left-wing anarchist general?

For those of you who start convulsing and frothing at the mouth whenever you hear 'left-wing', 'anti-fascism', or 'anti-capitalist', this isn't the thread for you. Are there enough anarchists (ancaps & right-liberatarians need not apply) here for this general to even make sense? Time to find out! >Anarchism is a political theory which aims to create anarchy, "the absence of a master, of a sovereign." In other words, anarchism is a political theory which aims to create a society within which individuals freely co-operate together as equals. As such anarchism opposes all forms of hierarchical control - be that control by the state or a capitalist - as harmful to the individual and their individuality as well as unnecessary. >Introductions to anarchism https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-anarchy-101 https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/index.html >Cool resources https://crimethinc.com/ https://www.notrace.how/ (i4pd4zpyhrojnyx5l3d2siauy4almteocqow4bp2lqxyocrfy6prycad.onion) >Further reading https://theanarchistlibrary.org/ (libraryqxxiqakubqv3dc2bend2koqsndbwox2johfywcatxie26bsad.onion) https://anarchistfaq.org/ We should also get a 'recommended articles' list going, I currently don't have the time to go through my bookmarks and pick out the good stuff. I don't know what to talk about, if someone read the introductions but still has questions I could try answering those. Don't expect quick replies. Astolfo stolen and lazily cropped from http://bhpblog.blog24.fc2.com/blog-entry-173.html >inb4 go to leftypol fuarrrk them tankies

OP here, forgot to add this, very important!!! https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-anarchy-works

>>96084 Anarchy was the default but we built it away. Why wouldn't it just be built away if you brought everyone back down to it again?

I'm an anarchist and I'm the oldest お婆さん lainchan has. we used to have anarcho generals on i think it was /lit/ or /r/ and it was comfy. though i think a lot of the users here are going to have ancap leanings due to the matter of crypto-anarchism and cypherpunk. >recommended articles the rough draft of Debt, the first 5000 years is extremely good and quickly gets into some of the more interesting points, like the sanctification of religious language by finance. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-debt-the-first-five-thousand-years . Graeber in general is one of the best, definitely recommend if you're looking for a nuanced and organized understanding of economics and society from an anarchist perspective. another one that's worthwhile is Emma Goldman's travelogue of the russian revolution: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-my-disillusionment-in-russia . Goldman is great in general, she has many good essays and i think it was her in addition to crimethinc that convinced me to be an anarchist, and even after i feel like i've completely outgrown crimethic i still consider Emma Goldman to be good. Unfortunately i do not have many other readings i would consider to be `good', in fact i do not read anarchist literature because it is `good'. But there is some bad anarchist theory that I find very interesting and think is actually great. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alejandro-de-acosta-its-core-is-the-negation and and his reading of Desert, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alejandro-de-acosta-green-nihilism-or-cosmic-pessimism . He is a little post-situ in the pretentious way at times, but since you seem to be a fan of bob black i think you might be able to appreciate him. There is also Voltairine De Cleyre I adore, even though her historicity leans a little too romantic (she was also alive during the romantic era), she was the one who coined anarchism without adjectives among some other interesting points. The subject of anarchism in Japan is also interesting. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/helene-bowen-raddeker-anarchism-in-japan is a brief overview, kaneko fumiko and her mentor hatsuyo niiyama are particularly interesting to me. >>96088 every anarchist you ask will have a different and hopefully interesting explanation. there's a lot of different reasons why, for instance the idea of being "brought back down to it" presumes a particular notion of historical development, namely the hobbesian claim about the state of nature as a fundamentally violent place and the social contract state naturally emerging to prevent it from happening. there's a few different refutations of this, from the romanticism of Rousseau which takes a more optimistic and virtue-oriented view on human nature to the rational anarchy of Godwin, who made a utilitarian argument about it. Although its corny, i think my favorite defense of anarchy is in the poem at the start of Anarchy Works: There are hidden stories all around us, growing in abandoned villages in the mountains or vacant lots in the city, petrifying beneath our feet in the remains of societies like nothing we’ve known, whispering to us that things could be different. But the politician you know is lying to you, the manager who hires and fires you, the landlord who evicts you, the president of the bank that owns your house, the professor who grades your papers, the cop who rolls your street, the reporter who informs you, the doctor who medicates you, the husband who beats you, the mother who spanks you, the soldier who kills for you, and the social worker who fits your past and future into a folder in a filing cabinet all ask “WHAT WOULD YOU DO WITHOUT US? It would be anarchy.” * * * * * And the daughter who runs away from home, the bus driver on the picket line, the veteran who threw back his medal but holds on to his rifle, the boy saved from suicide by the love of his friends, the maid who must bow to those who can’t even cook for themselves, the immigrant hiking across a desert to find her family on the other side, the kid on his way to prison because he burned down a shopping mall they were building over his childhood dreams, the neighbor who cleans up the syringes from the vacant lot, hoping someone will turn it into a garden, the hitchhiker on the open road, the college dropout who gave up on career and health insurance and sometimes even food so he could write revolutionary poetry for the world, maybe all of us can feel it: our bosses and tormentors are afraid of what they would do without us, and their threat is a promise — the best parts of our lives are anarchy already.

>>96088 >Why wouldn't it just be built away if you brought everyone back down to it again? I believe anarchy was built away for two reasons and I'm pulling both of them out of my ass 1 - We didn't have history, philosophy nor political theory when societies and states first began developing, so we were mostly stumbling in the dark while trying to organize larger and larger groups of people. People also can't predict what the future holds, so they couldn't have known what hierarchy and statism would lead us to. Now that a critique of such systems has been built up, resisting their return would become easier since people could understand why they should protect anarchy. 2 - Hierarchical systems like nations, empires, kingdoms, etc are established through conflict and submission of the loser. People didn't submit to rulers because they wanted to, the rulers had armies and forced subjects to submit through force and intimidation. If you look throughout history, most anarchist societies fell not because people within felt like the system didn't work and then left, but because they could not resist outside suppression well enough. However, Zapatistas/EZLN are still kicking and they declared independence in 1994. They spent 10 years preparing themselves for armed conflict before they declared independence; clearly, with enough patience and perseverance anarchist societies (yeah yeah the EZLN don't call themselves anarchist but cmon) can build up a militia capable of meaningful resistance. >>96091 Thanks, pretty much everything you recommended sounds interesting. Not much else to say, I really can't get much free time now so reading them and giving my own little list will drag out a bit (((

>>96088 ah yes, if primitive communism so great, why fail? I won't pretend I know the anarchist lore around it, but I believe that "social anarchist" (so no crimethinc) and marxist reasoning converges in that aspect and points to qualitative change in reproduction of societies paried with creation of family as an basic unit. As to why "to return" to stateless, this where they diverge a lot. I'd love for an anarchist to give concrete reasoning from "their side", but as far as my understanding goes the so-called stateless communism is different from primitive one in that it doesn't have a state apparatus itself - means of one class to subjugate another - but the other things we commonly associate with the state - decision-making, infrastructure, etc - remain. For this it isn't "bringing it back", but rather abolishing the old to give birth to a new.

>>96093 Ah ah! One last thing, this is my "statist" tradition speaking, but if you go by the dialectic, then you by definition can't make predictions how the thing you are theorising about will turn out. The movement of history happens with you in it and as an agent of it, you can't have the full picture nor influence/predict it. Plekhanov discusses this very thing at nauseam. This might explain why grandpa Karol didn't really do any predicting and only outlined the general historical direction. Also might explain why "statist" left-wing is much less immediate in it's goals.

Anarchy is de-facto rule by criminals, and rule by criminals is what is already in place over the whole earth.

>>96095 No, anarchism is just a decentralized governance. It is a bit of a contradiction in labelling though since it is a form of government.

I don't like the Bakunin-Kropotkin school of anarchism. Quite a lot of anarchist theory is just plain wrong and makes false historical claims. I guess its better than terminal tankieism. Always figured I lean socially conservative but anarchist on other issues (anti-state, anti-capital). I'd recommend J. C. Scott. Really he's more interesting than anything Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman etc. wrote.

>>96097 Why are you not elaborating with sources on who got what wrong? It isnt exactly surprising if it was someone pretty far back in the past since information likely always got distorted as it travelled and fact checking would be more difficult. Are you talking about James C. Scott?

>>96093 Presumably I can answer some of your questioning. There are many different anarchist histories of how the state and capitalism came to be, the one I most like is Graeber's overview of it. My basic rundown of what happened is that in some early cities, a form of resource management emerged through increasing social complexity that involved armed protection of the quadi-commons that kept individualized ledgers of deposits. These ledgers supplanted the previously existing system of social credit, which was more lenient of things like personal catastrophe, they also either incorporated or killed off other systems of social complexity. Eventually these forms of debt keeping took over and due to the innate contradiction between debt and entropy, there was an ever-increasing mandate to pay off debt (which could also be increased by things like interest and whatnot). This system now rules the world and perhaps imagines the rest of the universe as the same terra null it once colonized. Although I would also argue that there still isn't a singular global system, there are a few overlapping, international systems which cope with how they share the same planet in different ways. Post-left anarchism tends to see injustice as beginning with agriculture, which gave rise to social roles such as male and female. They tend to argue that the terra null that was projected onto people who were wiped out by colonization is also projected onto the earth itself, in addition to more philosophical or spiritual categories like our own sense of time and distance, and that this abstract form of domination precludes the formation of authoritarian social structures. This can happen more or less materialistically, depending on who you ask, and the question of post- vs anti-civilization for instance is also debated. But in general if you can imagine the development and critique of capitalist society, posties will say this applies to all societies because of some inherent contradiction. I think for me personally, I disagree with this premise, but also the argument that post-left and "social" or "orthodox" anarchism are really at odds. While I do think there's different tendencies, one's own perceptions tend to create those categories as well, and I think bob black kind of suc​​ked as well as bookchin. >>96095 But lain, the appeal to criminality is exactly what these people's authority rests on, and the fact is that they are terrified of anarchists, always have been, and they are terrified of anarchy. Pay attention to what every president, from the right to the left, has said. Joe Biden was explicitly condemning towards us. Donald Trump certainly was as well. Before that we were "outside agitators" and terrorists.. before that we were commies, but the soviets certainly didn't seem to like us either now did they. >>96097 Do you have any thoughts on Nozick?

I love anti-fascism and anti-capitalism, but anarchy in my personal opinion I don't like, though I just want to go to the forest and live there because I'm tired of all these people. It seems to me that I'm tired of everything in this world being just illusions. For example, right now we're sitting on the internet, and we ourselves have made up that these letters, these words, this text mean anything at all. It's just an illusion, and this applies not only to the internet but also to real life. People invent things for themselves and then live in these invented illusions their whole lives. I believe that the forest and survival are the true human life because nowadays many have decided that what's cool and good is when you're rich, everyone wants to sleep with you, and most importantly, when you can do whatever you want and not be a pushover — for example, saying everything to someone's face and so on. So even such basics have become something that only some kind of superhumans are supposed to have. Almost everyone has some idol, and this list of illusions can literally go on forever. But surviving in the forest, I consider real because food for the sake of food, which you obtained after hunting some animal, I believe will be many times more delicious. Undoubtedly, I haven't practiced such a lifestyle myself, but I still believe it's something worth striving for. Because, for example, the warmth from a campfire in the forest is not an illusion, it's reality. You didn't make something up for yourself. The food you found and cooked will, firstly, be tastier, and secondly, more real — it will be real food you obtained through your own efforts, not by sitting at a computer for 10 hours a day. (P.S. I used an AI to help translate this, so apologies if anything sounds off. Hope my ideas make sense!)

>>96110 >Never hunted, never made a camp fire But its more real!!! Or go outside and make a garden instead of spending 10 hours a day doing something you dislike ???

>>96105 >Why are you not elaborating with sources on who got what wrong? Well, its hard to know where to start because they got so many things wrong. The classic anarchists make false claims about human nature, rely on a lot of 19th century social darwinist theories which don't hold any water, and their criticisms of hierarchy are relatively unnuanced. The classic anarchists were basically extreme liberal individualists who saw capitalism and the state as hindrances to individual freedom, a desire they saw as natural an innate to all non-brainwashed people. Is individuality natural or just a social construction produced by capitalism itself? Is hierarchy always so bad? Is submission? Anarchists are like liberals. They have an atomized view of humanity and like to see social relationships as something that should be contractual, and anything that contradicts this is branded authoritarian. They seem to think people are individuals, that they want to be free etc. but this isn't clear e.g. BDSM relationships where domination and inequality are pleasurable and embraced by choice or tribal communities where hierarchy is desirable and important. Basically, anarchists assume everyone wants to be a free individual who's not limited by externally imposed rules and is free to chose their sexuality, gender, beliefs, and make their own life choices. Its not clear that that's actually desirable. Aside from this liberal philosophical anthropology are the stage theories of history which they share with Marxists. Ideas like "primitive communism" or "feudalism" are academic abstractions that probably never existed. Anarchists assume that all human societies must evolve towards bourgeois industrial capitalism and develop individual freedom, secularization, women's equality etc. and then the next step is developing a stateless society where private property and social class are abolished. This is too teleological. Lastly, anarchists are hardcore secular materialists and its questionable if that metaphysics makes any sense but it does put up barriers between people. >Are you talking about James C. Scott? Yeah. Seeing Like A State should be mandatory reading for anarchists, or really anyone interested in how state's behave. >>96106 I don't like Nozick very much. I lean conservative on social and cultural issues, not economic ones.

