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
I’d love it if you expanded on this cause i’ve been on this massively ML dominated space for years and still haven’t been convinced that they’re not (though i was always an anarchist so that might not matter that much). One of the main function of a state is reproducing it’s power, that’s why it can’t wither away, especially in a world dominated by capitalist mode of production where communist states are forced to develop their productive forces.
We don’t know what a communist society will look like either, mind you, we have blueprints at best. I posted an essay a few weeks ago about revolutionary spain and how anarchists there organized themselves and they definitely were getting there. You can check out Diego Abad de Santilan’s writings to see a pretty concrete vision of how they wanted to make things work (though he’s somewhat of a pariah cause he joined the revolutionary government, which is, yeah, not very anarchist).
Apart from that Anarchy Works by Peter Gelderloos (it’s in the sidebar) is, while a pretty basic, but is another good example that shows why anarchism is anything but idealistic since it shows that the basics of anarchism together or separate were actually laid into praxis tons of times.
One thing to keep in mind tho which i see all the time is that anarchists have a different notion of what a successful revolution is than marxists, since their methods are different and i see this turning into a dick measuring contest still. For anarchists any revolution and any activity that creates stateless bubbles is a success, even if it’s crushed in two years. That’s why i specifically can’t look at the USSR and say it’s a success story, because while it existed, the state never withered.
Apart from that, what i think is also a huge and catastrophic misunderstanding is that most MLs still think On Authority is the greatest gotcha ever existed, but in my opinion doesn’t do anything apart from conflating authority and force. Anarchists have proven thousands of time since it was written that they are very willing to use force against capitalists and fascists but biting the hand that beats you in itself is not an authoritarian act. What anarchists didn’t do is setting up state structures where everyone’s every step is monitored and you’re encouraged to snitch on your friends and neighbours. Yes, i know we live in a system like that currently as well. That’s why i say, from an anarchist standpoint there’s no difference.
So yeah two critique’s of Engels i’ve found interesting is this one and this one.
Are we allowed to have discussion on these points in this thread? Because one thing I never understood is the idea that the socialist projects have to wither away so fast, I never got how anyone thought we were at any time in modern history at a point where the coordination created by socialist States could be torn down safely while preserving the gains made.
With the richest countries in the world and many of their colonies, with all the nukes and military one could imagine, breathing down on your doorstep I don’t know how it’s rational to think that you should then begin tearing down the structures which were then only created out of historical necessity to fight against these very forces. Do Anarchists (capital A) generally believe that the period for communist parties to prove they can transition towards a classless society has passed, and that they’ve somehow proven they’re incapable? Or do they think that the chance hasn’t been available yet but that if it was then communists would then prove themselves incapable of transitioning towards communism?
Anarchists generally think that state communist parties (council communists are a different question) are not capable to lead towards a stateless, classless society, since they want to use state power, whose primary functions include reproducing itself. I’m yet to read any convincing account about how, if we got there, Leninists would start to break down the vehicle they used to defeat capitalism and rallied society around.
If you’re asking my opinion, i have much of the same scepticism towards communist parties, but not on an equal level, for example i see much more potential in Latin American left/communist movements than in China. What i differ from most anarchists tho is that i’d be very happy to be proven wrong and generally won’t advocate for the overthrow of the CCP in the current context.
Lenin himself writes extensively on critiquing the existence of the state, so any real leninist would align with this position. Mao himself also was quite anti-state, see the cultural revolution. Both of these incredibly important figures were anti state but saw it as a necessary tool to defend against extreme capitalist agression. there is little doubt in my mind that if capitalism fell, many would start critquing and deconstructing the current power structures.
Many would see it in their best interest too, because every head of Marxism leninism has shouted to the stars about the bureaucratic state apparatus corrupting Socialism and causing capitalist restoration.
As i said, i’d be very happy to be proven wrong. The thing is that with this method you would have to keep that anti-state ethos up for generations and generations as we see, so there’s ample time for there to be sticks put between the gears. A global revolution you wrote about in the other comment would help with that.
