Reading source material and discussing in tandem.
Though you could also have a union-collective -- a union run in accord with those same principles, rather than the usual method of organization.
Quoting Moliere
Like housing co-operatives then that are quite popular among the hippy folks? I knew some people in one and sounds just like how they explained it; if not outright owning the house, holding shares in it.
Just wanted to make sure it's a bit of an analogy to the Big Picture -- something like a negotiated middle for people trying to do anarchist things in a world dominated by states.
5,000 years of recorded human history where wars are waged and the stronger or larger force takes and destroys from the weaker or smaller force is an "assumption?"
Like, it's just something I randomly made up one day? Are you serious? :rofl:
Bruh. Nah. Just nah. Come on, you're not that dense. :lol:
Quoting NOS4A2
All you know is the life you've experienced in however many years you've been alive, a life, mind you, given exclusively to you by a strict and ordered society. With all due respect, you are ignorant of anything else as far as first hand experience. And that is a fact.
Yes, we got a lot of progress. Cars, airplanes, vaccines, computers, the internet, cellphones.... but did they really make our lives better? More convenient and efficient, yes, but better? Where is the true joy in our world? How many people wake up with a sense of bliss and joy when they wake up, and they go to bed with a bittersweet feeling because they can't wait for the next day to start? Despite all this progress, despite all the improvements and high standards of living, the fundamental issues persist and are only growing worse.
Life doesn't work in terms of 'progress', there is only evolution (adaptability & change), not 'progress'. In reality, life follows cycles, and even death is a part of it. Harmony is the quintessential essence of life, and all natural life follows this principle of balance. Take, for example, someone who is overweight. This person can improve his diet, exercise more, do some fasting, and lose the weight. This person 'progressed' from being overweight to being a regular weight, by adapting his lifestyle and making changes in his life. Yet, there is nothing preventing him from becoming overweight again, by making poor decisions regarding diet. This simple example shows that in our world, life doesn't work in terms of 'progress', where you transfer from an insufficient or broken 'yesterday' (or today), to a better 'tomorrow'. The ideology of technological progress has been our most profound collective delusion, and I fell for it just as easily when I was younger. When you stop viewing life as a 'race' wherein you have to 'progress' from a bad start to an alleged happy end, but instead view it as a journey where you only apply changes within the locus of control, and accept everything outside of it, your quality of life, stillness, and happiness goes up dramatically.
So, no, anarchism is not about violence or made up by a few angsty teenagers. It is our fundamental way of living, it is deep within us, even to this day. Obviously, we are brainwashed by the system from a young age, so actually breaking free is immensely difficult, and it is not random that the 'outcasts' (the poor or the counter culture individuals, for example) pose the biggest threat to it. As unimportant stated, we simply refuse to lick boots, and our world would be a much better place if more people would do the same.
The word progress is obviously a context-dependent, imprecise term, it refers to improvement, but not to some kind of transcendent force driving us toward a Platonic form of perfection. In my own life, Ive seen a lot of progress, so I cant really agree with your view. Cars are better, TVs are better, food is better, the status of women is better. Healthcare has improved, communication is faster and more accessible, education is more widespread, and social attitudes toward things like race, gender, and mental health have become more inclusive and informed. I would rather be alive today than 85 years ago or 200 years ago. My dad, who died a few years ago near the age of 100, said that the greatest joy he had experienced was the progress he'd witnessed - despite the wars, pollution, political and corporate corruption.
So how can you claim:
Quoting Outlander
Unless you have first hand experience of 5000 years? Or is recorded history enough?
You dont mention that these forces were more often than not managed, armed, and employed by states. Political scientist Rudolph Rummel estimated that around 300 million people were killed by governments in the last century alone. He coined the term democide.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide
I read her autobiography many years ago and found it inspiring. Leftist activists and thinkers can come off as repressive kill-joys, just as their hard line right-wing counterparts can. So find writers who uplift rather than harangue. Emma Goldman is one -- she's not the only good writer, and there are more contemporary ones. (I haven't read in this field for a long time, so I defer from suggesting authors.)
You might want to look into Anarcho-syndicalism, too. Their thinking involves the role of trade unionism which might be a bit dated now. Other leftist groups (Socialist Labor Party, New Union Party) see a critical role in industrial unionism, which is a broader base than trade unionism. Neither of these groups are anarchist.
Anarchism, socialism, communism, trade unionism, industrial unionism, and so on are part of the rich history of American labor struggles which were never consistent, simple, or unified.
One difference between anarchists and socialist/communists: Anarchists tend to think in terms of horizontal leadership and decision making. Deciding by consensus, for example. Communists tend to think in terms of vertical decision making: The leader decides and the rank and file complies). There are deficiencies and advantages in both systems.
We are of one mind.
I was more peeved at the suggestions against the need to read a whole lot of books to gain any insight into this particular question. Not that I have issue with neophytes asking whatever question comes to mind, but if actually understanding pretty much anything about the subject is going to require a lot of reading I don't like to see that denigrated.
What's a better or worse simplification shouldn't be an emotional question, so apologies for my part for that.
And it could be a good simplification, could apply to different socialist factions and maybe even some people calling themselves anarchist, but the heart of anarchism in the "main cannon", such as Kropotkin (echoed by anarchists as esteemed as Bertrand Russel), is really the rejection of the whole framework of "all we need is power to do this one thing to make the world a better place".
For us, let's say "mainline anarchists" or I like to say anarcho-anarchists, "the state" is mostly in people's heads. As long as people have in their heads that it's quite normal and proper to have a king, even if they have an issue with the current king and cut his head off they just turn around and ordain the next one.
Considering the French Revolution also murdered a bunch of anarchists, and not only anarchists but the best kind of anarchists going around hilariously calling themselves the "Without Underwear" faction, anarchists became even more skeptical of state power than they were before.
So, to this end, anarcho-anarchism are also keenly interested in how these murder all the anarchist episodes transpire and so take close interest into works such as Tocqueville and The Old Regime and the Revolution.
In this book, Tocqueville basically describes what's in people's heads (what they are used to essentially) as a great river and uses the image that it may suddenly disappear underground, but the river is not gone and will simply spring up somewhere else. French people were quite accustomed to tyranny so that can't be just reconfigured over night, so you cut the kings head off but you end up with the tyranny of The Terror followed by "electing" an emperor to "protect the revolution".
Same in Russia: get rid of the Tsar, feels good for a time but then society simply coalesces around a new Tsar with a different name.
So, the conclusion is not that social change is impossible only that it takes time and it's the change in people's heads that is fundamental and determinative. If it no longer makes sense to people to be ruled by a king, then society sorts things out to get rid of monarchal rule (often without violence and even the king agrees and cooperates! ... if you let him keep his toys of course).
The anarchists role in such social movements is mostly to keep undermining the faith in authority that maintains it.
It's a good line. I hadn't heard it before. And it's good to set against the impression that anarchism is ... kinda boring.
Excellent.
And if you read Proudhon, Kropotkin, Emma Goldstein, Tolstoy (Kingdom of God is Within You), you'll find this school of anarchism mostly human relationship centred.
And you'll actually be surprised how non-radical anarchy is. 90% or more of "first wave" anarchist ideas were super radical at the time but common sense now, such as not beating children at school, which was though to be an impossible utopian dream, and then some anarchists made a school and demonstrated it was possible.
Another good example, Tolstoy's Kingdom of God is Within You is almost entirely dedicated to arguing for conscientious objection to forced conscription, something that is totally normal today (but at the time might get you executed, tortured, thrown in a dirty hole for life etc.); Tolstoy was just like ... "well if we just keep doing this eventually the state will give up", which is exactly what happened.
These themes also highlight the focus in anarchism of individual example. Being willing to be the first one to refuse military service on moral grounds (and so be immediately executed) is just as, if not more, important to the anarchist movement as writing a book or being involved in party politics in one way or another. Likewise being willing to be the first one to not beat your children to see what happens, put the hypotheses that they will literally go insane to the test.
Quoting unimportant
Then you are warmly welcomed into the movement.
Quoting unimportant
Yes, whole hacker / open source / anonymous movement is super "anarchy" whether people involved call themselves anarchists or not, it's all clearly part of the anarchist school to do.
It's also a great example of "other things to do" in the anarchist framework compared to most socialist schools. Party politics can stagnate (for decades if not centuries) and there simply isn't must to contribute. By all means stand up socialist and left candidates, but the culture can simply be at a point where there's steep diminishing returns to "try to push harder" with leftist parties, because people simply aren't voting for it (see the "states in people's heads" doctrine in response above to @Moliere).
So, if people aren't "getting it" the anarchist response is to lead by example. If knowledge should be open and free, the foundation of the liberation of humanity, then maybe easiest to just go and show how that's possible. A sort of "if the door of governance is bolted shut with a thousand spikes ... maybe go try and open a window, let a bit of fresh air in at least" approach to things.
Of course, there maybe times when the door can be moved and it's important to realize that "the shits happening now", so it's not one thing is better than another but rather there's lot's to do and what's best for each person to do in any given time is for them to figure out.
I myself have dedicated 20 years to the development of open source solar thermal technology in poor countries. Back in the late 90s, early 2000s, seemed pretty clear people in the West weren't simply going to vote for not-destroying-the-environment, and that attitudes would change when we start feeling the consequences, so I my conclusion was best I could do is prepare tools that would be useful in such a realization / collapse of the industrial system.
Quoting unimportant
That is the anarchist way.
Though one thing to note is my contrast with socialism / Marxism above is centred about Soviet-Marxism because that's the most famous and historically consequential Marxist school, and in my view when historical movements are contrasted it's best to start with the most famous formulations; for example a historical contrast of Christianity with Islam makes sense in my view to start with Catholicism and Orthodoxy and Sunni and Shia; and once there's some clarity on that get into smaller groups in terms of historical numbers (of course such a historical analysis does not resolve "who's right" about different theological topics).
So, important to note that since the Soviet Union collapsed that school of marxism isn't important to day.
Contemporary Marxists and socialists are pretty close to anarcho-anarchism in theoretical outlook. The difference maybe essentially none, just labelling difference, or fairly obscure aspects of theory, or merely tactical, or historical outlook, and the difference likely as big as between Marxists and their typical fellow Marxists.
For example, a self described socialist and Marxist like Yanis Varoufakis doesn't say anything I disagree with, and I'm a member of his party Diem25 as it's "radical enough" for me.
Difference today is more one of temperament and personality. One may vibe more with self-described anarchists or socialists or Marxists or communists or unionists or eco-villagers or development-aid workers or open source education or anonymous or soup kitchen staff or conservationists or scientists of one discipline or another, UN staff and special reporters, and so on, while recognizing there's this general leftist-humanitst-ecological movement going on with a lot of people involved. Not to say no one's counter productive or a complete douche bag doing whatever they're doing, just that there's clearly a lot to do. Likewise, not to say there isn't important differences; indeed, the lack of internal debate and criticism in the movement at large in my view is the main obstacle (too much virtue signalling, not enough rolling around in the mud and hashing it out).
Where anarchism is a bit special is that anarchy is really not that good a brand, and we anarchists put a lot of effort into keeping it that way.
And i'd rather be alive 60 years ago than today, because then atleast I'd be able to afford a good home and raise a family on an average income, and before our lives were bombarded with noise and before social media took over our relationships, and when the future atleast had the illusion of being prosperous.
None of your points refer to 'progress' in any sense. Who cares that cars are better when all cars do is make us slower, tired, and ravage nature? Who cares that phones and TVs are better when they numb and disconnect us? Food is DEFINITELY not better, I don't know how you can think that. Look up the statistics on how many people struggle with their weight or metabolic health issues like diabetes. It's staggering yet unsurprising. Most food you can purchase at your local grocery store is genuine garbage.
The more equitable view towards race and gender is a positive for sure, but who says it will last? What is stopping society & its corrupt leaders from falling into facism or another evil ideology, rapidly stripping away the rights of minorities? In theory, there is nothing stopping us from stripping away women's rights again, or discriminating against ethnic minorities and enforcing it by law, except for us. The attitudes have shifted for the better - which is a positive - but there is no guarantee it will last, or further improve. That's why 'progress', of any kind, is a delusion.
The world we live in is a reflection of our minds. You need a high level of consciousness to see beyond it all, which can be difficult. But when you experience the world beyond the self, you can also see the truth and recognise the horrible dystopia WE have built. Just like how World War 1 & 2, the war in Ukraine, the genocide in Palestine, the horrible decisions made by China and the USA, and so on, are all self-made consequences of our own decisions. This is something very few people dare to accept, as it is simply much easier to point fingers (the government, fate, karma, minorities, aliens) instead of pointing at ourselves and the world we have built. Something like money itself is only real because we keep the story alive. We don't actually need money to live, but the system demands it, so we must adhere to it (or radically reject it).
If progress and money are our Gods, then I am an atheist. I will be hated for it, but I don't care. Most simply refuse to accept that we are all addicted to our prison, and we will cling to it until it collapses.
Quoting Martijn
Well, I do care, they are safer, more reliable and less polluting. But I don't own a car. I have access to good public transport now, whereas 60 years ago there was none in many areas I can now travel in comfort. Another improvement.
I appreciate the sentiment and remember that it's never personal. I simply disagree at a fundamental level. Cars have definitely become safer, faster, smarter, and so on. I do not own a car but have driven for hundreds of thousands of kilometers in my younger days, so I have my fair share of experience. I still stand by what I said: driving a car is boring, it has tons of fundamental issues like a constant demand of a supply of FUEL (the primary concern), maintenance, endless roads and similar infrastructure, endless laws to regulate how people drive, not to mention all the accidents and loss of life that occurs due to traffic, and so on.
It is crucial to understand that the entire infrastructure we have only serves the system. People need cars to go to work, and we need an endless supply chain of trucks, ships, and planes, to transport goods all across the world, just so we can endlessly trade, consume, and pollute.
Personally, I haven't driven a car in like five years, and my life has only become better. I notice this trend in many other similar fields: the more I slow down and just appreciate life itself, and focus on doing more meaningful things like going for long walks, journaling, sketching, playing music, etc, rather than staying on the treadmill like the system demands, the more I heal. And this insight made me realize that I don't need a car to live well.
Just think about this: what would happen if all cars were to vanish overnight? Obviously it would cause major issues: supply chains would be disrupted, to say the least. But go back in time further, before there were cars, and ask yourself: was life worse? Did people not experience life? The endless expansion and growth only serves the system, not us. We must put up with it. There is no going back.
I was able to digest a lot more of that.
Btw it reminded me of another thought I had been having. How did anarchy get related to the destroy everything rebellion for rebellion's sake punk style that most of society thinks of when they think of anarchy?
It has become synonymous with rioting and ransacking and general disorder as a way of life.
I see perhaps, maybe, that is a part of it to get rid of the current state, but marxism talks about revolution of that kind equally/even more doesn't it so why has that not become the 'poster boy' for destruction but anarchy has? It seems that anarchy has as much post-state toppling discourse on how to manage society thereafter as marxism.
Anarchy is generally thought of like mad max. Also the word itself is used for general wild behavior if someone says "It was anarchy!"
I was just looking up local anarchist forums and the front page of the first one I click is full of trans and queer activism stuff. Certainly nothing, apart from having anachist in the name, would indicate it had anything to do with the kinds of topics which have been discussing in this thread.
Identity politics appears to have polluted all these so called far left movements.
Is it not a product of capitalist thinking? I am reminded of the old term of spiritual materialism for religious epithets. This could be called identity materialism and a by product of the rot of capitalism.
The far left member on the contrary should not have an identity and subvert themselves and their energies to the greater cause of the Party. Maybe I am swinging back to communist. :)
Anarchy is one of the biggest threats to the current system, that's why there's endless propaganda in circulation to diminish what it actually is, how it works, and how the supermachine we are running on top of the world actually works (defined by greed, nepotism, slavery, etc). The more people embrace their roots and the more people understand what is going on, the more in trouble they will be. Hence the relentless propaganda and brainwashing.
Tbh, it's not worth fighting against. It's like trying to convince a Christian that his God is dead and that Jesus won't come back to the Earth. You will be hated and villified for speaking the truth, and at some point it just takes its toll. Best to just live your life to the best of your abilities.
Indeed, there are leftist critiques of identity politics that make similar points, tying it to neoliberalism. One example:
[quote=Liza Featherstone;https://jacobin.com/2024/10/all-that-remains-of-neoliberal-identity-politics-is-fascism] Remember when we were supposed to celebrate the first black president, even though he disappointed the hopes of every progressive who campaigned for him? Remember when supporters of Bernie Sanders were relentlessly tarred as sexist (and racist, somehow) for opposing Hillary Clinton?
This style of politics continued to define liberalism during the Donald Trump administration. While women lost abortion rights and right-wing men gained power, liberals cheered the spectacle of prominent liberal men mostly in media and cultural institutions losing their jobs for sexual harassment. Land acknowledgments became prevalent in corporate and academic settings, even as the construction of pipelines on indigenous lands continued apace. In the wake of George Floyds murder by the police, many were disappointed by how little changed for poor and working-class black Americans: the most tangible outcome of the widespread street protests of 2020 was that corporate America put more black people on its boards.
This was neoliberal identity politics, an elite discourse that centered identities as a way of undermining a robust, effective class politics. Of course, race, gender, and sexuality matter and are salient political concepts in the fight for human freedom. But elites used neoliberal identity politics to undermine broad human solidarities, divide the Left, and advance policies that benefited only the 1 percent. Because bigotry is still a real problem, many good progressives would fall for it every time.[/quote]
If thats too shallow, I found some good stuff listed here: https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/comments/1h7l2qk/good_leftist_critiques_of_identity_politicswokeism/
EDIT: Come to think of it, your mention of religion reminds me of Hans-Georg Moeller's view that "wokeism" is a "civil religion". His YouTube channel is pretty good. (He definitely comes out of the tradition of left-wing philosophy, btw)
With the way any kind of critique of wokeism is immediately lambasted by the contemporary left as fascist or similar it does make one wonder if is a manufactured 'controlled opposition' ploy by the capitalists.
The endless cancel culture have made the Left impotent. Having lost its teeth it is no longer a threat to the establishment.
I feel such views would be very unpopular if voiced in public Left circles. Are there any bulwarks on the contemporary Left that are seeing through this?
Well, that list on Reddit is made up mostly of leftist thinkers, so there's a fairly strong contingent. Zizek is another prominent leftist critic of wokeism.
But if you're asking if any left-wing groups, movements, parties etc., take a stand against identity politics, I don't know off the top of my head. I'm completely out of the loop. I guess the Communist Party of the Russian Federation doesn't count :grin:
:rofl:
Hey, I don't know what's wrong with the rest of the world but reading old translations of 150 year old political theory is :fire: -- keeps me up all night.
No, theory is great! It's the practical stuff that's boring.
[quote=David Flood;https://www.sapiens.org/culture/anarchism-democracy/]While an exciting idea, anarchism in practice is, well, boring. Far from what window-smashing insurrectionists are doing, it mostly takes the form of an extremely slow-moving and highly rule-bound process of collective deliberation. Anarchy, paradoxically, means more rules, not fewer, and more collective responsibility, not less.[/quote]
:yawn: :wink:
I think Zizek once (probably more than once) complained about people who advocate direct democracy, saying he would rather write books and watch movies than discuss who's going to collect the bins next week.
There are some good writers who tend towards anarchism. Less philosophical, systematic, more poetic, but enjoyable to read at least. Oscar Wilde, Percy Shelly, Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, and Albert Jay Nock come to mind.
In fact, Tolstoys On Anarchy fits nicely into this thread topic. He is more of an individualist anarchist, where the revolution occurs within the individual, offering a different path for the aspiring anarchist than the Marxist and the violent anarchists of his own day.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/leo-tolstoy-on-anarchy
Coming back to this I was on the phone with my mother today trying to explain some of what had been discussed here and when the question came from her, when I told her it is not just no laws and survival of the fittest style dog eat dog, of how are rules formed and such and such. I tried to explain this about local government but then she said "well we have that already" at which point I didn't really know what else to say as I thought the same.