v>>96113 do you have any examples? there's plenty of 19th century anarchists who rejected many of these premises. for instance, the idea that we should microscopically scrutinize our own beliefs and relationships for any trace of hierarchy was rejected, even among individualist anarchists. after all anarchism was considered a workers' movement, and kropotkin explicitly rejected social darwinism, it was why he wrote mutual aid in the first place. >BDSM relationships where domination and inequality are pleasurable and embraced by choice BDSM is often quite popular among anarchists. this is because consent and conversation tend to factor strongly into BDSM play, oftentimes moreso than non-bdsm sex. what's more, the community around it is highly encouraging of this, oftentimes developing language, seminars, workshops, and parties around safer sex and consent. >tribal communities where hierarchy is desireable and important if there is such a thing as the "liberal anthropology" you attempt to lay on us it is rather exactly this, the notion of tribal society as strictly hierarchical is not only historically incorrect it is also the primary defense liberals make of the state - they will argue these hierarchies are necessary to maintain social order and to prevent murder and other breakdowns of social trust, which then justifies the development of a social contractarian state. Anarchism rejects this. >Anarchists assume that all human societies must evolve towards bourgeois industrial capitalism and develop individual freedom, secularization, women's equality etc. and then the next step is developing a stateless society where private property and social class are abolished. This is too teleological. We don't. Certain communists (marxist-leninists in particular) seem to believe that capitalist industrialization was necessary for the development of socialism, and it was for this reason that lenin's new economic plan was justified. However, this is one of the most common marxist ideas that is criticized and rejected by anarchists. what I find interesting about it is that it wasn't even an idea of Marx himself - there is a letter exchange between Karl Marx and Vera Zasulich that states exactly this. in fact Marx was in agreement with his anarchist peers, calling this progressive view of history 'supra-historical' and i think you will find that most communists who are consistent in their views would reject this historiography in favor of historical materialism. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/zasulich/reply.htm https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/ni/vol01/no04/marx.htm That being said, there were many anarchists who disagreed with both karl marx and stageism, the most immediate historical example being the Spanish civil war, the conditions for which someone you actually mentioned - Bakunin - explicitly described as occurring "without anyone's permission" in Statism and Anarchy. In fact he describes anarchist revolution as emerging in the failure of the development of a bourgeois state. >Spain seemed to be trying out all the conceivable forms of constitutional monarchy, and they all proved too constricting, ruinous, impossible. Now a conservative republic, the dominion of speculators, rich property-owners, and bankers under republican forms, is turning out to be equally impossible. A petty-bourgeois political federation of the Swiss type will rapidly prove impossible too. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mikhail-bakunin-statism-and-anarchy >Lastly, anarchists are hardcore secular materialists and its questionable if that metaphysics makes any sense but it does put up barriers between people. this is also not true, and it is especially not true of the classical anarchists you mention. While there are anarchists of many different faiths, i will focus the christian ones because they are the most historically relevant to the development of anarchism that you seem concerned with. There were many widely influential christian anarchists to such an extent that anarchism was largely criticized by Marxists for being overly utopian in this respect. Leo Tolstoy is probably the most well-known name you've heard who was this, but he was actually inspired by prominent abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison who were both christian and anarchist as well. The lineage continues further into the present as the preamble to the Industrial Workers of the World was written by a catholic, and Dorothy Day was a christian anarchist as well.

>>96111 I can't because of americans

>>96110 >It seems to me that I'm tired of everything in this world being just illusions. For example, right now we're sitting on the internet, and we ourselves have made up that these letters, these words, this text mean anything at all. It's just an illusion, and this applies not only to the internet but also to real life. People invent things for themselves and then live in these invented illusions their whole lives. Welcome to metaphysics, retard.

>>96113 >false claims about human nature You claim it is false then fail to support this. Humans are social species, that is how we evolved and built societies. This is self evident in the fact most people have a thing called empathy. Even as babies people act altruistically. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBW5vdhr_PA >19th century social darwinist theories What? I don't understand where you get this from. Social Darwinism is a term created by an economist in his support capitalism leaving people behind. Anarchists are not that unless you consider AnCaps anarchists which they are not. >their criticisms of hierarchy are relatively unnuanced Sounds like you are just lumping it all together. Anarchists are just against unnecessary hierarchy but they do not all agree on what is and is not necessary so you have a wide range of different views. > extreme liberal Liberalism is pro private property and pro state > hindrances to individual freedom Just Individualist Anarchists focus on this that much really. Any other kind it is more about how the state and capitalism holds everyone back not just individuals. > Anarchists assume that all human societies must evolve towards bourgeois industrial capitalism Anarcho Primitivists say hi. > hardcore secular materialists Supporting secularism is not same as being against belief in paranormal things.

>>96084 Ignoring all the practical problems with (especially left-wing) anarchism I don't understand why anyone would even want to work towards a world without hierarchy. What's the appeal? Just slacking off having gay sex and doing drugs all day until you eventually get stomped on by the country next door that has any form of a military or get eaten from the inside by people who just want more power or justice and decide to organize a state? Best case scenario is that your little plot of land just evolves into a right-wing anarcho-capitalist community instead before eventually collapsing all the same. You'll never get everyone to just play along but even if you could it would just be boring and unfulfilling.

>>96123 I wanna clarify here, that you don't need to be a centrist liberal to share a liberal philosophical anthropology. The classic anarchists and Marxists share several things in common with liberals, including a liberal concept of human subjectivity (possessive individualism) and liberal ethics (the individual's right to autonomous agency, to dispose of their personal property, to be free of external rules, and independent of society). Centrist liberals believe that the state and private property facilitate individual freedom, whereas the classic anarchists and Marxists disagreed on this point, seeing private property as the thing that generated inequality which limits individual freedom. Even when leftists emphasize the importance of collective responsibility, they see the collective as just a aggregate of individuals who come to work together for the common good. The actual concept of the individual goes unchallenged. I brought up BDSM because it points to a difficulty. Both liberals and classic anarchists think that inequality is bad, that submission is undesirable, that people naturally resist domination etc. I'm not saying people are just inherently slave-like, but that the concept of human personhood which anarchists share with liberals is limited. Rather than reflecting universal human wants, its simply one ideological and philosophical position and one that's probably descriptively false anyway. >the notion of tribal society as strictly hierarchical is not only historically incorrect it is also the primary defense liberals make of the state The tribal community I come from is strictly hierarchical. Progressives seem to treat 'tribal' as some pre-modern stage of history and romanticize it as a leftist society in utero (primitive communism) so we get these aimless debates over whether humans were originally egalitarian or not etc. Let's take for example many rural Chinese families, where deference to elders and seniors isn't only mandatory and socially enforced but something that's pleasurable, desirable for the person submitting. This Confucian culture is completely different from Western societies, where deferrence to parents is often seen as a sign of weakness and lack of individual freedom. Here you have an example of hierarchy and submission being experienced as a good. Now anarchists can't get away with saying no to all hierarchy, an absolutely non-hierarchical society would collapse. So instead they try to distinguish between justified and unjustified hierarchies and come up with a rational yardstick to measure which hierarchical structures are legit or not. I'm not convinced they could actually do this without excluding people. e.g. let's say a group of people describe dom/submissive sexual relationships as unjustified hierarchy or Confucian filial piety as unjustified hierarchy? When it comes to stageism, its true that anarchists and various Marxists disagree on how society's change and evolve or if its possible to skip stages etc. but they are all progressives, they see human society as evolving from a primitive state towards more developed forms (feudal, bourgeois, communist) or unlock certain features (gender equality, abolition of child labor, sexual freedom) . This theology of progress is too teleological and isn't backed up by evidence, which is why most archeologists abandoned it decades ago. >this is also not true, and it is especially not true of the classical anarchists you mention. While there are anarchists of many different faiths, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Goldman were militant atheists. I think Kropotkin was too while Rudolph Rocker wasn't as militant and had connections with Jewish anarchists. In any case, if you go to any anarchist fair or talk to a lot of anarchists, you'll find most fall into the militant atheist or militant secularist category.

>>96113 >and their criticisms of hierarchy are relatively unnuanced. Engels? Is that you? Sorry, but You nicely parallel old marxist critique of anarchists, so I couldn't help, but joke. Anyways, there is merit to calling a anarchist an liberal, since they don't adopt class outlook, but instead look for jouissance and treat it as an identity. >stageism Won't argue with that, even Marx didn't emphatise enough that his model of "stages" applied only to concrete conditions - Europe - and not the whole world. Asiatic mode of production could only be a concept made by a racist European, I am surprised the dynamic duo didn't consider it further. Hell, even Soviets rejected it. >>96140 The classic anarchists and Marxists share several things in common with liberals, including a liberal concept of human subjectivity (possessive individualism) and liberal ethics (the individual's right to autonomous agency, to dispose of their personal property, to be free of external rules, and independent of society). Big French Althusser enters the stage >China I mean, if you write that Marxist share things in common with liberals and then you bring China into equation, something is wrong. Chinese were/are still marxists, after all.

>>96138 It no unneeded hierarchy. Anything you do not personally approve of someone being over you. So it's just more pro democratic if not pro consensus but it just is a different form from the pseudo representative capitalist democracy. The YPJ in Syria did fine defending themselves and so have the Zapatistas in Chiapas Mexico and these are not even on a large scale with the resources one would have on a larger scale so appealing to military is not a good argument. I do think there needs to be some structure but anarchism is not actually against government literally just government that operates from the top down so it has this strange semantic argument going on. An assumption of dominance of capitalism eternal is nonsense because if what you need is provided to you free you arent going to pay for it. Many cultures operate on gifting cultures where financial exchanges are social exchanges instead of business.

>>96141 I'm not out to do a take down on anarchism, only point out some problems and disagreements. I'm not against anarchism per say, even if I have a bone to pick with some progressive causes. >Engels? Is that you? Sorry, but You nicely parallel old marxist critique of anarchists, so I couldn't help, but joke. Anyways, there is merit to calling a anarchist an liberal, since they don't adopt class outlook, but instead look for jouissance and treat it as an identity. The criticisms I laid out would apply to Marxists too. I'm really not in the businesses of defending the usefulness of authority in achieving socialist goals like Engels, but questioning the idea that hierarchy is something undesirable that people naturally want to push back against. Marxists pull ideas like class struggle and oppression out of their bag without thinking about their relevance. Is class oppression really a feature of all societies? Do people's primary interests lay in their class position? I doubt it. When populations don't behave the way Marxist theoreticians claim they do the Marxists resort to all kinds of gymnastics (false consciousness, ideology) to weasel their way out of it. If you want to claim that anarchists just treat anarchy as an identity, you can say the same for most Marxists too. Marxists love to arrogantly paint themselves as intellectually and historically rigorous and soykaf on their "idealist" rivals, but the irony is that their claims are rarely backed up by solid evidence or research. Marxism only really makes sense if you read nothing else besides Marxist literature, most of which serves to uphold the Marxist worldview rather than improve or fix it. In many ways, Marxists are much worse than anarchists and suffer from dangerous tunnel vision. >Althusser He might have rejected humanism, but even Althusser doesn't reject the individual. He no doubt saw the individual as the basic unit of human society, an idea he doesn't really challenge, even if he did think social structure often determined the behavior of individuals. >you write that Marxist share things in common with liberals What I mean is that anarchists, Marxists, and liberals are birds of the same feather, or rather species of the same family. They share more in common but have some core disagreements. All are committed to individual freedom but disagree on how to get there.

>>96147 >What I mean is that anarchists, Marxists, and liberals are birds of the same feather, Understandable, all of them are reaction to modernity after all >Althusser doesn't reject the individual Wann expand on this? In my reading Altie overempathises the social structure and uses "the individual" to show examples on more local level, like with famous "I know a cop is calling me specifically, because I have guilty conscience". >If you want to claim that anarchists just treat anarchy as an identity, you can say the same for most Marxists too. Hard agree here, most marxists are armchairs as opposed to anarchists, who even if tangled in identity, "do stuff". One could almost argue, that pure theory is fangless and produces asshats that think they are better than everyone else. >most of which serves to uphold the Marxist worldview rather than improve or fix it. for every 100 Cockshotts and Furrs you get one Grossman. The problem with marxism in general is how you can't develop any general theory, it's all time-and-place specific. The Cockshotts of the world often forget that and produce their neoricardian utopias. Like ffs, Lenin's theory of imperialism might even be correct, but only in aftermath of WW1, why those fuarrrkers try to 1:1 it to today? >When populations don't behave the way Marxist theoreticians claim they do the Marxists resort to all kinds of gymnastics (false consciousness, ideology) to weasel their way out of it. Funny we talk about when Altie was mentioned. I don't feel like it's a cope. Only it shows how early marxism and soviet ortodoxy was hard on economic determinism. Even then, there were some outliers, like Gramsci's. The "let's not ignore social order" shtick got better during May, I guess? >Is class oppression really a feature of all societies? As usual, I will counter by saying that it seems like a feature of all observed societies. In my reading of Marx, he really doesn't do whole "this is universally true, always" thing. Capital showcases that really hard. >Do people's primary interests lay in their class position? Might explain the gymnastics you mentioned, when folk don't do what they should. >but questioning the idea that hierarchy is something undesirable that people naturally want to push back against feel like we are rehashing "human nature" arguments. I'd personally don't say that people can "naturally" do something, because there is no "naturally" in people. I hard-reject the human nature thing. One could say I am a "marxist" in that sense.

