My question to you is this, what vision should we strive for in your opinion?
If feel like, that was what my comment was about. Of course it did not address every minute detail, but I tried my best. If you want a more complete vision of anarchism, I would highly suggest you do your own research, there are a lot of great anarchist scholars, that could do a way better job than me, a random person on the internet. As I said, “The Dispossessed” is great, also you could watch this great introductory video by Andrewism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrTzjaXskUU. He has some great and informative videos on his channel.
The problem of anarchism is that it goes basically against everything, that we were taught to assume about the world, because the system can only work, if the people, who are oppressed by it think, that it couldn’t have been different. We need to work hard to be open minded and challenge our most basic assumptions.
But this a contradictory notion, is it not? Marxism is an inherently authortarian ideology in both theory and practice, which is why every attempt at it in history has resulted in some tyrannical regime.
That is just wrong. Marx was actually stonchly against authoritarianism, he argued for workplace democracy and was against nation states as a concept. He defined communism as a stateless, classless society. So, even though the Soviet Union pretended to be Marxist or communist, they were wrong. At least if you go by what most leftists thinkers understand as communism.
The idea that you can collectivize an entire economy and redistribute resource as the “collective” (read: government) deems necessary is simply impossible without a great deal of violence, coercion, and theft involved.
You seem to be conflating authoritarianism and violence. Yeah, a revolution might be violent.
But the status quo is already incredibly violent, so it might be the most sensible option we have.
One of the hallmark defining features of civilization is inequality, not in the sense of wealth, but in the sense of power.
The way that we survived in nature is by forming small communities that we depended on our survival. If you lost your community, you’re screwed. Therefore, we evolved to become very protective of our tribes.
Like I was saying earlier, things like this don’t exist because of capitalism. If your claims about capitalism were true then there wouldn’t be any notion of things like war, racism, crime, and so on before the 17th and 18th centuries when capitalism formed
Almost as if there were other authoritarian systems, that tried to protect the interests of their ruling classes before capitalism.
In fact, a lot of these traits can be found in our closest ape relatives, which means that they’re a product of our evolution.
Apes are racist and wage war? That seems interesting, where can I learn more?
Impressive how? I think all three are considerable failures. They didn’t manage to last long and they didn’t achieve anything notable.
Almost as if every capitalist government is doing everything they can to strike down these attempts because if they became successful, they would make other systems look bad.
But also, the Zapatistas still exist and have existed since 1994, so we don’t know yet, how long they will last. And yeah, it is really impressive to build an egalitarian, system with flat power structures amidst overwhelming resistance by governments with hugely powerful military force.
Kind of, but I was wondering if there more to it than just Marxist communism?
We need to work hard to be open minded and challenge our most basic assumptions.
But wouldn’t the same apply to you?
That is just wrong. Marx was actually stonchly against authoritarianism, he argued for workplace democracy and was against nation states as a concept.
What? This is just pure misinformation. Marx was a notorious authoritarian. This isn’t some secret either, he was very, very vocal about it. He went out of his way to criticize, mock, and demean the pacifist socialists of his era as being naive, stupid, and weak. Just look at criticisms of Pierre Joseph Proudhon or Charles Fourier or Henri de Saint Simon. He’s literally famous for favoring violence over peaceful alternative in his works.
He defined communism as a stateless, classless society. So, even though the Soviet Union pretended to be Marxist or communist, they were wrong. At least if you go by what most leftists thinkers understand as communism.
Communism was just his idea of a utopian society, it’s not his ideology. Marx’s ideology is about how he thought societies should get to this utopia of his. His ideology instructed that a society should overthrow capitalism in a revolution, workers should seize all property and means of production by force and kill all those who resist, and then establish a transitional socialist state that represents the workers that rules with an iron fist in order to bring about the social climate necessary to realize communism (dictatorship of the proletariat). Since communism is a utopia, it’ll never be achieved, and that’s why all the attempts at it in history have always stopped at the tyrannical transitional socialist state stage… the Soviet Union was such an example, Maoist China would be another.
You seem to be conflating authoritarianism and violence. Yeah, a revolution might be violent. But the status quo is already incredibly violent, so it might be the most sensible option we have.
