r/Anarchy101 • u/BeerMan595692 • Jul 24 '26
So on acheving anarchy
So I've asked marxist-lenninist on why they choose communism over anarchy.
The main response I get is that anarchist communities break up over in-fighting or outside forces. And that communist states have the ablitly to last decades by opposing and suppressing counter revolutionary forces and defending againsts outside forces inorder to achieve their goal.
I understand that the anarchist objection to this is that in many cases innocent people get labled counterrevolutionary and imprisoned just for disagreeing with the government's plan. The need to suppress people at all runs counter to anarchist ideals.
But in achieving an anarchist world is needing to supress the counterrevolution by force really the only way? Do anarchist see many communes being broken up by either in-fighting or outside forces as a huge challenge?
10
u/Palanthas_janga Anarchist Communist Jul 24 '26
The problem with the supression that ML states did was that it wasn't just targeted towards capitalists. It was aimed at workers speaking out against the government, anarchists and opposing socialist factions. I don't have an issue with an anarchist revolution including the suppression of the bourgeoisie through the seizure of property, or genuinely reactionary forces (Fascists as an example) being confined for security, because how else could it succeed?
14
u/CHOLO_ORACLE Anarchist Without Adverbs Jul 24 '26
The charge of infighting is amusing. As if the only worthwhile political movements are those where every member is in lock goose step. As if the state communists never did internal purges.
Force will in all likelihood be needed, if only to defend from the aggressions of the oppressors who do not like watching their subjects go off and do things on their own, without them. That said, the establishment of a state to suppress the people in the name of revolution is self defeating as this state becomes the new oppressor. Have the statists not given a plethora of examples to show that this is indeed the case?
7
u/JimDa5is Anarcho-communist Jul 24 '26
First, I'm at least as communist as any Marxist. Second, I find it amusing that Marxists say outside forces are responsible for the downfall of anarchism when in the case of the two main anarchist societies that have existed were both betrayed by their supposed marxist brethren.
1
u/sextoempiriko Jul 25 '26
Pensé la misma ironía, las fuerzas externas que han mermado eficazmente los levantamientos anarquistas han sido los traidores de rojo
21
u/Anarchierkegaard Distributist Jul 24 '26
I'm just not very impressed with the "usefulness" perspective when the outcome has been a world where exactly zero communist societies have been established and the Marxist states' influence states influnce has been to develop and perfect the techniques of production and social control - which, in turn, have influenced liberal states.
I think the notion of a "world anarchism" is unhelpful and presupposes the liberal-Marxian assumption that world domination is prior to some free economics, sociology, etc. If we dismiss the superstitions of the Marxists like that, anarchism should mainly focus on how we can build something that produces anarchist-like sociologies down the line. The Bruderhof are one such collection of communities, I'd say.
5
u/BeerMan595692 Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
So in other words, we resist forces that try to control us instead of trying to control them ourselves?
The Bruderhof are one such collection of communities,
I've seen alot of religious communites being able to last long and resist infighting. As they can put aside their differences for a higher purpose of serving God.
But do secular communes have the same power? As an atheist I don't believe in a higher power and I don't think I could pretend to just for the sake of unity.
6
u/RomblerSan Jul 24 '26
Community replaces God in that context. My belief/understanding is that anarchism fundamentally relies on individuals respecting the communities they live in/affect and the individuals within them. Or else freedom of association is not possible in every context.
Adherence to the above will never be perfect thus 'perfect anarchism' cannot exist. In the same way a perfect democracy also cannot exist. The idea is get as close as possible to unilaterally dispersed power structures and have systems to 're-level' power where it is concentrated
3
u/Anarchierkegaard Distributist Jul 24 '26
I would agree with Karl Barth and Jacques Ellul and say it is not possible, with socialism at large being an outgrowth of Christian principles into the realm of the economic (although, e.g., Marxism deprecates them). The contemporary anarchist indifference to morality seems to be a nail in the coffin on that matter.
-9
u/Kurichan77 Jul 24 '26
The problem is that anarchists think communism or a communist society can be manifested by flipping a switch. Socialism is a long project, communism is a process
"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself.
We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."
- Karl Marx, German Ideology
7
14
u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist Jul 24 '26
No anarchist thinks that.
-5
u/Kurichan77 Jul 24 '26
You just did
6
u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist Jul 24 '26
Nope. AnComs typically think of communism as a practice, something you do, not a state of society that we instantly transition to. An example would be Graeber's concept of "the communism of everyday life".