>>96148 >I will counter by saying that it seems like a feature of all observed societies Marxian ideas about oppression are rooted in a certain idea of personhood and subjectivity, the possessive individual who's ripped off by somebody else taking more than their fair share of economic surplus. In a society where this sense of what it means to be human doesn't exist, the idea of oppression is irrelevant. Class and oppression aren't nearly as self-evident or as simple as Marxists assume. Competition and conflict might be commonplace among humans, but class identity, a sense of individual oppression, and suspicion of hierarchy aren't so clear cut. In Afghanistan, communist authorities couldn't understand why rural Pashtun peasants reacted violently to land redistribution. It was because land was seen as belonging to kinship groups and tribes, not individual land holders. While there was internal competition, these peasants didn't see their tribal leaders as oppressive feudal exploiters but members of the same in-group with other tribes and clans being their competitors. If you looked at this society through the lens of class conflict, mode of production, and oppression you wouldn't understand the actual political economy. >Althusser I haven't read him in years so I could be getting it wrong. iirc Althusser emphasized social structure over the individual, he saw the former as something that shapes individuals. However, he did still think there existed individuals and that society was made up of them, just as an object is a bunch of atoms stuck together. I don't think he denied that the goal of Marxism is maximizing individual freedom and that's a good thing. Because the word and concept 'individual' is so basic to the English language, its hard wrapping our heads around how weird a concept it is. >In my reading of Marx, he really doesn't do whole "this is universally true, always" thing This is something Marxists ignore. That other lain mentioned the Zasulich letter and he did once say that Chinese socialism would look radically different to a European one. I do think Marx was trying to construct a universal model, but he knew that his sample size was limited and cautioned others not to take it literally. Today, its pretty common for Marxists and anarchists to try and brute force a crude idea of historical materialism onto everything. So China became "semi feudal" or Iran's bazaar merchants became "petty bourgeois." They seem to look at a society and think "okay there's gotta be some feudal lords or lumpenproles here so which group can we pin these labels onto?" Instead of studying the actual social and economic relations.

arguing about theory is nice and all but how about sharing some anarchist material and discussing actual happenings related to anarchism or sharing guides? a 19th century russian nihilist got a job in a prison and used that to free his comrades. im not a nihilist myself (they are too comfortable with violence for my tastes; their assasinations and attempts of such are plentiful) but their tenacity is laudable and smart tactics like that seem useful to all stripes of anarchists. does anyone have some more stuff like that? >pdf 1 paper on nihilism >pdf 2 hacking a bank, why and how you should too >txt same author as pdf 2, hacking italian nso-wannabe >Error: You didn't make a post

>>96159 lainchan wont let me post 3 files in reply update: 2 neither flood detected flood detected flood detected flood detected flood detected flood detected flood detected flood detected flood detected

>>96159 >>96160 figured it out lainchan no loner allows txtfiles so here is link http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/phineas-fisher-hackback-a-diy-guide-i

>>96084 >Anarchism is a political theory which aims to create anarchy, "the absence of a master, of a sovereign." In other words, anarchism is a political theory which aims to create a society within which individuals freely co-operate together as equals. That's what a sane society already does. But then this sane society understands the principle of necessary hierarchies because it's natural, efficient and good for the people–you can reject history as much as you want, it won't go away–not ran by eternal angry and immature teenagers with ego or daddy issues. People aren't identical, differences and inequality are fine, so talented people should stand above the less talented ones when respect is earned and submission legitimate. I once toyed with those ideas you currently enjoy but I later found them to be utterly sterile and ridiculously out of touch with reality. The measure of the quality of anarchist value is found in the sheer absence of great works anarchists wish they had to claim for themselves. There is simply nothing except a few figures here and there making some noise while, sometimes, landing a few decent criticisms not too far from the lower mark. The poem proves my point. Let's pick one piece randomly. >the professor who grades your papers In a civilization that owes its prowess and function to skilled people, there is a need for authority, for those with wisdom and experience who can judge pupils. Want another one? >the doctor who medicates you Good doctors who use alternative healing methods are worthy of respect and necessary. Why would you reject them when they're ever so rare? >the husband who beats you Gratuitous insertion out of nowhere. >the mother who spanks you Another bunch of whiny little brats who pretend being traumatized by a spanking. >the soldier who kills for you For you? Why would that be bad if a trained and qualified man would be willing to give his life to protect your way of life and your land? Why would you mock, reject and hate such a person? Your blind and total rejection of any form of order and hierarchy is why I can't take you people seriously anymore. You're a running joke that too often paves the way to communism, because you break down structural norms that couldn't be all wrong, you sabotage orders, no matter how imperfect they may be while you often exaggerate their ills, softening them so that organized forces of communism can crush their remnants with greater ease. I'm also amused how anarchists want to be left alone in their little villages, fine, but as soon as they want tools and advantages that can only be produced by organized societies with their own top-down hierarchies, they turn a blind eye on their much cherished principles. If you're really involved in this, you would rather want to look into classical tribalism and autarky. >>96092 >People didn't submit to rulers because they wanted to, the rulers had armies and forced subjects to submit through force and intimidation. A kid. That's how you sound like, just like a kid. You can't even imagine that there are people who would willingly obey, either because they believe in the goodness of the people they submit to, or because they are themselves terrible people just happy to take the worst of orders for some money and comfort. >Zapatistas/EZLN Please. Taking on the name of a commander. I thought they were all equals? Where do you go with that army of yours if there's no hierarchy on how to organize cells and compartmentalize information to minimize losses? Even if they vote, which they could not afford to do in any real intense war, they still need a council of elders. Where do they get their assets from, starting with guns, cars and fuel? Anarchist industries maybe? >>96106 >Post-left anarchism tends to see injustice as beginning with agriculture, which gave rise to social roles such as male and female. It's called biology. Smart people follow what nature gives them so although there can be some commonality on some level, men are naturally tailored for tasks they exceed at better than women. The social roles merely aligned with this reality. Whether it went overboard with it is beyond the point because the point right now is the idiocy of the claim that male and female are social roles, which is one extra variant of them being a social construction. Again, when you are so divorced from reality, you're not just dangerous to yourselves but also to others. But if you want to live with ten people in a grotto, it's up to you, but don't come out of it and hypocritically ask to have access to modern comfort and modern tools when it's convenient to you, because the real conditions that allow for the erasure of most hierarchies also require of you that you eschew any cordedware civilizations and beyond. >Before that we were "outside agitators" and terrorists.. before that we were commies, but the soviets certainly didn't seem to like us either now did they. It's because they saw you as the useful idiots you've always been.

>>96148 >Is class oppression really a feature of all societies? It is when you want it to be. You just have to spot a hierarchy, ssee that the most clever accrue more than the less capable and immediatley begin whining about it. And when you realize that it's literally that way since the darn Bronze Age, you may have to ask if it's really not a bug more like a feature of life. Applied Marxist reading of societies shouldn't try to get too far into the past, or too far into the wilderness, because it's only remotely relevant to modern industrial societies combined with the rise of banking. But if I wanted a true and honest criticism of banking, surely it wouldn't be in Marx I'd find it.

>>96150 >Instead of studying the actual social and economic relations. This is precisely my problem. Most texts I've read do this "book-worship" thingie. Genuinely interesting analysis is far and between. I mean, I am not surprised, to get organized and to analyze that lived experience into theory is a hard task only few orgs can afford. Hence, all this crud (looking at you western maoists). >Altie Wondering how it looks like in original french. I am also quite rusty, so Your reading seems possible. >In Afghanistan, communist authorities couldn't understand why rural Pashtun peasants reacted violently to land redistribution. It was because land was seen as belonging to kinship groups and tribes, not individual land holders. [...] If you looked at this society through the lens of class conflict, mode of production, and oppression you wouldn't understand the actual political economy. Here I want to chime in and reply in saying that communist authorities coming from "outside", i.e. schooled by soviets applied wrong analysis (as you pointed out). I'd counter with the Chinese which post-long march was able to provide a correct analysis of their own situation (after purging bolshevik-schooled cadres). I also agree with, >Class and oppression aren't nearly as self-evident [...] If I remember correctly in Capital Marx argues that only with capitalism the class struggle is visible to the naked eye and only in capitalism (since it's so visible) one can apply struggle model to previous societies. I sorta think that this is an open issue, because it implies that post-capital societies will be able to see the past as some other kind of struggle (A RACE WAR :3). Hence, while class struggle ceases in so-called communism, it doesn't mean we face the end of history. The dialectic doesn't end, there is no eastern bunny, there is no tooth fairy and there is no queen of england.

>>96167 >you may have to ask if it's really not a bug more like a feature of life Anon, I... This is precisely what Capital argues for. >But if I wanted a true and honest criticism of banking, surely it wouldn't be in Marx I'd find it. Yeah, logical, since Das Kapital was written around 160 years ago. The method is historical, so it can't be applied into the future. One could point to some more modern studies like Divided World Divided Class or Unequal Exchange (I hate Monthly Review with passion though). And also those fuarrrking neo-ricardians, post-keynesians, etc. Hell, entire theory of crisis is built upon fundations of Kalecki, Grossman and Luxembourg (which, suprisingly seen a resurgence a bit, might be cause she a woman).

>>96169 >Anon, I... This is precisely what Capital argues for. Argues for? So Marx wants us to follow natural law? >>But if I wanted a true and honest criticism of banking, surely it wouldn't be in Marx I'd find it. >Yeah, logical, since Das Kapital was written around 160 years ago. >ergo traditional banking is 150 years old at most! A WILD CLAIM APPEARS

>>96182 Marx argues that there is a science to economics. or rather, scientific and philosophical reasons why hitherto existing theories of political economy were wrong (including some attributed to him, like the LTV or smithian social democracy). and he is right in that. He argued that industrial capitalism is a product of "natural" processes (there is a conversation to be had about naturalism) and that it will end because of these processes as well. He made no moral condemnation of this natural law, at least not in his magnum opus, and he believed we are fated to act in accordance with it. As we've discussed, Marx's findings were limited in scope perhaps because of his desire to be thorough. While he may have daydreamed of a universal model he was careful not to make assertions he couldn't back up and for this reason many of his important and relevant ideas remained in drafts. If you want a thorough piece of writing about the history of banking from an anarchist perspective, you should certainly read Debt: The First 5000 Years, the draft of which was posted earlier.

>>96182 >argues for yeah? Have you *read* his critiques of non-"scientific" socialism? The so-called "unjust" hierarchies are not something that was dreamt up by some bad people, but developed "naturally" (like >>96183 writes). He gives no thought whenever this is "moral" or "immoral". Hell, cases has been made that Marx was a bit of an accelerationist, who wished for "less developed" countries to accept the gift of capital sooner. >wild claim Error on my part, but I had modern central banking with fiat currency in my mind. Afaik, the central banking theory would fit nicely with the volume on the role of the state, but since he finished only one volume out of planned six, the mantle had to be taken on by someone else. As I mentioned in that post.

>>96184 note, because I forgor. German Ideology discusses the formation in relation to, duh, Ideology. Engel's On the Origin of Family, is more historical and discusses (guess) family and it's relation to production based on cutting-edge science (at least it was cutting edge then) of Morgan's Ancient Society. If you don't want to read them dirty commies, open any anthropology book.

>>96167 >the most clever accrue more than the less capable Quite true. Nobody has ever gotten more wealth/power through sheer might, or from being born to a certain position, or from doing some type of evil deed, or because it was politically useful for someone else, or from being resistant to a certain disease, or from happening to be in the right place at the right time, or from happening to not be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The *only* way to be in an advantageous position is to deserve it more. This is why the Huns were the rightful rulers of Europe. It's a shame they turned back from Rome, really.

>>96184 >case has been made that marx was a bit of an accelerationist, and wished for "less developed" countries to accept the gift of capital if this is what accelerationism means these days i am only the more glad i saved myself the embarrassment of ever identifying with it. but we're just going in circles at this point. marx did not believe in supra-historical development, the letter to zasulich explains earlier ITT. regardless, this is anarchism gen and not marx gen. >>96168 >it doesn't mean the end of history if I am familiar, the so-called social anarchist murray bookchin makes a very similar argument, precisely because he has an investment in maintaining dialectics for his theoretical project. it is possible, i feel, to understand that there will be contradictions after class, but we must be very careful with this because most don't really understand what class is. I will elaborate on my understanding as a point of information for the thread, I'm sure you have your own understanding so please argue with me if there is a part you disagree with. Class does not merely refer to income level nor does it refer to fashion and habits. These things are litmus tests of class. To leftists and anarchists alike, class refers to proximity to the means of production. but what is that? "Production" refers to the product of labor, whether that be a service or a literal product known as a commodity. In this case "means of" refers to place of work, in Marx's case the factory, but it can refer to other things I will elaborate on later. Marx believed it was the industrial proletariat - city dwellers who worked in factories - were the class most capable of revolting. this is more-or-less true in many flavors of leftism, and is why we have arguments such as third worldism, which believes the United States and First World, referring to winners of the cold war, had no revolutionary potential due to their now ancillary role in terms of commodity production and rather regions like China which have the most commodity production are the most revolutionary. I am also of the understanding that of the proletariat, the "labor aristocracy" - workers with some protections, unions, highly skilled, intelligent, labor actually had the most revolutionary potential which is why they were incentivized so strongly and paid more by the capitalists, to prevent them from organizing the proletariat and overthrowing the bourgeoisie. This is the Marxist position but Marx wasn't the only class analyst nor the least authoritarian one. Bookchin of course was a class analyst and so was Goldman, Bakunin, and I believe that Proudhon was as well. Stirner was also a class analyst who believed that the state had bourgeois character, which is an interesting argument when you consider who else typically says things like "bourgeois character". There are differences in how each of them thought about class but a rundown of the differences between anarchist and marxist class analysis is that, unlike marxists often claim, it is not the same as the differences between scientific and utopian socialism, but rather that there are specific points of difference in the precise formula. For instance, it was believed by Bakunin that rather than the most organized part of the proletariat having the most revolutionary potential, it was rather the most disenfranchised class because of how they were organized, or rather not organized. this class was known as the "lumpenproletariat" and referred to roles like drug dealers, prostitutes, criminals, other social dropouts who were not well-educated or well-connected and couldn't organize a socialist revolution. Bakunin believed they were the most revolutionary class, however, due to their non-hierarchical nature and lack of skin in the game in maintaining the property of the capitalist class. The proletariat could not, for instance, engage in industrial sabotage on a serious scale because it would destroy the society that had some benefits for them. the lumpenproles, being disenfranchised, had no such investment in this world and therefore no reason to preserve it. in general their way of life would be less affected, and their more communal nature would make them naturally more drawn to communism. Another anarchist argument that was closer to the romanticism of the utopian socialists was that the ideal means of production was not the factory as marx and engels believed, but rather the individual's own tools, and that every worker was entitled to their own, personal mean of production. IMO this is not a type of society that can exist anymore and it largely romanticizes the cottage industry, which is a system by which goods were created through individual craftsmen sending small batches of commodities between their local shops until complete products are made and sold in markets. the cottage industry was destroyed by industrialization. I do not remember what the specific name for this is but it is based on mutualism, which was the ideology of pierre-joseph proudhon who is often regarded as the first anarchist in the western tradition. like bakunin, Proudhon believed that non-hierarchy was key to effective organizing, however like Marx he believed in the revolutionary potential of the proletariat. for this reason mutualists believe that mutualism, a socialist and anarchist society based on the principle of mutual aid could be achieved through the formation of a kind of corporation: the worker's cooperative. Nowadays, many marxists incorporate some mutualist arguments as well, especially Richard D. Wolff, and there is actually a mutualist caucus in the democratic socialists of america. I believe there is also a mutualist caucus in the american libertarian party, which makes for some funny crossover. Now after the theoretical infodump of background knowledge I want to bring up another point that is not about categories of ideology and what specific thinkers believed but rather about what i believe class means in a more philosophical sense and why I think the idea that the e.g. sex war is a contradiction that will be central to future societies, rather than class, is erroneous. it is because "class" means something other than the limited context of proximity to the means of production. while it is true that there are means of production that aren't financially imbursed, what i mean is the simple fact that "class" means "category" and in terms of all of these ideas "class" simply refers to "groups of people with shared traits," which are exclusive between one another within the theoretical framework in question. to this point there are areas of feminism, known as marxist, materialist, and socialist feminism, as well as anarcha-feminism, that conceptualize women as a class with a labor relation. it was also the ideology of the black panthers and among many modern abolitionists more broadly speaking that race is a form of class with a labor relation as well. the argument can also be made, and I used to believe this as well, that these "identity categories" were in fact constructors of class - that class referred to an abstraction of one's social status which was affected by the categories of race, sex, disability, etc. each of these categories had their own master-slave-dialectic, meaning that there was a class of owners who controlled the property, or means of production, which the laboring class would work on. In patriarchy this is the Family and in modern white supremacist society this is the prison and the ghetto. I think what changed for me was an advanced understanding of the object-subject mode and that there could be other dialectical hierarchies that didn't quite correspond to master-slave.