So you’re not an anarchist, but a Marxist? Anarchy as a philosophy is fundamentally opposed to the idea of using organized violence to coerce society into doing things that are against people’s will.
What makes you think that? There is actually quite a bit of evidence pointing to the contrary
I wasn’t giving an opinion there. That’s literally how civilization is defined:
“All civilizations have certain characteristics. These include: large population centers; monumental architecture and unique art styles; shared communication strategies; systems for administering territories; a complex division of labor; and the division of people into social and economic classes.”
Community does not necessarily need violence towards outsiders. In fact, according to a lot of scientists, human societies were very peaceful for a very long time
Did you read the article that you linked? It doesn’t make this claim. It’s saying that we have new evidence of prehistoric wars, but it’s still too limited and vague to determine the origin of warfare, because the interpretation of that means is also too vague. It doesn’t say that humans were more peaceful or more warlike.
Humans, like all the other great apes, can be violent and can have physical fights between different tribes, and we did. Evidence for human on human violence is present in every era and everywhere. It just that it used to be that human communities were small and nomadic, and if they ran into people, they would just move to another area. The only times people fought was if a group was threatening another group or if there were scarce resources. However, around 10,000 years ago, we developed agriculture and people depended on the land they were on. Population and population density both increased due to the increased food production, which demanded more land and resources… and it’s not hard to see why competition, and ultimately war, became more intense.
Almost as if there were other authoritarian systems, that tried to protect the interests of their ruling classes before capitalism.
Yes, and Marxist socialism was no different. Instead of the elite being royalty and nobility or economic tycoons or the clergy, it became the rulers of the new socialist government. Every single Marxist attempt in history devolved into being a dictatorship of sorts where immense power was concentrated in the hands of a few who had all the say and no oversight who ended up wrecking havoc on society. This is actually one of the biggest reasons why Eastern European countries despise communism as much as fascism, and rightfully so.
Apes are racist and wage war? That seems interesting, where can I learn more?
I know you’re being facetious, but what I said is factual. Obviously apes aren’t racist, you just misinterpreted what I said. I said that humans, like the other great apes, are tribalistic. For us modern humans, that has manifested itself in the form of something like racism or whatever other type of bigotry. The point is that the underlying cause for it stems from evolutionary trait that we evolved in nature. The same goes for war. Great apes, specifically chimps, our closest relatives, do have wars of their own.
Again, I’m not babbling nonsense, this is something that’s both well studied and well known. This research is literally what made Jane Goodall famous. She studied the Gombe chimps in Tanzania for 50 years, and she found that chimps are very similar in behavior to humans. They made and modified tools, the had complex social hierarchies, they had wars, they were tribalistic, they ate meat, they share bonds and emotions like people, and so on. You’ll be surprised by how much of our behavior is actually evolved rather than conditioned. Human nature is very complex and runs very deep.
Almost as if every capitalist government is doing everything they can to strike down these attempts because if they became successful, they would make other systems look bad.
You can’t blanket blame capitalism for everything, that’s just lazy and dishonest. During the cold war, for example, the Soviet Union spent a comical amount of effort trying to take down capitalist societies. They committed genocides, overthrew democratically elected governments, started civil wars, invaded sovereign nations, installed puppet dictators, launched countless propaganda campaigns, and the list goes on and on. They were after all the other half of the cold war. Yet despite their efforts, which were on par with the US, they failed and capitalism came out on top. That didn’t happen because of the CIA, it happened because capitalism just happens to be a better, more functional, and more resilient system than socialism. Accountability is often better than deflection.
In this case, Rojava was actually supported by Western capitalist democracies, and it got taken down by islamists backed by Turkey. The anarchists in Spain were on the side of the Republicans who were defeated by Franco and his fascist army, who were supported by fascist Germany and Italy, so there wasn’t any notable capitalist society that opposed them. As for the Zapatistas, they were never sovereign, they’re just a rebel group that hasn’t really done much. Even the Mexican government doesn’t care about them. You talk of a grand conspiracy against anarchist attempts by the big evil capitalist governments, but there really isn’t any evidence to support that. They failed to achieve anything, they failed to sustain their movements, and they failed to defend themselves when it mattered.