Doesn’t it seem reasonable that the idea of trying to create a classless society would be a task better suited for those who come after us? For example, the promise of socialism is that democracy is then increased to be available to the wider masses of people. Socialist societies have in the past, and even in the modern day, demonstrate that they’re able to make huge leaps in social progress that enable more people than ever before be able to participate in the democratic processes of a society. I guess I’m not convinced that the idea that “Leninsts would not break down their own state” is something which is provable, and thus not a useful heuristic for making decisions. So what if “Leninists” aren’t capable of the next step in the growth of humanity, it’s been shown that they’ll give up on their power much more peacefully than societies dominated by the bourgeois class ever will (even and especially communist officials who didn’t benefit from the transition to liberal governance). If we’re able to save the planetary ecosystem with cybernetic planning, end hunger, guarantee housing and work for those who’re able and a good life for those who aren’t as the “Leninists” demand; won’t we have left our children with far more fertile soil for an anarchist society than if we simply struggle directly for a classeless society today?
IF we are able, than i’ll be the first one to admit that. But if in the process we have to wiretap literally everyone and encourage snitching on our friends, i’ll reserve the right to be sceptical about whether this is the goal or not.
Yeah but this hangup is also disconnected from the actual reality of living in socialist societies outside of their most turbulent times. The United States is already the most surveilled society and it doesn’t effect most people; only political actors working against the status quo and those recruited by intelligence agencies to shoot up a mall. As well, friends snitching on friends, it’s reminiscent of only a short era of Soviet history that’s often highly exaggerated.
However I can’t blame you for your hangups, except to say that after talking to comrades in multiple different existing socialist nations, I simply don’t have them anymore. If you ever get the chance to talk to communists in real communist parties, I think your worries will fade away. They’re largely like all the punks and progressives I know in my life if they were simply given the political education and support to make their society better. I can’t guarantee this is true in all cases, clearly, but socialist governance is far more humane and elevates far better members of society than the bourgeois governance we’re both used to. It really does set the stage for a better humanity.
I live in a former east bloc state (hungary) and the only communist party we have left is explicitly against LGBTQ people and immigration. In the meantime unions are in shambles because all union activity was heavily vetted by the police so workers now don’t even care to try (of course 30 years of neoliberal pacification also contributed but there was basically zero resistance even in the 90’s because they were all gutted. So i am a bit sceptic about it, but again, i am happy to be proven wrong, i would be a supporter if such a humane system would rise and i watch with great admiration the latin american projects (and also defend for example Cuba against radlib losers who think it’s the most authoritarian state ever).
One thought morsel to your original question though: If we got closer to all those things through ways of anarchistic organizing, wouldn’t that be better too even if it ultimately fails to achieve all the goals?
Hm, yeah, I can definitely see your perspective. I’ve only interacted with members of, for example, Cuba and China’s communist parties; so that paints the picture for me in my mind of what a communist party looks like.
I think to answer your question though, I guess I focus on two things;
A) A clear path of continuation, explicitly bound institutions which allow the next generation to pick up the mantle of running whatever revolution, and this requires institutions in my experience
B) An ability to survive through crisis, for example, if an anarchist project were able to bring huge progress in a short period of time, what use would it be if that project was then crushed by better organized and better funded imperialists or capitalists within a matter of years if not months?
I guess for me, I see that positive change only happens over long periods of time. The projects and solutions we have to environmental decay, economic democracy, etc all require these two things which socialist projects (not all, unfortunately, but enough to learn from) have shown an ability to do. If we don’t engage with what’s worked historically and build and improve that, we might as well be theorizing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Mind expanding on that since it seems like in the us its doing a piss poor job of it. In fact I’d say that a capital dominated state wants to do away with itself via privatization.
Engle’s makes a pretty convincing argument that the state arose to mediate class conflict in favor of capital and that it cannot be destroyed until that class conflict is resolved.
Take the landlord tenant relationship. In order for this to exist then the landlord must exercise their property right through state mediated violence and the tenant is offered some rudimentary protections. If the state simply no longer recognized the property right of the land lord the state would wither and class conflict would resolve a bit.
That’s not how i see it. From what i see capital still needs and will need in the future the state there to be an enforcer. IMO the ultimate dead end of right wing libertarian theory is this, even when the market’s hand is the least tied by the state there will be a need for a force to beat down slave riots. And that’s what the state’s ultimate power lies in and i don’t see it privatized in the future.
