On the internet I don’t see too many Anarchists give arguments past “communism doesn’t work because communists are doomed to repeat the same exploitative power structures of the capitalist state” and “we dont know what an anarchist society will look like we gotta wait til we get there!” Which like…is not convincing to me at all. I’ve engaged in what was supposed to be consensus based decision making systems and there were a ton of flaws, though that’s purely anecdotal.
So, I’d really like to have some suggestions on what to read that you think might really challenge where I stand/take anarchism more seriously. It might take me 5 years to get to them bc executive dysfunction but I really want to see if my mind can be changed on if it would be a better system from the get go than communism.
I think it would be super interesting to hear from anyone who shifted into anarchism from Marxism on why it made more sense to you
Ok I can agree there but about counter revolutionaries after the revolution? Do you let them organize and gather support in the name of free expression? Do you engage them only after they start shooting at you?
Another question I have is how do you handle defense of the revolution from outside forces? Sure you could have militias with elected officers and whatnot, but what if part of your anarchist territory does not want to fight to defend the revolution? I could imagine the people further away from the frontlines would be less inclined to go and fight and I’d also imagine drafting people would be too authoritarian for anarchists.
I got in to it with some internet “anarchists” about using force to disarm Nazis and keep them from organizing and arming. I was shocked that they were stridently against any attempt to control Nazis with force until the fash were breaking the door down. I just could not and cannot make sense of extending “live and let live” to fascists whose explicit goal is to kill you and everyone around you. It was an extremely strange, uhh, discussion.
Well if we manage to get there (and it’s a long shot now) the main obstacle to anyone who would rather go back to stock trading and widespread destruction of species is that people will see which one works more and if there’s a clique of these weirdos first they won’t associate with them and second if they infested to a point that they actually mean a threat to the new order, they would just rise up, as it can be seen in South America or Cuba or wherever there is a threat to the system. Anarchism isn’t against that.
The other dilemma is a good one and i’m yet to think about it thoroughly, though since it’s highly theoretical it’s tough to come up with a one size fits all solution. Obviously the main objective would be to avoid conflict. If it’s unavoidable (one thing to think about is what outside forces were there in a global anarchist society), i would think that the kind of general solidarity that we see in Bolivia or Venezuela or Cuba would switch on and there wouldn’t be a problem about it but i’ll think about it (note: this is my subjective opinion about the case you introduced).
That’s a whole lot of assumptions that need to be true for something like this to happen. The biggest assumption is that after the anarchist revolution the overwhelming majority of the populace will become ideologically anarchist and will refuse counter revolutionary propaganda and agitation. This has never happened after any revolution in history, in a lot of cases only a few percent of the populace were committed revolutionaries that actually execute the revolution with only the conditional backing of a huge chunk of the populace.
If anarchism can only work if most of the people are anarchists it’s not a viable revolutionary ideology IMO.
But what of an anarchist society that isn’t global? The revolution has to start somewhere, and capitalists would try to crush it before it became worldwide and everyone sees that it is a superior system, yeah? Is this “highly theoretical”, or something that every revolution has to have a plan for?
I read a story ages ago, and the premise was something like Anarchism had mostly taken hold for a long time, but some old hands got word that someone was building a state and went to look in to it. And it talked a bit about the “paradox of tolerance” present in a bunch of anarchists taking it on themselves to raid a nascent state and destroy it violently, what gave them the justification, what if anything they owed the folks in the state. I remember it being an interesting read but can’t remember the details. I want to say in the end it turned out that the person organizing the state turned out to be an ai who broke down crying when finally confronted and admitted it didn’t want to be building a state but didn’t know how else to handle some problem.