And yeah, it is really impressive to build an egalitarian, system with flat power structures amidst overwhelming resistance by governments with hugely powerful military force.
But they didn’t do this. The Mexican government controls all of the territory they claim, and Mexican law is the rule of the land. Do you have any actual evidence that they achieved this? More importantly, do you have any evidence that this led to anything tangible at all? As far as I’m aware, they only make grand claims, they haven’t done much. They didn’t build infrastructure, improve healthcare, raise the standards of living, advance science, build universities, decrease crime, they didn’t gain sovereignty, or anything really. If anything they did the opposite. They opposed a train project by the government to connect them to the rest of the country in 2020. They dissolved the Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities because they couldn’t get a handle crime in 2023. They seceded their claims to sovereignty by trying to participate in Mexican elections in 2018, only for their candidate to not be able to garner enough signatures to even show up on the ballot. This is impressive to you? Like come on, what are we even talking about?
Also the crime thing, what I meant about coming together as a community was assembling councils of people that have expertise in how to handle this, who decide together and enforcing the decisions not through state violence but through collective action by the community.
I pasted this from your other comment for convenience. Based on your evasive wording, I think we both understand that fundamental flaw with the ideology here. Societies require order in order to keep the peace, however order can only be achieved with a certain degree of force (i.e. threat of punishment for breaking the law)… but that directly contradicts anarchism as a concept because anarchy is against order in general because its inherently hierarchal. So you can either have a functional society or you can have anarchy, not both.
Marx’s theories consisted mostly of criticizing capitalism and it’s exploitation and international inconaitancies. He believed that there was an inevitable progression from feudalism to capitalism to socialism to communism, mostly because the internal inconsistencies of capitalism would lead to collapse. In my opinion, he was right about the internal inconsistencies of capitalism, but wrong about that this would necessary lead to a workers revolution. One such breaking point of capitalism was the great depression in 1929, where a some states actually went the opposite route and fell to fascism. Facism ensured, that the working class was pacified with making the lives of minorities worse, which was almost as good as actually making their own lives better. Capitalists could continue what they were doing and after Germany was defeated, they could roll back the worst excesses of facism and call it progress (Fyi: I am obviously not saying, that it was not progress in comparison to facism, what I am saying is that facism successfully prevented a workers revolution in Germany).
So you could criticize Marx for predicting this wrong.
Another aspect, that you could criticize Marx for is that he never really specified how a revolution would exactly work. This seems to be the core of your confusion. He only said, that the workers would rise up, establish majority rule by workers, seize the means of production and finally abolish the state. He never specified how they would do that. That was also the reason, why it was so easily abused for establishing essentially facism in China or the Soviet Union. Because Marx was much more clear about what capitalism was than what Communism was and especially how we could get there.
Like I said, most of his work was focused on analyzing the inconsistencies of capitalism and establishing a framework for historical analysis of societies and economical systems (historical materialism, dialectical materialism).
A revolution in itself is neither necceraly authoritarian nor violent. If you want an example for that, just look at how the Soviet Union fell. The revolution there was actually quite peaceful. It was also anti-authoritarian, because it destroyed a facist, authoritarian state. By your definition, it would be authoritarian though because it forces the view of the revolutionaries on the other people, that liked the Soviet Union (yes, there were a lot of them aswell), or did I understand you wrong there? Because that is not how authoritarianism works, maybe you should look it up.
Anarchists are also not necessarily opposed to violence (as long as it is against our oppressors, because our oppressors enforce a much more violent system), we are opposed to hirarchy and state violence. Unfortunately, pacifism, which you seem to think anarchism is, just doesn’t work in a world like this.
Alright, I read your answer and obviously I don’t agree. But I don’t have the time, nor the energy to respond to all these claims.
If you are generally curious about anarchism, try to watch the video I had linked or read the book I reccomended. Also, read the Wikipedia articles about Marxism, Communism and Anarchism, the, are a good summary. But I can only encourage you to stay open minded. You don’t have to agree, just try to understand the other perspective. Maybe you can also expand your own ideas with some of the ideas of anarchist thinkers.
But, I can’t force you to, I guess. I am honestly quite happy that this discussion stayed very civil for internet standards.