So Engels is half right about that, but i’d rather say that negotiating class conflict with violence is one way the state can be used and it doesn’t negate that it reproduces it’s power itself. The state pulling the rug from under landlords is a good step but in this context imo it’s not necessarily withering it just oversees the conflict in a different (better) way - would a tenant yeeting their landlord be arrested? Would landlords have their properties violently seized? These are all good things imo but they don’t contribute to the withering of the state, only give it another role. And under communist parties - at least until they get to the point where capitalist forces aren’t a threat - it’s necessary to have the state as an official enforcer.
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.
The whole thread we started here is a whole lot of assumptions. Of course globally humanity will take generations to be ideologically realign. As it is with EVERY ideology.
Good thing i didn’t say that.
You still haven’t responded to my concerns at all tho. How exactly do you deal with counter revolutionary activity in an anarchist territory? It’s pretty clear how you do it with a state.
I can’t see it being viable any other way tbh. What keeps the anarchist territory cohesive in protecting the revolution if not that?
Look the best here i can do is to guide you to the relevant parts of Anarchy Works, it probably explains it a lot better than i have the capacity right now.
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.
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?
A not global anarchist revolution would have to grapple with the same problems as a communist one and having a state apparatus at hand is not a guarantee of the revolution being protected.
But how would you do it without a state? A state offers an obvious and historically proven vehicle for defending a revolution from internal counter revolutionaries and external imperialists. What is the anarchist alternative?
There is a flip side to this.
A state offers an obvious and historically proven vehicle for imperialists and internal counter-revolutionaries to derail, subsume, or decapitate a revolution. A revolution centered on a state will have a huge target that it advertises; a revolution that manages to operate horizontally will not.
The state apparatus emerged in conjunction with money, and it co-evolved with the development of capital. It’s going to take a lot of de-coupling to get to a point where it’s truly and fully independent.
See this is exactly the kind of senseless dick measuring contest all of these conversations devolve into that brings with itself the disgusting sectarian bullshit in the fucking anarchy community of the left unity website like the comment that replied to yours. No, the state isn’t “an obvious and historically proven vehicle for defending a revolution from internal counter revolutionaries and external imperialists.” The state failed many times to do that. The USSR is long gone. There’s ZERO states that has achieved communism.
I think “How do you do it without a state?” Is a fair question in an educational thread. We are mostly communists here, with a common understanding of how we would defend a revolution - some of us might be taking sectarian snipes, a lot of us just don’t know the anarchist answer to this.
If our premises are incorrect, maybe tell us why? Or direct us to someone who would?
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if socialism was global, i think it would be much better and less ‘authoritarian’ for them as well.
There are two dynamics to keep in mind here.
One is that the bourgeois state has more contingencies that it depends on than localized egalitarian collectives do. Capitalism isn’t some latent universal law that resurfaces as soon as you’re no longer stamping it out. It’s a historical process; it came from somewhere; it was ushered into being with great amounts of force. It would take a great amount of force to reimpose it (and in 1991, it did take just that). To get rid of the landlord class, though, all a government needs to do is arm the working people and pledge not to prosecute violence against landlords.
The other is that there’s a bit of a cost-benefit analysis that needs to be done in order to subjugate a putative free territory. There’s a certain amount of resources or revenue that could be extracted from the territory. If the attempt to being it back under the yoke of capital was projected to cost more than that amount, there would be no material driving force to get it done. Capitalist entities have enough trouble already balancing 10-year prospects against quarterly prospects. Granted, though, this means that anarchist approaches would most easily work in less-developed, less-contested places.
The colossus is not something that categorically hates you, it is something that sees you as a threat to itself and also wants to exploit you.
So for the case of counter-revolutionaries, all flesh is grass, they bleed as easily as any plebeian does. For the case of “fighting to defend the revolution”, I’d be interested to see a concrete example of what that would look like, situationally.
It kinda of is right now. Unless the anarchist revolution is immediately global you’re gonna get bad actors from capitalist states trying to ratfuck your anarchist institutions, also the ruling classes that you deposed aren’t going to disappear overnight unless you outright kill them all.
My second point directly addressed that. Capitalist state apparatus operates by a conflicting logic, but it’s still a logic rooted in material benefit.
Sure, if it’s someplace like Grenada that could be seen as a lilypad to attack the United States, it would be crushed to avoid perceived harm in the cost-benefit analysis. If it’s someplace like Chile or the Congo with a whole lot of mineral wealth, the payoff will be higher. But there’s still a calculation that gets made. Capitalists are not irrationally driven to crush socialist projects; they do it because they stand to financially benefit in the long run even after the losses in money and equipment and lives.
