Technically, anarchism is incompatible with communism, fascism, and socialism, as all of those require the state to exist in some way if undertaken at the national scale.
Anarcho-capitalism makes the most sense of them all. Just say you don’t want a state to exist at all because you want to suck some robber baron/warlord’s cock.
Tell me you know nothing about anarchism, communism, fascism, or socialism, without saying you know nothing about anarchism, communism, fascism, or socialism lol…
https://medium.com/international-workers-press/misconceptions-about-communism-2e366f1ef51f
Which do you not understand: anarchism or communism? Communism is a stateless, classless society. It does not require a state, and it is perfectly compatible with anarchism. In fact, within any form of anarchism you’d find communism.
Anarchism is no state and no hierarchies. In any form, it seeks horizontality and mutual aid. It is absolutely unhinged to think that’s compatible in any way with capitalism.
Jfc the media has really succeeded in deluding people about what anarchism is, haven’t they? The surprising thing is I’d expect that on, say, Facebook or 4chan or Stormfront, but I thought 196 was more … leftist
It’s because capitalism the pejorative is distinct from capitalism the naturalistic economic theory and a lot of people actively refuse to understand this. Unless your anarchist society is truly post-scarcity, you will end up with commerce and value proxies regardless of how much you wish otherwise. And even in a material post-scarcity society, there will still be scarcity in the form of things like artistic talent, companionship, etc. If you don’t want to call that capitalism, then you might as well just define capitalism as monsters under your bed.
There is no post-capitalist society besides the one focused on harm reduction. And then there is no utopia, no end goal, only an eternal struggle to combat the evils of where material scarcity and human greed intersect.
Oh look, the “capitalism is human nature” folk have arrived!
Thoroughly debunked propaganda. Blocked.
Communism requires someone to distribute goods and assign labor. That person is effectively going to be your state at essentially any scale above a family.
And if you want to live in a developed society, you need a state to defend against invasion and colonization, arrest murderers and rapists, and regulate trade (even if trade is only external).
Communism does not require a state. What part of “a stateless, classless society” are you failing to grasp?
Even state authoritarian communist nations at least ostensibly seek a stateless, classless society. That’s the whole fucking point.
And you don’t need a state for those other things either. Do you think anarchists just throw shit at the wall and hope for the best? There are functioning anarchist communities which have no state. If they did, then they wouldn’t be anarchist.
That distribution doesn’t have to be top down. And as communism is a stateless society, the entire concept is predicated on the absence of top down distribution. Read up on democratic confederalism, parecon, project cybersin (admittedly done with the presence of a state but there’s nothing about the system the necessitates one).
The CNT-FAI, zapatistas, rojava, and free territories of ukraine can all speak to decentralized militias. For auth-left examples just check out maoist militant orgs, they drew a ton of inspiration for anarchists in how to manage militias.
Most anarchists are prison abolitionists, I’m not going to summarize that one, look into it if you wish
Market economies can and have existed in horizontal societies. There’s nothing inherently contradictory regarding trade regulations in a horizontal society
You misspelled utopia. Not sure what reality you’d expect humans to create a stateless and classless “communism” outside the hippie commune out in the woods.
The comment you replied to even said “at a national scale.” That’s the rub, isn’t it?
Well of course, there would be no nation ideally, so the concept of a national scale is a bit incompatible in a way, isn’t it? As you pointed out in another comment, the existence of nations only threatens progress and equity! They can and do disrupt any such attempt. I mean, look what happened to the Spanish anarchists, and what the US has done every time a remotely leftist movement has taken hold in Latin America.
I don’t agree with the Marxist-Leninists, but even for them the end goal is (at least in theory) to advance to statelessness and classlessness. We anarchists don’t agree that such a thing can be achieved via a state. A state will never offload its power. Its whole shtick is coercion and control, and it will hold onto that at all costs.
utopia
Very few anarchists would use this term. The concept of a utopia is rather antithetical to anarchism, by most people’s assessment. “Utopia” implies a perfect society with no room to progress. I doubt such a thing is possible, and I think it might be rather harmful to imagine we’ve arrived at perfection. It would stifle progress, now wouldn’t it?