As to my own open mindedness, I always try to work on it. I always change my views on the world, only about a year ago, I was a really convinced democratic socialist. It’s just that, a lot of your arguments, I’ve engaged with before.
With others, like the human nature thing, I will admit that I specifically tried to look for evidence, that supports my beliefs. But, it’s also really hard to find out the truth about a subject like this, because even most scientists are shaped by their own biasses and the institional biasses of their employers or the people that give them grants. And the journalists, that report on them are shaped by the biasses of their own billionaire employers. I mean, just look at the shit that Fox News tells you. But also, CNN where they have “experts” on, who keep saying “the economy is fine, just look at these numbers I got here, no matter the lived reality of the Americans”.
I hope, that I was able to make you look at the world in a bit of a different way or at least make you curious.
If feel like, that was what my comment was about. Of course it did not address every minute detail, but I tried my best. If you want a more complete vision of anarchism, I would highly suggest you do your own research, there are a lot of great anarchist scholars, that could do a way better job than me, a random person on the internet. As I said, “The Dispossessed” is great, also you could watch this great introductory video by Andrewism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrTzjaXskUU. He has some great and informative videos on his channel.
The problem of anarchism is that it goes basically against everything, that we were taught to assume about the world, because the system can only work, if the people, who are oppressed by it think, that it couldn’t have been different. We need to work hard to be open minded and challenge our most basic assumptions.
That is just wrong. Marx was actually stonchly against authoritarianism, he argued for workplace democracy and was against nation states as a concept. He defined communism as a stateless, classless society. So, even though the Soviet Union pretended to be Marxist or communist, they were wrong. At least if you go by what most leftists thinkers understand as communism.
You seem to be conflating authoritarianism and violence. Yeah, a revolution might be violent. But the status quo is already incredibly violent, so it might be the most sensible option we have.
What makes you think that? There is actually quite a bit of evidence pointing to the contrary (https://newrepublic.com/article/163941/dawn-everything-book-review-earliest-societies-anarchists) (while I find the evidence cited in that article to be quite interressting, I don’t agree with all the conclusions they come to).
Community does not necessarily need violence towards outsiders. In fact, according to a lot of scientists, human societies were very peaceful for a very long time (https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/debate-continues-stone-age-people-were-peaceful-or-warlike-020303). So the claim, that war or racism is in our human nature is ridiculous.
Almost as if there were other authoritarian systems, that tried to protect the interests of their ruling classes before capitalism.
Apes are racist and wage war? That seems interesting, where can I learn more?
Almost as if every capitalist government is doing everything they can to strike down these attempts because if they became successful, they would make other systems look bad.
But also, the Zapatistas still exist and have existed since 1994, so we don’t know yet, how long they will last. And yeah, it is really impressive to build an egalitarian, system with flat power structures amidst overwhelming resistance by governments with hugely powerful military force.
Kind of, but I was wondering if there more to it than just Marxist communism?
But wouldn’t the same apply to you?
What? This is just pure misinformation. Marx was a notorious authoritarian. This isn’t some secret either, he was very, very vocal about it. He went out of his way to criticize, mock, and demean the pacifist socialists of his era as being naive, stupid, and weak. Just look at criticisms of Pierre Joseph Proudhon or Charles Fourier or Henri de Saint Simon. He’s literally famous for favoring violence over peaceful alternative in his works.
Communism was just his idea of a utopian society, it’s not his ideology. Marx’s ideology is about how he thought societies should get to this utopia of his. His ideology instructed that a society should overthrow capitalism in a revolution, workers should seize all property and means of production by force and kill all those who resist, and then establish a transitional socialist state that represents the workers that rules with an iron fist in order to bring about the social climate necessary to realize communism (dictatorship of the proletariat). Since communism is a utopia, it’ll never be achieved, and that’s why all the attempts at it in history have always stopped at the tyrannical transitional socialist state stage… the Soviet Union was such an example, Maoist China would be another.
So you’re not an anarchist, but a Marxist? Anarchy as a philosophy is fundamentally opposed to the idea of using organized violence to coerce society into doing things that are against people’s will.