Another point is in the belly of the beast. Nobody has outlawed homesteading, despite the fact that this actively reduces GDP by displacing the formal economy with the informal economy, limiting tax revenue and also rarely contributing to anything that can be used as part of a war effort.
If you call yourself a Marxist-Leninist party with the stated goal of overthrowing the government, you’re a target from the beginning, and the past 100 years have seen Western governments running absolute circles around insurgent communist parties. But if you’re supposedly just a bunch of people doing collective homesteading, with a mutual aid network that’s definitely no-sir not at all part of a dual power institution, you have the capacity to grow and spread.
I thought we had fully abandoned the whole premise of “they hate us 'cause we’re free” and understood the logic that was obscured by that thought-terminating cliche.
What kind of ratfucking is a bad actor going to do? Assassinate the Leader that doesn’t exist? Bribe or blackmail someone, okay. But do you bribe the chief parliamentarian, the chief strategist, the chief taskmaster, the chief mediator, the chief teacher, or the chief spokesperson on the council of good governance? None of those options sound very productive, and all those roles are easily switched out with someone from a lower council. Or maybe they want to invade and occupy- how are they going to do that when there would be a rifle (or a bow) behind every blade of grass?
In practice, anarchistic projects in the 21st century have faced more difficulty with gangs than they have with state actors.
Presumably with artillery and bombing runs.
I don’t think they’d just sit by idly if an anarchist revolution popped up in a developed western state for example. They understand well that a successful socialist project on their doorstep is an existential threat to them. Even by your logic they’d want to intervene because a lot of capital would be lost to them otherwise.
Also the point of a socialist revolution IMO is seizing the industry and cities, not homesteading. Once you start doing that they’re not going to look kindly to you and will go all out.
There’s a pretty big assumption there, that you’re fighting to hold ground that the enemy operates on. Is the point of a socialist revolution to accept the framework of the capitalists, and contest it in a matching style? Or is it to secure a well-founded base of power for people regardless of inherited means, in order to provide them with the quality of life and personal development they need? Are you trying to seize as much GDP as you can, or are you trying to garner food, shelter, education, healthcare, and transportation? In short, is your revolution focused around the outcomes for your revolutionary subject, or is it focused around depriving your adversary of something?
My strategy would not center around seizing a Funko Pop factory even if they became the most traded commodity.
Look how successful that was in Afghanistan.
To quote another reactionary griping about their Ls, the conventional army loses if it does not win; the guerrilla wins if he does not lose.
The biggest and most conclusive military strategic lesson of the past 40 years has been that you don’t automatically “win” everything by winning the pitched battle, and that fighting an insurgency is counterproductive and rapidly becomes probibitively expensive, because of the gap in cost between guerrillas and occupying armies.
In the case of a remote target, it is far easier to disrupt the flow of capital (e.g. burning cash crops, sabotaging equipment) than it is to disable the local ability to field an autonomous resistance force.
If we’re talking about the invasion of a bourgeois army in the service of capital, then it’s pretty clear that everyone in its general path will have a common cause of self-defense against it- and sure, you have a military commander for the operation, plus a couple officers, for the sake of strategic and tactical coherence. There is no reason why that military command needs to spill over into the sphere of governance.
For the whole world’s sake, I am glad that the CPC in the 30s did not follow the directive that “the substance of a socialist revolution is seizing industry and cities, not building up a rural power base and the means of subsistence”.
And how are you gonna do that without an industrial base? It’s not about “GDP” or “playing their game”, it’s about industry being necessary to support a decent life for a large population.
Will they? There’s gonna be a sizable chunk of the population that would probably materially benefit from capitalist restoration, mainly the previous upper classes and their lackeys. Also people with terminal religious/traditionalist brainworms. Also people that don’t want to spend a decade in a guerilla war.
1930s rural China looked absolutely nothing like for example rural America today, it’s not even the least bit comparable. Back then peasants were the absolute majority of the population, nowadays this isn’t true at all.
You’re forgetting so easily that most of the industry that’s “required” to support a population has been offshored. Much of it went to a neighbor that in fact has multiple empirical examples of exactly what I’m talking about, with government crackdown being either fully stalled or outright absent.