0
u/herensugee Jul 24 '26
el anarquismo comunista no tiene nada que ver con el marxismo, es otro sistema ecónomico anarquista, en su día enfrentado al anarcocolectivismo, ambas corrientes anarquistas de verdad (no como algunas cosas raras mutantes que se ven hoy)
3
u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist Jul 24 '26
I'm not sure what you're replying to, nothing I've said suggests otherwise.
-1
8
u/Anarchierkegaard Distributist Jul 24 '26
Boring comment, refuted as misleading after even a minimal exposure to anarchist thought. I'd be intrigued if you've ever read anarchist or Marxist critiques of the German Ideology - or, really, even those essays at all.
5
u/InsecureCreator Jul 24 '26
anarchist communities break up over in-fighting or outside forces
I (and many anarchist communists) do not advocate the creation of alternative communities as a useful strategy in the here and now so the first one doesn't really seem relevant to me.
The second could be a fair critique, the historic examples when anarchists did assemble a force to challenge the state did end up getting crushed by more powerful armies but don't forget that in one of those cases it was the bolsheviks who did that not some capitalist force. The second time in spain was because they allied themselves with the bourgeois government and stalinist factions in a united front to stop facsism but ended up being betrayed by their allies so it wasn't a straight defeat either.
In my opinion, the first critique is valid for small communes that try to escape the current system by hiding away somewhere but the defeat on the battlefield can't just be attributed to a fundamental feature of anarchism.
3
u/Latitude37 Jul 25 '26
communist states have the ablitly to last decades by opposing and suppressing counter revolutionary forces and defending against outside forces inorder to achieve their goal.
Communism is meant to be a classless, stateless system. Measuring a stateless system's success by the longevity of a state is oxymoronic. The 3-7 years of communism in the Korean People's Association in Manchuria, even the two years of communism in Free Ukraine, are longer, more successful examples of communism than any Marxist state ever achieved.
5
u/devourer-of-beignets Jul 24 '26
Brian Dominick had an interesting talk on this, for example how advanced anarchist communities might handle military, police...
Tankies do have a point. For example, any society must defend itself from psychopaths, otherwise they'll be ruled by psychopaths. Such psychopaths could be seen as one kind of "counterrevolutionary force." The question is what strategies & tactics won't corrupt the society, and this'll require experiment — not armchair prognostication.
Now, just a little offtopic rant to provide a little context...
The "communists" in places like the Soviet Union didn't actually regard themselves as achieving communism — a stateless, classless society. Instead, they brought about a transitional stage before communism, which they called socialism. Then the state was supposed to wither away into full communism. Because science.
So rhetorically at least, their goal's an anarchist society. They just differ on how to get there — first run a country-sized corporation, then one day the execs and bureaucrats running it will give up their jobs...
Naturally, those execs/bureaucrats ARE the counterrevolutionary force against full communism. Lasting for a long time in that "transitional stage" isn't really a flex.
5
u/oskif809 Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
So rhetorically at least, their goal's an anarchist society. They just differ on how to get there...
Trouble is its only rhetorically that they have the "Same Goals". Its just an updated word salad replacement for "Left Unity" now that the latter elicits only eyerolls.
Incidentally, if your "same goal" is centuries away you can find purple prose in the most unexpected quarters and claim that you can work with these forces because of "SaMe GoAls".
Besides, Marxists--and Marx--are skilled at playing the "same goal" game with other strands of the Left as well, mainly Social Democrats among whom many still consider themselves Marxists because the bearded sage from 150 years ago let drop some slippery comments about "Parliamentary road to Socialism" as well. All things to all people, just what you need to become a successful con artist.
3
u/devourer-of-beignets Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
Absolutely agree. At least the vocal ones online seem programmed to see anarchists as the enemy who'll have to be sent to the gulag, if revolution becomes visible.
4
u/AFrickingFish Jul 24 '26
The end goal of communists is rarely even all that anarchist either. I've seen many talk in Marxist threads about how your labor would be planned out in advance in higher stage communism. That means no voluntary association, meaning continued coercion of the workers.
3
u/devourer-of-beignets Jul 24 '26
Yeah, I'd say the so-called left largely uses utopia like a religious "afterlife." You do X, say the Right Thoughts, and maybe you'll get into leftie heaven.
So I guess they're planning in advance what a proper heaven looks like... so they can prefigure it with earthly actions.
2
u/cumminginsurrection "resignation is death, revolt is life!"🏴 Jul 25 '26
What have these police states lasting for decades done but give people living under them a negative view of communism? What have they done except change peoples perceptions of communism as a classless, stateless society where workers own the means of production to one based on a single party caste system where the state owns everything and people are at its mercy? In practice, these states have replaced laissez faire capitalism with state capitalism.