I wasn’t giving an opinion there. That’s literally how civilization is defined:
“All civilizations have certain characteristics. These include: large population centers; monumental architecture and unique art styles; shared communication strategies; systems for administering territories; a complex division of labor; and the division of people into social and economic classes.”
Source: National Geographic
Did you read the article that you linked? It doesn’t make this claim. It’s saying that we have new evidence of prehistoric wars, but it’s still too limited and vague to determine the origin of warfare, because the interpretation of that means is also too vague. It doesn’t say that humans were more peaceful or more warlike.
Humans, like all the other great apes, can be violent and can have physical fights between different tribes, and we did. Evidence for human on human violence is present in every era and everywhere. It just that it used to be that human communities were small and nomadic, and if they ran into people, they would just move to another area. The only times people fought was if a group was threatening another group or if there were scarce resources. However, around 10,000 years ago, we developed agriculture and people depended on the land they were on. Population and population density both increased due to the increased food production, which demanded more land and resources… and it’s not hard to see why competition, and ultimately war, became more intense.
Yes, and Marxist socialism was no different. Instead of the elite being royalty and nobility or economic tycoons or the clergy, it became the rulers of the new socialist government. Every single Marxist attempt in history devolved into being a dictatorship of sorts where immense power was concentrated in the hands of a few who had all the say and no oversight who ended up wrecking havoc on society. This is actually one of the biggest reasons why Eastern European countries despise communism as much as fascism, and rightfully so.
I know you’re being facetious, but what I said is factual. Obviously apes aren’t racist, you just misinterpreted what I said. I said that humans, like the other great apes, are tribalistic. For us modern humans, that has manifested itself in the form of something like racism or whatever other type of bigotry. The point is that the underlying cause for it stems from evolutionary trait that we evolved in nature. The same goes for war. Great apes, specifically chimps, our closest relatives, do have wars of their own.
Again, I’m not babbling nonsense, this is something that’s both well studied and well known. This research is literally what made Jane Goodall famous. She studied the Gombe chimps in Tanzania for 50 years, and she found that chimps are very similar in behavior to humans. They made and modified tools, the had complex social hierarchies, they had wars, they were tribalistic, they ate meat, they share bonds and emotions like people, and so on. You’ll be surprised by how much of our behavior is actually evolved rather than conditioned. Human nature is very complex and runs very deep.
You can’t blanket blame capitalism for everything, that’s just lazy and dishonest. During the cold war, for example, the Soviet Union spent a comical amount of effort trying to take down capitalist societies. They committed genocides, overthrew democratically elected governments, started civil wars, invaded sovereign nations, installed puppet dictators, launched countless propaganda campaigns, and the list goes on and on. They were after all the other half of the cold war. Yet despite their efforts, which were on par with the US, they failed and capitalism came out on top. That didn’t happen because of the CIA, it happened because capitalism just happens to be a better, more functional, and more resilient system than socialism. Accountability is often better than deflection.
In this case, Rojava was actually supported by Western capitalist democracies, and it got taken down by islamists backed by Turkey. The anarchists in Spain were on the side of the Republicans who were defeated by Franco and his fascist army, who were supported by fascist Germany and Italy, so there wasn’t any notable capitalist society that opposed them. As for the Zapatistas, they were never sovereign, they’re just a rebel group that hasn’t really done much. Even the Mexican government doesn’t care about them. You talk of a grand conspiracy against anarchist attempts by the big evil capitalist governments, but there really isn’t any evidence to support that. They failed to achieve anything, they failed to sustain their movements, and they failed to defend themselves when it mattered.
But they didn’t do this. The Mexican government controls all of the territory they claim, and Mexican law is the rule of the land. Do you have any actual evidence that they achieved this? More importantly, do you have any evidence that this led to anything tangible at all? As far as I’m aware, they only make grand claims, they haven’t done much. They didn’t build infrastructure, improve healthcare, raise the standards of living, advance science, build universities, decrease crime, they didn’t gain sovereignty, or anything really. If anything they did the opposite. They opposed a train project by the government to connect them to the rest of the country in 2020. They dissolved the Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities because they couldn’t get a handle crime in 2023. They seceded their claims to sovereignty by trying to participate in Mexican elections in 2018, only for their candidate to not be able to garner enough signatures to even show up on the ballot. This is impressive to you? Like come on, what are we even talking about?