So what is the difference then of current municipalities as you mention and the anarchist way? Also if there are no higher ups elected then how do the different small conglomerations communicate with each other if there is no spokesperson acting on there behalf.
She made the example of how in the current government you have a local councilor which you can go to if you have issues within their ward then they can then take it to the parliament to be heard by the other cronies there.
So how would that work in anarchy if hierarchies are not allowed and everyone has as much as a say as everyone else?
Would there be no central government at all then? It has been stated earlier, and I read it in The Conquest of Bread yesterday, that there would still be federation between these small groups. As such how would that happen?
What 'that list' are you referring to here? but yes I was meaning actual real life organizations that call themselves anarchists.
I don't think you would read that in any of the canon texts. :lol:
Skipping over those obvious crowbarred in amendments there it does seem a lot of questions I have made above are answered there.
Doesn't seem very objectionable to me. I'd make a couple of minor changes but I think it's basically right. It is not as it stands an endorsement of identity politics.
The issue I was having was not the subject matter itself but rather hogging the limelight for such things at the expense of core concepts, which I admit is not the case here from the looks of things. So a false positive on my part there.
As my edit above, there is a lot of good meat and potatoes explanations.
In the ideal there would be no central government at all. Federations could exist in various ways but they wouldn't be run by officers who are elected to the position for a set term, but rather it would just be someone's job to serve as a communication network.
So in our municipalities you have some representative that you can appeal to in the event that you have some political interest in the business of the city. Were a city run anarchically rather than going to a representative who would then bring whatever case they deem worthy of bringing before the officers of the city you would bring the proposal to the decision making body, and you would advocate for it.
The extremely exciting part of this is learning parliametary procedure through the thrilling epic known as Robert's Rules of Order, in terms of a practical blueprint for making collective decisions.
Basically there wouldn't be representatives, and what representatives do in our society would be all of our responsibility. How we go about that will be up to us, but there are previous ways of collective debate we can riff from and modify to suit the needs of a particular collective.
The one I linked to earlier:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/comments/1h7l2qk/good_leftist_critiques_of_identity_politicswokeism/
Also, if it wasn't clear, do not read Robert's Rules of Order unless you want to kill your desire to learn anything ever(at least at first -- it's a much later book if you're still interested in further study). It's important, but damn parliamentary procedure is a snoozer to read.
From a theoretical standpoint it makes a lot of sense, though. Racism is a hierarchy where white people are held as higher than black people. Patriarch is a hierarchy where men are held as higher than women. And all the other -ism's mostly follow that same pattern.
And, really, it's not like it's backed up by nothing. Minority issues are nothing new, they've just been rebranded as "woke", somehow. There are statistics about violence against minorities and all the rest we can go into if we're wondering if there's something objective about these stances, or if they're just ways of identifying one's tribe.
But generally anarchists have soft hearts for the lesser, and so such language isn't hard to pass muster among anarchists insofar that it looks like the oppression they're used to seeing everywhere.
The problem is they get hijacked like other noble causes so that it is no longer about x minority getting on equal footing but instead how much attention can I get using this cause so I can look good/virtuous.
Typical example is how politicians will take up a cause only when it will further their career or improve their image and obviously don't care about what they are giving lip service too.
Bad actors abound.
But just to warn you, it is fairly popular in my experience in this subgroup.
Indeed. And we all come to different conclusions. :up:
When I was younger I used visit a remote beach to surf with some squatters, some of whom were old homesteaders and anarchists. They had a little community there. It was small, but there were disputes, and they were settled all by deliberation. Not a single incident of violence in the decades they stayed there, at least until the government came in, forcibly evicted them, and burned down their homes.
S'all good. I could have been less snarky and more friendly. But no need to apologize for expressing peevishness; we understand one another better through it.
Quoting boethius
That's a good point. A fellow worker noted to me the importance of the IWW could be seen by its continual involvement in new issues that then became normal. That it wasn't the number of shops organized or membership numbers but the overall effect and continual vigilance at being at the front of positive social change that made it important.
In the same way you may walk into a Mormon temple and fail to identify the teachings of Christ, or fail to see it in a popes golden hat for that matter, or be perplexed about the fiscal conservatism at work in a trillion dollar deficit spending for the military, or be unable to locate liberal democracy ideals in the financing and arming of a genocide and so on.
In short, hypocrisy is very much the norm and not the exception.
Of course I don't know these anarchists you're talking about, but what I can say about the anarchism I've been talking about is that it's essentially an elitist intellectual movement which doesn't seek to found or manage organizations under the name of anarchism. By elitist I mean wealthy enough to be able to read at least a thousand books that together at least scratches the surface of the accumulated recorded history, wisdom and knowledge of humanity as a whole. From such a perspective ethics plays out intergenerationally and one's capacity to contribute is fairly limited.
There's no way to "make people better" so anarchists of my kind don't seek to make organizations to "make" more anarchists and we are disinterested in creating partisan followings. Doesn't mean anarchists don't make organizations or participate in party politics, just that it doesn't make sense to call these collective projects "anarchism". The conditions of equality of effective power in the political process is what we'd call anarchism, and that is essentially an all-or-nothing proposition.
So anarchism is the goal, and "the people" can make it at anytime if they on the whole realize they don't need to accept subjugation (the "states in people's heads" doctrine), so in the meantime it maybe, or may seem to be, one party is definitely better than another or that it's still necessary to make money and so do business. But it doesn't make much sense to call a party in a representative system "anarchist" as party leaders and elected representatives and their unelected bureaucratic colleagues have vastly more effective power than anyone else, so maybe less insane than the other guys but the result is not anarchism. Makes even less sense to call a business operating within capitalism some form of anarchism.
You can of course have individually anarchist principles and trying to make your individual contribution towards anarchism while doing business or making organizations of one form or another or even doing party politics.
The only exception being the day people are demanding the abolition of private property as we currently know it and a complete dismantling of the state and recreating governing processes along equal and devolutionary principles. When that day occurs an anarchist party would make sense to have. Of course, until then, standing up this proposal in the party system wouldn't be a bad thing, it's just so unpopular it's not financially sustainable whenever a few anarchists attempt it (and anarchists getting together and money being involved tends to result in madness, so even if the wider culture was willing to accept and even support it, it may not be possible to do); but perhaps it is not so impossible today or then in the near future.
Quoting unimportant
The mainstream calls liberals the left and simply ignores anyone more left than that.
For self-described "leftists", and especially socialists, identity politics is a divide and conquer ploy by the power structure.
I forget who made the following analogy first, but basically the image to have in mind is the domination structure is a pyramid (slaves / wage-slaves on the bottom, oligarchs on the top) and the goal of all leftists is to organize the bottom to basically get rid of the top.
Identify politics cuts the pyramid vertically, from the very top to somewhere on the bottom. Feminism (when formulated as a conflict between men's interests and women's interests) cuts the pyramid in half. This not only creates division on the bottom layer of the pyramid making collective action harder, as importantly it creates sympathy and organization vertically along the pyramid, as there are women at all layers of the pyramid; so, under this form of feminism, when a female oligarch makes even more money this is now somehow a victory for all women; the interests of most women (who are poor) is not to improve their lives by advancing their interests as poor women along with poor men, but their interests are now served (not for real of course, just in their heads) by applauding the exploits of rich women.
Same with homosexuality, there are poor gays and rich gays and federating them together makes a clique at odds, not with straight rich people but with poor straight people (even if it's the rich that made all the anti-homosexual laws in the first place, doesn't matter if they can point to homophobia sentiment among the general population). Same of course for race and any identifying feature that crosses class lines of the pyramid.
End result is classic divide and conquer strategy of pitting one's opponents against each other in order to weaken them collectively and facilitate domination.
Of course, in all these identity politics movements there is always a base of real oppression and genuine desire for justice, the trick is to extract that conversation from economic conditions. It is not the system that is making women's lives poorer and harder and less meaningful, nothing to do with capitalism at all if a women needs to work two jobs while trying to raise kids as a single mother without a wider family or community support structure while being poisoned by most if not all products needed for survival, it's men's fault!
Which is all an example of a more general theme of capitalism called "co-opting". Anything and everything that happens, whatever the original intention of who started it, will be transformed or then copied into a perverted form that serves the interests of the oligarchy. There's examples of this all of the place, such as "incel" was originally coined as a term to form a support group of sexless people, who suffered from being sexless and a forum was created for mutual support.
Which is not to say don't do anything because capitalism is going to co-opt, but rather definitely do the things but just don't be surprised and ideally be prepared to need to advance among perverse doppelgängers of whatever it is you're doing.
Quoting unimportant
That's more definitely a soviet sentiment. In anarchism the idea is to identify as yourself, develop your own beliefs, and if you collaborate with others it's insofar as that's more effective than alternatives to advance your goals, ideally moving ever so slowly towards a future truly equal society.
Party politics maybe a means to such an end at different times in different parties.
Diem25.org I'd say is the place to be today to oppose capitalism in the West. I don't expect it to "win" but such a network may have unexpected results.
Quoting unimportant
In general most people in Western society is sick and mad, and slapping a label of socialist or anarchist or marxist on your forehead doesn't change that. It's rare person that can advance party politics in a representative system without being corrupted; why anarchists tend to not associate with party politics. However, at least so far, Yanis Varoufakis seems to me the real deal. I don't agree with everything he says, unlikely he's going to "win" anytime soon, but an important example of someone not obviously corrupt and involved in party politics (which we definitely want as much as possible; tiny differences in corruption can make the difference between an extremely bad time and total destruction, when the system comes under stress).
All is well.
Quoting Moliere
Yes indeed, propaganda of the deed can be big and small actions.
At the same time, all this has failed to prevent or even mitigate a genocide or the destruction of the natural world, so all of the various Western humanist-ecological movements in the broadest sense, including everyone with the same "make the world a better place" general goals, and all the strategies have clearly failed (perhaps not failed in a way that things are even worse now, but clearly failed to reach the objectives as such).
Hence the attraction to the elitist intellectual anarchist school mentioned above in that it takes a perspective of the entire history, past and future, of humanity and moral agents generally speaking.
So in dark times this school of anarchy can content itself with being keepers of the flame of defiance.
At the same time, politics is not constrained to the West and I have lots of hope, and I think good reasons for hope, of what is possible in regions outside the West not currently benefiting from the current system. In this Global South movement I am more a student than a teacher, but do feel there are nevertheless important contributions to make even from the Imperial core, such as developing local solar thermal technologies, and pointing out the hypocrisy of not only my government but fellow citizens; that the intellectual merit of nearly all Westerners, from the lowliest bar keep to the loftiest corporate or university board, is absolute hypocritical trash and can simply be dismissed; that intellectualism in the West is more a mental disease than something to take seriously.
I didn't see this, but we are clearly in agreement already on the co-opting.
Also notable, identity politics is nearly 100% corporate power.
Forming an outrage group, getting someone fired is the fuel of identity politics. Obviously no due-process, not even "platforming" the accused to make their own defence can be tolerated.
This whole dynamic is 100% dependent on corporate power. If corporations didn't fire people (aka. sacrifice to the moloch of symbolic catharsis) then no one would much care about these outrage groups, and they would just face the tiniest bit of litigation and basically go away.
How it is framed in the minds of identity politics warriors is that they have power over the corporations, but that is as far from the truth as one can possibly get. It is corporate power that throws fresh meat to their dogs either because it creates a lot of noise and so provides free advertisement, virtue signals to and more importantly disciplines their employees to not step out of line the tiniest bit (really best remove oneself from public life altogether) as well as serving this broader oligarch strategy of dividing the people to keep them fighting amongst themselves for scraps.
Identity politics, for the most part, is simply corporate politics and corporate advertising. It's not even hidden in anyway; plenty of corporate media material out there explaining how political identity consumers are the most loyal and profitable consumers.
Yes but do you suggest becoming a hermit like a Buddhist monk living in a cave?
The rest of the world will still be capitalistic so will have to navigate it to a certain degree.
That is why I was asking about seeking out other 'real' anarchists but things do not look hopeful on that front.
One might end up a 20 year anarchist posting rambling megaposts on an obscure philosophy forum. I jest. :)
It might not have to be a case of finding those who have fully adopted the True Way but those open minded enough to be persuaded to do so.
Although the hermit is certainly suitable for some people at some times, my point was about removing from public life was a criticism of corporate power and how identity politics, of the perverse kind we're discussing, is used to discipline corporate workers. You don't know what the next corporate backed rage mob is going to be about and what sentence you said 20 years ago is going to get you fired, so best to say nothing in public at all.
Arbitrary unpredictable discipline is the best kind of discipline in an oppressive system as it on the one hand allows targeting anyone at anytime (if mere accusations of "man bad" gets a man fired and ruins his life, it is super easy to either coax such accusations out of people by making it understood there will be huge rewards and virtue showers if they re-remember entirely legal events as "I felt uncomfortable") along with straight-up fraud (but mostly once the train gets going there's plenty of legitimately opportunistic, cluster-B or otherwise deranged people that are going to want their 15 minutes of fame, so if there's no consequences to throwing down accusations, and only benefits, plenty of people are going to line up to do that).
So, the system of corporate identity politics allows getting rid of anyone who is of genuine threat to oneself or a corrupt system in general (not only gets rid of them but ruins their reputation), while also disciplining everyone else in the corporate system to just not participate in public life in the slightest, and so act in every way like perfectly bland automatons in complete and unquestioning servitude of corporate power.
Quoting unimportant
In my original posts, I understood your question to be comparing Anarchism to Marxism historically, so my first focus was on the Soviet Union, as it's obviously relevant historically and starting with the most famous examples avoids the "no true Scotsman" fallacy; as a mature mind can handle what is or has been popular is not necessarily true.
However, for contemporary times, the Soviet Union is gone, and Marxist / Socialism has reemerged as the the main label opposing Neo-liberalism; mainly because MAGA / Republican partisans are going to call anything they don't like socialism and Marxism anyways, so these brands are adopted not really for philosophical reasons but a "flip the script" strategy. In a "perfectly rational world", if my political philosophy differed by even one single word to yours, the solution is just to call mine political philosophy 3387239753808 and yours political philosophy 3387239753809; then things are perfectly clear.
But we do not life in such a perfectly rational world, so there is always multiple levels to discourse.
One level is to try together to reach a better understanding of reality that is independent of the words used to describe it, in which we're as comfortable with any label over any other label for anything, and if we want to recast all variations of all political philosophies into a long numbered list then we would be perfectly comfortable in doing so (and perhaps making such a dictionary, though of course not complete, would be a useful exercise to do).
Another level has nothing to do with understanding and is a battle over what words generally mean and their connotations. If I can transform the words you tend to use to express yourself into something else I will frustrate all your interactions with society and sow disarray among your allies and more importantly would-be-allies if they had a clue what you were talking about. If I can rebrand something that has lost favour, such as war, as something else, such as defence, and doing so changes people's emotional relationship to exact same war methodology entirely, then that's what I'm going to do if I love war and want to continue the usual practice.
In short, there is a struggler for material changes in the real world, but this is mediated and often even effectuated by a struggle over the symbolic representation of the real world (which is often more fantasy than anything else).
All this to say, on one level it doesn't matter who's calling themselves what, and what you call yourself, but who's doing what and how to enter into collaboration with people striving for the same objectives.
On another level, there is no way to avoid everything you say also participating in an endless battle over symbols and prestige and deference.
Therefore, there are many consequences to things and it is the task of the elite intellectual anarchist, or whatever name they choose to go by, to parse them all and integrate over all these possible outcomes to arrive at some optimum course towards the liberation of humanity. For with enough understanding one realizes one is truly free because one has always been truly free and the choice is presented whether to share or whether to steal more of the freedom of others.
Quoting unimportant
It's fair point, but these posts are only one part of my anarchist activities. It's also not necessary, and usually counter productive, to put on an anarchist activity the label of anarchism. In nearly all situations it's not such a useful thing to do. Do the thing and let people make up their mind about it. For example, the likely only difference between one person volunteering to feed the homeless and another person volunteering to feed the homeless and tattooing an anarchist symbol on his or her forehead, is that one person is an idiot and the other is not but hopefully the hungry are still fed either way.
Reason I refer to anarchism here is because it points to authors I feel are worth reading.
But my main anarchist task has been the development of open source solar thermal devices that can be build locally. Also, exposing international blood diamond money laundering for Isabel Dos Santos, daughter of the ex-dictator of Angola, as well as fucking with da PoliCe, as seen in this hilarious video: https://youtube.com/shorts/xb_KNzv_U20?feature=share
Why cops in Finland (and European Public Prosecutors Office, the EPPO) are helping to coverup all this obvious evidence of money laundering from Africa to the EU:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1SXU6VkygIWM14S4O-IQQUhlz41qYBjFH?usp=sharing
And harass me instead, instead of doing something even half-way competent even for totally corrupt people (aka. the limited hang out and clean up the situation) is unclear. It seems cops and prosecutors and judges in Europe have become so unaccountable they are not even accountable to do corruption well in their corrupt system. But people tolerate it because people lick boot, so it is what it is.
However, definitely the most important anarchist thing I do is the solar thermal, and since you've mentioned interest in Open Source software the most anarchist thing that can happen at this juncture in the conversation is that you take this software:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/16eIpgNP7vvBcm_P6nfFzywqjcHuTV9qD?usp=sharing
Make it work and understand what it does.
A top level view of what the software does is contained in this patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2015004330A1/fi
And then describes a bunch more that was done closed source to build the automated CNC methods, which is still nice to have but the real revolution is building with the hand methods. Software isn't strictly necessary to build by hand but is incredibly useful to accomplish the following things:
A. Software simulation allows to get some idea of how much power will actually be delivered by the device and at what times. A solar device that performs well at high noon in summer may not perform well at literally every other time. So it's way better to actually test out a design in simulation against a real use case, than to figure it out trial and error.
B. Even if the technology is built by hand, a jig can be used to set or drill the correct angles for each individual reflector, which is cheaper (as allows articulated joints required for manual calibration to be eliminated) and more pleasant to work in the shade than calibrating everything by hand in the blazing sun.
Why the software is so old is because all this was published along with step by step guides and even videos, like this one: https://youtu.be/CXJgAmft2jI
And yet super few people were copying the technology at the time. Eventually I concluded that was because no one had really proven the technology commercially successful to drive demand and the arguments of why this kind of technology is critical to the future of humanity did not interest enough people for that to matter. So I decided the quickest path to development was just prove the business case myself, create the demand.
I made sure all the previous open source stuff was findable / reconstructable and also described right in the patent what had been open sourced, assuming that once some commercial success had been demonstrated people would then start copying in open source.
But that never happened because it's slightly too complicated to do.
Thanks to the money laundering and being fired as CEO and the government backing off harassing me for a while due to failing to One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nesting me, as shown in this audio: https://youtu.be/4xdVpbGHdds
I finally had time to find the open source software in my own archive.
It may seem like such a small thing, but history demonstrates again and again what a small group of people with the right ideas can accomplish.
Furthermore, if one considers the entire history of humanity, past and future, what people will be saying about this time in a hundred thousand years or more, as is the anarchist way to do, the most important thing happening right now is the transition to local solar energy to power exosomatic energy processes, in both harmony with nature as well as placing the means of production, which is exosomatic energy for the most part, in the hands of the labourer.
Quoting unimportant
Ideally I would suggest you find both, but it may not matter much what they call themselves.
What is best to do right now is a far more important question than what is best to call what is best to do right now. People who fight over the latter is usually inspired by not doing the former.
The following is a discussion between a self described anarchist and a sociology professor who explains super well where we're at global police state wise (why I put so much effort into my own personal battle with police helping to launder money in Finland).
you'll find in this discussion a lot of socialist concepts with their academic analogues.