A revolutionary situation isn’t going to pop out of nowhere and hold contested territory. It’s going to need capillaries in the hinterland so it can support itself with lower recognition and risk. And I’m not going to rehash the explanation of how a good quality of life can be secured mostly independently of gasoline technology here.
Before you started drifting the conversation with selective clapback quotes and refusing to specify an example as I asked for, you were talking about “defending the RevolutionTM” from outside forces. Now you’re talking about adversaries running on idealism popping up inside the territory, who are not a small minority, are not better off in the alternative to capitalism, and who somehow are equipped with everything they need to set up the systen of subordination and oppression again. I’m not sure you’re arguing in good faith.
But my answer to the counter-revolutionaries question is that imperialist infrastructure is harder and lengthier to build and easier to destroy than autonomous infrastructure. It takes months of construction to build a bridge that can carry military equipment, and only 1 well-placed explosive to nullify it. If the power grid and petroleum distribution network were knocked out, the armed forces couldn’t move a mile- and the same would be true of suburban pickup-truck-driving reactionaries, who would more likely shrivel in their subdivisions or get in a gunfight with their neighbors at the first sign of scarcity. Meanwhile for every anarchist it would be a sort of dream come true.
Moving prior to the question of military contention, if an anarchist movement in the West was integrated with the economy like China has been since the 80s, stamping it out would be an act of self-destruction by capitalists. If it wasn’t, attempting to suppress it would still be weakening the metropole by the state turning on its own territory and population. In any given revolution, you don’t start out from square one saying you’re going to annihilate the government. You conceal your intention while you build up your capacities, so that you actually get a chance to act instead of being infiltrated, compromised, and executed.
I had a whole bunch of these discussions with 2 people in my scene IRL years ago, who insisted on the need to conduct conventional warfare or take over the military from the inside, under the assumption that you publicly declare a much larger enemy from the very inception. They had both just gotten out of the armed forces themselves. I call this “army brain”. Anyway, neither of them are still involved in anti-capitalist organizing. One of them moved away and the other got kicked out of the local PSL.
Thank you for the thoughtful response, I look forward to reading your essay I’ll definitely try to get to it. I busted out the laptop to give a thoughtful response to you here lol. I apologize for how long it is, like it’s ridiculous but I can’t help but be long winded.
I guess for some background on where I’m at politically which may not matter but here goes lol: I’ve read very little theory myself. I think I got more radicalized in a communist direction after I went to college and studied Latin America and learned about colonization, imperialism, and socialist revolutions in different Latin American countries. I also was taught a tiny bit about Marx in college as well when I took some labor history classes. I have done a bit more research on my own about Cuba specifically, and over the years, kinda became more interested in learning about North Korea and wanting to break down internalized American propaganda. So I think my experience in college helped me to favor communism while I never was taught anything about actual anarchism. I’m familiar with some theorists and have done a tiny bit of research about it. I believe mutual aid and any other praxis happening on the ground now is critical and important. I am just starting to try to get myself more serious about reading theory and such, and before I slide more and more towards ML, I am hoping to kinda learn about both at the same time so I can actually decide where I stand politically. I do wanna challenge myself and be as informed as I can about both. I do agree with you for what seems like the dick measuring contest between the two lines of thought lmao. I find it really silly and that’s another reason why I want to learn for myself and probably want to take ideas from both anarchism and communism and apply them to how I think and operate politically. I ultimately wanna study indigenous struggle though and strive towards incorporating that thought first and foremost tho.
To give my thoughts on the quotes I provided, and explain my thoughts on consensus after engaging in it: I think what bothers me about those phrases is that often, I don’t see the explanations go much further than that, and I kinda find them contradictory. Like, okay, so on one hand anarchists believe that society and the way that humans cooperate together is fluid and constantly changing, and so that plays into why we don’t know what anarchism will look like. There is a base structure that’s been thought out as to how consensus and horizontal decision making can work now, during, and after the revolution, but that can and will change so the “end goal” is unknowable. What I find contradictory is that fluidity and evolution is being applied to anarchism, but not to communist revolution. A communist state doesn’t seem to operate the way that a capitalist state does, so why is it that we can’t evolve that state structure, and keep changing it, where the anarchist structure of consensus that was created is afforded that freedom? We are always learning from our mistakes, and from Lenin to Mao to Castro, no revolution has looked exactly the same and as far as I know, they try to look at the errors made and try to apply what works to their version of communism and discard what didn’t work in prior revolutions.