I pasted this from your other comment for convenience. Based on your evasive wording, I think we both understand that fundamental flaw with the ideology here. Societies require order in order to keep the peace, however order can only be achieved with a certain degree of force (i.e. threat of punishment for breaking the law)… but that directly contradicts anarchism as a concept because anarchy is against order in general because its inherently hierarchal. So you can either have a functional society or you can have anarchy, not both.
One point, I will specifically respond to is your claim about Marxism. This random article neatly summarizes the views of Marx towards revolution: https://polsci.institute/western-political-thought/marx-vision-capitalism-to-communism/#the-proletarian-revolution.
Marx’s theories consisted mostly of criticizing capitalism and it’s exploitation and international inconaitancies. He believed that there was an inevitable progression from feudalism to capitalism to socialism to communism, mostly because the internal inconsistencies of capitalism would lead to collapse. In my opinion, he was right about the internal inconsistencies of capitalism, but wrong about that this would necessary lead to a workers revolution. One such breaking point of capitalism was the great depression in 1929, where a some states actually went the opposite route and fell to fascism. Facism ensured, that the working class was pacified with making the lives of minorities worse, which was almost as good as actually making their own lives better. Capitalists could continue what they were doing and after Germany was defeated, they could roll back the worst excesses of facism and call it progress (Fyi: I am obviously not saying, that it was not progress in comparison to facism, what I am saying is that facism successfully prevented a workers revolution in Germany).
So you could criticize Marx for predicting this wrong.
Another aspect, that you could criticize Marx for is that he never really specified how a revolution would exactly work. This seems to be the core of your confusion. He only said, that the workers would rise up, establish majority rule by workers, seize the means of production and finally abolish the state. He never specified how they would do that. That was also the reason, why it was so easily abused for establishing essentially facism in China or the Soviet Union. Because Marx was much more clear about what capitalism was than what Communism was and especially how we could get there.
Like I said, most of his work was focused on analyzing the inconsistencies of capitalism and establishing a framework for historical analysis of societies and economical systems (historical materialism, dialectical materialism).
A revolution in itself is neither necceraly authoritarian nor violent. If you want an example for that, just look at how the Soviet Union fell. The revolution there was actually quite peaceful. It was also anti-authoritarian, because it destroyed a facist, authoritarian state. By your definition, it would be authoritarian though because it forces the view of the revolutionaries on the other people, that liked the Soviet Union (yes, there were a lot of them aswell), or did I understand you wrong there? Because that is not how authoritarianism works, maybe you should look it up.
Anarchists are also not necessarily opposed to violence (as long as it is against our oppressors, because our oppressors enforce a much more violent system), we are opposed to hirarchy and state violence. Unfortunately, pacifism, which you seem to think anarchism is, just doesn’t work in a world like this.
Alright, I read your answer and obviously I don’t agree. But I don’t have the time, nor the energy to respond to all these claims.
If you are generally curious about anarchism, try to watch the video I had linked or read the book I reccomended. Also, read the Wikipedia articles about Marxism, Communism and Anarchism, the, are a good summary. But I can only encourage you to stay open minded. You don’t have to agree, just try to understand the other perspective. Maybe you can also expand your own ideas with some of the ideas of anarchist thinkers.
But, I can’t force you to, I guess. I am honestly quite happy that this discussion stayed very civil for internet standards.
As to my own open mindedness, I always try to work on it. I always change my views on the world, only about a year ago, I was a really convinced democratic socialist. It’s just that, a lot of your arguments, I’ve engaged with before.
With others, like the human nature thing, I will admit that I specifically tried to look for evidence, that supports my beliefs. But, it’s also really hard to find out the truth about a subject like this, because even most scientists are shaped by their own biasses and the institional biasses of their employers or the people that give them grants. And the journalists, that report on them are shaped by the biasses of their own billionaire employers. I mean, just look at the shit that Fox News tells you. But also, CNN where they have “experts” on, who keep saying “the economy is fine, just look at these numbers I got here, no matter the lived reality of the Americans”.
I hope, that I was able to make you look at the world in a bit of a different way or at least make you curious.