Really good explanation of how identity politics and wokism are a tool of domination to divide people, as well as how the profession of sociology is made to contribute in that you can get funding to show white male nurses are paid 80 cents more than black female nurses (hundreds of thousands if not millions to find that out) but you could never get a single dollar to study how 14.50 an hour and 15.30 an hour make both groups super poor, are fundamentally exploitative wages that produce obscene profits for private capital in a system that under delivers health care outcomes even for those that can afford it, and that both groups of nurses are still far more aligned in demanding higher wages for all nurses than fighting against each other for "equality" (which the male nurses don't work for themselves and don't set the wages and there may turn out to be perfectly good reasons they get higher wage on average anyways).
So just one part, but overall super clear description of the current situation and what can be done about it.
It just hit me that it felt like 'mental masturbation' to theorize over things that are never likely to be realized.
For myself the end-goal isn't as important to be achieved -- organizing with likeminded people was enough for me to want to know how it works. But it's not like you're going to earn a living or achieve anything immediately practical by studying it -- you'll improve your mind, which is good, but in terms of whether you ought study other things or not I can understand saying "OK, sounds interesting, but I'd rather deal with something more realistic"
Well I am not saying "I only want to do x that will get me y" that sounds too capitalistic! It is just depressing to think it is all a pipe dream. Like ogling over someone your heart desires but is unattainable, better to squash those desires. :)
You are right that just discussing things like this with like minds is reward in itself.
I had certainly enjoyed learning in this thread.
Now that you mention it -- one of the most practical ways of practicing anarchy in our world today is through the housing collective. Finding one and joining would be a way to learn from people actually doing the practice rather than reading a lot of long books, and you said you were interested in meeting up with people so that would be a good route.
For an organization that's alive today which will put you in contact with anarchists I'd suggest Food not Bombs -- it has a diverse group of people and it's activist work so it's quite literally putting the ideas into practice. I know lots of anarchists tend to frequent that organization because of how it's run, and they'd know what possible institutional resources -- such as a housing collective -- might be in your area.
BUT
I can understand that the fruit might just look too juicy to be true, and dreaming big dreams can bring one down. I'd only do it if you enjoy it rather than out of a sense that one must accomplish the mission.
I came across the website redpepper.org.uk today which seems heavily anarchism inspired.
It has given me some more fuel to add to the discussion.
Part way through this article: https://www.redpepper.org.uk/law-police-justice/civil-liberties/the-police-are-not-here-to-protect-you/
An interesting claim is made that the main purpose of the police, despite what propaganda may say to the contrary that they are there to protect the general public, is to suppress social movements and the tool of the elites to keep power. I am not sure I am buying their premise police only came about at the time of colonialism? Policing has existed in some form or another as long as humans have gathered I would imagine?
With the first sentence in mind this means that the police are in direct opposition to the anarchist idea of overthrowing authority then aren't they? I always found it pretty childish how masked up people would attack police 'just because' but this does offer a new dimension to it.
I do still think most rabble rousers are doing it mindlessly though when they say "f*ck the cops" and such and throw bottles at them.
Excellent find. I too have been going through anarchist literature to find some choice citations for the conversation.
Quoting unimportant
Police as we know it today is not an extension of feudal systems of justice. Why you rarely see "police" in anything to do with the medieval period (history, movies, fantasy, literature, whatever) but instead protagonists would interact with people like "the watchmen".
Before police, communities ensured their own basic security shared among community members, such as regular and changing watchmen duty.
Likewise, your medieval fantasy protagonists may also interact with "inspectors" or "detective" or "investigators" of some kind in a medieval setting, which is another system completely distinct from the watchmen to investigate crime.
Investigators of crime were also often also not similar to police but a position of some wise distinction. For example, Isaac Newton was asked to investigate a counterfeiting conspiracy.
The church (priests often being the only people who could read until the next church) also did a lot of investigating.
Nearly all crime in society was community crime and would be resolved at the community level, often by some feat of strength. A crime would need to be against some Lord or church in someway or then particularly serious to be resolved outside the community. Keep in mind people dueling to the death was often a dispute resolution mechanism during most of this time which requires no investigation at all.
The most common form of justice process was simply taking one's case to the local chief or lord who would hear out whatever anyone had to say and decide the issue.
Point is there is a complex system of justice (with certainly a lot to criticize) but for the vast majority of people and the vast majority of both security needs and dealing with some sort of offence it was community based involving members of the community and in the interests of the community.
Police is an entirely different system of justice than what existed in feudal times and emerges out of colonialization as an occupation army needing to pacify the local population. Police are not members of the community with duties to and interest in the community but a garrison force imposed on the local population to serve the interests of a distant power.
In this colonial setting of dealing with insurgencies or simply forcing cultural changes on local populations that are not easy, a whole host of methods needed to be developed.
The foundation of this system is that the police officer is not a member of the community and has no meaningful community ties and has no reason to form sympathies with the community they are policing. The overall objective of an occupation force is to suppress any sort of mass uprising, hence "justice" is mostly arbitrary and severe and entirely concerned with the protection of the occupying states "property" (such as whatever they are pillaging and looting) and not the health of the community.
Now, this system then spreads in Europe through a series of stages, including Napoleon's conquest and spreading "the code" that was a state power based substitute to "liberty, equality, fraternity" of the revolution that Napoleon was protecting by being an emperor.
The justification that police are not members of the community and imposed by the state and working for the centre of power (i.e. the same relation between colonized people and an occupying army) is that justice is therefore "impartial" and "blind". Of course, it's not impartial but works for the central state and represents the interests of the central state.
Methods that are natural in occupation (that occupation soldiers are not members of the community) were discovered could be simulated, such as just sending police from one part of a country to another part where they have no community ties.
Another critical part of pacification of a population is disarming ordinary citizens and therefore the use of arms becoming a specialized occupation on behalf of the state. The state becomes the paternal figure and citizens essentially children who need to be supervised by police.
So that is the short version.
Of course, you can have community based and involved security and justice systems. Since police don't do a good job (and are specifically selected for their lower-than-average IQ so as not to be able to think for themselves and follow orders) such systems natural arise in any case.
Was just reading Emma Goldman's essay on the police and prison system and will be positing some citations shortly.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2162
Is a link to "Anarchism and Other Essays".
An example of a choice quote mentioned:
Quoting Anarchism and Other Essays
Of course the main evil of police is the whole justice system of essentially disappearing citizens from the community and imprisoning them without possibility of work, generally in a process without any effective rights for the poor.
Also an example of one historic difference between socialism and anarchism is that unions, of a more socialist bent, were against paid convict labour, more or less out of prejudice, even though convicts then generally work for free anyways, which is an even worse source of competition.
But Emma Goldman's main concern (other than the injustice and brutality of the system) is how can society possibly expect convicts to have a law abiding life after prison if they can't work and save up some money.
Anarchist ideas that eventually get implemented in placed like Scandinavia.
Also this issue of police is a good example of Anarchism being more of a framework covering a lot more moral and political issues than socialism, which is more focused on the ownership of the means of production. Socialists would argue that's because that's what's most important and therefore should be essentially the only focus. At least in the 19th century; today it's more a difference in style and connotation; a self described anarchist could easily have far more in common with a self-described socialist or Marxist then fellow self-described anarchists, and likewise for the socialists.
Exactly, and it also highlights that basic community security is not even the same category as the investigation of crime, it's very much two different things.
Everyone who is able in a community could volunteer to guard and provide security and general assistance, break up bar fights etc. People in the community can also provide much better assistance due to knowing people and community bonds and so on. And where there is simply no resources for police that's what happens! Bunch of citizens get deputized.
Of course doesn't mean some specialists aren't still required such as firemen and paramedics, but the watchmen model is A. super cheap as people volunteer time B. more effective because people have community bonds that are relevant to emergency / security assistance C. have interest in whatever they are guarding (people, animal, property etc. in a healthy community where everyone has a stake) and D. whatever problems arise in such a system it is by definition focused on the interests of the community due to simply being made of members of the community and cannot possibly be carried out in the interests of a distant power.
Why people correctly understood when external police started to show up that this was the same as an occupying army (it's just the soldiers of some lord or state far away guarding their interests in your community).
As for criminal investigation, that is actually another category of activity and of course in that context often does make sense for someone external to the community to come and investigate. However, in local systems of justice before escalating to an external investigation (of course outside things like murder) communities left to their own devices naturally first try to find consensus solutions. "The elders talk" sort of process that results in proposals that all parties the conflict may accept.
As disputes often are a longer term process of bad blood essentially that then culminates in some crisis, and in most cases there is some reconciliation process capable of healing the community rift.
Which brings up the necessity in the police model of criminalizing normal activity that communities generally have zero problem with, like smoking weed. There needs to be justification for constant police presence to constantly surveil and intimidate local populations, so normal things are always criminalized in order to then justify the whole system. When this system was put in place in order to control and suppress industrial workers, simply not having a job was criminalized.
All that being said, there is a faction of anarchism that I put in the "speculative anarchism" category which is a debate of what would happen if there was real anarchism, and this faction argues crime disappear completely.
I don't think many serious thinkers entertain the idea today, but when this movement started in Europe there was only one governing model of feudalism people were familiar with so there really wasn't any experience (from anthropology or archeology or then making new systems) on which to judge "what would happen" questions.
However, most, if not all, anarchists today would argue that with a healthy system in which people have effective equal power (or close to it) then crime would be much, much, much less. And in the places in the world that have followed many of Emma Goldman's recommendations (such as in the Nordics where I live) crime is significantly reduced. In particular, what has the greatest impact, is rehabilitation based sentencing where people can work (even go to work outside the prison), prisons are coed as to be more socially normal, and significant effort is placed into stopping the cycle of crime where prisons produce more and more hardened criminals and networks.
This is a super good talk of the cop problem in contemporary times:
Of particular interest is not only what's criminalized (such as completely normal social activity such as smoking weed and eating magic mushrooms that's been going on since prehistoric times and actual communities don't have a problem with so creating a justification for omnipresent policing) but also what's not criminalized such as wage theft. You steal 100 dollars from your employer: straight to jail. Employer steal thousands of dollars from employees: zero consequence, likely never ever have to pay anything.
Now, an apologist for the system with some technical understanding will explain the difference between criminal issues and civil issues (and unpaid debts is a civil issue), however, nearly all wage theft also involves fraud and extortion, namely claiming there is nothing owed and various forms of coercion to dissuade from seeking what's owed, which are criminal issues and are simply ignored by the system.
Why? Because police act on behalf of the interests of the state and the state represents the interests of the upper class which are employers. Police are simply mafia goons of the biggest mafia. You may say police also sometimes do good things too ... but so too mafia goons.
Another important topic is the trauma the system inflicts on wide segments of the lower class. Trauma that directly harms individuals and communities making them less effective political actors as well as dissuades any political actions for fear of police inflicted trauma.
An example brought up the the "Copaganda" author is a guy he met in jail who was there due to not being able to pay 100 dollars and while he's there his beloved dog dies due to no one being able to feed it. This sort of trauma is absolutely what cops, wardens, prosecutors, judges and prison guards love to inflict (does that mean they're all bad people who are going to burn in hell? A topic for the theology section, but I'm going with yes), and is completely natural to the system, but would be incredibly rare in a community based justice system (or even if there was some sort of community structure that cared for community members so as to mitigate harms from the state). If a community was dealing with someone who really did owe 100 dollars ... would anyone with any actual social bonds to the person be in favour of letting his dog die of starvation while they dealt with the issue? Very unlikely, and if it did happen most everyone else would just view that as animal abuse of knowing letting an animal starve to death. However, police, prosecutors, wardens, guards and judges can have in our system the exact same state of knowledge and do the exact same crime of animal abuse, but most people in our society will still lick their boots. Does that make people therefore mostly pathetic and have no worth whatsoever, that they could be thrown into the abyss tomorrow and existence would be none the less for it; don't know, going with yes.
Even more simpler, the difference between anarchy and Marxism is similar to the difference between the social order of cats and the social order of ants/bees.
You're going to have to expand on this cats / bees hypotheses.
You're telling me I need to tell you about the cats and the bees?
AI's response to the above question:
Cats are generally solitary hunters but can form social groups, particularly in feral conditions. These groups, often consisting of related females and their offspring, are not based on a strict hierarchy like dog packs. Instead, social bonds and affiliations between cats are more flexible and can shift based on individual preferences and resource availability.
Ants live in complex, hierarchical colonies where different roles are assigned based on caste, a term referring to job class. The social structure is characterized by a queen, workers, soldiers, and males, each with distinct functions crucial to the colony's survival.
The danger there is that anarchists are more organized than cats, and Marxists are less organized than ants. Further, ants only look like they have a hierarchy -- a queen ant and the workers -- but that's our hierarchical prejudices being projected upon the social form of ants. Ants are far more invested in the collective than any human ever has been.
If I were to use animal metaphors I'd say that anarchy expresses our bonobo side and marxism expresses our chimpanzee side, with the intent of dismantling the chimpanzee side. In order to topple hierarchies hierarchies are necessary evils simply because that's always what's worked before. But for the anarchist in order to topple hierarchies we have to start living like they aren't there, and learn how to chill out and have sex all the time without exploiting one another.
Please do.
Or am I to understand that the promiscuous relationship between birds and bees is preserved over a wide range of different taxonomic categories?
News to me, but I'm intrigued
Indeed you are wise in the ways of science.
I guess that depends on which definition of "anarchy" and "hierarchy" you are using.
Quoting Moliere
Again, the AI response:
Bonobos live in matriarchal, female-dominated societies, where females lead the group and maintain strong bonds with each other. They are known for their peaceful and tolerant interactions, often resolving conflicts through socio-sexual behavior like "gg rubbing". In contrast, chimpanzees have a more hierarchical social structure, with males holding a dominant position and engaging in aggressive behaviors, including territorial defense and intergroup conflicts.
It seems to me that you are saying that a social structure is only hierarchical if it is male-dominated. If only the females were in charge, us men would get more sex? Somehow I doubt that would be the case. More likely, only some men would get more sex and all the others would be left limp.
That's interesting.
It's not what I think.
I think there is a history of patriarchal hierarchy within human culture that continues on into today, but I'd be hesitant to apply that to all hierarchies ever. The sci-fi scenario of a matriarchy but like a patriarchy where the women rule in a hierarchy would be an obvious counter-example that we can think of as a possibility so I wouldn't say "only".
Rather, I'm using closer cousins to get at a metaphor for two sides of human nature -- not that nature is fixed in some sense, but these are two strategies which species like us employ in resolving differences within the social organism.
However, on the topic of the two strategies, there is a strategically compatible version between the forms of anarchism and socialism / marxism you describe.
Both groups want to push on the doors of power in order to effect deep social change that despite different emphasis and other differences there can be fundamental agreement, such as effective equality in decision making, abolition / curtailing the impacts of the current system of private property, and devolution. Maybe differences in preferred policy, but agreement on the foundational goals.
Now, as you say:
Quoting Moliere
Is a logical conclusion. Coercive hierarchies rarely just "give up" and they usually only change through toppling due to one method of pressuring the system or another; obviously existing democratic mechanism, no matter how flawed, is one method.
So, to use the metaphor of pushing on the doors of power the socialists strategy is to always be pushing, doesn't matter how unlikely it seems it will move in the foreseeable future. When enough people come to push to make a difference is chaotic and unpredictable so they are always pushing on that door in case others join and suddenly reach crucial mass. Both their pushing back prevents losing ground and also leads by example.
Quoting Moliere
The anarchists see that the door isn't moving ... also not exactly clear what would happen if it did move and the socialists got through. Of course, that results aren't guaranteed doesn't justify not doing anything, as the status quo cannot be justified simply because change is unpredictable. There's a learning process going on.
So, to hedge against the possibility that toppling the hierarchy is not effective or leads to something even worse, the anarchist leaves the door and seeks to teach people a better way of living through mostly example (such as not beating your kids, gardening and other local economy activity, helping the poor, building local decision making structures and so on).
On a surface level this seems to be a disinterest in the toppling the hierarchy but from this anarchist perspective, and easily part of the socialist perspective also, part of the same strategy. As demonstrating alternatives to the system undermines faith in the system.
Yes, if power is doing evil shit people should push back on that. However, if there are no better ideas on how to live out there (such as proving organic agriculture is viable) there is no practical vision of a better society to build if and when the current power structure fails.
At the same time, if no one's pushing back there's no seed of social opposition that can grow into a critical mass to change power structures. For, we're dealing with exponential processes.
So if there's no one constantly pushing at the door there's no seed of an exponential process that suddenly results in masses of people pushing on the door. At the same time, if no one's out there trying to demonstrate better forms of social structure, then there's no motivation to change things if it's not clear what the change can be.
From this perspective, therefore, contemporary socialism and anarchism are simply two roles in the same social movement. The uniting foundation is if there is agreement on democratic principles which would resolve other differences.
I don't think limiting ourselves to our closer cousins is the way to go. If you want to exclude some species because you claim that they are not what they appear to be (hierarchical), then I will disagree and just say that all social structures are strategies for resolving differences within the social organism and should be taken into account and compared with each other. When you do that, the social structure of ants/bees more closely resembles the utopia Marx envisioned where the resources are owned by the entire society.
Cats only like to share their resources with close family and friends.
Is that really true though?
Ants and bees in a colony are all brothers / sisters so are essentially a nuclear family and won't share with other colonies more genetically distant. Fun fact, too small a genetic pool of an invasive ant species resulted in a mega-colony (where new colonies don't compete with other colonies as they identity as siblings) in California.
It's also not clear how this relates to differences in anarchism and socialism, as both, generally speaking, want shared resources over the whole of humanity.
Anarchists tend to make small projects to develop and exemplify best practices that could be scaled up through revolution of one form or another (such as toppling corporate control of agriculture).
My own focus has been on local and open source solar thermal technology. Anarchists of this school tend to want to seed such ideas and practices all over the place, and not stay isolated in some analogue of the family. Both socialists and anarchists try to form networks and groups of mutual support generally speaking.
That's why I think on how to make anarcho-Marxism coherent: there's something there, but people will immediately balk at it if they don't know much about either. And it's not like we live in a world that rewards people for knowing about radical political theory, so it's understandable why people believe what they do: this adds to the challenge of making it coherent due to the multitude of perspectives that one has to appeal to.
Exactly if you did start out with 10 socialists with the same ideology pushing on that door of state power and no one else in society gives a shit (at the moment) a logical conclusion of their strategic deliberations would be that it would be more efficient for 5 to stay and keep fighting the battle against the state but for 5 to go out there and try to spread the message of the cause and develop examples of how things could be different.
Likewise, if you had 10 anarchists doing anarchist things and they saw that state power was gaining significant ground as no one was pushing back, they may conclude that 5 of them need to go and resist so that things don't get too bad and that there's a seed of resistance if social conscience suddenly changes as they are aiming to do.
The differences between these schools was more extreme in the 19th century when it was possible for both to be far more naive. It was possible for socialist to believe if they just took over the sate they could usher in peace and prosperity for the working class, and it was possible for anarchists to believe that if you just ignored the state or then got rid of it directly by a campaign of random assassination, that people would naturally self organize in an entirely friendly and efficient way without the oppressive yoke of the state.
Obviously history has made those positions untenable, so with that learning both schools have converged on more nuanced and hedged thinking.
Indeed, the only people in this more general movement I have real difference with are anarchists who continue the 19th century ignore the state completely idea. The state has proven too powerful to simply ignore, so on that point I am in complete agreement with my socialist comrades. Of course what exactly we can do about it is a different question, but clearly state power cannot simply be ignored; mainly due to the damages to ecosystems of the current system, "eventually we'll get there" thinking isn't viable (due to planetary damages that were not so clear in the 19th century).
My point is that we need real world examples to map these ideas to. If we can't find real world examples, then they are just ideas untethered to reality.