>>96167 I don't think its that simple. It assumes hierarchies produce resentment and there's evidence to the contrary. Social differentiation is common among humans, but class as anarchists and Marxists have traditionally understood it (the result of a relationship to the mode of production) is too simplistic. Even in this narrow sense, class identity isn't always primary for many people, even if they engage in competition with other groups for resources or influence or whatever they happen to compete over. >>96184 >Hell, cases has been made that Marx was a bit of an accelerationist, who wished for "less developed" countries to accept the gift of capital sooner. Marx's work spanned decades and he changed his perspective and opinions many times. This means his work is often inconsistent, allowing people to read all sorts of things into it.

>>96190 >Marx's work spanned decades and he changed his perspective and opinions many times. This means his work is often inconsistent, allowing people to read all sorts of things into it. Ah yes, yung Marx vs old Marx thingie. >>96190 More or less, infodump is agreeable. I don't even have much to add, aside from maybe the fact that mutualists are not well "liked" in circles that maintain more marxian understanding of economics, because they do not abolish commodity-form and in that don't really do anything remotely non-capitalistic. As for your interpretation. I find it funny, that it aproaches hardcore modern maoists of the Moufawad-Paul variety. I am not poisoning the well here (I think), his book "Politics in Command" tries to tackle the exact same thing - intersection of identities - as opposed to brutal economism (which >>96197 mentions) of many leftists.

>96197 your understanding of class seems confused as it positions it as an identity in opposition to the other "groups" you mention. class is simply a form of group, for this reason the concept of social groups is not something anarchists are somehow blind to. other groups you might be referencing are spoken of at length by Bakunin for instance. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mikhail-bakunin-statism-and-anarchy >Social differentiation is common among humans Anarchists don't believe in the smothering of natural difference, we simply don't consider it appropriate grounds to base a hierarchy off of. furthermore it is a very basic point of communism that there are normal differences in skill. "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" does not mean that the strong are morally or otherwise indebted to the weak that they must give up to the state everything that makes them different, this is authoritarian propaganda. furthermore, anarchists don't simply believe in the common resentment of hierarchies, which there is certainly much evidence of, but also the inclination of strong to help the weak often as a property which we call mutual aid. there is a very serious poverty in capitalist society, wherein one is mandated to give more than they are capable. this not simply refers to the need to work for money to spend on your basic necessities. it is too obvious a point that people need resources to survive, and in any remotely complex society those resources are acquired through socialization (which you might also call exchange) with other humans. In capitalist society, there is also a very commonly felt mandate to neglect one's own needs in order to socialize at all. Anarchy, we believe, will do away with the mandate of personal scarcity by abolishing the contradiction between one's self-preservation and the maintenance of your relationships. This should be extremely simple because there is as others and perhaps also you have discussed, an interdependence people have to one another and their society even for their own sense of self and identity. It is not the abolition of self and other, but rather the question of selfishness as it is now understood. We do this not simply through collective action and/or online posturing, but also in conducting our own affairs with grace and understanding. there is subjectivity in how exactly this matters, but you can expect virtually all anarchists to hold these principles. Politically speaking, you can understand the principle in two senses: in the egoist sense, the self is permitted to all that appears to it, that the whole world will be owned by the egoist and her ego, and selfishness is so permitted that it is not seen as selfless (and therefore wrong) to share in the world either. Egoism might begin with Max Stirner, who has been briefly mentioned earlier, there is also another thread about him on lainchan. In the other sense, the social one, the individualistic hoarding of resources, particularly as enforced by state violence, is abolished completely. the question of theft is deeply persecuted as it is understood that 'property', under bourgeois law, is the regular theft of the commons, but theft of the personal as well. There are many social anarchists mentioned in this thread, such as murray bookchin, proudhon, kropotkin, and bakunin who i have also mentioned. these two tendencies - socialism and individualism - can be identified within anarchism, but frequently work together, or they seek to abolish the same contradiction in different ways. There are two anarchists that come to mind who exemplify this synthesis that often butted heads with one another: Emma Goldman and Voltairine De Cleyre. Their relationship is interesting because Goldman was a communist who at first supported the revolutionary cause in Russia until visiting it herself and, and then being one of the first communists to speak out about the authoritarianism of the bolsheviks. De Cleyre, on the other hand, was an individualist anarchist who on reflection and much debate coined the term "anarchism without adjectives". the two together are completely prescient of nearly all issues, abstractly speaking.

>For those of you who start convulsing and frothing at the mouth whenever you hear 'left-wing', 'anti-fascism', or 'anti-capitalist', this isn't the thread for you. No, this is exactly the right kind of thread for me to ridicule you trust fund kids with your luxury beliefs. And your inability to understand the importance of hierarchies based on competence or, aside of the scaling issues, that in a place with no hierarchies the next would be tyrant only needs a small level of elevation to stand above everyone else. While micro managerial dictatorships aren't desirable either it seems like a reasonable compromise of choosing competent leaders and reject the self serving ones is the only reasonable mode. Anything else is just intellectual masturbation or an attempt to justify their primitive desire to rule over other and control them as simply the extension to their environment. Living in an empire ruled by a Marcus Aurelius would always be preferable to any of these anarcho syndicalist whateverist musings. >>96204 >Anarchists don't believe in the smothering of natural difference How hierarchical of you to speak on behalf of other anarchists.

Hey OP, I like your edit. Solidarity forever. >>96208 I'm personally wondering why it is that you expect to be taken seriously in your "ridicule" which to my understanding is too long to be posted on most boards, to say nothing of the content, when your 'critique' of anarchy is to claim you aren't the most self masturbatory personv and then point fingers at random figures of speech and screech hierarchy. Do you care remotely how you come across, or are you simply unaware of it?

>>96208 >While micro managerial dictatorships aren't desirable either it seems like a reasonable compromise of choosing competent leaders and reject the self serving ones is the only reasonable mode. The only way anarchism as a secular political ideology makes any sense is to say: yes, we need leaders, but we do not need rulers and we especially do not need owners. The conclusion of disdain for nation-states, racism, and capitalism remains the same when this basic principle is applied, but the vision of what society should look like makes a lot more sense. It is true that many people fail to make the distinction between leadership and rulership, or between government and state, or between class distinction (e.g. doctors are different from nurses) and class hierarchies (e.g. doctors are superior to nurses). You are very correct in assessing such people as stupid people that know nothing about the world.

>>96209 >no u That's what your entire post can be boiled down to. So instead of getting mad at me, ask yourself why you're getting mad at someone telling how it is? >destroys social cohesion and destabilizes nation UwU >yaaas we did it sisters! we destroyed fascism and ushered in the utopia! >some Stalin type mofo takes over, shows what real fascism is and clears out the weirdos >ACK Why does this keep happening? And when will you folx learn?

>>96212 who r u quoting? character limit your mistake was thinking this was a debate. I wanted a cheap source of reaction and you provided. but it seems you've proved some of my assumptions correct, so thank you :)

behold, the mighty leftist intellectuals: >>96216 >n-n-no UR mad >>96084 >For those of you who start convulsing and frothing at the mouth whenever you hear 'left-wing', 'anti-fascism', or 'anti-capitalist', this isn't the thread for you. >If you disagree with me, don't post here, I don't wanna talk. >>96211 lets discuss what we think the closest thing to USEFUL anarchism that works might be: option 1 (the uncle ted special): time-travel back to neolithic times without agriculture + any sort of technology, it is very difficult to enforce an artificial hierarchy note: a natural hierarchy will still emerge, but it will at least be biological in nature and trivial to destroy if necessary option 2 (hobbits with guns): agriculture heavy society with no urbanization (microindustry only, technologically static), mandatory firearm ownership, no armed forces, full democracy at local level, elected leader-for-life acts as the federal govt. pros: you can shoot the guy if he's a dickhead. you can mobilize as a nation if necessary. cons: ???

>>96204 I want to see class, not as an identity, but has a historically specific way of organizing human societies. The mistake anarchists make is pulling from a lot of vulgar Marxist and scientific socialist theories, which turn class into a universal category that can be applied to all societies that are not so called primitive communist. I'm not sure that the Marxist idea of class is as important in explaining human affairs as many people think it is. The problem I have with anarchist isn't that they want to smother human difference (in a sense they do) but that most brands of anarchism are weighed down by 19th century social science, post-Enlightenment political and moral philosophy, and scientific materialism. I don't want an anarchism that's obsessed with eradicating unjust hierarchies because to me the claim that hierarchies are inherently bad is hard to substantiate. Anarchist analysis is built on theories that are too general and sweeping and aims that not everybody wants. If anarchism fails to escape this way of thinking, then it can't really challenge the state and capitalist system. I'm not anti-anarchist but would like to see anarchism move in different directions, away from Bakunin, Marx, Kropotkin etc. Maybe anarchism could be seen as a general attitude or spirit of rejection of state and capital which can come in different forms. So not a political tribe like the tankies or an ideology. >>96211 The distinction between ruler and leader seems semantic. I agree with Marx that the state is a modern invention, and medieval kingdoms or Japanese daimyos were a very different ball game. So anarchists shouldn't say "we're against rulers and owners" but that they are against the nation-state and its dependencies.

>>96222 >So anarchists shouldn't say "we're against rulers and owners" but that they are against the nation-state and its dependencies. To make sure I understand. Anarchists here against state apparatus which is to be considered separate from things one usually thinks about when saying "a country" like nationalised railways, infrastructure, etc.

>>96222 >The distinction between ruler and leader seems semantic I consider it a pretty core difference. They derive authority from different places. A leader has to build trust with their followers, and can only maintain their position by maintaining consent from at least a majority of their followers. Leaders arise naturally all the time in life, for instance most families have a leader, be it the mother or father, and foremen are another example of people that are typically leaders and not rulers. Some people naturally take on leadership in certain situations because they are most comfortable making decisions in that situation. Rulers, on the other hand, derive their authority from either some legal doctrine (e.g. they hold a certain title by law) or by intimidation. A ruler does not need the respect of their subjects to make them do things, they just need some way to compel them. Rulers also show up all the time in everyday life, they're the worst people you know, CEO's, and politicians. >>96218 The "hobbits with guns" scenario sounds fun, although it is a bit paranoid. I am never very concerned with finding some kind of self-regulating steady state, I would prefer to go with whatever is the most sensible possibility is at the time and see where it goes. I imagine people actually living in an anarchist society would have a very different view of what the problems with their society are and how it should proceed than we do.

>>96224 >I am never very concerned with finding some kind of self-regulating steady state I'm surprised. To me the main issues in anarchism are: >How do we get there? >How do we STAY there? Both of which depend on having a goal in mind. My fear is that 99.99% of outcomes when a state falls are not sustainable anarchism. Even if you achieve temporary anarchism, technological progress will lead to the accumulation of power will lead to the emergence of a state, and probably a worse one than whatever preceeded it. I fear that if you give someone the opportunity to accumulate power, they will do it, and the happy anarchist land will come to an end. Hence my two ideas: #1: No tech (agriculture + long term food storage can't exist) = power nearly impossible to accumulate. #2: Just enough tech to keep the big guy on his toes. I'd love to hear other ideas for a sustainable, achievable anarchist society. #1 can come from nuclear war + rotten gene pool making us all peabrains. #2 can come from a slow collapse of a centralized govt + mass arming of civilian population.

>>96225 > My fear is that 99.99% of outcomes when a state falls are not sustainable anarchism. On what time scale though? If it fails in a few weeks or even a few years yeah, that's a failure, but I think if it works for more than one generation that's a success. Planning society that far in the future is just impossible.