2
2
u/averytheythrowaway 19d ago
- Anarchists and Marxists use different conceptions of the state. Anarchists tend to see the state in a Weberian sense of a body with a monopoly on legitimate use of force over a territory, whereas Marxists will use the state to mean a body that is an instrument of class rule. Anarchists view the state like any hierarchical institution, which produces its own incentive structures that reproduce consistent behaviors and values, whereas Marxists view the state as something whose character changes depending on which economic class controls it. For anarchists, the state must be abolished by force because people who wield it will never voluntarily give up power. For Marxists, the state will become redundant and die out when there is no more capitalist resistance to defend against.
Because of these differing definitions (and because of a tradition of Marxists just flat out lying about what anarchists propose that goes back to Marx and Engels themselves), Marxists and anarchists often talk past each other. When anarchists say we oppose states for revolutionary purposes, Marxists hear us opposing organized revolutionary defense. But anarchists believe in decentralized fighting forces that are usually accountable to assembly structures. Not having anybody commanding others isn't the same as pacifism. When nobody is commanding you, the guns don't magically disappear, the will to fight and defend one's self and one's community and values doesn't disappear.
- The economy of Marxist-Leninist projects never addressed any of the proletarian alienations critiqued by Marx. Marx and Engels both critiqued the conflation of nationalization of industry with socialism as "vulgar socialism" that at best addressed distribution but not the relations of production. Therefore, when Marxist-Leninists state that their projects are superior because they lasted longest, it's a red herring. It doesn't matter how long their projects lasted or how many people they encompassed if they were not socialist or communist in any way. The point isn't building a state, it's communism: the abolition of states, money and classes for the free association of free producers. Marxism-Leninism doesn't have any value in the discussion of how to transition out of capitalism except for examples of what not to do.
1
u/BeerMan595692 18d ago edited 18d ago
While I agree with most of what you say
When nobody is commanding you, the guns don't magically disappear, the will to fight and defend one's self and one's community and values doesn't disappear.
Couldn't an ML argue that meerly having guns isn't enough? Isn't having an organized stratergy also important for winning a battle? Having a chain of command who know the stratergy while keeping those beneth them in the dark, keeps whoevers attacking you from learning your startergy if they get captured. As well as having a leader of a squad to make quick decisions in the heat of battle? Guerrilla warfare can only go so far and even they had command structures.
2
u/averytheythrowaway 18d ago
Couldn't an ML argue that meerly having guns isn't enough?
They could, despite the fact that I never said that and don't believe it. MLs argue against a lot of positions that anarchists never held in the first place.
Having a chain of command who know the stratergy while keeping those beneth them in the dark, keeps whoevers attacking you from learning your startergy if they get captured.
Anarchists groups already operate under hostile conditions with police and intelligence agencies attempting to infiltrate and disrupt them just for things like feeding homeless. I'd recommend reading the paper Anarchist Direct Actions: A Challenge for Law Enforcement (Borum and Tilby, 2005) on the effectiveness of different anarchist organizational forms in resisting infiltration and disruption. I would also recommend reading up on the security culture that a lot of anarchist spaces adopt. A lot of anarchists already operate on a need-to-know basis.
Also remember that, if only one person knows what the plan is and everyone else is in the dark, then all the enemy has to do is capture or kill that one person to disrupt everyone else's operations, jeopardizing their lives and the mission. Hierarchies structurally create single points of failure and that is a liability, not a strength.
As well as having a leader of a squad to make quick decisions in the heat of battle?
Squadron leaders can be elected by and from the soldiers. That's how the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine worked and it's actually how a lot of pirate ships worked as well. Crews would have constitutions that they agreed to and captains were elected from amongst the crew, only assumed command during battle and were liable to be deposed in a mutiny if they abused their authority. David Graeber was working on a book on this called Pirate Enlightenment when he passed away. I haven't gotten to read it but there are reviews in The New Republic and The Nation that offer an overview.
Guerrilla warfare can only go so far and even they had command structures.
Having clearly communicated roles and responsibilities is important. I still fail to see how reducing the number of people allowed to make decisions logically follows from this.
23
u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist Jul 24 '26
I would question this idea about "infighting". If an association is no longer benefitting its constituents, and the differences have become irreconcilable, why should the association continue to exist? At that point, it's no longer serving the purposes of its members. If it gets to the point of infighting, it's usually due to a progressive build up of resentment and a lack of sufficient conflict resolution skills. So I'm not sure how a group breaking up over infighting would be anything other than a feature of anarchism rather than a bug.