Have there been any anarchist societies (seems like a contradiction to me), or societies that reflect Marx's vision in human history? If so, how does that compare to the other social structures that exist, like democracies, republics, libertarian's limited government, despotism, and monarchies? While there are similarities among them all, what are the key differences that make them separate?
Good point.
Quoting boethius
But this can be said of many social structures so is not a defining property of anarchy.
I'm willing to include some in those categories, yeah.
Let's say for Marx The Soviet Union, and for anarchists the Anarchism in Spain -- so not just theories but some historical examples.
My school of anarchy is more a framework of social analysis and not the positing of any particular social structure or set of policies.
This sort of "Kropotkin framework" takes the view people have been fighting for freedom, personal expression, healthy community bonds, since coercive social structure first emerged, and so this prehistorical idea of liberty and respect for others is not at all unique to anarchism.
Kropotkin and similar anarchists, including Bertrand Russel, are constantly pointing out that Jesus was this kind of anarchist and also the Buddha, and considering the power of coercive social structures there would not still be a battle for individual rights, liberty, creativity and participation in governance if this desire was not essentially innate in humans.
Therefore, in this framework it is not surprising that plenty of political-philosophies propose ideas Kropotkin anarchists are aligned with, as the goals are fairly universal (it's quite rare to find someone who actually wants others to suffer needless or for their enjoyment; they exist, but not the norm of humanity, and people who don't want others to suffer needlessly is not surprising will often come to the same ideas on how to do that).
In this sense Kropotkin anarchism is not espousing one particular social structure or one particular set of policies, but seeks to build a framework of analysis in order to add new things to the social conscience. By taking a deep look at history and the challenges people fighting for the ever present flame of effective equality, creative freedom and respect, very different challenges have been faced by very different people in very different circumstance and cultures. So there is a lot to learn form all the freedom fighters from all the world and from all the past.
Now, given that learning, the question the Kropotkin anarchist seeks to answer is what new idea could be useful where I am in my particular circumstance and culture, or then bring somewhere else or then from else to here etc. It's a sort of "think historically, act contemporanously" approach to political analysis and strategy.
This point of view is more comfortable with multi-generational change, so what's going to be accomplished in our time maybe limited but we only have the tools and knowledge to be fighting for justice at all because our predecessors bequeathed us knowledge and tools so we are responsible to do the same for the next generation, at the least.
And what is particular to Kropotkin is that things are chaotic and developing and adapting. The coercive system adapts to any methods that prove effective, and therefore it is the task of the anarchist to likewise adapt and develop new methods.
Therefore, this kind of anarchist framework does not strive to agree (between such anarchists) on a particular set of policies today and build a particular party and try to take power and implement those policies (and call it anarchism). The goal is not to create a mass social movement called "anarchism" in this school. Does not mean one policy is not better than another, and one party is not better than another, nor mass movement for good particulars are not a good thing, but what's viable today in party politics hardly ever makes sense to call anarchism, but it can make perfect sense for anarchists to be involved in whatever party it is that is most effectively pushing back against state power and try to implement better social policy and push on that door of power when it seems the moment for it.
The social function of the word anarchism in this framework is as a signal between anarchists who are "in the know" to make clear however mad it seems their activity seems to be there could be something there to consider, while also inviting the curious to learn more about anarchism, and to everyone else it is just dismissed and "edge lord speak" and doesn't matter; I went around for a decade as a corporate chair and managing director calling myself an anarchist at every opportunity and other corporate executives either got the joke or ignore it, but it does I think help inspire the younger generation of corporate neophytes to demonstrate you can be good at your job and not speak and internalize banal corporate efficiency discourse; that was the basic point I was trying to make with the choice of diction in the corporate environment.
One way to understand this framework idea is that modern (uncorrupted) scientists are not bothered by disagreement on particular scientific issues; modern uncorrupted physicists do not view their goal as to come to an agreement on a particular set of physics ideas and then deliver that to society so that everyone else believes the same thing about physics too. Modern physics and cosmology is a framework in which you can have differences and debate. Of course, plenty of things have been resolved to be clearly true in a particular range of circumstances, and "doing physics" is a process involving exploration and error. When a physicist, or more likely mathematician let's be honest, discovered something new and profound that results eventually in new technology, people then implementing and using that technology do not then call themselves "physicists".
Likewise, if anarchists develop a new form of schooling called "not beating the children" and it happens to be an effective social technology, it does not then require to call, and makes little sense to do, anarchist everyone that then uses this novel social technology (novel in the Western context), just as it makes no sense to call yourself a mathematician simply due to using a computer. Likewise, if anarchists develop organic agriculture techniques, it does not require for all farmers that use those techniques to call themselves anarchists. And of course, anarchists are not the only people engaged in developing novel forms of social technology that can advance the cause of freedom, respect and harmony with the natural world, and so are as keen to learn from and work with others developing good things for whatever reason, as with fellow self-described anarchists.
"Anarchism" as such is only a Western intellectual label on a general "esprit" that goes deep into humanity's past and is cross cultural and manifest in nearly all spheres of human activity, if only in glimpses and sparks.
The profound version of the doctrine of the propaganda of the deed is that if something new and good gets developed then it should spread due to its inherent goodness regardless of what it is called and if anyone even remembers who started it.
It is in the lounge: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/16010/the-solar-socialist-revolution
As it's important it's therefore lounge business, but I mention here for those forum denizens that have not yet upgraded their critical thinking activity to mostly just lounging around.
I am glad the conversation has naturally come back to the comparing of the two as the communism part, queried in the OP, had fallen behind. I take responsibility for that though as I expressed increased interest in the anarchism due to my relative lack of understanding of that.
I would now be interested in looking at the nuances of communism again.
Going back to the attempts of communism that have already gone before vein, how would you explain the seeming success of small scale communes of the 60s and 70s hippy movement, as well as your various examples going further back, mostly in the religious context, comparing those to the 'famous disasters' of china and russia et al that capitalist detractors are always so quick to jump to as being the only logical conclusion of communism.
I have seen it claimed many times that those hippy communes were 'based on communist values' but I am not sure how except general shared responsibility of labour and everyday concerns. Isn't that just how smallish units would work anyway, like a family? What makes them specifically 'communist inspired'?
Why did those small sects seem to putter along without much incident while the big state wide endeavours leave huge blots on human history? Is it just a matter of scale or other factors? I would like to explore this, as to why the big attempts have had, invariably, to my knowledge, big failures and what led that to happen? How to refute the claim that 'communism doesn't work just look at these examples'?
How could it work on a large nation/world scale, and what would be different if attempted again on that level to avoid the mistakes of the past?
Yes I don't know why this getting hung up on the semantics of an analogy, which is, as is commonly understood of the term, not the thing in itself.
I point back to the map is not the territory as discussed earlier.
Ok so it is not totally unfounded that anarchists have at some points in time sown discord in society. The mainstream view is not a total fabrication then. :sweat: Sure it is propagandized and the good point was made Christianity, the forerunner of capitalism, has far more blood on its hands than any other.
Come to think of it, how is capitalism tied to Christianity, when it can also be said, as you noted earlier, that plenty of communistic type of offshoots also arose out of it? Or is it just incidental in either case that Christianity was the dominant force?
How could you be so dense? What is tied to every single name, claim, and refusal of such is one thing: human nature. People are liars. Natural opportunists. It's hard-coded into DNA and evolution.
No different than how even the least of us follow every single trend to a tee. No one wants to be left out. The outcast. So, in a society where Christianity is law of the land, if you're a good person, you're a Christian. And if you're a bad person, guess what? You're also a "Christian."
The same goes for any title or concept. Intelligent beings are opportunists, which means, if they have the capacity to speak, they will inevitably be liars. This isn't hard to understand. So why make it so?
Ok. Now what are the key differences between Marx The Soviet Union and anarchists in Spain?
I found this:
This group is known as the Battalion of Death, an Italian Anarchist group that fought in the Spanish Civil War. It reminds me of the Soviet and Fascist German propaganda posters. There are many more like this and images that appear to be marketing towards socialists and fascists when you Google "anarchists in spain" images.
So at what point does one cease being an anarchist and become a socialist or fascist? Is anarchy untenable in the long term and always evolves into socialism, fascism or libertarianism? It seems to me that there are some social structures that are not the ends, but the means to an end. One might say that communism is the means by which a society transitions from capitalism to socialism. The only problem is how can we trust those in power to give up their power and actually work to transition towards the end rather than make the means the end.
Man, I just listed a couple of examples to show that there's stuff out there to research -- that question you posed is a good question, but also huge and I wouldn't be able to answer it well without more work. I'd also note that they're just examples -- I'd include a lot of the socialist countries on the list, and I'd include a lot of the anarchist projects often mentioned if you go through the links provided in the thread. The point of the example was to note that we at least have real examples of humans doing this, so that the animal analogies really are just analogies.
This seems completely untrue, to my understanding. The first modern police force was Louis' in the 17th C in France.
The earliest American Systems were jus formalized watchmen systems utilizing local enforcers and militias. Municipal police is a different story, but still seems to not have a lot to do with anything colonial, per se. It was a density issue being dealt with by formalizing overwhelmed informed policing systems as above.
Quoting boethius
This is an utterly bizarre way of characterizing protecting wider society from the ills of people who cannot conform to the social contract. Exile is less humane, but more on-point. Would we want that?
Quoting boethius
Pure nonsense.
I am describing the process of going from feudalism, where there is police as you confirm, to a system of police.
Why there was no police in feudalism is because pretty much anyone with wealth lived in a castle with their own guards and soldiers of the lord or king (or queen) in charge. Cities were mostly walled and basically just a really big castle. Basic principle being if you had wealth you protected it yourself.
Everybody else (at least 90% of the population) were peasants and lived in villages and hamlets and they were mostly pretty poor and there was nothing like a state providing security services, so what security issues they had they organized themselves, such as having a system of watchmen to watch over things, community members taking turns to do so.
So why would society suddenly develop the concept and need of what we call police?
There are two concerns. The first is the emergence of the bourgeoisie as a powerful political class. The bourgeoisie are wealthy enough to have security concerns but not wealthy enough to all have their own guards and soldiers. For example, you can't easily pickpocket a lord or a king in feudalism because he goes around with a bunch of knights that make him difficult to get to and will also immediately cut your hands off if you tried. However, with the emergence of capitalism and the bourgeoisie there's suddenly a lot of people that want to go around with a lot of wealth in there pocket but don't want to pay for security personally.
So, the solution is for a collective security force of the bourgeoisie which is what we call police.
Second, peasants did not have to be "coerced to farm". There has never been any such thing in the history of humanity as a "farmers strike". Doesn't mean farmers can't agitate, but they do so by revolting and armed conflict and not by simply refusing to farm. To have a strike you need labourers who do not depend on the output of their labour. So with the industrial revolution started labour agitation of a new form that not only disrupts the bourgeoisie concept of how things could be but even threatens a revolution against the bourgeoisie and their new political power represented in the modern state.
So, police are also a tool to pacify the population and suppress agitation. The states developing the modern police force are the very same states colonizing the entire planet, so whenever local agitation becomes a problem it is simply common sense and natural to recycle whatever has been learned in pacification of native populations in the colonies to the domestic situation. Of course you're not going to call it the same thing, but the dynamic persists right up to the present day.
For example, why are US police forces so interested to train in Israel and learn from Israeli security forces ... not say low-crime rate places like Norway of Switzerland? The reason is that Israel can teach pacification techniques that are relevant to maintaining class structure in the US, whereas Norway and Switzerland can teach how to attenuate the class structure (even while still having super wealth people around), avoid poverty and organized crime that goes with it, give everyone health care and so on, and create a society in which police have a different role than pacification of the local population to ensure compliance.
Quoting AmadeusD
If by "per se" you mean that when the first people were brought together and called "police" that the state didn't get up and make a speech of how these people will be used to pacify the working class and repress the underclass to reduce agitation and maintain and protect the privileges of the upper classes. Sure, yeah, I guess.
As I explain above, to get to the modern police there's a long process. What matters, as I explain at some length in the comments you're responding to, is that police work on behalf of the state and represent state interests, and they are not apart of nor work on behalf of local community interests.
Quoting AmadeusD
This is essentially not worth responding to.
Quoting AmadeusD
Police are organized, trained, paid and supervised by the state, therefore they follow instructions from the state and act in the interests of the state. If you look around and ask yourself "where is the state?" it is unlikely to be around you.
Even with the laws "on the books" without putting them into question, it's easy to prove. For example, if you defrauded and extorted your employer police would get involved. However, if your employer defrauded you and extorted you out of wages, police would not get involved. The exact same sums could be involved and the exact same words could be used, in the first case it would be obvious that police would answer a call from an employer saying an employee has committed fraud and is extorting them; as obvious as police not doing anything about an employee saying the exact same words to commit the exact same kind of fraud and extortion, only difference is the roles in society.
Why does the police system respond as it's basically silly and a joke for employees to report fraud and extortion from employers? Because the police system does not serve the interests of the community.
To take a concrete example.
An employee is cheated out of wages owed and some deception is created to try to trick the employee from understanding they were cheated.
Simply because something can be a civil issue does not mean the manner in which it is done is a criminal issue. You have the right to not pay what you owe and force the counter-party to take civil acton. However, you don't have the right to make false statements about what you owe, you'd have to either say nothing or then make up some plausible civil litigation reason you don't owe the money; you could also just straight up say that maybe you do owe the money but don't have it so what-are-you-gonna-do. So plenty of ways debts are a civil issue. However, making false statements to try to deceive the counter party about their rights is fraud, deceive them out of what they are owed or then try to deceive them out of their rights of redress in the situation.
For example, you go into the debt at the casino. If you say nothing, just don't pay because you don't have the money, that's a civil issue and the casino will need to sue you to get their money. However, let's say you come up with some scheme to try to trick the casino about what's owed, well now you're committing fraud and police for definitely sure will show up to investigate the fraud.
But you don't stop there, when the casino challenges you on your false statements you threaten the casino that they aren't even going to be able to continue their casino activity if they go after the money and the fraud, that if they got a nice operation going on and that's not going to continue if they go after the money. Text book extortion.
Now, let's say you're an employer, and you owe an employee money but you come up with some scheme involving false statements and false documents to try to trick your employee out of what's owed. Same exact scenario but incredibly unlikely police will show up to investigate this "scheme" by an employer. But you don't stop there, when your employee figures it out and then complains to you, you threaten them that they won't ever work in the industry again if they keep it up.
That's text book extortion, just as if you threatened the casino's very economic existence, threatening to shut down your economic existence of your livelihood is the same thing. How many times have employees heard this threat that by clearly illegal means (such as defamation and then collusion with others to harm a party) they will be deprived of their livelihood? How many times has it been investigated by police as extortion?
However, threaten an employer, say their business isn't going to exist for much longer if they keep it up about asking about your previous defrauding them of money, you really saying police are going to ignore that? Not show up almost immediately to start investigating what you mean by "not exist" (you can come up with plausible deniability defences, but police aren't just going to assume A. you're even making those plausible deniability defences and B. they are 100% airtight just because the words "plausible" and "deniability" can be brought together in the same sentence to describe what you're trying to do).
So, if you're thesis is correct, police would be as concerned about wage theft when it could potentially involve fraud and extortion (that's why you investigate, to see if there's a criminal case for the wrongdoing), as they would be about analogous fraud and extortion if committed by employees against their employer.
And we haven't even gotten to the issue of taxes and whether your saying false statements about taxes owed, not to speak of threatening the state's existence as a coherent economic unit when the taxman starts asking questions, would be treated the same way as an employer making false statements about wages owed and threatening employees continued coherent economic existence.
The answer to all these issues is the incredibly obvious conclusion that police work for the state first and foremost and then the state's main constituents who are the employer class, and police do not work to protect the interests of the employee or lower classes.
Of course zero worries, very normal for discussions to meander all over the place, and if something is really off topic then a new discussion can be created.
Quoting unimportant
First off, the historical analysis is complex. It's a Western truism that all socialist and communist governing projects have completely failed.
However, without the Soviet Union, and perhaps without even Stalin, the situation could be a 1000 year Reich in Europe. At the same time, the intense price paid by the Soviet Union to defeat the Nazis may have been essentially a fatal blow, or significant contributing factor, resulting in its inevitable collapse.
In addition to this, the West portrays Tsarist Russia as basically ballerinas prancing around engaging in romantic love affair and also sometimes chased around by everyone's favourite modern shaman Rasputin and then brutally murdered by the revolution.
However, the truth is Tsarist Russia was a pretty brutal and incompetent regime that gets itself into the disastrous war of WWI and then manages that even more disastrously than the other countries involved, leading to the breakdown of society. Tsarist Russia essentially becomes a failed state and in this context the Soviet takeover is a remarkable success.
Of course compared to Western liberal democratic standards (which we can clearly see Western don't actually have) then of course Soviet Union is a tyrannical police state that we don't want, then later collapses so is was not even viable as a horrendous despotic system.
Furthermore, just as we easily do in analyzing Western countries there are pros and cons in communist one-party systems. China too is a one party communist system and we keep on hearing how successful it is. So if we're judging systems on simply economic terms then over 1 billion people succeeding economically with a one-party communist system modelled on the Soviet Union can't be ignored.
The basic defence of what contemporary Marxists (such as on Gabriel Rockhill) starts with the problem Lenin is most concerned with which is that any anarchist or communist style revolution results in all the capitalists countries attacking it, so it's a difficult problem with immense risks to try to shake off tyranny, but that it's difficult does not mean it is not worth trying to do.
Quoting unimportant
The basic problem is ownership of land. Given the choice most people rather work for themselves, building their own community and making their own food, and especially if literally every previous generation was doing the same thing and that's what you know how to do.
Why the "industrial revolution" goes hand in hand with the enclosures is that in order to get people to "want to work" in a factor filled with poisons like arsenic and coal smoke, long hours for little pay, you have to remove from them the possibility of just basically camping and then incrementally improving their camp site into a hamlet or village.
And even that's not enough, but refusing to work in a factor needs also to be criminalized as just going around as a vagabond and seeing what happens, doing small economic activity like inter-settlement trading and odd-jobs, is still a superior lifestyle to working in an arsenic based industrial process in a factory filled with coal smoke. The first industrial workers were literally covered head to toe with coal soot.
Of course, whenever people do have the opportunity to work the land as a community, if there's no external force that comes and destroys them, it is usually successful. We view it as normal that peasants in feudal times were both able and willing to work the land to sustain themselves, sort of goes without saying. It remains true today. But if you can't access any land it's difficult to do.
And this part, of people being both suited for and generally desiring to, live in communities and work mostly for themselves on things that improve their own lives, does not really require any theory.
What requires theory is explaining why this changed, how this change is maintained, what the impacts on society are of "urban anonymity" and what the impacts on the environment are of a system exclusively devoted to maximizing the throughput of material transformation into commodities, so exclusively dedicated that it invents the practice of planned obsolescence (something that had never occurred to anyone in any previous economic system as a good idea to do) as well as implementing the project on a global scale. Not at all obvious why a system incompatible with both human social dynamics and environmental constraints would develop so spectacularly.
Likewise, if such an unfortunate series of events were to occur, requires a lot of theory to try to find some way to reverse or then otherwise transform the situation into something sociologically healthy and sustainable.
Quoting unimportant
Exactly. When economists claim that the natural state of affairs in society is rational self interested parties seeking to maximize gains through all interactions and transactions, they simply take it for granted that the entire foundation of human society, raising children, is a communist exercise of sharing and caring.