>>96224 The type of sovereignty that is characteristic of capitalist modernity and its mechanisms (the nation state, rule of law, human rights) should be opposed. I don't think we disagree there. The tricky part is does this mean we should oppose all forms of sovereignty? I'm not sure about that. On a side note, a flaw of actually existing anarchist and communist attempts was that they didn't challenge these mechanisms but tried to run them without a king or a president. So anarchist Catalonia tried to get rid of the state but kept its mechanisms of social control, surveillance, and discipline. I figure this is the real reason that anarchist type entities fail and revert back to the state. Its because they can't actually move past it. >>96225 The main issue isn't "how do we get there?" but "what do we actually want?" A state simply won't evolve with technological innovation or with greater scale. A state is really central to the mindset that capitalism produces, the desire for development, large scale industry, a consumer society etc. so people born in this environment or see it as desirable can't imagine a word without the state. They are unable to think outside of the box. Unless anarchists challenge the values that justify the state (something they've largely failed to do), then people will always want to go back. Every modern revolution, from Russia to Iran, has led to people wanting to go back to what they see as a vanilla political system because the revolutionaries told them they could meet the dream of industrial development, abolition of human suffering, consumer plenty etc but couldn't do that as well as Western style democracy. As long as development, abolishment of scarcity etc are values people hold, anarchists won't succeed. They can only move forward if they have a complete alternative to that worldview.

>>96227 >A state is really central to the mindset that capitalism produces You are stuck in a foolish frame of reference. A state government isn't inherently a "capitalist" concept but instead capitalism is the box that marxists try to shove everything into that they don't like, like having to get up in the morning to go to work. While self reliance is good, what is the extreme extent of it but a lone hunter gatherer with little more than sticks and stones (or the inability to repair any tech they've got)? So even from stone age we had to rely on tribes (small self reliant organizations of people) and division of labor. And then the more organized those tribes were and the more they leveraged individual specialization through DoL, the larger that tribe could become and the more they would tend to kick everyone else's asses. Until they had to face someone who was larger and even better organized. The resulting hierarchies from people organizing in this structured manner are thus inevitable. Maybe you could avoid the introduction of a formal institution that would function as a government apparatus but you can hardly change the general shape of civilization. Including not having civilization at all since you would get steam rolled by anyone with a more competent structure and with more ambition, which would make the reformation of civilization inevitable unless we ran out of people or natural resources entirely. While I'm eager to hear the possible solutions for what you've described, I don't think there is or will be any. Because what you seem to be asking is going beyond just reinventing the wheel here but trying to change the human species and game theory as a whole. And we've tried that already historically. Nations under communist leadership or occupation have culled significant portions of their population. And instead of shaping mankind by artificial selective pressure, they were just left without anyone competent and only the dregs. Thus it's hardly gonna happen outside of some very small communes (not bigger than Burning Man) of like minded people. The best possible solution I have found so far is to promote a healthy ego and a sense of responsibility, ambition and character in people, especially men. So that enough of them are eager to climb the ladder, drown out the psychopaths and their sycophants from high positions. This is how you increase the chances to get more Aureliuses and less Neros. But this would require us to figure out how to deal with the envy of competence and individual merit which I know especially marxists can't let go of. >>96218 It's funny that Uncle Ted is one of the few anarchist types who isn't just some sheltered Disney adult or posh champagne socialist who have little understanding about live outside their cushy bubble or are otherwise just spiritually void teenagers who don't know what to do with the little mental capacity that they have. But he had to have some glowie glitterboy trying to mk ultra sissy hypno him in order to get him off the path of an aspiring mathematics prodigy who most certainly would have been a contented element of the machine which instead ruined his life and prospects. He also had some interesting things to say about socialist intellectuals. Option 1 is as I've described not going to be possible. Option 2 sounds like the Amish on crack. >>96226 >I think if it works for more than one generation that's a success The Roman Empire lasted for about 500 years. If you count the Byzantine Empire it was over a millennium. Anything that can barely go on for more than a single generation is akin to Nietzsche's "last man". >>96225 It's not even about tech. It's social mechanisms that you can't really remove. I'm yet to hear from an anarchist how they will prevent some strong man from internally taking over their flat hierarchy commune. They always think they're gonna be the next Trotsky, forgetting that there's always gonna be the next Stalin. And no, the "if only we removed some people" route has been tried and failed. And without even a plausible hypothesis on what could actually work in practice you're just not being serious, nor to be taken seriously.

>>96244 >I'm yet to hear from an anarchist how they will prevent some strong man from internally taking over their flat hierarchy commune. It's literally the goal not something anarchy seeks to avoid. It's rule by gangs, by those with power & numbers. Or by those who are willing to take things further and be assertive. Some people even say stuff like "gangs are there for the community", they want gangs to be their society. A "flat hierarchy commune" is just a gang.

>>96244 >The Roman Empire lasted for about 500 years. If you count the Byzantine Empire it was over a millennium. It was hardly stable during that time. Almost every time an emperor died there was a succession crisis, territory was gained and lost constantly, there was a civil war that lasted the better part of a century, it split apart multiple times, and it later became a christian theocracy after oppressing the Christians for hundreds of years. The Byzantines fared little better. Trying to game out how you think a society will go long-term is a complete waste of time. The future is too unpredictable. The best you can do is set up something that has a chance of lasting if enough people are diligent, and raise your kids to be diligent. >how do you prevent someone taking over The answer is the same under anarchy as any other system: you try to stop them before hey become too powerful. It's really not an inevitability that someone with any amount of advantage will use that advantage to dominate others. That is a very simplified model of the evolution of nations, and simplified models are usually wrong.

https://lainchan.org/sec/res/27133.html This thread should be interesting as context to the conversation. While the discussion centers around snitching inside of the frame of a governmental system; how could you tell the nature of humans to snitch would be prevented in anarchism ? The point is that, the collective of humans does not consist of 100% decent and honest people. So, you cant even make out the error you expose yourself to under anarchism. Tell me how this is prevented? What damage do you take as acceptable.

>>96244 >A state government isn't inherently a "capitalist" concept but instead capitalism is the box that marxists try to shove everything into that they don't like People often conflate 'state' with any kind of government or rulership however the modern nation-state is one specific form of government with specific tools and institutions of social control which condition and shape behavior in ways that are very different from other forms of government that preceded it. The call to abolish or reduce the power of the state, isn't a call for abolishing rulers or leaders. We might disagree over how and why the nation-state emerged, but large scale industrial capitalism could not exist without it. The pair are joined at the hip. It should be clear from my other posts ITT that I'm very anti-Marxist. I don't think hierarchies should be abolished nor am I an individualist who believes in maximum self-reliance. I also didn't describe any solutions at all. The point is that anarchists are not entirely clear about their goals. The social evolutionist framework that you seem to be pushing is ironically very Marxist i.e. humans evolve from hunter gatherers to states with industrial capitalism etc. Theories not substantiated by solid evidence but assumptions loaded into political theory, hand me downs of the Victorian age. >what you seem to be asking is going beyond just reinventing the wheel here but trying to change the human species and game theory as a whole. And we've tried that already historically. Nations under communist leadership or occupation have culled significant portions of their population. I find it strange that you find the transformation of human society's impossible and undesirable when you also claim that humans transformed from hunter gatherer to tribes to states etc. Human society's are always undergoing change and if living without a state or capitalism was so incompatible with human nature, then why did there exist human societies that lacked these features? Why are there humans who to this day live as hunter gathers, nomads, hill tribes or others outside of or on the fringes of capitalist modernity? Enlightenment political theories (liberalism, Marxism, anarchism) always claimed to be rooted in an understanding of human nature, but their claims about human nature were the product of speculation by philosophers and armchair theorists and not based on solid research. Its no surprise that their claims about human nature end up being wrong.

>>96253 > if living without a state or capitalism was so incompatible with human nature, then why did there exist human societies that lacked these features? What is the fruit of those societies? What is the quality of life inside them? How do the power structure stay stable? How do they prevent other populations to make them like them? Have this social structure evolved when contact with a better structure has been made? Here is a part of human nature: if there is something that you have but don't desire and a thing that you don't have but you desire, you want to trade the two things. Boom, capitalism is back. >>96251 If you use civil wars as a sign of failure (and you would be right), then you should dislike anarchism. Span, Ukraine, every single time they get people killing each other to extend their political structure and to seize their stuff. I have noticed a subtle difference with theoretical anarchism. >>96246 I remember at the start of the CHAZ thing when they tried to make it anarchist. It took one day for a thug to invent rules and to enforce them with his henchmen.

>>96251 >The answer is the same under anarchy as any other system: you try to stop them before hey become too powerful. The nature of force becomes it's own condition that must be considered. Fundamentally, the biggest issue with Anarchism is that it cannot reconcile the concept that in an unstructured society, structure naturally arises by the very nature of human interaction. Politics is the very interpersonal connection that people form. There is also a distinction between anti-capitalist (which is often sensible, as both capitalism and communism equally support the concept of money as an objective and a collective measure of value which can easily remove humanity and humanism from the equation by creating too much of a transactional structure that people must exist in spite of), anti-government (which is the ideology of revolutionaries, but inevitably results in those same ideologists, whether in success or failure, perpetuating the systems and structures already in place), and anti-structuralist, which is akin to an individuality. Through the nature of interpersonal relationships, society is formed on the backbone of shared work and a division of labor. If one wanted to truly exist independent of the system, only then does anarchism become feasible. A twofold system of interaction is often necessary at a minimum. One of hard power (i.e. weapons and defenses) and soft power (opportunities for collaboration and exchange). Morals and values are not universal, and that's part of the problem with anarchist systems. That does not mean that self-organization with optional participation, which I suppose is what is most commonly understood to be anarchy, still has merit in a number of situations. Also 99.999% of the posters in this thread have been tainted by the concept of money and as a result view most interaction as transactional, although there are collaborative and collective cultures who's concept of community survival existed without money or barter, in fact barter is more a consequence of money, and economics is virtually pseudoscience because it's more about correlation and not inherently causation. >>96253 With communism, the fewer people there are, the more the wealth can be spread.

>>96244 >Option 1 is as I've described not going to be possible I pointed out later on, the only way option 1 happens is if we both: 1) burn out all easy resources 2) destroy our gene pool and become literal retards incapable of planning or large-scale organization >It's not even about tech I still think tech is a critical component at the very, very basic level. In micro-societies on the edge of survival (think inuits), you literally cannot tolerate a wasteful organization. If a dickhead strongman is a less-efficient solution to survival, he won't last. Someone will just apply rock to brain while he sleeps. Also hard to prevent the rock-brain collision when your social group/power structure is very small. >>96253 >I find it strange that you find the transformation of human society's impossible and undesirable when you also claim that humans transformed from hunter gatherer to tribes to states etc. Human society's are always undergoing change and if living without a state or capitalism was so incompatible with human nature, then why did there exist human societies that lacked these features? not anon, but i can try to argue this one. hunter gatherer is the default survival grouping pre-state once the state exists, all the hunter gatherers "lose", and get killed/integrated forcefully/sent to the fringes of junktopia as token artifacts i'd argue the transition from HG -> state is facilitated by tech allowing for resources accumulation and this is a one-way road, b/c you cannot un-technology yourself without giving everyone lobotomies > but what if we all gave up our tech the one asshole that didnt becomes king, hurray. also, tribes > 100-200 are functionally a state imo. but this is not important for the discussion. really to me the issue is more that tech facilitates the accumulation of power, which is the issue. whether that power manifests in an "industrial capitalist thing" or a "marxist thing" or a "state" doesn't really matter. anarchists that allow for the accumulation of power are imo in the same boat as the rest.