Another point that has probably been addressed in anarchist literature: When anarchism is talked about, it seems that it is portrayed as immune from hierarchy and certain people gaining more clout/influence/social capital, whatever it might be called. At one point, I worked at a job that based all of it’s decision making around consensus and a horizontal workplace. All positions were paid the same and every decision in the agency was discussed in individual department meetings, then consensus from that group was brought to the larger agency wide meeting where those thoughts/proposals were again decided through consensus. For a long time, anyone and everyone was able to join those larger agency wide meetings and participate. The workplace engaged in this type of decision making for probably close to 50 years.
There were many things that ended up happening that I felt replicated social hierarchy and what made it feel like not truly consensus decision making. Even when taught how the consensus model worked and when people were encouraged to participate, there are many people who did not engage. That could be due to apathy, anxiety, feeling that their voice would not echo as loudly as others, etc. So, people who felt more confident, were better at public speaking, or had more knowledge about the process and the work were often the most influential in the group. Sure, we would come to consensus, but there were many people who just kinda went with the flow, even if they didn’t necessarily agree with whatever decisions were made just because they didn’t care enough to participate or any of the other above reasons. The “social capital” piece also felt very inequitable; if someone came to the meeting with a personal request, or any kind of proposal and they were very well known, charismatic, well likes etc etc, they would often get the most feedback, more people would participate and they would also get decisions that would work in their favor. At the same time, other people who did not enjoy those qualities might not get equal treatment. The inequity was not a conscious choice but that was just the nature of the group. So through this, the very hierarchies that anarchism wants to abolish seem to replicate themselves. There are people who hold knowledge who try to raise the consciousness of others, there are delegates and representatives for group decision making, the charisma and ability to make social connections influences the direction of the groups. Now, I recognize that there are failsafes in place that could probably discourage these problems, and this was not called anarchism in name, so I do see how it’s different but the way the discussions were structured were the exact same way as our local anarchist collective structured them, so I feel like it’s an apt anecdote. Considering all that, it makes me feel like criticisms lobbed towards communism for its faults are also faults that exist in the anarchist system, and that anarchy can just as easily replicate systems of inequality.
ANYWAY thank you for coming to my ted talk I’m so sorry for the length lol if you stuck around this long I’m stoked to hear your thoughts on this.
Thanks for your response! I’m gonna do a brief response to each topics:
First: I support your method in engaging in both side’s theory, that’s the way to do it imo, so good on you for that! I’m not against marxist criticism if it’s informed by the knowledge of anarchist theory (lots of the shitthrowing around marxism and anarchism comes from people not engaging with source material from the other side only criticism of said source material which i try to avoid, that’s why i read marxist literature as well).
Second: What you say is true, there’s a lot of anarchists (especially on the internet) who are applying this double standard (they generally come from a place that the two ideologies can’t be synthesised at all) but there are some who think there can be a synthesis between the two ideologies, apart from the essay about Spain i would also suggest Daniel Guerin’s For a Libertarian Communism (and Guerin in general, i think he’s pretty underrated) to see where it could end up. Hell i’ve even read texts praising Tito on The Anarchist Library.
Third: You’re right, informal reproduction of social hierarchy is a problem that anarchists are grappling with, since some people will be more confident and less anxious in these situations. I’m not that well versed on the theory on that but one essay i found helpful is this one. Apart from that what i can advise you is to, if you are in a situation like that is to ask the people organising, what they will do in order to avoid this happening, like, will the people who seem more withdrawn given a platform deliberately? Will the people who tend to get asked everything willingly step back? I think this is an important problem to grapple with especially in the mentally gripping system we live in, but also i think that there could be (and maybe there are i just don’t know about them) methods to reverse it.
This is a valuable insight.
Formal power discrepancies do not spring into being out of nowhere; it usually emerges organically from informal power discrepancies. The main focus of anarchists has been to decry the formal sort, but they are largely silent or inept or even complicit when it comes to the informal sort.
Any anarchist praxis, which does not include mechanisms of preventing or narrowing informal power gaps, is going to be crucially deficient.