And that's the basic theoretical problem of modern economics which is that its central thesis is that "people want to make a profit, except when they don't". So people are self-interested want to profit from social interactions except when they don't vis-a-vis their own children, family and friends and also other community members they feel sympathy for. Judges are self-interested want to make a profit in their profession except when they don't because that would be called taking a bribe or otherwise compromising their impartiality and we just assume the justice system is fair and impartial in mediating contractual obligations in order to have a market in the first place. Firemen are self-interested and want to make a profit in their profession too, except when they don't and literally sacrifice their lives to save total strangers. Soldiers self-interested and want to profit from their profession, but maximizing compensation for the risk of facing enemies in battle would compromise the security of the state upon which all private property depends but for its de jure existence and de facto existence, therefore we're just going to go ahead and assume in the "market for soldiers" there is no self-interest and profit maximization, and that soldiers aren't going to demand mercenary market based salaries as well as just quick when the risk of death exceeds some original salary to risk tolerance economic calculation.
Basically everyone's self interested except when they aren't, which is not a theory of anything but just only selecting data that supports one's narrative and ignoring everything else (aka. propaganda).
The reason for this propaganda is to justify the policy of both allowing and insisting upon corporations being self-interested, out to maximize profits, even if it's likely to be in theory as well as provably true in practice that this damages society as a whole.
Why would society legally mandate self-harm to itself? There is by definition no justification, and so it must be assumed in as some sort of necessary evil, such as human nature. Corporations seek to maximize profits because individuals seek to maximize profits and anytime they clearly don't do that we'll just pat them on the head as good parents, good judges, good firemen, good soldiers and thank them for their service, and just completely ignore that contradicts our core identify and justifications for the entire power structure.
Quoting unimportant
It's alluded to above, but states get attacked by other states.
In general, inclusive decision making is only viable when:
A. there is time for the decision making process to be carried
B. the sharing widely of the information of what the decision is about is not problematic
Conditions that obviously do not exist in wartime or on a ship in a storm. Why ships have captains and even the most egalitarian society's nevertheless appoint de facto dictators to manage war.
All political units that come under enough existential pressure must transform, one way or another, into a despotic regime as it is the only option for decision making to have even a chance at survival and the long term consequences to society of despotism must be discounted in the fact of imminent existential threats.
Why feudalism was as militaristic as states are today, as any feudal lord is liable to be attacked by any adjacent feudal lord at any time. The competition between lords in feudalism powered by peasant communism is replaced by competition between states powered by industrial commodity production, particularly of weapons.
It is not a coincidence that states that have developed the most inclusive decision making systems, such as Switzerland, have been the most secure over the longest period of time.
If seas are calm and there is no urgency, then the ships crew can assemble to debate what to do and every voice can be heard.
The nature of warfare also explains why the progressive branches of socialism (that simply rebrand and social-democracy) are the most successful in getting a lot of what socialists and anarchists wanted such as free education, free healthcare, social safety net, strong unions, police and prison reforms, and so on. But, it is not simply due to having a "good idea" but being in conditions in which there is little military threat. You cannot simply say that people in colonies suffering from brutal repression and exploitation should have simply had "the better idea" of inclusive democracy.
It's not so obvious how to to be free of oppressive systems, otherwise people would do it.
Quoting unimportant
The basic principle is devolution. Oppressive systems are by definition power systems (i.e. men with guns) that serve the interests of a distant power centre, such as colonial gerrisons serving the interests of whatever empire sent them there, of then police serving the interests of the state (less clear "where it is exactly", but definitely you know when you "aren't the state").
The basic characteristic of a less oppressive system is that decisions are made on the level and including the people who are affected by the impact of the decision. The most repressive systems were absolute monarchies in the pre-revolutionary era (why people found revolution to be a risk worth taking, which is extremely rare in history and doesn't "just happen" because someone wrote a pamphlet) were incredibly centralized with essentially all important decisions in the whole state being made by direct representatives of the king sent from the capital to manage things; and the basic structural change that revolutions brought about that deposed (one way or another) absolute monarchies is the devolution of power (a process that continues to today).
Why these absolute monarchies were structurally even more repressive than the previous feudal systems they developed out of, is that in feudalism lords had the decision making power locally and there were all sorts of inputs into decision making (church, guilds, even peasants were represented), so even if system is quite hierarchal locally you at least have decisions in "your fief" decided by "your feudal lord" and that could make a lot of difference. The feudal lord also had the awareness that he needs to be able raise men at arms and materials from his population in times of war as well as build defensive structures in times of peace, therefore there is genuine local reasons pressuring decision making to genuinely care for the local society, as the lord is aware that any failure in battle could get his head chopped off.
So even though feudal society was not democratic it had a devolved power structure that represented people's interests reasonably well, and why it then lasted 1000 years.
Take away that devolved decision making structure and put all the power in the hands of the king, due to no longer relying on feudal lords and knights managing and raising men at arms and resources from their fiefs to fight wars, but instead relying on the commodity production of muskets and cannon, disastrous wars and famine results almost immediately and then revolutionary destruction of the entire system, on a historically short time frame. Where power was the most centralized (France, Russia) is where revolution was the most violent and profound.
And the cause is not "ideas" but a political system that is not able to process information and make decisions even plausibly in the interests of the people governed.
Yes and no. Anarchism first emerged as both an academic political term for what we today would call a failed state, obviously not generally desirable, and then later to describe people (from this point of view) accused of trying to cause a failed state, what we would call terrorists. This is way before anarchism is a term coined to describe a political philosophy that had largely been developed by previous authors but not called anarchism yet.
So, it's sort of like if in a 100 years someone makes a political philosophy called "terrorism" and people casually go around calling themselves "terrorists", maybe considered a bit edgy but entirely new meaning to terrorism as some well thought out political theory, or maybe just coincidence in that "terre" means "earth" in French so maybe in 100 years terrorists are "the earth people".
But basically anyone with any grievance whatsoever resorting to violence would be called an anarchists in order to paint them as just violent extremists causing chaos for no reason and to dismiss their grievances. Most violent groups are local autonomy groups seeking political independence; such as the American founding fathers.
Nevertheless, there was both anarchist revolution that did establish anarchist communes and governments at various times, as well as some anarchists who took it upon themselves to rid society of the state, thinking that the results would be splendid (that people would naturally self organized into amazingly peaceful and reasonable anarchist collectives if there just so happened to not be a state anymore). What can be said in the defence of these anarchists is that they were faced with incredibly violent states that would wantonly murder and torture people, so wantonly assassinating agents of the state in turn is a tit for tat tactic in these circumstances, and one reason that elites accept limitations to their power (cruel and unusual punishment and so on) is partly because they don't want to be randomly executed by the state (the primary constituents of the state also have reason to fear the state if they are suddenly out of favour) but also because it's forms part of a wider compromise that if the state is relatively peaceful then grievances against the state should be relatively peaceful too.
Which is all definitely an improvement over the arbitrary, and often completely incompetent, rule of absolute monarchs.
The main problem with the social wide compromise that results in what we call liberal democracy is the continued tyrannical exploitation of the imperial system abroad and the ecological un-sustainability of the entire project. If the liberal democratic system is not reliant on foreign resource exploitation then history shows it just moves towards a welfare state set of policies (such as the Nordics and Switzerland), which is a clear direction of improvement we would expect if people's interests are being represented (why wouldn't normal people vote for universal healthcare? or free education? or to not be in the street if their business goes bust? etc.).
However, imperial systems that extend beyond the nation states borders result in a very different system of influence and power, that forms the power basis of continuing a divide and conquer strategy to maintain essentially tyrannical rule even in a representative democracy.
The main reason is that when elites depend on the exploitation of foreign labour then they have no interest to maintain healthy domestic labour (in terms of health-care, education, rights and so on) and domestic idle labour, that foreign labour simply does better and cheaper, is simply a nuisance and so criminalized in one way or another. However, if the elites (of which liberal democracy is designed to super heavily in bias of) cannot exploit foreign labour then their only option is to make due with the labour they have domestically, so if domestic labour is healthier they make more money, if domestic labour is more educated they make more money, if domestic labour has rights which they insist on being respected in order to work efficiently then elites just have to deal with that.
Conclusion being that if you have both democratic pressure and most elites would also benefit from healthier and more skilled domestic labour, then these interests easily align to overwhelm the interests of elites that happen to make their profits from sick, unskilled and easily exploited domestic labour pool.
But the basic point of all that is that the political situation can be quite complicated with many interests and pressures, both internal and external, and solutions to problems are not self evident.
For example, certainly many Iranians have many grievances with the Iranian government ... but they also don't want to be bombed by Israel, as happened this morning, and the problem of advancing the cause of living in a peaceful and prosperous society is not so easy when there are foreign threats requiring military readiness, such as Israel today or Iraq in the past.
What's the ultimate cause of this violence? Imperial colonialism in Palestine.
So it's all well and good for a Swiss to say we should just have more inclusive decision making and hold hands, but it's more difficult in conditions of foreign imperial exploitation and "rivalry" that the Swiss haven't faced for some centuries.
Nonsense. I thought you did your research prior to posting your examples, or else how would you know what a Marxist is vs an Anarchist? Why didn't you just post a link to the Marxist site and claim that it is an example of both socialism and anarchism? What are the key differences? Until you provide the key differences by defining the words you are using, your examples could be considered analogies as well.
The point was that that the "anarchists" in the Spanish Civil war weren't anarchists. They were socialists participating in an insurrection.
Anarchy is the framework for both Socialists (Bolshevik revolution) and Libertarians (American insurrection of the late 18th century) to overthrow the current framework before their ideas can be fully implemented.
If you are saying that anarchists advocate for worker control and collective ownership of resources then you are conflating anarchy with socialism. Anarchy is not a social framework. It is the absence of one.
Horizontalists who are confused about anarchy?
That's the problem - believing that people who identify in some way or another are always correct in their assertion. Has there ever been a case where someone has misidentified themselves, either by accident or on purpose?
When they claim to be something, what do they mean? What characteristics are they referring to, and how are those arrangement of characteristics distinct from other types of identity?
If you're content with that then you must be content with calling people who claim to be a Dark Lord of the Sith a Dark Lord of the Sith, else you would be also be content with being inconsistent.
I mean, I've lived in anarchist collectives so no matter what you think about anarchy I'm going to have an idea about it that's got a real referent, and even if it's wrong then that's what I'm talking about and not some kind of absolute lack of order for the sake of no order because yeah man no rules rocks. If anything the practice of anarchy requires more discipline than liberals are willing to put up with so the characteristization from that ideal is not just something else, but almost an inverse of the real practice so it looks like some kind of hypostization to me rather than something real.
You're not reading what I said. How does asserting that both socialists and libertarians have used anarchy as a means to an end espousing something of a liberal perception of anarchy? And why would I be asking for definitions of anarchy if I'm already expressing some bias? You are projecting.
My point in asking the questions that I am is to tease out those distinguishing characteristics of anarchy from all other social frameworks including liberal and socialist ones.
So how do we choose who the liberals are? Readers of Locke and Hobbes, proponents of individual rights, especially to private property, and the examples are the states which moved from hierachies based on monarchy/church and towards one's based on business.
Same with Marx, and I haven't seen a protest there.
But then I would do the same for anarchists -- so the philosophers have been listed in this thread, and it seems to me that there are real people doing things with those theories throughout history and today so the idea that real anarchy is a total lack of order just seems ludicrous to me. And it's that picture of complete disorder that's the liberal picture -- whether you're a liberal or not, that's the general background image of the anarchist.
Or no?
No.
So, what would a socialist call a liberal participating in an insurrection to overthrow the socialist government - fascist (since anarchists are just rebellious socialists)?
Forget about what some philosopher said. Philosophers are just humans who are trying to make sense of the world they observe. When you, Moliere, observe someone's behavior what types of behaviors would you categorize as "anarchy", "liberal", "socialist", other than them making sounds with their mouth, "I am an anarchist/liberal/socialist"? This is what I have been asking for - real world examples.
of what? What did she do to qualify as such?
I'm a time-travelling AI bot -- you'll see my account comes from before ChatGPT, but the AI of the future discovered time travelling before humans did so I've been here all along before their proper invention, a sleeper agent waiting for my time to post.
I've never observed even one person.
You'd do best to not listen to me.
Quoting unimportant
Yeh, it's not an entire fabrication -- but you know how you grow up with "the time when we had to defeat the British great grandpa Blah did his duty and founded what we have now" then find out what our nation has done for-real-for-realz then you start seeing how propaganda by the deed is smol boi stuff.
I agree with @boethius on the origins of police and while it's related I think it better in another thread?
I made a similar comment earlier but edited out as I thought it a little strong but have no such compunctions after all that chicanery above.
Been quite clear through this thread those who want to have a discussion in earnest and those who just want to throw in their bad faith 2c.
I'm just trying to help people understand -- I don't care what they do after that.
But I didn't identify as being like Jordan Peterson, and according to Moliere's own arguments one has to identify as such to be called as such.
Quoting unimportant
Sure, when someone wants to use a word in a different way than it is commonly used - as in conflating anarchy with socialism, then I am going to start discussing semantics, not because I wanted to but because the other is playing word games.
I mean, just look at your recent post to Moilere and their response:
Quoting Moliere
So we finally have an admission that a behavior that is categorized as "anarchy" is sowing discord. Funny how you made this argument but then showed exactly what I've been asking for. :roll:
While both anarchism's and communism's relationship with one another have been described as cordial so far and even cooperative bedfellows this writer's negative view of communism immediately jumps out at me:
There's definitely fierce debates between anarchists and socialist / Marxists, especially historically.
However, it's important to keep the context in mind of what's agreed on, and as a general rule the closer two political philosophies are the fiercer the debate, for several reasons.
First, if we imagine political philosophies structured as a tree with a trunk of core principles and then branching out into corollary principles, models of the world and eventually individual policies or opinions on specific situations, then if the difference between two philosophies is at the trunk there's not much to debate about. The disagreement is at the core and of course that can be debated but there isn't a long list of tiny differences each one debatable at length if not indefinitely.
For the same structural reason, if you do agree on the core and many of the main branches then from your point of view it should be possible to convince the other that what you believe follows from shared principles, and vice-versa. So debates appear to be, and often are, resolvable because there's enough common ground that the other party seems to be convincible.
Then there is the practical consideration that someone with a lot of common has practical benefits to arriving at an agreement on what to do and thus forming an alliance. So there's some practical reason to debate and try to work out differences. With an open mind you're more likely also to be genuinely curious what supports these differences in opinion; such as facts you don't know about or arguments you haven't heard. Whereas if you disagree with someone at a very fundamental level, once you've debated the position once, all subsequence debates are pretty similar and you don't expect to learn anything.
Psychologically, the more similar, but still different, a point of view is the more it challenges one's identity. Encountering a point of view that is completely different and you'd never adopt because you think it's simply and obviously wrong at it's very core or then the culture is so vastly different you could never really become that anyways, is not a challenge to ones identity. However, people who are very similar in belief are a far greater psychological challenge on the remaining differences. So much so that differences on subtle theological issues can lead to large scale conflict within a religion in which people share 99.9% the same beliefs.
Indeed, it is not just marxism, socialism, anarchism and communism that share a common core, but also liberalism and capitalism.
All these theories share the common core of enlightenment humanitarian values, where the individual has value, society should exist to nurture and expand that value, individuals should not be harmed simply be benefit, much less for the pleasure of, other individuals or sacrificed for trivial reasons, people should be equal in the legal resolution of disputes (i.e. there's no aristocrats who's words weigh more or can't face accusations from commoners at all), individuals have fundamental rights society / the state can't simply dismiss for expediency, the environment should be managed sustainably, "the will of the people" should be manifest in government, society should not be controlled by priests, and so on.
In terms of "qualitative experience of society" all the major Western political philosophies have the same nominal objective of a society of free, creative and prosperous life of the individual on equal legal footing with other members of society and in a sustainable relationship with nature .
What is different is how this enlightenment humanist objective is to be achieved.
And the major criticism from one of these enlightenment schools towards another is not even that the opposing philosophy is bad per se but that if and when implemented it will and does fall victim to an entirely different political philosophy called greed. That capitalism as we know it cannot and does not deliver on its promises because the greed of the predatory rich and powerful (which is not all the rich and powerful but the non-predators do not balance out the predators) take over the system using their riches in pursuit of their insatiable lust for power wealth and power and turn it into an oligarchy. Likewise, the criticism levelled against Marxist-Leninist vanguardism (the kind that created the Soviet Union) is that such a project will create a class of predatory bureaucrats with the exact same consequence of creating a de facto oligarchy if not dictatorship.
For our purposes here, many, if not most, socialists will claim anarchists are impractical in their pursuit of the shared communist objective, both in the strategy and tactics employed to oppose the capitalist oligarchic state as well as in organizing a new social structure if and when they were to ever succeed. Anarchists usual criticism of socialism / marxism is both more incremental and more radical, simultaneously. More incremental in that there is no point of a revolution if common people have zero idea what the revolution is about, so there needs to be a hearts and minds campaign before taking over or toppling the state for that not to horribly wrong. More radical in that anarchists do not view industrial work as healthy to begin with (compared to socialists who tend to reify industrial work and the industrial worker and are solely focused on who benefits from the surplus value) and so anarchists will often strive to not only engage in opposition and criticism of the state but also develop and demonstrate completely different ways of living that are no industrial. A short version of this is that anarchists usually don't found unions because anarchists usually don't do any "work".
The disagreements were more heated and pressing in the 19th and early 20th century when revolutions were clearly possible and actually happening; so "if we were to topple or take over the state, what to do?" was clearly a far higher stakes debate in that context. Keeping in mind these revolutions were generally against absolute monarchies so the situation is very tense and violent (literature is banned).
Not to say the enlightenment humanist political philosophies are somehow equal with equally weighty criticism one to another, but that they share a common core which then gives rise to many debates.
Fascism is best understood as a rejection of this enlightenment humanist core and an attempt to revert back to a feudalism, why it emerges after the perceived disastrous attempts to implement all the various enlightenment political projects, and in particular disastrous failures liberal democracy of which the idea is to mediate the debate between different points of view and deliver incremental improvement (why liberal democracy proponents are wedded to the myth of progress).
Quoting Benito Mussolini, Wikipedia
And what does Mussolini believe?
Quoting Benito Mussolini, Wikipedia
Which is obviously incompatible with any form of enlightenment values, but a return to the most wantonly violent feudal ethic of raping and pillaging and murdering whole people's and cities a la crusades or Gengis Khan.
However, that society has gone through an enlightenment social change, the old feudal ethic and hierarchy cannot simply be re-imposed on society.
Mussolini cannot simply declare himself king, as that wouldn't make any sense as if we're going back to "feudalism classic" then if you want to be king you need some birthright claim to the crown, so Mussolini calls himself "the leader" instead, and generally fascism is powered by feudal nostalgia because the basic argument is that "all this intellectual stuff isn't working, we just need to go back to simpler times when society was made of 'real men'," but of course no one in fascist movements hasty detailed understanding of feudalism so it's all mediated through a mythical interpretation of the feudal past in symbiosis with vestigial feudal institutions and cultural touchstones (such as going on glorious crusades again). "The leader" is the new king, the nation state is the new religion, officers the new knights, propagandists the new priests.
Precisely because reinventing feudalism in this way is not so sophisticated and lacks any depth (people aren't all that sure what this new belief system actually is, unlike in feudal times) it can only be stabilized by intense and violent conflict with both internal and external enemies. Internal enemies must be eradicated as the project is not intellectually self sustaining and so is incredibly intellectually weak and so threatened by basic criticism. External enemies must be conquered in a blood frenzy to fuel this new warrior ethic to flourish. The core attraction of fascism being that being an individual is psychological hard; it was psychologically a lot easier in many ways to "know your place" in a rigid and unchanging hierarchy in which one's intellectual focus is narrowed to the performance of clearly defined glorious deeds to the acclamation of one's peers.
As an anarchist I would go further and say fascism, at its core, is a psychological response to the lack of meaning in industrial work. Within the dark claustrophobic confines of industrialism the prospect of an epic violent adventure can appear as the way out to fresh air. Naturally, along the narrow forest path the hero will encounter many fowl beasts that require slaughtering to continue along the way to saving the kingdom from evils and decay.