The tl;dr: I have 0 respect for anarchist who are dead serious about actually forcing their silly ideas on populations of scale. Their arguments are genuinely stupid and they are too detached from reality or too drugged out to understand this. Now having poisoned the well: >>96251 >The best you can do is set up something that has a chance of lasting if enough people are diligent Exactly! If you weren't willfully ignorant you might even see my point. We are talking about a continental pre-medieval empire, that there would be some occasional tumult during its half a millennium reign is not something that's surprising. I even mentioned Nero who was genuinely insane and watched Rome burn down while having wine so it's not like I was idealizing it. But instead that we can take an example from when it did work well and try to figure out how to have more of that. Meanwhile it's a miracle if a somewhat sizable anarchist experiment lasts more than two weeks. And not even one that's greater than maybe a skirmish province in comparison. I've seen how insane the bickering and bike-shedding becomes even on campus communist meeting. The closest that I can think of were the Mongols but that was a nomadic nation ruled by a war lord and its men being ketogenic chad steppe warriors on horseback and archery which was akin to a super weapon back then. They were immensely brutal, we're talking literal hills of skulls. The Russian Federation basically exists in that shape and size because everyone else got so fed up with them that almost an entire continent decided to join forces and become one combined nation to fend them off. >The answer is the same under anarchy as any other system: you try to stop them before hey become too powerful. You have not read much about how Stalin got to power, did you? He was basically considered a loyal doofus by the Bolshevik intelligencia, tasked with either their dirty work or doing some menial pencil pushing while the big brains were busy doing the important work of doing socialist theory. But he managed to collect enough favors and play inner party politics so well that once his party support reached critical mass then you were either with him or against him. It was the classical sudden power grab move. And likewise any other successful nation wide socialist revolution ends up with the same internal high stakes struggle that makes House of Cards look like absolute child's play in comparison. So if you think you will be the leader of any revolutionary take over then you better prepare your last words already for when it inevitably disposes of its old guard when the strongman types inevitable come to power. The only such putsch that I can think of from the top of my head where the revolutionaries remained in power was with the NSDAP but that was due to them already being their own strongman. They still ended up having a night of the long daggers anyway, just for good measure. >>96253 >The social evolutionist framework that you seem to be pushing is ironically very Marxist i.e. Not a higelian and you clearly misunderstood what I was saying. It's indisputable that a group that is just a bunch of lazy hippies is going to get absolutely obliterated by a tribe that decides to go full Spartan. And after a while the region is dominated by these types of highly structured tribes until a larger better organized population forms. This has little to do with biological evolution and more with what scale requires from a population to function and not be conquered. Frankly, how can you even dispute that? >I find it strange that you find the transformation of human society's impossible and undesirable when you also claim that humans transformed from hunter gatherer to tribes to states etc. Humans didn't really change much since they've become agrarian and remained quite similar in physiology. You could probably teleport a Babylonian child from 5000 years ago into 2026 and they would grow up the same iPad addicted, broccoli haired mess as everyone else. It's the scale of a society that plays a role. Doesn't mean that people can be just molded like a blank slate putty but that the game theory works differently. You can have a true communist commune with a small tribe or village of maybe 50 people. But if you have hundreds of thousands or even 10s of millions, do you even understand what that would need? Do you even comprehend the scale? A nation state or government structure becomes inevitable. Even if you don't want to form one, someone else always will. The only hope you then have at that point is that there's more good people who see it as their duty to become leaders vs bad people who want to manipulate and backstab their way up to become rulers. Thus the only question that truly matters is how do we promote the good ones and reject the bad ones? >Why are there humans who to this day live as hunter gathers, nomads, hill tribes or others outside of or on the fringes of capitalist modernity? Just to give you some perspective, if we wanted to eradicate those people then it wouldn't even be worth their time if you asked any western military force. A 2 hour mission tops, likely not even boots on the ground. We have drone striked middle-eastern weddings larger than those "societies" you mentioned. If anything, we try to actively preserve at least some of those tribes for anthropoligic reasons and also curiosity. We only know about them because of how much of an oddity they are now, that's how insignificant the people "living a non-capitalist lifestyle" truly are. And if everyone was using the same hunting practices that they do, we'd deplete all wildlife maybe in just a single month. Honestly I don't even know how to continue any further discussion with you if you're truly serious with that argument. >The call to abolish or reduce the power of the state, isn't a call for abolishing rulers or leaders So you're just some night watchman government type of guy? Sic semper tyrannis then I suppose. Either way you'd be well off to read up a bit on anthropology and ancient history. >>96246 It's funny. I was thinking of bringing up the inevitable roaming gangs of men who go around killing the lone wolves, taking loot and sex slaves as a most likely threat to a small anarchic commune. But yes, of course the anarchists want to be those gangs themselves, the war lords, the red terror. But if a Fallout scenario were to happen, they still wouldn't last long once someone decided to go full Caesars Legion on them. In that situation you either see that you recreate some sort of large hierarchical governance structure or be squashed by someone else who gets to it first since nobody likes a bunch of hedonic bandits around. Just look at what happened to those MS13 guys recently. And most certainly those anarcho types are the type of malignant people that you ideally prevent from getting any power whatsoever. >>96255 >99.999% of the posters in this thread >61 replies at the time of writing Well, I see why you don't like money that much. Me neither but for completely different reasons. >>96256 Didn't say tech doesn't play a significant role to solidify or even project power but that you don't even need it as a psychopath who just climbs the ladder from within the structure, one sucker at a time. >whether that power manifests in an "industrial capitalist thing" or a "marxist thing" or a "state" doesn't really matter Yes, from a certain scale onward it's essentially always the same pyramid shaped social structure. No matter what legal title you give it or how they internally manage resources, the anatomy of a large organization of people is always the same. And it's not a flat anarchy. >>96254 Oh man, I remember having followed that live as events unfolded. What an absolute mess. I believe it was also called CHOP first before some random black dude went in and started playing real life FarCry boss, handing out kalashnikovs from the back of his beamer. Some people died, more were raped and many more had their stuff stolen from their tents. A true summer of love.

>>96254 >If you use civil wars as a sign of failure (and you would be right), then you should dislike anarchism. You're right that industrial anarchism (broadly, Marx-influenced anarchism) has mostly cropped up during periods of civil war. Probably because that is the only time that states in Europe were weak enough for people to think of anarchist armies as a political entity that controlled land. >>96256 >once the state exists, all the hunter gatherers "lose", and get killed/integrated forcefully/sent to the fringes of junktopia as token artifacts Well, is there no way to go past states? The process you're talking about took millenia, btw. >>96260 >I even mentioned Nero who was genuinely insane and watched Rome burn down while having wine so it's not like I was idealizing it. Nero being a megalomaniac that intentionally burned Rome down was an idea popularized by the English. Fires were very frequent in ancient Rome, they had little ability to stop a big one. >The Russian Federation basically exists in that shape and size because everyone else got so fed up with them that almost an entire continent decided to join forces and become one combined nation to fend them off. >that there would be some occasional tumult during its half a millennium reign is not something that's surprising. My point is, Rome could hardly be called a consistent government. Tumult was almost its default existence. Like most long-lasting states, the Roman Empire was really more like an idea than a governing structure. Each successive ruler, even several rulers at the same time long after people generally consider the western Empire "over", claimed to be carrying on the legacy of this idea, because it harkens back to the glory days and lends them legitimacy. The idea itself can only evolve over historical time scales, and eventually the evolution of the idea can force a revolution of the governance (the enlightenment period and the rise of nationalism are examples of this). Rulers that make no effort to do this and rule purely with force, such as the Mongols, can only produce extremely ephemeral empires that fall quickly. Basically, there's a state in your head, and if a ruler can convince you that they are implementing that state, you perceive them as legitimate, even if the political reality is very different. The only way to make anarchism a realistic political stance is to say, we should replace the state in our heads with an anarchist society. We should not consider *any* rulership as legitimate, even if the political reality at a given time is that we are ruled. This is also why I think one generation of success of an anarchist form of governance is enough to be considered success. That's enough for an entire generation of people to grow up with the idea in their heads that anarchist governance is the the legitimate governance. >Meanwhile it's a miracle if a somewhat sizable anarchist experiment lasts more than two weeks Yes, probably the worst thing about anarchism is anarchists. You might notice I never called myself one of them; I have been trying in this thread to show a way that anarchism can make sense. This is a stance that would get me laughed out of most anarchist meetings.

>>96261 Oh my goodness I forgot to write a sentence. Anyway, I consider the Russian Empire (or Federation, whichever you prefer) to be another example of a state that has undergone some pretty extreme tumult but remained roughly the same state.

>>96261 >Nero being a megalomaniac that intentionally burned Rome down was an idea popularized by the English. Not him, but every old roman text I've read paints a similar picture of Nero: - hedonist - not nice - liked killing people for funny - brutally murdered because he was such an asshole IIRC whether or not he ordered the fire started seems to be 50/50, but the roman writer's I've read generally agreed he was not dissatisfied by it, and his men probably helped to spread it once it was burning. sources: - tacitus - seutonius - plutarch (fragmentary) >>96261 > The process you're talking about took millenia, btw. I'd argue that developing the tech to make the process possible took millennia. Once the tech was in place, the process spread fast as hell. Note that I consider the nomad -> semi-sedentary agricultural tribe transition to be sufficient to represent non-state -> state. > Well, is there no way to go past states? If by state, you mean "the natural tendency towards centralization of power among humans, and the establishment of structures that reinforce this tendency" as I do, then I say the answer is no. Not without a radical re-imagining of what it means to be human, and that isn't necessarily desirable. I think the preferable solution is to design states where the allocation of power is intrinsically fragile, hard to defend, and well within the whim of the people to control. This would (ideally) minimize abuse while still deriving the game-theoretic benefits of a state.

>Rulers that make no effort to do this and rule purely with force, such as the Mongols, can only produce extremely ephemeral empires that fall quickly. Define "quickly" since the Mongols still went on to dominate the region for a couple hundred years. And they were my closest example for a significant nomadic and "anarchic" civilization, even though they weren't really an anarchy but a large and hierarchical war tribe. Can you point at any historical examples of an anarchic society of even just a fraction of the size and duration they lasted? >This is also why I think one generation of success of an anarchist form of governance is enough to be considered success. We clearly do not share the same priorities. You seem to just want your intellectual musings to be validated. I am instead interested in maintaining stability for many generations to come. While also being aware that social hierarchical structures always form one way or another in sizable populations. Also this whole mental gymnastics of a standing national army just being something in "people's heads". Even in its weakened days of past glory, the Roman Empire would still be able to project enough power onto some autonomous commune. People have local leaders, those answer to broader regional leaders who in turn answer to the emperor. These structures may be circumstantially arbitrary but not without purpose and meaning. And that purpose is to mop the floor with any potential threat and the ability to do so is very real and tangible. And if that ability ceases so does the legitimacy of the ruler. And that's the moment, after a brief period of instability, until someone else takes over and assumes the same position. If you and your buddies can just think that the state is nothing but a social construct and is thus invalid, some other guy can just get his buddies together and decide to enforce his supreme rule. And other people will join them because nobody wants to be a loser. Instead people want to be part of a structure that keeps them safe while kicking everyone else's asses. Anything else is just wishful pontification.

>>96264 >Define "quickly" since the Mongols still went on to dominate the region for a couple hundred years. the empire fragmented almost immediately after Genghis's death, and after 3 generations the various successor states had little to do with each other. >And they were my closest example for a significant nomadic and "anarchic" civilization They were that before they conquered Asia. >You seem to just want your intellectual musings to be validated. I want people to be free and not suffer for it. I can't help being an intellectual either way. >I am instead interested in maintaining stability for many generations to come. How's that working out for you? >Also this whole mental gymnastics of a standing national army just being something in "people's heads". The standing national army changes along with governance, and people won't join an army they view as illegitimate. The Roman state was how they derived that legitimacy. You are correct that conquered subjects never view their conquerors as legitimate but are ruled anyway. >If you and your buddies can just think that the state is nothing but a social construct and is thus invalid, some other guy can just get his buddies together and decide to enforce his supreme rule. And other people will join them because nobody wants to be a loser. Prove that this is inevitable.

>>96265 >the empire fragmented almost immediately after Genghis's death But his political structure lived for centuries. Take the golden horde in Ukraine for instance. >The standing national army changes along with governance, and people won't join an army they view as illegitimate. The people who are in the army don't, and yes, you will always have people willing to join. Look at how popular the PMC are. Fast money, the thrill of being the strongmen and the dream of sacking something always motivate a good number of people. I find that armies made of people who want to defend their motherland is preferable. You use the exemple of Rome, they had many auxilia. >Prove that this is inevitable. Not him but whoever have the best capacity to apply violence get to decide what the rules are. This is why it's important for states and nations to always keep a good capacity to apply violence, otherwise criminals, warlords, jihadis or whatever take the country.

>>96254 When people bring up quality of life, they forget that there's no objective standard for that and their opinions are usually based on their own cultural and social background. The widespread view that hunter gatherers or nomads are living an awful impoverished existence is contradicted by actual studies of these groups. You also seem to conflate capitalism and trade and assume that the former evolves out of the latter. The idea that humans are insatiable, desiring subjects isn't natural either, as studies of foragers and nomads have illustrated, but was born of Protestant theology and liberal philosophy in the 18th century, which are now hegemonic in developed societies. >>96256 This Marxian view that hunter gatherers are primitive humans and then we socially evolve into tribes and states and that this is enabled by accumulation of surplus resources etc. isn't substantiated by evidence. Human society does not evolve according to defined stages with the more advanced humans seeking to kill off the lesser ones. That's an obsolete paradigm with no supporting evidence for it. Like I said, what we call the state is a modern invention and Marx himself understood this. >>96260 I'm not convinced that the nation-state is necessary simply because of scale. Its only in the last two centuries that the modern nation-state became globally dominant. The fact that the nation state concept historically specific before being globalized suggests that its not inevitable, otherwise other civilizations would have invented them without external influences. The vast majority of the human population lived under governments that were not nation-states and some had no centralized government at all. Your point that the nation-state is necessary for defense is again an unverified assumption and the claim that hill tribes etc could be eradicated easily is laughable considering the widespread failure of nation-states to actually eradicate them. The US and NATO were defeated in the tribal hinterlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan (the largest tribal society in existence), and that was the most powerful alliance of nations on Earth. And before you wheel out the nuclear excuse, the use of such weapons would completely destroy any nation-state too. Nobody ITT was calling for anarcho primitivism. By pointing out that humans have organized themselves in a variety of different ways, the claim of any ideology (liberal, fascist, anarchist etc) that it is based on an objective understanding of human nature, that it is simply the logical way humans will live etc is proven false. You can insist that your preferred flavor of ideology is in tune with human nature but you can't actually provide evidence for that besides "duh of course it does" appeals to common sense and that's not a substitute for actual research.

>>96265 >How's that working out for you? Well, in fact. I personally was able to specialize on computer stuffs instead of having to spend my time plowing some field in the cold or having to go into battle with some neighboring tribe or be eaten by wild animals and so on. Culturally I believe it also speaks for itself as my country actually matters on the world stage. It's mostly comfy though we could use a new set of leaders as the current crop has gotten a bit too decadent. >the empire fragmented almost immediately after Genghis's death And? Are you saying that the Mongols didn't maintain multiple hundred years of dominance? Besides I mentioned them to support YOUR argument but even they had a strict warlord based top-down hierarchy. >Prove that this is inevitable. By virtually all of history? Basically any group of men will develop an internal pecking order and at least implicitly elect a leader. Especially in a survival situation. And if that group can operate as a single, cohesive, common narrow goal oriented unit and yours doesn't then, assuming equal numbers, you can't compete nor defend yourself against that. If they want what you have then you won't be able to do much against that. This is why whenever a state government disintegrates for whatever reason then roaming gangs of bandits and raiders become the norm. And if you find yourself in that situation then you better figure out how to join the biggest strongest and best organized and situated group around so that you minimize your chances of getting looted, raped and murdered (not necessarily in that order). You need to have had your mind be sheltered and marinaded in years of abstract lofty theory in order to not acknowledge that reality. >>96280 You again misunderstand. I wasn't saying that a large enough population will magically have a western style parliament pop into existence but that there's going to be plenty of individuals and groups eager to consolidate power or take over more territory. Regions then unite either by being conquered or as a measure against being conquered. And since even tribes have a pyramid like power structure, when groups, tribes, regions and kingdoms etc. merge then that structure really only changes in size, not in shape, with a tiny number of people either being declared or claiming the prime authority over that structure. It's not even a quality judgement but simply that it seems that a power vacuum is always going to be filled. I'm really not sure what your supposed "proof" against that is since every single kingdom, empire and nation operated this way for all of recorded history. And anything that wasn't that it was just a large region of warring tribes like Africa or pre-colonial North America. And of course technically nothing is absolutely inevitable but if something happens in an overwhelming amount of cases then there must be some substantial obstacle which prevents the opposite. And the example with that 20 year Middle-East war? I believe it's clear that it was dragged out on purpose, but that's a different topic. >>96263 Good clarification but isn't it funny that even if I bring up an example of what I think is a bad instance of my argued position, these people still have to apply their alternative history hat and go akshually Nero was the good guy... But what's your thought on this idea that since psychopaths and megalomaniacs will always strive to power, if instead there were more men with a good set of ethics and principles who saw it simply as their duty to lead, do you think they could keep those negative elements at bay and that there would be enough push back against all these passive aggressive, self serving, back stabbing politics games that are done simply for power's sake? I also imagine any transition period being more smooth since it wouldn't matter that much who becomes the next ruler as long as they're aligned with everyone else on what matters? That's at least the only way that I see the inevitable becoming tolerable.