I thought 196 was more … leftist
Unfortunately once there are more than a few votes a post will reach /all, making it visible on all instances, and with that come… the others… lol
Good point. I always browse by new, so I forgot that that’s a thing.
I guess that explains why posts seem to start with some productive discussion, but then tend to get derailed over time. It gets exhausting having to explain the very basics over and over again, but maybe I need more patience. I too grew up propagandized, and thankfully I’ve had some people help me learn.
Ancaps and tankies are everywhere these days. No good place for an old fashioned ancom anymore.
Then again, same as it ever was.
Communism is a stateless, moneyless, classless society. In what way is that incompatible with anarchism, the ideology based on the elimination of heirarchy (the state)?
Modulo MLs defining state to mean “any method of organising a society” in which case not even anarchism is stateless because yes of course we’re doing that. The common politological understanding of state is more or less along those lines, too. I propose to not get anything in any twists over definitions.
Anything is only incompatible with anarchism insofar as it inflicts hierarchical power. Certain stuff at least some people call communism most certainly falls under that umbrella (though even Lenin admitted it was state capitalism), others are compatible or at least very close. Classical council communism certainly looks awfully like anarcho-syndicalism.
That’s assuming anarchists agree with Marx’s definition of the state. Which, famously, they don’t. It’s far too nebulous to be useful for analysis, theory or prefigurarion. Marx isn’t the end all be all of left wing politics. Here’s a short video going into more depth on anarchist criticisms of the Marxist conception of the state.
To quote Malatesta “Anarchists, including this writer, have used the word State, and still do, to mean the sum total of the political, legislative, judiciary, military and financial institutions through which the management of their own affairs, the control over their personal behaviour, the responsibility for their personal safety, are taken away from the people and entrusted to others who, by usurpation or delegation, are vested with the powers to make the laws for everything and everybody, and to oblige the people to observe them, if need be, by the use of collective force.”
If you’re going to debate anarchist ideas, you should use anarchist definitions so at the very least you understand what you’re criticizing.
Definitions matter and communism has been understood as a stateless, classless, moneyless society for as long as the term has existed. The only people who would contest that definition are either ignorant or anti-communist actors who have a vested interest in muddying the waters. And I don’t think those individuals should have the final say on what is and isn’t communism.
Lenin didn’t practice or install a communist society, and as you’ve noted, he didn’t intend to. Council communists and even libertarian marxists (Marxist autonomists for example) are both horizontal ideologies and despite some linguistic differences from anarchism, I consider them comrades. They can call it a state if they want, anarchists would disagree. But if the only difference between us and them is definitions, I don’t really see an issue. That’s something that can be debated post-revolution
A state, according to the average anarchist, is a society ruled by rulers who make decisions for you.
Resource distribution and factory management could absolutely be planned without a central planner under socialism/communism/whatever. Capitalism, on the other hand, needs bosses and police officers that protect the boss’s property. Fascism doesn’t require an explanation IMO.
Whoever is making the decisions about distribution and factory management is effectively a state at that point.
There’s also the fact that generally, people want to live in developed nations. You’ll need a military to keep your neighboring countries from taking all your stuff/people/land, and you’ll need some kind of police force to keep those few assholes you have internally from just kidnapping people or stealing everything that isn’t nailed down whatever.
Whoever is making the decisions about distribution and factory management is effectively a state at that point
This is objectively false. You can do all these things and not have a state. See: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-anarchy-works
You’ll need a military to keep your neighboring countries from taking all your stuff/people/land, and you’ll need some kind of police force to keep those few assholes you have internally from just kidnapping people or stealing everything that isn’t nailed down whatever
As you have pointed out here, the state will always be the enemy of progress, will stand in the way of and disrupt every attempt at creating a more equitable society (which must exist apart from a state, since a state will always trend toward fascism, without exception).
For this reason, most anarchists start practicing our ideals immediately and do not await a revolution. We try to educate people and inform them. We work imperfectly within desperately broken and inequitable systems to introduce more equity and justice.
Want to see an example of this in action? Look up the Zapatistas.