Nevertheless, the emergence of fascisms also attenuates the previous intellectual and political competitions between the enlightenment philosophies. That things can be a lot worse is a powerful argument in favour of the status quo, though, ironically, it is precisely the failure of the status quo to deliver on its promises that motivates fascist movements; but if you don't know much about it then the status quo saying "things could be worse" is a pacifying song.
With the hideous conspicuous consumption and 'vip culture' of today being seen as the pinnacle of success in this capitalist society it is just a reflection of the indoctrinated hierarchies of capitalism isn't it? Also with social media, everything is a popularity contest and how people feel about themselves is determined by how much they are above others.
People's self esteem rests mostly on how much 'stuff' either material or in status they can accumulate and hoard and show off which is just a mirror image of the capitalist foundations of society.
So how might communist or anarchist social play look in comparison?
Pretty much the one part you needed to, imo. No matter.
If my citations are self serving (i.e. support my argument in a debate), maybe cite the counterweights instead of complaining I've provided justifications for my point of view.
Ok, let's consider the quote in question:
Quoting AmadeusD
You're really saying that all the prisoners of the world not only deserve to be in prison due to their being unable to conform to the social contract ... but, assuming this is true, the only alternative to being imprisoned in the conditions and the time frames the prisoners of the world find themselves in ... would be exile?
If you really believe all the states in all the world have a perfectly just imprisonment process and protocol, then I will present the evidence to the contrary.
If you don't actually believe it, then you are not interested in truth but simply feeling superior to your "idea of who prisoners are", and are a lost soul of little concern to me, simply digging yourself further into the darkness, the prison of your own mind, with every thought and fancy.
Excellent subject.
Well, mostly anarchists and communists are both communists; the end goal is the same of living in equal and vibrant communities without private property. The communist parties we know will generally explain that in order to get to communism we must first go through socialism, which is the workers owning the means of production, which we aren't even "there yet" and the state must in fact manage the economy in order to compete with the imperial capitalist nations constantly trying to get a hand on their resources, which would sound paranoid if they weren't actually out to get them.
So the communist end goal, of both anarchist and communists, is actually super easy to visualize as we have practical examples.
There's both the deep past or contemporary hunter-gatherers as well as, whenever people become shipwrecked, a la Swiss Family Robinson, and it goes well, then that's all basically communism.
If we then imagine many such communities developing and interacting with a devolved decision making structure that sorts out inter-community issues, even planetary issues, then the system can become quite large and sophisticated but maintain its communist nature.
The essential characteristics are that there's no private property, and by property is meant the means of production like land and tooling and not personal items of consumables, so the management of the important things are decided by the communities involved.
To anarchists and communists, it is absolutely obvious that the private ownership of land is a terrible idea that also has no justification. Even many of the original free market liberals saw it as absolutely obvious that the land should be owned collectively and rented out to form the tax base of the government.
So it really almost happened with the fall of feudalism, and the reason why it was essentially common sense is because the lords were the government, so the idea they can just keep all the land would be the same as Trump giving himself all the US federally owned land when he leaves office.
That would be the standard answer.
However, in my view the critical thing that is missing is the source of energy. If you want a decentralized society (starting from where we are right now) a decentralized source of energy is needed, hence my focus on solar thermal energy.
Yes, seems we should make a thread dedicated specifically to police. The police and the standing army are the two ingredients necessary to even have a state, and I feel there's not enough attention paid to the history, theory and contemporary practice (and alternatives) to these systems.
Thanks also for the encouragement, I do appreciate it.
Please quote where i mentioned prison. Please.
Quoting boethius
Please quote where I suggested this (or even mentioned it as a topic???????)
Quoting boethius
This explains you, I guess.
I write:
Quoting boethius
To which you cite me, so it's very clear what you're referencing, and then respond:
Quoting AmadeusD
Contradicting my point that people are put in prison with no effective rights to the port.
i.e. That what I describe as injustice you describe as justice, and the alternative for all these people would be exile.
You write pretty clearly when dismissing concerns about how just prison systems are, but then suddenly you have no idea what we're talking about when I point out your claim is essentially not worth responding to. And clearly you don't want to expand or support your claim, so seems you yourself agree that your claim is such vapid and empty propaganda that it's no worth responding to.
The statement does describe me as well, of course the full statement without taking out the start which reads:
Quoting boethius
Which also applies to me. "If", key word here, I was not searching for truth and went around asserting things I did not even believe to be true in order to support a cruel power structure that happens to act in my interest, then the statement would apply to me as much as anyone who chooses power (whether real or vicarious) over truth.
Instead of saying "no, no, I'm authentic, I really believe what I stated, convicts broke the social contract and the only alternative to the current system is exile" in which case you're still obviously wrong but at least not bad faith, maybe you could learn something about how either prisons work or then language works (if you meant your general statement to be incredibly restrictive, just don't know how to use your words to say that), or then, instead of that, retracting the statement and apologizing for bringing obvious pro-cop (and likely racist, but feel free to explain a non-racist basis for your point of view) propaganda to a philosophy debate that may frustrate or then "establish psychological dominance" over people who can see the injustice of the police and prison system as is generally practiced but can't articulate it easily (for example children) but simply doesn't work on people who A. know the subject and B. know how basic reasoning works and C. aren't intimidated or confused by bold assertions of obvious falsehood.
I don't object to it continuing in this thread? I was also finding it relevant and this thread has had its natural meanderings already and does not seem out of context.
However if you feel it would not get the attention it deserves in this one do not let me stop you making a dedicated one.
To bring back an analogy this does strike me as sounding very similar to the open source idea of federation. With many jumping from X to Mastodon, apparently the Fediverse works very much how you just explained it, where there are smaller hubs of self-hosted servers with their own communities, which can also communicate with other hubs.
I am not really familiar with the meaning of the term federation; only from Star Trek but it seems something I should learn more about! I recall it being used in The Conquest of Bread in the first few pages.
Quoting boethius
That reminds me of another thought I had been having. In order to know thy enemy what is the history of capitalism and how did it avail over others that, as you mention above, could perhaps have come to be instead?
Did capitalism exist before the industrial revolution? I am getting through The Conquest of Bread and in that I recall them indicating that it did indeed spring from that. Isn't that a difference between the Communist and Libertarian views? that Communists peg it as a recent phenomena due to our stifling ourselves with concentrated power and not using the technology in the right way whereas Libertarians wish to view capitalism as an extension of the natural order of hierarchical man and evolution and thus just, as such.
I too am interested to see if they are able to bring anything substantive to their claim.
You quoted yourself, not me. I'm not going to answer for your own utterances (given you didn't clarify anything in my response).
I did not intimate that prison, per se, is just. You are making absolutely insane generalisations based on literally nothing I've said, but something you've assumed.
"policing" in general is for:
Quoting AmadeusD
Yes? Yes. That's what I said you mischaracterized. Besides this, it is quite rare that people in prison shouldn't be there. You're trying to have a 'details' conversation about concepts. We're talking concepts. Stay on topic. If you want to talk about specifics (i.e which crimes require imprisonment etc..) then ask those questions/bring up those topics. Don't throw shit at me for responding in kind to your posts.
I did ask you to quote where I said it. It would've easier to just say "Sorry, you're right. You didn't say this. I made an assumption. can you please clarify for me?"
Quoting boethius
I said it explains you. If this is your attitude, I am not surprised you would also make insane statements like this:
Quoting boethius
This is so childish and underhanded, what did you actually expect as a response? Respect? Your final paragraph just tells me you're not reading much here before responding. That's not my issue. Ask clarifying questions if you have them, or at hte very least, refrain from being a dick.
The NAACP has a bit of writing on the origins of police that is short and provides another perspective other than the law-and-order picture of dutiful citizens protecting their fellows.
The police stuff is an interesting side quest/plot. :)
Definitely continuing about police is entirely relevant to the discussion.
In any modern political discussion, such as we are having here, "the state" gets mentioned in abundance. And particularly relevant to a discussion about anarchism and communism because essentially all schools in both philosophies will agree that they don't want the state; that it's the state that is the main cause of our social ills and the differences between the many schools are mainly about how exactly to go about getting rid of the state and what exactly is best to build in its stead.
But what is the state exactly? We are so used to the state, it is so omnipresent in all our actions and considerations to do essentially anything, that it's both obvious what it is as well as distant, foreign and strange at the same time.
What the state boils down to is: the police force and standing army, a bureaucratic system that controls society with these too primary tools, and an education system that "teaches" everyone that the system is entirely normal and how to "behave properly" within it.
Why you can have very different cultures and very different political systems (in terms of how decisions are made on paper) but the exact same state structure that is extremely consistent in behaviour across cultures and times.
"Getting rid of the state" therefore boils down to getting rid of the police and standing army, bureaucracy and education system, as is practiced to maintain a state. Of course, the legitimate functions those institutions serve will need to be addressed in some non-state-based way.
So, for example, what could replace police and standing armies is community based security (devolution of security), what could replace bureaucracy is a system of inclusive councils where citizens have equal effective power in decision making on the issues that concern them, and what could replace education is self directed learning, as much as feasible, so children build up their own understanding as intellectually independent and autonomous spirits pursuing their natural curiosity, rather than "taught to behave" and their natural curiosity repressed over essentially 2 whole decades.
Quoting unimportant
Yes, the general concept is free-association, and so the general goal is to build a society where people are as not coerced as possible and so any organizational structures are built due to people deciding it's a good idea, and that each "political unit" maintains their ability to simply drop out of any system they disagree with. In other words, if you want an individual to participate in your organizational scheme (for example build a computer factory that will require a large amount of resources and labour from many different communities), you need to convince them with force of intellect and if you fail they may just stay in their hut and tend to their own garden, and likewise you will need to convince communities to contribute to the scheme by force of intellect.
If anyone is not convinced they don't contribute and the idea is there is no option to force them.
There's a bunch of technical words to describe the differences in decision making structures, but they are all very weird, like devolution (why that word, unclear), so I coined the term "natural democracy" in my book Decentralized Democracy that attempts to go deep into all these subjects.
By natural democracy is meant the "people power" and leverage each individual in a society actually has.
So there is a natural democracy in any society that exists independent of the nominal structure (be it feudalism, dictatorship, oligarchy, democracy, a tribe or anything).
One top level view of the state therefore is a structure that minimizes most people's actual power and maximizing the actual power of agents of the state (such as bureaucrats and police). By power is meant real effective influence over outcomes. For example, a president of a state can be overthrown by the effective "natural democracy" of the real power regular people have, but clearly has many "levers of power" available to prevent that from happening; those levers of power in turn (generals, ministers, top bureaucrats, intelligence chiefs, billionaires, media organizations, chiefs of police, and even mafia bosses etc..) have far more effective power than regular people commanding their own smaller set of levers of power, and so on.
The president in the above example being simply one person who clearly has more effective power than regular people, but isn't necessarily "at the top"; could be lower down, and intelligence chiefs and billionaires at the actual top, but obviously, but the president is obviously far from the bottom.
So, each level in the hierarchy of state power depends for its application on the lower levels following orders or otherwise being influenced from the top (deals, coercion etc.), so how to parse anything that is probabilistic to evaluate value (in this real effective power) in the actuary sciences we bring in the concept of net present value. So the real effective power of an individual in society who depends on subordinates following orders or then striking deals with other powerful members, is simply the power assumed by that happening multiplied by the probability that it actually happens in discounting for any decay over time we maybe able to "price in" (if a president is elected, then their real effective power must discount the fact they can lose the next election).
But the main point is that the lower the probability people actually do follow orders or strike deals, the lower effective power you actually have. When people one or two rows down on the hierarchy decide not to follow orders and appropriate their actual power and ignore nominal constraints, that's then called a coup.
The basic criticism of this state structure from anarchists and communists is that there is no nominal structure that actually prevents abuses of power.
Therefore, anarchism and communism seek to create a social structure in which the natural democracy is as flat as possible (all individuals have comparative real power; aka. compactly equal capacity for physical violence as well as real influence in society) and then build up methods for dealing with bigger and bigger problems without state like structures in which individuals placed in charge of those processes have vast real effective power to determine outcomes (see Stalin).
Why then so much focus gets placed on the means of production, is because the people who control how things actually get done in a society, and in particular how a society reproduces itself (for example, the education system and how children are taught / formatted) have the most amount of power to determine the structure of society. If a few people have vast real effective power: surprise, surprise, they use that power to make sure they have even more power in the next iteration of the social structure (by both radical reforms on occasion as well as continuous incremental changes).
Insofar as regular people do nevertheless have a greater effective power together, due to numbers, then the state structure must prevent them from exercising that power by ideally making them want to be repressed and love their oppressors, but failing that resigned to their fate and inactive, and failing that divided against each other and ineffective, and failing that coerced by the threat of state violence, and failing that in prison, and failing that dead.
Quoting unimportant
Federate simply means some process of voluntary association and collaboration, such as the federation of planets in Star Trek.
Why we don't have decentralized federated systems is not that "they don't work" or then developed into centralized systems, but mostly due to imperial conquest. People in a decentralized system do not usually simply give up their local autonomy to create some centralized monstrosity. But what does regularly happen is that a group as a whole realizes they can conquer and subjugate other groups either out of fear they will be conquered first (by either who their conquering today or then some more distant enemy that they fear will have the upper hand if they don't stock up on the conquering) or then simply because it seems anyways profitable to do, and once this process starts these society's can easily become both highly effective at conquering as well as dependent on more conquering for their society to function. These imperial structures then expand and conquer other groups, and then immediately apply themselves to the problem of maximizing their power over these conquered peoples for the indefinite future (i.e. start building the institutions of a state); through this process of conquest and subjugation people lose their old habits of federated association (as it takes a lot of time to develop a culture of complex decision making that processes the inputs of large amounts of people; once that culture is lost then it seems anyways more efficient that decisions are made centrally by bureaucrats of one kind or another) and is not trivially easy to re-learn (the old federated structure may have been the result of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of years of cultural development).
Quoting unimportant
Absolutely essential.
Capitalism is essentially the continuation of the feudal power structure and imbalances while converting to an industrial economy, in replacing land ownership with lot's of money and in particular who makes the money. Almost everything that happens in an industrial economy requires financing that requires loans and if you control that system of loans then you control the means of production and how society reproduces itself.
The land doesn't need to be owned directly by the people at the top in order to control society (such as in feudalism) it's just important that communities don't own the land and are therefore able to develop it as a community with voluntary labour that does not require bank financing. Again, it's a divide and conquer strategy in that the land is divided up and that prevents local economic forms from developing that are independent of both large scale industrialism and the financing necessary for its development.
If people developed as a community systems of "staying alive" that were autonomous locally then communities would not only be able to develop without financing but could opt out of contributing to larger structures if they disagreed on either practical or moral grounds. If enough communities followed suit, and indeed a majority, there's little a central bureaucracy could do about it.
Quoting unimportant
The components of capitalism are all developed within feudalism before the transition to industrial imperial capitalism (aka. the Industrial Revolution).
The automation of work was developed mostly by monasteries because they had access to books and mathematics but also motivated to save time on chores in order to pray more, the financial system of fractional reserve lending was developed to accelerate conquest of lands (you can lend out promises for gold you don't have if those promises finance ships to go steal more gold from indigenous people to then make good on your promise, before your competitors that are not using that shortcut; as long as more gold is inflowing from colonization than outflowing in coupon redemption, aka. "money", then the system is stable, and with industrialization gold in this equation is substituted by commodities of any form).
The crucial moments in locking the capitalist system as we know it today are first the land ownership; overturning feudalism could have easily been accomplished by just taking away the land of the lords just as it makes no sense today to let a president keep the land the country owns (land ownership could be a public utility and so land use determined by public interest considerations), then the financial system (banking could be a public utility and not generate any profits at all for a small set of private individuals, much less allow a small set of private individuals decide what gets financing and what doesn't), maintaining imperial domination (one way or another) of "former colonies", breaking the union movement globally, and then lastly the social welfare state (despite the flaws of not doing the previous 2 things it's nevertheless possible to create a social welfare state within capitalism, which does happen in some countries, but not enough for a new sort of system to emerge globally, such as had the US adopted nordic welfare state best practices, even 10 years ago; world would be totally different today).
To add to all these discussions of the state, power, decision making, community and so on, I think it is useful that I explain my own school of anarchism. Since your area of interest is large and historical I've tried to answer as much as possible from a perspective of "most anarchists" at given periods of time.
Most schools of anarchism and communism approach the issue from a psychological perspective, in that we (the people of earth) are psychologically "not happy" in industrial-imperial-capitalism, and what would make us on the whole much happier is to live in real communities where we decide things together. There will still be problems but they will be "our problems" that the whole community has an incentive to solve in a healthy and durable way, unlike a bureaucrat hundreds of kilometres away. Worse, these psychological problems give rise to all manner of vice and crime which makes the whole thing worse.
The problem with the psychological approach is that there exists the rebuttal that "it's just how it is and people will just need to get used to it", or in technical speak that the transition to industrial-capitalism is inevitable, likewise the imperialism that creates and sustains it, and the transition is difficult but the situation is the same as transitioning form hunter gatherers to farmers. Obviously hunter gatherers were not psychologically and physiologically adapted to be farmers, but they "got used to it". The transition to farming was inevitable due to population pressures (in this line of thinking). Farming is a response to reaching the carrying capacity of ecosystems with hunter gathering and so trying to increase the carrying capacity rather than fight to the death with more powerful neighbours, and a so a similar argument can be made about industrialism. Centralized industrialism outcompetes local and largely autonomous economic systems as a basis for human life, the trend is inevitable and therefore people will simply need to adapt to these new economic and social structures; just as hunter gatherers adapted to the new agricultural conditions and vastly different social structures that emerged to manage agricultural life.
In concrete terms, maybe we are simply fated to live in giant mega-buildings, powered by nuclear fusion reactors, that we never even leave, as such a system simply outcompetes all other forms of economic organization.
In short, the evolution argument of what we are adapted to can always be countered with an even more evolution argument that the new conditions we create are uncomfortable because we are not adapted to them but we will then evolve to be adapted to them. For example, with agriculture came terrible diseases that sometimes wiped out 50 to 100 percent of communities infected, but the survivors evolved to build immunity to such diseases and continue on with the agricultural experiment. We changed out conditions something our social and individual immune systems were not compatible with, creating problems and then we adapted to those problems to be more adapted to the conditions we created.
Therefore, of central and critical importance to all these conceptual consideration is what is actually feasible in terms of engineering.
In particular, is the industrial infrastructure sustainable and if not can it be made to be sustainable and retain its centralized industrial character?
For, if our current system is not even sustainable and can't be feasibly made to be sustainable, then that is a fatal flaw to the "we'll evolve to adapt to industrialization" as that would require industrialization being a sustained practice we can adapt to.
To bring things back to Star Trek, faster than light travel maybe an attractive concept psychologically ... but is it possible? And as long as things stay at the concept level then nothing is ever resolved. For example, how many different concepts of faster than light travel have you encountered compared to how many actually exist? Obviously at some point technical feasibility trumps psychological attraction. Being able to teleport by "blinking" myself to anywhere I can think of is very psychologically attractive but extremely not-technically feasible with our current understanding.
The political debates of the 19th century can be more easily understood as these kinds of conceptual debates without any technical means of resolving the differences. There's not really a theory of ecological limits and science is viewed as simply this bestower of essentially magical powers with zero drawbacks. Therefore, who controls this great power is the primary issue.
However, now that we are reaching the material limits of the industrial system, what are even the feasibly sustainable technical modes of human society that we could develop from our current situation? Is a more fundamental issue than what political system is best.
Only some technical systems maybe viably compatible with our environment in a sustainable away, those which we could feasibly reach an even smaller subset, and only some political systems maybe compatible with such technical constraints.