>>96280 >When people bring up quality of life, they forget that there's no objective standard for that I am sorry to have to inform you that you are full of soykaf. Every single group of people have the same pyramid of need. Name one culture that value starving as a positive thing. Hunter gathered lived harsh and violent life, and guess what they did when they had the opportunity to modernize? They choose not to be hunter gatherer anymore. >and assume that the former evolves out of the latter So does Karl. If you can trade something you have for something you have, that mean propriety exist, thins have a commercial value and raising the value of what you own without producing exist. If that thing I have is my labor and that thing I want is what I can use to buy thing, boom, capitalism. It's one step before lending and interest rates. >Its only in the last two centuries that the modern nation-state became globally dominant. More than 3. And now that war become a possibility again, everybody remember why we use to restrict profit for the sake of the idea of a nation. > The vast majority of the human population lived under governments that were not nation-states and some had no centralized government at all. What was the fruits of those forms of governments?

>>96138 People who like or want anarchy do so for the same reason someone likes/wants communism (and there is in fact overlap, and I'm sure many of the people in this thread think would choose both of these as their top two beings of a society), and that is they want to wipe the board clean in the hopes that they will be at the top when the dust settles. They know that anarchy will not functionally exist for very long before order is created, and in a communist society these people never imagine themselves as being dedicated laborers doing menial, but necessary work. Truth is that what we have now, as soykafty as it is, is better than both of these options. They will come up with all kinds of insane rationalizations to deny this, but it's the truth. Our current society is inferior to a more traditionalist one, however, but we aren't going back to that within this millenium. The truth is that people who tend to favor things like monarchy usually do not have this fantasy where they envision themselves as the monarch or some sort of high caste. They simply wish to live in a world that exalts virtue, and having things ordered according to higher principles. A place where the peasant exists because that is his place genetically/spiritually but where the higher caste praises and loves the peasant, and where the peasant praises and loves the noble. What we have now is an entire society of people who were born to be peasants going to college and being made to LARP as if they are intellectual. It's not hard to get an idea of where a person belongs. A person who plays Runescape and WoW all day clicking the same thing over and over is trying to act out their spiritual and biological inclination to till the soil, which is a noble thing. Feeding your people is an admirable vocation.

No thanks, I'm an individualist and not a bugman.

>>96302 >They know that anarchy will not functionally exist for very long before order is created, and in a communist society these people never imagine themselves as being dedicated laborers doing menial, but necessary work. This might be the problem with anarchists/communists that are purely online. I mean, the commies/anarchos I know do their job from within union position (or are part of some union that is explicitly anarchist). I.e. the part that gets-soykaf-done(TM) wants to stay at their shop, but thinks beyond that shop. The commies/anarchos not connected to any union-type soykaf (so random orgs like, uhhh, Federation of Anarchists Doing Thing Anarchisticly) seem like the type that this post is describing. So, thinking that all-leftist-are-like-that seems ironically like ascribing Your values to them. >Blud und soil spiel Nice.

>>96307 Forgot to add. Commies are tad different thing, although it varies by denomination. I can only speak from seeing how ordinary MLs handle that. They will place focus on party-adjecent unions and try to create cells of those unions in their workplace. If said party has no connection with trade unions, then it's purely armchair and not worth bothering with. At least this is a model I see in Germoney. Also, >The truth is that people who tend to favor things like monarchy usually do not have this fantasy where they envision themselves as the monarch or some sort of high caste. This bit runs parallel to what I said. You create Ideal Traditionalist that does stuff and is content with his position in the world, while denoucing Left as not doing that. Just as easily I counter by describing Actual Leftie that does stuff and wants to stay at his shop, while denoucing right terminally-online-bits as not doing that. In essence, we would both strawman the other position if I started bitching about muh-cookservatives-who-see-themselves-as-superior-to-unelightened-sheeple-and-work-out-to-protect-the-x-race.

>>96183 >Marx argues that there is a science to economics. or rather, scientific and philosophical reasons why hitherto existing theories of political economy were wrong (including some attributed to him, like the LTV or smithian social democracy). and he is right in that. That's like saying water is wet. That's a low hanging fruit. >He argued that industrial capitalism is a product of "natural" processes (there is a conversation to be had about naturalism) and that it will end because of these processes as well. Not only this remains vague, but it's also incorrect because Marx wasn't willing to recognize how humans operate, what the natural rules truly are, so his own grand economical escathological theory is nothing natural. It's totally alien to it. >As we've discussed, Marx's findings were limited in scope perhaps because of his desire to be thorough. What did he really find that had not been discovered by his peers and other men before him? At best Marx' work consisted of corralling all of these ideas as a basis for his theory. In other words, he borrowed earlier observations and criticisms, bundled them up as his own discovery, and purported to provide the one great solution. >If you want a thorough piece of writing about the history of banking from an anarchist perspective, you should certainly read Debt: The First 5000 Years, the draft of which was posted earlier. I am only interested in hard data about debt and the criticism thereof from a strictly wealth related perspective. I do not wish to be sold crass attempts at calling for the ruinous obsession of tearing down the complexity of great societies because some people feel overwhelmed by them.

>>96184 >yeah? Have you *read* his critiques of non-"scientific" socialism? I don't think you understand what natural law means. As for Marx, he feigned not getting it. >He gives no thought whenever this is "moral" or "immoral". This is being disingenuous, he passes off his judgement without necessarily using those words and he does not establish his prognosis of the future in the coldest of way. He had at some point the obligation to state if it were good or not to warrant a critique and then his proposal of a solution that would come about naturally (supposedly), otherwise we would have to believe that he would have been observing the existence of a systemic exploitation, which he would have nevertheless refrained from declaring as unfair, unjust, alienating and hurtful to the workers (see dead labor), and that would be certainly false. Marx's strength was his capacity or his desire to gather all former critiques into one single model which his theoretical future would brass against. One could argue that he hijacked the legitimate resentment or warnings against the economic injustice to peddle his absurd predictions.

>>96186 I derided the typical leftist position that always applies a marxist reading to any type of hierarchy by default, even when hierarchies and subordination are legitimate. That wrongdoings happen is not my argument at all and I was not establishing a rule about how wealth is always gotten, but how leftists react to hierarchies of power and wealth. It's always based on resentment and short sightedness. I will also expand on your post and say that sheer might is the definition of being capable. In this case not in working but in fighting for example. Being born to a certain position is not a crime either, but leftists often seethe about it and it's ridiculous. The Huns got where they got because they were powerful, ruthless and numerous and only the cumulative application of opposite forces on multiple fronts put an end to this (and the odd folding back on Khan's death). Theories of economics hold no candle against sheer might and resolute armies that are ready to trample your lands.

>>96190 >Proudhon believed that non-hierarchy was key to effective organizing So organizing does not entail hierarchy? Have you seen any efficient organization that operates without a hierarchy and achieves great plans? That sounds like a load of sh!t.

>>96199 >Ah yes, yung Marx vs old Marx thingie. Are you annoyed because it could be a real critique or Marx's flip flopping positions or did you simply acknowledge that without any scorn? >Anarchists don't believe in the smothering of natural difference, we simply don't consider it appropriate grounds to base a hierarchy off of. Which is stupid. You cannot pretend creating a perfect society that entirely lives in the abstract and denies natural difference. >furthermore it is a very basic point of communism that there are normal differences in skill. "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" does not mean that the strong are morally or otherwise indebted to the weak that they must give up to the state everything that makes them different, this is authoritarian propaganda. On the contrary, it is a honest and logical understanding of the maxim. Communism is hell for those who are better, for those who want to achieve more and have more, because rewards are important and this is how we are wired. Communism is just an excuse for the lazy and incompetent to do nothing exceptional and pull down those who could and should surpass them. It's an organized system of hidden envy and dishonest repressed resentment. >there is a very serious poverty in capitalist society, wherein one is mandated to give more than they are capable. this not simply refers to the need to work for money to spend on your basic necessities. No need to go commie to realize that capitalism is destructive. >Anarchy, we believe, will do away with the mandate of personal scarcity by abolishing the contradiction between one's self-preservation and the maintenance of your relationships. >This should be extremely simple Hence the rest of the paragraph that comes off as a word salad. Get that nose off from your books and get real, even the way you communicate is abstract to the fullest. >that the whole world will be owned by the egoist and her ego Oh, I have seen those specimen over the years across internet, making a point to use the feminine pronoun as a statement instead of the masculine one. Flash news, you're already obsolete. Your leftists friends are now using they instead. >In the other sense, the social one, the individualistic hoarding of resources, particularly as enforced by state violence, is abolished completely. the question of theft is deeply persecuted as it is understood that 'property', under bourgeois law, is the regular theft of the commons, but theft of the personal as well. Or it is not, as we could say that the commons didn't exist as nothing belonged to every one. And so the forced imposition of commons on resources is a theft of a necessary private property. Why do you need to make things complicated after all as all societies have understood for ages the concept of property, starting with families owning some acre of land? The control you would have over anything would be precarious and totally artificial as it could be taken away from you at any time, under any circumstance, for the lamest excuse even. This is just obfuscation about the inner resentment I spoke of, which is confirmed by the fact that anarchists and militant leftists often are dimwits trying to sound smart but belonging to a group of total under-achievers who can't even be honest with themselves enough to simply fly into the woods for good and live their life outside society and its hierarchies and organized economy, in your unending hatred of authority. It must be tiring being you.

>>96211 >The only way anarchism as a secular political ideology makes any sense is to say: yes, we need leaders, but we do not need rulers and we especially do not need owners. It may make sense to you but this is where it also ends, at the shell of your cranium as the absolute inescapable boundary of this silly system. Owning is essential. It was essential to families and the simplest model for all, it was simple to the tribesmen too. Moving further up, virtually all the greatest achievements of civilizations are but the fruit and desires – not even critical needs – of owners who ruled over great sums of wealth. This is why your anarchist fever dream is one of losers, of under-achievers, of midwits who won't be able to create anything that surpasses the mere need to lie on the curb and beg for money while pissing in a bottle while sharing flees with their dirty dogs, only capable at most to promise an eternal housing in drab pigeon cells called community apartments.

>>96225 You're just stuck on a masturbating machine. All you're wanting is a nuke fest that takes us all back to neolithic party times. >>96227 >I figure this is the real reason that anarchist type entities fail and revert back to the state. Its because they can't actually move past it. Or maybe because they are just dysfunctional? There are types of works and economic activities that need networks and authorities. Otherwise you're just cutting everything into confetti and hoping that it magically combines into a just as functional society. You just keep evading the question of what do you really want and what form it should take. From there we will see what can be done and assess if some ideas are feasible or just plain demented. >>96244 >While I'm eager to hear the possible solutions for what you've described It's assuming that a solution is even needed. What if the perceived problem was all made up? >Option 2 sounds like the Amish on crack. Who makes the guns? Some local gunsmith? You better hope your foe doesn't have an entire high tier industry dedicated to making guns. >The Roman Empire lasted for about 500 years. Resting on laurels. Inertia. Bloated. Condemned to inflate until it could only deflate. The United States run on a similar model, minus the prestige and the historical legacy.

>>96253 >The point is that anarchists are not entirely clear about their goals. That's precisely why they can keep going on with their childish silliness. As soon as they're pressed into a corner to articulate their ideology and their plans, they either snap or vanish. They try their best to avoid having to live up to their chaotic beliefs.

>>96222 >I want to see class, not as an identity, but has a historically specific way of organizing human societies. Look into castes. This at least has proved workable a long time ago. When it's properly ordered you won't feel the need to walk out of yours and every body will have a fair chance. >>96224 >rulers bad What an absolute delight that you never had a chance to influence any society prior to your birth. If this is what reading tons of lifeless leftist works amounts to, then I have never been more happy to skip on so many "recommended" books. That, because you have arbitrarily decided that rulers cannot be legitimate so you had to shoehorn some kind of lexical acrobatics into your position. Or maybe you are two thousand years late and would prefer the German or Celtic way of life of old, with leaders kept in check and limited in their power? But there would be nothing anarchist about that.

That thread is getting long but there doesn't seem to be anything of substance being posted, in that it has typically turned into a long and boring name-dropping festival of people who thought highly of themselves and believed to have properly diagnosed the ills of all modern societies, often curtailing their analysis to a mere and crude materialistic approach. So this thread goes on, filled with multiple reading suggestions that are yet to provide a good problem-solution template, which is just an excuse to cast a fog all around the fact that anarchy is just an excuse to go on a pointless rampage while paving the way to tyrannies.

>>96084 I hate leftwing anarchism because it's anti-individualistic Every ideology (including capitalism) that doesn't support individualism is counterrevolutionary and needs to be done away with and destroyed

If you don't have time to read this dumpster of a thread, or really any of these types of threads, here's a summary: >what if we could make society better by getting rid of <thing>? I don't have a coherent plan or even really a clear idea of what <thing> is, but wouldn't that be neat? >heh, but have you considered that <thing> is an intrinsic feature of the human condition? You're literally a dangerous, stupid animal if you even question <thing>!