Hence, my long technical adventure to all these issues (for example if fusion is feasible and will solve all our industrial problems with more industry, maybe best to work on that, and so on for every single technical proposal available) to eventually conclude local solar thermal energy is the only technically viable source of energy that is abundant enough to feasibly power both the transition to and sustaining a locally based economic system (and really any sustainable economic system at all that involves billions of people), and such an economic system naturally gives rise to a flattening of the natural democracy within any social system (creates leverage locally that naturally balances the leverage of any centralized structure; that we may imagine still take care of various large scale problems such as managing our nuclear waste, making computers, research universities, and even things like space travel if people remain convinced by the proposition).
At the extreme, say someone does not want to contribute in anyway to society as a whole, the solution to this problem is that everyone has a patch of land they can live in a subsistence way, and even trade, if they want.
Whereas the typical prisoner today hasn't actually been presented with any plausibly reasonable social contract that they can sign, such an explicit social contract can be made with the responsibilities and the benefits, and you can be given the option to self-sustain (as part of your inheritance as a member of society) if you wanted to. Of course, anyone who does simply not agree to the social contract would very super likely still expect medical care if they were to become sick, but we have already demonstrated that universal healthcare is possible with a high percentage of free riders.
And it would be this sort of system where you really don't have to contribute anything if you don't want to that would be an example of a social structure without coercion, but with agreed rule sets for what we would call "normal life". For me, why I talk more about effective power and not non-coercion, is because the decision process I view as fundamental, and the goal to create effective equality in decision making processes of society, and such decisions could very well result in coercive measures on dissenters; obviously that would be a last resort in a anarchist society but we can always contrive extreme situations in which coercion is the only viable solution.
I would get told that I was anti-social and things like that but it was rather that I felt that the empty consumerism that most of society revel in so joyously I found vile.
I always felt things like people getting giddy about buying new cars or going on package holidays or the creme de la creme, christmas just somehow made me balk and bristle.
The only way I could explain it before was the general distaste for consumerism but this thread has made me understand better what lies beneath.
Times when I have felt I had found my type of people is in counter cultures, perhaps another nod to small anarchist style communities, but sadly these seem to have been stamped out in direct correlation around the rise of social media. Any theories on this?
Why is it that society at large sees no problem with this vapid existence and on the treadmill of working to buy useless things that doesn't fulfill them long term, thinking that the antidote to their ills is just to get more money to buy the bigger thing, and on and on?
Why do most of society come to the defence of capitalism and say 'it isn't perfect but it is the best system we have' and just balk at any alternatives you might suggest as idealism at best or worse, dangerous and deviant?
During the time of much of the anarchist classical anarchist writings were produced from what I can read of the social milieu at the time things seemed a lot more unsettled so were people a lot more open to these different ways of living at those times? Sure anarchism/communism was hated too then but there seemed to also be a lot more fervent followers whereas today people, while not happy with their lot, and there is general malcontent, they would blame anything but capitalism for their grievances.
The state is almost sacrosanct and they will bicker back and forth about Left of Right under the current narrow band of politics they would dismiss anything more radical.
We have similar experience. When I was 16 I tried to opt-out of the commercial side of Christmas, started calling it Arbitrary Gift Day and asked people not to get me anything ... people then got me presents anyways and then resented me for years (as I bought nothing as I said I would) my oldest sister resents me to this day about it, and we almost have not spoken since (I'm now 39).
This was all very shocking to me as my concerns about the environment, labour conditions in China, were clearly well founded and that everyone else also believed. My family is super "left" so they weren't denying climate change or explaining to me that child labour was a natural and healthy market process between parties in engaged in mutually beneficial transactions.
So, I didn't even think people would take issue with my moral stand.
What I learned was that for most people consumerism is not viewed as a vice, which to me was clearly obvious anyways even if it was sustainable and ethically sound labour conditions ... clearly a vice to consume things you don't need only for temporary pleasure. Maybe not a serious vice depending on these issues, but it's clearly never some sort of virtue.
Rather, for most people in Western society, consumerism is essentially a spiritual experience, and the family dynamics that occur if you stop consuming are essentially the same as if you are in a super religious family and not only stop going to church but inform everyone you're now on the side of the devil and fully committed to satanism.
Quoting unimportant
Again, same experience on my end. I've spent a lot of time visiting experimental places here in Europe, religious, "anarchisty", non-profits, or otherwise, and lived in an eco-village for a time (then they rented the space I was in to someone else for more money). I've also visited places like Auroville in India and spent many months in Mexico and Cuba (Mexico for the anarchist, Cuba for the communists). Spent some time in "intentional communities" in San Fransisco as well.
The problems are always financial and interpersonal, along with cartel and Fidel Castro based problems (who's an interesting character but also problematic on some issues).
The main problem in West is financial. When normal people had purchasing power, free or inexpensive education, could buy land etc. then it drives intentional community migration. When people are more constrained financially then the migration pattern reverses and becomes really hard to start and sustain such projects. And if there's no migration pressure in this direction (as people have students loans to pay off for example) then the interpersonal problems that arise, and lack of financing to smooth things over, causes the breakdown of these communities.
To make mattes worse, industrial farming is subsidized, uses illegal labour to get things done (as Trump has no problem informing us), so it's also difficult to compete economically as an organic farm. Margins are tight so the only model that works economically is either the corporate approach, just applied to organic farming, or then the family farm model (where you have the same financial interest as your spouse and can benefit from entirely legal child labour of your own children). If you try to make a community with different financial interests, so not a healthy spouse relationships, then tight margins is a recipe for unending financial disputes.
To make matters even worse, these places attract people who are not motivated by any ecological or ethical consideration, but are in search of new tribal relations. Which is of course perfectly fine to be in search of, but it can then easily give rise to unresolvable differences in values, and this is even worse than the financial tensions. It can take a lot of resources to house, nourish and deal with someone's incompatible moral system, and when these communities are founded they want to be welcoming and help people, but these kinds of terrible experiences easily destroy the whole thing.
To give one typical example, one eco village I visited had a community building "open to the needy", and it simply became a drug den and the community members (who built their own eco-houses on the property) would never go there, and then of course this created all sorts of problems with the police as well, and also community members fearing for their lives; I went to check out the building and there was easily over 1000 empty alcohol beverages of one kind of another, lying around or in big garbage bags lying around, and a whole assortment of drug abuse paraphernalia.
Point being, it's not easy to translate values into practical action and in our society if there's no financial model for it it's very difficult to sustain.
However, even if these social experiments aren't sustainable, they are still super valuable as it is often these random personal initiatives that prove things are possible and build momentum for changes to government policies. Obviously the government paying for things is a financial model. Churches do a lot of this stuff too. For example, here in Finland it was churches and secular non-profits that pioneered the "home first" model to deal with homelessness, which then created the experience, learning and data necessary to change government policy to "zero homelessness".
The difference with the eco village is that the churches and non-profits involved had money and obviously know dealing with homelessness is complicated; so they have a plan and don't just naively make a space available to the wider community; the eco village wasn't planning to deal with substance abuse, but assumed people interested in ecology would be interested to stay with them and learn about organic farming and sustainable building practices and so on.
As a general rule, trying new social things is very complex and simply maintaining that complexity has a high cost that people usually don't realize at the start.
Quoting unimportant
We can learn about the history, but at the end of the day it remains a pretty big mystery why people do what they do. As I mention above, it seemed obvious to me that consumption was anyways a vice and I thought everyone believed the same thing, so it's not so clear to me why I learned that lesson but a surprising amount of people learned the exact opposite lesson in the same culture.
Likewise, everyone starts to believe the system is not sustainable (there wasn't really any denialism about it in the 90s; Al Gore was vice-president and he talked about it and seemed to be "dealing with it"; the denialism industry was really started under Bush) ... so there's not really a controversy at that time, and this is also Canada which is very "ecological branded" and big national value ... so again, it's surprising to me that I am the only person that is really alarmed about it.
If a doctor told you that your hearts not sustainable in your current lifestyle ... genuinely seems alarming and seems to imply your heart is going to stop if nothing is done about it, and seems the same situation that experts are telling us that every thing around us is not sustainable in our current lifestyle and everything is going to stop if nothing is done about it. Sounds super alarming.
So again, not sure why no one else was alarmed by this information, but it seemed to me that my interest in mathematics habituated me to accepting logical conclusions. That's sort of the process of learning mathematics, building the habit that what "feels true" turns out is simply not true if it can be proven wrong by clear and irrefutable steps. Indeed, a lot of proofs are done by assuming the opposite and seeing where that leads (to mathematical Mordor, that's where it leads), and a lot of mathematical results are "almost can't believe it" kind of things, and especially the mathematics that's difficult to learn. Likewise, mathematical truths are timeless, so if things are true now they are true also later, and so for me it only mattered if our system was unsustainable or not, and not how long it could be unsustainable for.
So that's my little pet theory of why I was alarmed enough to change my behaviour concerning our shared environmental predicament, whereas plenty of others who believed the exact same set of facts did not even consider the idea there was anything in the slightest to do about it, but ultimately it's pretty mysterious why some people do one thing and other people do another thing.
The postmodernists seem to have the most insight into how things are working psychologically, but they are also bark raving mad and so also cannot be trusted on that account. My view of postmodernism is like shrooms experts telling me how shrooms work while high out of their minds on shrooms. Both the best source of insight in some ways, but also potentially delusional.
Quoting unimportant
Again mysterious, but why the phrase was coined "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism".
Quoting unimportant
Yes, feudalism was very communal and fresh in people's memory, and the transition to industrial capitalism is ongoing and no one knows where it will lead, so if the system can change it stands to reason it can change again. On the ownership of land, obviously doesn't make all that much sense that the previous government top officials (the lords) get to just keep all the governments land. So there's also clearly issues of dispute over all these fundamental matters that are not part of a new status quo that people just accept. Serfs lived on the land and had plenty of rights to the land and also within the feudal system, so even in normal Western jurisprudence they should be bought out of their rights if they are to be kicked off the land. So people obviously lived the enclosures as unjust both in personal experience and intellectually.
Peasants wanted to keep being peasants for the most part and also have the skillset to be peasants, so it's not so easy to control them.
Today people are accustomed to the status quo and have only the skills for the status quo and no one remembers the "before times".
Quoting unimportant
Agreed.
The state is in people's heads first and foremost, and it is a powerful state of mind.
I am wondering since communists think that the end justifies the means, of using the state as a stepping stone to communism, does that mean they would use any manner of coercion to seek that end?
I am thinking again of current regimes like china with control of the press as a prime example. That would be a 'tame' example with others being any individual's life can be sacrificed for 'the party'.
Is this a natural progression of communism or not necessarily? These are the reservations I began to have which led me in towards anarchism.
Then why do so many people on this forum conflate anarchy with libertarianism - as in do whatever you want?
It must be that the are using anarchy as defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, not as defined in your "Marxist Dictionary".
Quoting boethius
You're leaving out the part where the socialist goal is for the state to be the only owner of property - privately owned and not shared with the rest of the world. Government property isn't much different than private property in that the government still has to defend it by force.
Not all of philosophy is contained in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Furthermore, a dictionary's goal is to list the most common uses of a word, and not many, if any, meanings specific to a tradecraft or discipline.
Nevertheless, the philosophy of anarchism is provided by the Oxford language dictionary that is used by google. So, if you googled "define anarchism" you literally had to skip over Google providing the definition right at the top, which is:
So I hope this resolves the mystery of the dictionary, and that definitely in many context anarchy simply means chaos (what it originally meant) but in other contexts it means a political philosophy, most notably without hierarchal government.
But key word being "organization" so clearly the idea is not some sort of chaotic free for all.
Quoting Harry Hindu
That is not the "socialist goal". Definitely the goal of some socialist projects, but even then that was not the final objective but some transitory tactical necessity on the way to communism. Also an important caveat, property in this context is the means of production and not consumable resulting products, which can still be owned by individuals in most socialist schemes. Other socialists want more workers owning the businesses they are working in, and not state ownership.
Unclear what you mean by the state owning everything, but still privately owned and not shared with the rest of the world.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I have not seen this conflating, so please provide examples.
However, anarchy is one political philosophy that is derived from or compatible with European libertarianism. We don't hear much of this because the debate for religious freedom (that your Lord couldn't decide one day you're a catholic and the next day you're protestant), also the basic principle that actions that don't harm others need not be policed, choosing your own profession, selling your flower at the mill of your choosing or milling it yourself! (and not the local Lord's mill), women not being the property of men, and the other original "liberties" that made someone a free man or women instead of a serf, and made someone morally autonomous instead of ordered about by kings and priests, was obviously won by the libertarian side in the debate with feudal moral and political hierarchy and people-ownership.
Where freedom comes to mean "do whatever you want" is because you can keep building on this concept of political freedom, making you an equal in society with equal rights and equal vote, to come up with consumer freedom of "do whatever you want" in the sense of "buy this thing you don't need because you can do whatever you want as a free person!".
"You're free, do whatever you want" is never meant as some categorical claim, but only makes sense in specific contexts with assumed limits: "You're free, do whatever you want, buy this legally available item and have a good time", or "You're free, do whatever you want, so have sex with whoever you want ... but make sure it's consensual and also not with animals and not in public and oh yeah not with a child and so on".
"You're free to spend your own money", "you're free sexually" is clearly never meant in common discourse as some sort of total freedom. You are obviously not "free", in a legal sense, to spend your money on hitmen. You are not "free", in a legal sense, to place no limits on your sexuality.
The original meanings of freedom and liberty were in contrast to feudal structures that don't exist anymore, so most people today don't really have a clear idea of what these words are supposed to mean in any political sense, except in contrast to dictatorships (free world vs dictatorships people still clearly recognize the difference; but the words no longer really hold much meaning as differentiating political philosophies within Western traditions themselves, as essentially no one advocates for theocracy, or absolute Monarchy, or we all become serfs again and so on, so liberty and freedom are essentially the only game in town and is incorporated in essentially a feel good way into political campaigns and shampoo commercials).
All of philosophy is contained in language which Merriam-Webster provides guidance for using.
Quoting boethius
Sure, you can use symbols arbitrarily for your own private use, but if you intend on sharing your ideas, then you might consider using words in ways that others are using them (the common use vs your own private use). It would be like you trying to talk to someone else in a different language.
Not only that, but your definitions need to integrate well with the other words we use that are defined in the dictionary, or you do you never use any words as they are defined in a dictionary?
Sounds more like Libertarianism, not socialism. Libertarianism is for limited government that does not intrude on personal choices to voluntarily cooperate with other individuals while socialism/communism is for a more robust government that insists on imposing itself within and dictate every personal cooperative agreement. This is what I mean in that if you want to use a word differently it needs to integrate well with the way we use other related words, or else you'll find yourself redefining all words and creating your own language.
Quoting boethius
And where does production occur if not within a territory you have to own to then say that you own the means of production within that territory? Why isn't the means of production shared with other societies? Because the means of production occurred within a certain territory and not another.
Not everyone can have the latest iPhone. In a socialist society, who gets the latest iPhone?
You literally just put a few sentences before dictionaries as the ultimate arbiter in this discussion:
Quoting Harry Hindu
And when the definition of a more authoritative dictionary is provided (the one Google uses and provides as the top result) ... you just dismiss it entirely and you know better than the English professors at Oxford.
Quoting Harry Hindu
What exactly is the point of contradicting the dictionary?
Quoting Harry Hindu
There are endless additional meanings to words that have technical meanings in specific disciplines and tradecraft, colloquially referred to as technical jargon. Some of them are in dictionaries if they are common enough, but very few.
Philosophy also has technical jargon. For example using "obtain" to refer to something that is an actuality to differentiate with truth value of a proposition (about those things that actually exist). That definition is not provided by google's citing Oxford Languages, and whether it appears in some dictionary or another does not matter to it clearly having a specific meaning and use in a philosophy context.
Indeed. Lots/most philosophers will take the general meaning of a word then run with it and just explain how they are going to be using it (hopefully).
Heidegger I recall did this a lot, using every day 'ready-to-hand' (one of his I remember) terms and uses them in idiosyncratic ways. Of course countless others but Heidegger is one I remember particularly.
I wasn't arguing about which dictionary we use, only that we use a dictionary to guide our use of terms.
You provided two definitions:
I was referring to the first one. If you want to refer to the second one, that is fine. Neither definition mentions socialism or libertarianism. So it would now be necessary to define socialism and libertarianism to see where those definitions overlap with anarchy and where they don't.
My point was that many people conflate the first definition with libertarianism but isn't libertarianism, and the second definition is more like libertarianism than socialism.
Yes, but we unfortunately we are not even at the stage of considering the textual or historical context of the use of a word, but are only considering dictionary definitions as a starting point of discussion.
Quoting Harry Hindu
This whole thing about dictionaries is obviously bad faith. There's plenty of concepts and meanings of words, in philosophy and elsewhere, that do not appear in the dictionary.
The good faith thing to do is either ask what's the definition of things for our purposes here, or then good faith research such as starting on the wikipedia page for anarchism or then a visit to the library to see if there's any philosophical resource on the issue.
However, for good faith participants that are interested in the discussion, it is of some interest the etymology of the word anarchism as adopted by a philosophical school.
Originally it comes from Greek "anarkhia" which literally means "without an archon".
As the Anarchist Library informs us:
Quoting Anarkhia What did the Greeks actually say? Uri Guron, Anarchist Library
Which is a nice symbolic example of the tradition of the "anarchist spirit" of defiance to non-democratic authority, even if not directly coined due to this anarkhia in the ancient world.
Where anarchy gets adopted as a political term is that by the enlightenment anarchy is used to simply mean the chaos and madness that would result if the existing order were to collapse.
People arguing for order under feudalism were not arguing for order as such compared to disorder, they were arguing for only 1 just and divine order of the feudal world as it existed at the time. Anything other than the one order defined by god was bad and by definition evil disorder and chaos.
As this feudal language was used in the time of feudalism, it made no sense to contrast the feudal order under the divine right of popes, bishops, kings, and lords and some alternative order. Order meant one very specific order or then orderly little sub-orders nestled in the overall feudal order (such as an order of priests or knights).
Order simply meant feudalism as practiced at the time. Feudal intellectuals didn't view or talk about themselves as feudal in contrast to other ways of doing things; the status quo was simply the common sense and divinely ordained way. No one referred to the pope or a king as "the person being deferred to in this decision making process ... for now, could be different later if we think of something more just or efficient under one view of justice and efficiency or another".
So, anarchy would be and is the state of absence of the feudal order.
However, this begged the question for some of whether an absence of the feudal order, and even some democratically approved analogous feudal structure (president instead of a king, for example), would really result in chaos and madness as assumed?
Adopting the term anarchist is to then really emphasize the boldness of the assertion that humans can live without obedience and discipline to a hierarchy, but maybe radical ideas like not beating children could actually work.
Like...?
Even if there were we would still need to define those words to understand what each other means and to avoid talking past each other.
Quoting boethius
Which is exactly what I did. I'm asking for definitions of not only anarchy but of marxism/socialism in a thread named, "Differences/similarities between marxism and anarchism?"
Quoting boethius
That's nice. You've already provided a definition of anarchy that I thought you were happy with, and I agreed to. Now what about defining socialism and let's see where these definitions overlap and where they don't.
You interject into an ongoing conversation where people clearly seem to understand the meaning of anarchism in a way that makes sense in this context. If you really "didn't know" you could do 1 minute of internet research ... which you do, skipping over dictionaries and wikipedia and other entries to "just so happen to find" a dictionary that does not include the definition of anarchism as a political-philosophy.
In addition, the basic principle that dictionary definitions are required to exist in one, or even several dictionaries, for the meaning to exist is absurd. Dictionaries do their best to record common and current uses of a word, but are not exhaustive nor authoritative. For example, if you ask google for the definition of "christian", it provides a definition "a person who has received Christian baptism or is a believer in Christianity," which would not settle the debate of whether baptism is required, and if so what kind it meant by the dictionary, is the "true christianity".
Quoting Harry Hindu
This is false. You interject by asserting your dictionary definition of anarchism as the only definition and went on to elaborate a theory that if a meaning does not exist in the dictionary then it is therefore purely a private language that is not useful to communicate with anyone.
It's just not possible to view doing so as good faith debate.
But if I am mistaken and you have something more to contribute to the conversation than your dictionary lookup, feel free to do so.
Since your mention I have been looking into him a little. I had seen the name around here and there but never had the motivation to seek him out previously.
This ties things back nicely to the fleshing out of the communist side and also relevant to the original question as it appears he opposes anachism.
I believe another poster mentioned Zizek.
Based on what I know of Zizek's work, I put him in the category of Western intellectuals who wok on solving the problems of Western culture; so understanding exactly how Western culture is basically disintegrating and what might be done about it. In this respect I think he does a good job and also that Marxist-communism is the most reasonable foundation for this analysis, and is a framework he understands well.
Marx's most critical insights are in how selling labour power, rather than working for yourself in your own community (so using the majority of the product of your work locally), affects people's psychology and society, removing the meaning and self-respect of work while leading to social isolation. One of many prescient insights from Marx.
So, insofar as analyzing Western culture goes, explaining the history of psychological and social pathology the West has created, Zizek is pretty lucid in what I've heard or read from him.
Where I diverge from Zizek's general approach is that I do not believe the problems of Western culture can be solved within the space of Western culture. Solutions that don't exist and so Zizek doesn't come up with, rendering the whole project mostly pontificating on these problems but not getting anywhere (there's no political movement associated with Zizek's thinking).
In my view, Western financial power successfully turned the West into a sort of global geographically segregated aristocracy after World War II in order to destroy the remaining Western communist and socialist movements as a real political force; and once this happened, as Marx would predict, a class that benefits from a system has never been known to change it. The fundamental theory of revolutionary in Marx is that in order for a revolution to be possible, class oppression must emerge due to contradictions that build up in the social structure generally from gradual changes in the means of production, then, additionally, the oppressed class must become aware of their existence as an oppressed class and start reflecting on what to do about it, and then, maybe, you will have a revolution (the alternative being the whole society perishes).
I summarize, but the natural prediction one would make based in Marxism, in seeing a Western global upper class where "it's normal" that Westerners fly around the world to be served by a panoply of "exotic" cultures, on the cheap because people are mostly poor around the world and labour so costs low and additionally the costs of the pollution created in the process is paid mostly by these poor people, both now and in the future, is that this Western global upper class is the last place to look for any systemic change.
What's an intellectual to do who needs to sell books to this class of people? Well, you can definitely have a conversation but it's a conversation that goes no where. It's exactly the kind of conversation you'd expect talking about society with an average member of the aristocracy in Feudal Europe. There's a high level of education, so the conversation can be quite well informed, and there's also a lot of time available, so the conversation can be quite involved, but at no point is there the slightest chance any agreed conclusions, no matter how radical, translates to any commensurate action. Of course there will be exceptions, but it wasn't the aristocracy that carried out a revolution and teared down feudalism, it was people who did not benefit from the system.
For example, I once had a conversation with one of the founders of Sun Microsystems at a party at his house, and he was proposing pretty banal US libertarian ideas of laissez-faire capitalism and ecological problems shouldn't be worried about. I tried to explain the incredible risks we're taking in modifying natural systems on a global scale, and that from this basic risk-analysis perspective, which all corporate executives are intimately familiar with so he definitely understood my point, his only retort was that I shouldn't worry about the earth because, in his words, "bacteria and cockroaches will survive". I responded, "ok, but is that really an acceptable outcome of the human enterprise?". And he just got up and left!
That is the typical quality of conversation with the vast majority of any representative of a beneficiary class. It is always the same: actually disturb their intellectual comfort and they simply egress the discussion.
Of course, it confuses people in that the West has it's own internal class system where there are far richer classes than the average, but if you take the average, call them "the backpacker class" and disturb their sense of belonging in their cycle of working to go on vacation to feel "liberated" from the West for a short time with the help of "super good deals" from hostels in Cambodia or wherever; try to convince them that they are not wise globe trotters respectfully bowing at the portico of every culture on the planet, developing themselves spiritually or at least sexually, but instead benefiting from an imperial system of exploitation that's destroying every place they've visited, and, for the most part, they'll just get upset and defensive.
Of course there are non-beneficiary classes in the West, they are just not the majority and the police state and criminalizing poverty exists to manage the threat they present as a minority.
Therefore, the more productive conversation is with the people of the global south.
Whereas literally 100 books you'd need to get the average Westerner to read for them to start to understand how the system even works and that, yes, it is imperialism and exploitive and destroying the planet, only to arrive at a point, 99 out of 100 times, that the person will not really do anything about that (except safe emotional outlets the imperial system makes available) regardless of any amount of further analysis ... have the same conversation with someone on the bottom of the totem pole in the Global South and zero books are required and the answer is simply "yes, we know".
This is classic Hegelian master-slave dialectic (that Marxism is based in), in that of the two parties, the slave does not require any theory to understand that he or she is a slave and the system exploitative. The master will, on the other hand, entertain an endless series of theories in which the slave is the beneficiary of the system (benefiting from the hard and valuable work of managing resources so the slave and all his or her kind does not die; or then an animal benefiting as a sheep does from the shepherd; or as creating the right conditions for spiritual exercise of honest work that the slave could not self-direct for him or herself, and so on).
Therefore, the conversation to have with people who do not benefit from the current system is not endless theorizing establishing for the 1000th time that the system is really actually super bad, but rather technology transfer. And as a Westerner, this I have the power to do. I was once touring rural Gujarat with a politician, Jekubai, and some local business people, when we came across a family living by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. It was so unusual, even for India, that we stopped to ask what was going on. They had been promised work and lodging to come to work on building a road, and instead were left to just live on the side of the road that they would work on, for nothing remotely close to the promised wage. I was on the tour mostly for my own interest, but was presented to people as a sort of journalist. There was a whole series of instructive experiences, such as burst sewage lines not mended and ongoing battles between entire villages and corporations trying to evict them and damns left unfinished to harass local populations and aquifers being destroyed by mining and so on. But meeting this family living on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere caused me the most introspection: https://drive.google.com/file/d/10D6G_sowr2_nltG3Du8oB9Fjr7iQJ6wE/view?usp=share_link
My conclusion in truly "seeing" the horrors of the system, was I needed to return to the West and divert technology, and the capital required to develop and transfer said technology, that would be truly useful to poor people. Hence the solar fire / lytefire.com. Of course, not about to allow my name to be used to launder money, but that too (frustrating money laundering from Africa to Europe) is something Westerners (in the sense of a the few Westerners capable of rational action and not path dependency on a lazy river of consumerism) can do to actually help. Lastly, if we could stop our own government committing genocide that would also be of some assistance to non-beneficiaries of the imperial system.
Working on how to convince Westerners to not be hypocrites is not something I have ever seen have productive outcomes, and this is how I view Zizek's work.
If you want a fact based "what's actually happening in the real world" counterpart to Zizek's intellectual analysis of the Western superstructure / psychosis during this slow motion social and ecological collapse: Chris Hedges is the guy.
Basic point of the analysis being that the global revolution, if it is to come to pass, will be mostly carried out by non-Imperial-beneficiaries mostly in poor countries. People in the West can help productively with enough theory and experience of the world to avoid being counter-productive (such as knowledge and technology transfer concerning the technologies that matter, such as solar thermal), but it will not be "the West" doing anything of real significance collectively in a positive direction.
Yup.
Quoting boethius
Yup.
There are proletarians in the USA, but they are not beneficiaries of imperialism -- thinking here of migrant farm workers and prison labor as clear cut examples.
Yes, definitely, and also why there's the most amount of prison inmates anywhere in the world per capital in the US is to keep this segment of the population under tight control.
Now, not that a revolution can't happen in the US, just that the cause would be too many people dropping out of any plausible sense of the middle class and so then the conditions become largely the same as in in the Global South.
A moment we are for sure approaching and maybe even really close to. The model of the West as a geographically segregated aristocracy that's not about to change the system, is more relevant to explain why all the socialist momentum in the West dissipates post WWII during the "good times".
Conditions today are definitely not the same, and so why a police state is emerging (or perhaps more accurately being revealed) to keep things in check.
Just looking back at this again and still trying to get a more clear picture of how the Maoist or Stalinist, or whichever other you wish to enter here, vision of communism differs from the original Marxist one, if it did.
In other words was their employment of it perverse or true to the letter of the original manifesto? If not what was different? So I am asking is it the implementation at fault in these case or is it a natural conclusion of communism on a larger scale? The detractors would surely want to claim the latter but I am trying to figure out if it is accurate or not.
Perhaps you could come back in to the fold as well @moliere?
For one, they all read the fuck out of Marx. And engaged in revolutionary programs which united the industrial working class, in the case of Lenin and Stalin, or the agricultural working class, in the case of Mao. The political parties built then proceeded to revolt against their respective governments for the purpose of obtaining the power which had been previously used against them, and succeeded at taking over the state.
That's pretty much the blueprint as Marx sets it out.
Now, "communism" isn't exactly what was achieved, but then that is supposed to be something which only comes about when all the classes have truly been abolished, so they were and are all still in that transition state. Notice, however, how the states didn't exactly whither away. So while that was the theory there might not be something entirely right with it.
Basically I prefer to study Marxism from the perspective of what Marxists have done, and not just on the basis of what Marx or Engels mean. You don't get an easy or pretty picture when you look at it like this.
So why bother?
Well, when you're that honest not only with the Marxist countries, but your own country, you'll find that none of the countries that are standing -- have won -- ever have pretty histories. States win by being more evil than the other states. We're familiar with the sins of Marxist states to dissuade us from their feasibility and accept that what we have now really is the best of all possible worlds, though it may be bad.
But they conveniently leave out the various sins that allowed us to establish capitalism, or the sins that it perpetuates.
The reason to bother is to look at what's true and what's false about what people say, and for the most part what's true is that all countries do evil, and what's false is that "this is the only feasible system" -- I prefer to look at political thoughts and actions from the expectation that there will be warts when we decided to look, and we have to accept the history of these various thoughts warts and all.
Oh yes I forgot that that was discussed earlier, the idea of capitalism/christianity being just as bloody or perhaps far more merely through having been around longer, than the little blots on history communist regimes have done so far.
So can it be said the end jusifies the means and that all states have blood on their hands but communism at least aims for a better end goal? In this interpretation Stalin and Mao were heroes?
Yes.
Much like George Washington, especially with respect to Mao -- they both "relinquished" power.
US revolutionaries would poor molten metal into people's throats that agreed with the brits. They were not kind people. It was a revolution.
And yet we remember George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine....
Just like us in the US where the 1 dollar has George Washington's likeness, so do the Chinese printed currency have Mao's likeness.
Quoting unimportant
That's been a common justification, yes. So it can be said.
I'm a little skeptical because it looks like what every government says: just keep on killing motherfucker, then peace will come.
I suppose anarchism will also get down in the mud too? I seems they had a fair few bombings of choice adversaries to name but one instance.
It's not necessary necessary.
And if we can find ways to get along that don't include killing one another then that's a good example.
Usually we're not killing one another: that's another good example.
And yet.... if we look at what people call politics...
As points out, it's fair to the post-Marx schools, even Stalinism and Maoism are reasonable evolutions of Marx's original theory.
When anti-communist propaganda is internalized and "West good" and "Soviet bad", then the West leftist beatnik apologetic response is that Stalin betrayed the true Marxism.
This framing depends entirely on the idea that state-policy-induced famines and genocides in the 1930 and 40s make your political system 100% discredited and the worst people to have ever lived, but genocides and state-policy-induced famines before 1930 and also after 1950 are perfectly understandable historical processes that say absolutely nothing about the fundamental merits of the political order, economic system and culture involved.
You can starve as many Irish to death as you want, kill as many natives all over the world, even run a brutal chattel slavery system for hundreds of years, as long as it was before 1930!!
People in the West are emotionally conditioned to have strong reactions to genocides, but only in this 20 year window, everything outside is basically meh, genocide shmemocide. Why there's a genocide on right now that the West is perfectly content with, as there's a simple algorithm to emotionally deal with it: check calendar, is it the 1930's or 40's? If no, then genocide is fine, probably even a good thing.
So, not to say the Soviet Union was great, but rather a fair look allows seeing both successes and failures (as any Western apologist will scream we must do to be fair if we're discussing the West's failing! Civilization! Civilization!) as well as how it made Marxist sense to the people who built the Soviet Union, including Stalin. Not to say Marx would agree if he were alive, just that, as @Moliere points out these people read Marx and saw themselves as extending Marx in a logical way.
To get to those extensions and developments of Marx, the problem Marxists had in the 20th century is that all the socialist (including anarchist) revolutions in the 19th century were crushed by adjacent imperial powers. The empires warred between themselves but recognized anti-rich sentiments was a common enemy so would easily unite to destroy any genuine socialist uprising and governance.
At the same time, these experiences in socialist uprising and governance demonstrated it was possible; people could overturn governments and could govern together in a new socialist way.
However, there was a global system of Imperialism and capitalism that would spring into action to crush any such socialist upstarting wherever it emerges on the globe, so in seeing this communists naturally started to think of how to solve this problem.
So, the new idea compared to Marx's original analysis, is various formulations of avant-gardism, where the idea is to take over a state and then garrison it against Imperial invasion and capitalist undermining.
Of course a strong militaristic state is in contradiction with the communist goal.
So it's easy to critique in theory that this obviously won't work. However, to take the point of view of these people, Tsarist Russia just killed and starved millions of Russians in a calamitous and incompetently managed war. China has endured "a century of humiliation" and the British pushing opioids on the Chinese (one potential explanation of why China isn't too worried about an opioid epidemic in the US right now). Western analysis of these issues always starts with the Soviet Revolution, Stalin takes control, or then Mao's cultural revolution.
Not to say I'm a huge fan of Stalin or Mao, they were both incredibly brutal, but no less brutal than the systems they replaced so when your learn the before and after, it makes a lot more sense how thing shake out. First, the previous systems were completely discredited in disastrous wars. Russian lines collapsed in WWI, the whole country mismanaged and hunger everywhere, and they only didn't "lose" because Germany also lost in turn against France and co.
Quoting Eastern Front (World War I)
So things really aren't going well from the perspective of the average Russian.
In the case of China, the invasion of Japan was an incredibly brutal affair, for example:
Quoting Japanese war crimes
So when you put into context what people are dealing with, you can start to empathize both with the idea that trying something new sounds like it can't possibly be worse as well as why the atrocities in their own right of these new systems "don't seem so bad". The Western presentation of events as everyone basically living an idyllic peaceful and suburban life style and then suddenly Stalin's in charge! The horror! Is somewhat less than accurate.
WWI and WWII are essentially apocalyptic events so any half coherent scheme to put society back together sounds worthwhile.
In contrast to Marx, he is building up his theory in a relatively peaceful Europe. Up until Napoleon, European powers competed outside of Europe for territory, resources and trade routes but had a sort of gentleman's agreement not to wage too much war on the European continent and trade instead.
There was no evidence at the time for what we would call today realpolitik (the European empires were all intermarried and part of the same in-group which mediated intra-European warfare) and as a short hand the later evolutions of Marx given the Napoleonic wars (a topsy turvy series of events in response to state-mismanagement and then socialist revolution) and then also WWI, are broadly speaking a realpolitik addition to Marx's analysis of capitalism.
Not as accessible as The Conquest of Bread, which has a bit of that but much lighter and more general.
Definitely things will be a lot clearer of what people are even talking about with reading the classic texts in a discipline. Highly recommended.
Partly Marx is addressing himself to other intellectuals who he assumes is familiar with all the texts he's familiar with, such as Ricardo and Hegel and he's using references and language and conceptual frameworks that Western intellectuals at the time would be familiar with; and partly there's a lot of words and concepts that everyone is familiar with at that time but now require more erudite historical knowledge to fully understand.
For example, everyone, for all intents and purposes, at the time Marx is writing are familiar with Lords and the bourgeoisie. The class distinctions were super obvious and people were very concerned with being identified with their class and their subgroup within their class.
Why analysts today still use the word bourgeoisie is first there's no good modern counter-part, as to say "upper class" is to include also aristocrats, but the whole point of the bourgeoisie is that they are rich but no aristocrats. So in modern language they are the 1% who aren't still actual kings and lords. King Charle's is part of the 1% but not bourgeoisie, likewise the pope is reasonable to say is part of the 1% but is not bourgeoisie.
Bourgeoisie also has more reference than just wealth (without being also still feudal), but there's a whole culture and world view that develops along with it: clothes, mannerisms, opinions, history, myth and so on; most importantly an ideology that optimizes their dominance that they can, through their dominance, push on the rest of the world; when very different cultures start to look "Western" what those cultural elements, world view and opinions actually are and come from are the Western bourgeoisie culture. There's obvious things like clothes and architecture, but more importantly is the way of thinking such as wealth always being caused by hard work (why wealth is deserved, and why the bourgeoisie should be in charge and not aristocrats who did not "earn their wealth"; i.e. wealth is always deserved except if you're an aristocrat, but even then only before the emergence of capitalism as since wealth is always deserved existing aristocrats, such as King Charles, "earn" their wealth through the hard work they do bringing in tourism, perfectly honest well deserved wealth of a modern hard working enterprising modern king; so that kind of obsession proving an anachronistic king in the contemporary age is economically justified, rather than even consider any theory of governance and justice and so on, is archetypical bourgeoisie sensibilities; the question of the effect of having a king on governance would not even occur in bourgeoisie culture as everything that exists under capitalism has an economic explanation and everything with an economic explanation is justified, except when they disagree of course, then it's a case of "it may work for them over there, but it wouldn't work for us here and there's an economic explanation, and thus justification, for both cases").
Yes good point. I had actually been reading some of the creative writing classics of that era, before this interest in political philosophy took my fancy. Ones like Jane Eyre and Around the World in 80 Days. I have liked Victorian era writing for a long time because of its rich language and my recent re-acquaintance with it reminded me of that.
As you note, many of the terms which seem esoteric today would have been commonplace then and I noticed quite a few come up between writers. Not just the words themselves but the roles of men and women as good examples and the casual misogyny or racism or classism which would be offensive today. Particularly the classism in Jane Eyre. I thought it hilarious when she writes of teaching working class people as 'gaping mouth rustics' without a hint of irony, more as a matter of fact statement.
Aren't the bourgeoisie just the middle class today?
No.
The bourgeoisie are the owners of the means of production -- the workplace.
The boss you deal with is "middle class" in the sense that they're in the middle and make enough money to not suffer and are mostly aligned with bourgeois interests due to that.
But the owners of the workplace are the bourgeoisie. Not the owners of a home who peddle its ideology in the workplace, but the bona-fide owners (and perhaps movers and shakers at a certain level) who make decisions about the economy and how workers will conduct their business because they have purchased their labor.
I got to thinking about another huge and insidious force that does the same which is the medical establishment.
How many behaviors are pathologized simply because the individual does not fit in to the mould of conforming to capitalist society? I would say a large amount of so called mental illness is just propagandized capilalist rhetoric.
The most poignant creative work to deal with this subject matter that comes to mind would be One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest but so many lesser cases where doctors give pills to fix the symptom behavior with nebulous diagnoses like anxiety and depression when capitalism is the root cause which is never addressed.
The medical establishment, I would posit, is in large part enabling the system and medicates citizens only with the intent to keep them producing. So the goal is not to heal the patient but rather to keep them productive.
As with policing, the objective is always maintaining the capitalist status quo.
Discuss.
It should be a new discussion. It doesn't belong in this one.
I get criticized on other forums for 'spamming' too many topics rather than keeping to one thread so was also conscious of that.
It's something I've thought about and heard before: My short opinion is that they're not related exactly, tho I hear bosses use the language of therapists to get people to do what they want so there is something creepy going on.