Here's a hopefully productive anarchist contribution that lainchan should like: A demonstrator's guide to operational security. https://crimethinc.com/2025/08/28/a-demonstrators-guide-to-operational-security-fighting-back-staying-free One cool resource from it is the threat library, you should understand why it is useful. >>96322 Well do you have any better recommendations then?

>>96330 >Well do you have any better recommendations then? Repeal the 19th

>>96330 If we happen to become a anarcho-whatever place and it fit all of your wet dreams, how would you react if I was protesting like that, throwing bricks, beating everybody who got in my way? Would you use the presumption of innocence to clear me of all charge just because we all had masks so you can't be sure if it was me who tried to stab you or somebody else? I assume that you would not, you would the maximum level of violence that make your ideal society stay in place and you would use it on everybody that was part of the group. So, you see, your anarcho something isn't anarchist, it's authoritarian and you are using the virtues of others against them while denying the reciprocity. You are just a power hungry dude, a violent one and whichever society we live on, you are a liability. And you hide behind the mask of words. Anarchy is based on voluntary interaction. There can not be such thing than, for instance universal healthcare and that example is from Proudhon. If it's mandatory, not only the machine will feed itself with it but the people will see it as an adversary and cheating it will be seen as justice. If your goal wasn't to force other people to do what you have decided they should do, you would be living in a commune and nobody would have a problem with that.

>>96327 >you really should read those books about the issues of <thing> written by Gus Crappan, DeRubbleski and K. Pedoretz!

>>96315 >Are you annoyed because it could be a real critique or Marx's flip flopping positions or did you simply acknowledge that without any scorn? The epistemiological break between young hegelian Marx and older, more economic and materialist Marx was discussed to death, so we can't possibly bring anything new to that. Since the reply-tree was referencing Althusser, I though that exact post >Marx's work spanned decades and he changed his perspective and opinions many times. This means his work is often inconsistent, allowing people to read all sorts of things into it. was just jokingly referencing For Marx!, because I refuse to believe someone thought this is something that needs stating.

Does anybody else ITT still pay attention to Kurdistan? I've been reading about the ongoing situation and I can't say I've been optimistic about it. >SDF forces defecting to baathist remnant >new (liberal) syrian government waging war on DAANES / rojava after promising to work with them >unable to maintain order, raqqa and deir ez-zor handed over to the new government >remaining SDF forces also integrated into the new government I also wanted to ask if the person from ftp://distro was still here. It seems mail orders for zines are on hiatus and there hasn't been a blog update in years. If you see this, I hope you're well. >>96335 This is a lot to assume out of my post that entirely consisted of posting a useful link about opsec and threat modeling. I was merely trying to be helpful to the discussion and you accuse me of authoritarianism for sharing useful knowledge. Would you rather I not do that and instead bicker unproductively like a moid would? Very well. Your argument is equivalent to me saying >Wouldn't you, a Democrat be mad if Republicans started destroying public property / businesses when your party was in power? And I cannot answer that question, because I am not a Democrat, and I do not believe in party politics. Anarchism is not a political regime in the same way communism, liberalism, or fascism might be. There may be anarchists who believe in establishing a utopia, but I am not one. I have no illusions that anarchy is a utopia, I simply believe it is better than the conditions provided by the state, I also do not believe in anarchy as a stage to be implemented via revolution but rather something that exists in particular places in our current society that generally seems to be unambiguously good, but typically under-supported in terms of labor. You are I presume a conservative so you should be able to understand why state intervention is bad, why free expression should not be suppressed, and so on. If you think that sharing anti-surveillance resources is bad, and should be chided because somebody might use them for leftist insurrection then you are a hypocrite. You are also a fan of proudhon so I can imagine you understand the value of mutual aid and the kind of volunteer work I believe in too. I will say this: if you believe your society must be fought to be maintained then you are fundamentally pessimistic about the society in question. If you truly believed in the natural and universal emergence of an eternal state then you shouldn't feel a need to debate anarchism on online message boards. If you don't believe in these things then we have more in common than you think.

>>96375 >Does anybody else ITT still pay attention to Kurdistan? yup and seeing the HTS push them away saddens me greatly. I don't trust Jolani and his minions and they already proved they couldn't be trusted when they did mass civilian killings of the Alawites I know the syrian Kurdistan wasn't perfect, and I am far from saying it was heaven on earth, but at least they were trying. I think what angers me the most in this entire thing is how Turkey is supporting (with intel, money, arms, strikes) the HTS with absolutely no international condemnation. And lastly, I must say that perhaps relying too much on the US, which is definitely something the SDF is guilty of, made them powerless as soon as the US abandoned them - which they ALWAYS do. Now we've seen the SDF beg Israel for help which really really doesn't help their credibility anyway I'm no expert or anything, it's just some personal thoughts

>>96320 It looks like they did snap and vanish.

>>96340 This is becoming an amusing thread

>>96430 No probs, I can expand on this epistemiological break if you wanna. Long story short, earliest Marx's publications like Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 were made public in '30ish. Before that, only thing marxists had was mature Marx of Capital and more autistic writings. Then early humanist Marx was discovered. And we have a large body of work to autistically discuss this, for some (especially humanists) there is a continuity between yung marx and ol marx, for others (orthodoxy) there is a break. Hence you have epic soykafpost-fling of Lukacs which reinterpretes ol' marx from hegelian standpoint (that of yung marx really) and long line of academics like Marcuse who do ivory castle soykaf. Hell, less academic types see that yung marx as something Marx himself criticizes in his critique of german idealism (hence his first "mature" work is considered either Poverty of Philosophy or The German Ideology) and do not attach much importance, to his early works precisely, because it's normative as opposed to structural. They refuse that there are shards of mature marx in yung marx (telelology soykaf).

>>96273 >But his political structure lived for centuries. He didn't create that political structure, it is the traditional structure of Mongolian tribes that they adapted into what you might loosely call a state. >Not him but whoever have the best capacity to apply violence get to decide what the rules are. That's just not true, though. That isn't even true with (social) animals. People need to be convinced that the situation is tolerable, that they are being given some role (however lowly) that meets their basic needs, or they will take far more effort to control long term than the rewards that are gotten for controlling them. "The strong can do whatever they want with no regard" is the ideology that got Germany utterly obliterated. It has gotten emperors and kings deposed. It doesnt work, it never has. >>96316 I can call you a big dumb smelly poopoohead too. How do you like that?

>>96438 >I can call you a big dumb smelly poopoohead too. How do you like that? He didn't call you names but he substantiated his position. Address his claim please.

>>96456 Not either person but they did use ad hominem and they did not substantiate their position. It would be pointless to engage more than they did as the post is a gish gallop, several sentences in a row are blatantly false and seemingly lack reading comprehension. Not to mention how many other posts ITT consist, in their entirety, of unwarrentedly hostile personal attacks on anarchist strawmen.

>>96438 >I can call you a big dumb smelly poopoohead too. How do you like that? I said your silly system ends at the limit of your skull, which is just another way to say that it doesn't exist outside of your head, because it's totally abstract and fails against the hard truth of reality. The reality of ownership and the reality that all peoples and tribes have always protected their own belongins and identity by being safely xenophobic towards strangers, because land and people go together and not all nations want to live in a melting pot which barely holds by a wishful and forced application of the most identity erasing common denominator. I come from and live in Asia most of the time and I hate the idea of my people disappearing because some anarchists are offended by shades of racism. If that highly offends you, don't talk about politics. I understand that it is much easier to run away by hiding behind convenient excuses.

>>96308 >>96307 I am from the US, where none of what you've said applies, but I don't doubt that it does there. Europeans in general have a more realistic view of the world. Americans are largely detached from reality and don't frame reality in any sort of coherent way. You are almost never going to meet someone with communist, or even socialist opinions in blue-collar work. Unions are made up of people that are staunchly neo-conservative. All of the communists in this country work in make-work do nothing jobs like HR, and dogwalking. America is not really a serious nation, but that's another topic entirely I guess.

>>96092 >I believe anarchy was built away for two reasons and I'm pulling both of them out of my ass Historically, we see state-societies form wherever large-scale irrigation agriculture develops. Basically, states, as we understand them today, started out as palaces or temples that served critical functions in the societies that built them. Such functions generally included storing and measuring agricultural surplus that served as a buffer against bad harvests; and the coordination of off-season labor towards collectively beneficial projects, like maintaining/building irrigation infrastructure or organizing military campaigns for collective defense or to secure resources at the expense of other groups. These organizations typified civilizations like Sumer, Mycenaean Greece, the Ancient Indus, Pharaonic Egypt, the Inca Empire, pre-Colombian Mexico, ETC. While it is true that many if not all of these states often parasitized the societies that built them, the fact that they all collapsed & were reconstituted at some point (multiple times in Mexico) demonstrates the real advantage that state institutions could provide for civilizations that developed them. Ultimately, I think the historical example of early state-societies demonstrate that some institution of external and even internal coercion is necessary to support large-scale economic cooperation. I think biologically people just don't care as much about those outside the [100-200] people our brain tends to register as "familial" and there's just too much incentive to free-ride for personal or in-group benefit in a large organization. The goal of any system of government should be instituting the absolute minimum amount of coercive force to ensure large-group cooperation while also implementing as many safeguards as possible against an extractive state or nobility, as they will be the ones with the greatest ability to free-ride and are no less incentivized than anyone else to do so. I support Liberal ideals because I believe all persons are morally equal and I think Liberal principles are the best method to maximize a society's surplus. However, I could be wrong about the second point.

>>96473 I don't know how it works in US, true. It is possible that Germoney is not in Europe, because I am describing situation in Thuringia and "the party" I am describing is made of 60% blue-collar workers, and from that 40% are active in union work in the Industry (automobile mostly). >Unions are made up of people that are staunchly neo-conservative. Are you a pole?

This thread has become tremendous, in my opinion too big, there is so much to slog through just to follow the few points which have been made and discard the bickering & name-calling. I just want to say this; the only anarchist community in history which has ever been viable as far as I know have been the Cataluñan areas before the Spanish Civil War. Practically speaking, it seems anarchism is possible only in small-scale communities. Social-cohesion is a must. Present day, I think perhaps the few surviving tribal groups in the Amazon.

>>96473 It's not serious because hard working people are not communists? I find it a sign of a nation with good potential. The issue in America is the idea of regulations. They've been told to hate it, and it's been pushed by Milton Friedman and so on, people with an agenda. You do need regulations to protect people from the exploitive and predatory nature of some companies and their tendencies to inject their rules into the law of the land, starting with false studies, lobbying and ignoring warning signals.

>>96630 Not him, but I'm blue collar and I would say it's unserious because american unions approach labor battles believing they should lose. They are capitalist at heart and believe in the dominance of the bosses they claim to oppose. This mentality extends to a lot of areas where americans have very intense and convoluted political views but ultimately don't believe they should have a say in how anything is run. It's essentially WWE, but with the trappings of olympic wrestling. People investing a lot of time and effort without taking on the core beliefs that would make any of that time and effort matter. I would go far as arguing that for most americans politics really just consist of a series of rituals that are completely disconnected from any lever of power. People march in the street, vote or volunteer because it is a ritual associated with a stance. It says outwardly "I support whatever. I am the change" with no thought as to whether anything material is affected. "nothing ever happens" is the sincere prayer of the american people

>>96630 The people making the regulations are the same exploitative and predatory companies. The rich have captured the world, politics is WWE. Trump participated in a WWE wrestling match as a reference to how fake it all is, and even hired a former WWE CEO as the secretary of education. Politics & the media presentation of governance has all been as fake as wrestling for a long time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_fOYW-GXdc

>>96642 Spot on. I hope that now that the Epstein files have been released and it has been proven that all politicians and rich elites are amoral people that only care about themselves, more people stop coping with using sports-politics as a part of their identity. "I'm an anarchist" "I'm a capitalist" "I'm a nationalist". Nope, you're just another loser at the bottom of the food chain and no one cares about any of your opinions on any subject because you don't hold any bargaining power in the real world, stop having fantasies about your ideal utopia when you don't even have control of your own life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6z10SExCc0

>>96630 Even if regulatory agencies weren't corrupt & often in bed with industries they sought to govern; you can't deny that a group of bureaucrats being able to simply create new legislation because a law passed 60 years ago said they could "regulate" such and such policy is a pretty undemocratic system.

>>96643 Epstein files were pretty interesting but I think something critical is missing from the public discourse. I think these files were released in part as a warning to those who have been redacted out of the files. My point is, most of the rich elites might not be in control of their own lives as well.

>>96651 other possibilities that have been said are: It is either a trade off for something worse to us, better to them (kinda like what you said) OR some force/person(s) are aiding truth

>>96643 fuarrrk you, just because I'm not a wealthy pedophile doesn't mean I can't think for myself.

>>96651 From some of the stuff in the most recent files it looks like we are already in a state of internal civil conflict. A lot seems to depend on if the opposition to the pedos can stay alive long enough to do anything

>>96663 You don't seem to understand. Pedos in power are not an anomaly but a feature. I'm suspecting that influential people are influential because they actually diddled kids or engaged in so much depraved soykaf that any public spotlight on their crimes would instantly erase their existence. Hence they can be easily blackmailed by a smaller subset of rich elites.

>>96664 No, I honestly think it's becoming a problem that people are going back to pet theories and speculation while ignoring what is actually already in the files

>>96665 Okay then, explain why high profile techbros like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel are in the files even though there is nothing definitively implicating them but someone who sent a torture video to Epstein has been redacted out. They are being very selective naming names and it's only natural to be suspicious of that.

>>96664 You are right with the powerpedos being only pawns some other entity is using as disposable shields. Tho i think its worse than you think, i havent kept up much so i dont know specifics, but i recall people mentioning that the military is involved and the whole child smuggling ring is only the tip of the surface to cover up massive human trafficking operation for whatever reason. Knowing the capabilities of the cia and other organizations to cover up and manipulate public opinion, it only stands to reason that something much more neferious is going on. I think the whole epstein files leak is on purpose to distract and cause drama while they clean up their tracks. I understand the scope and scale of this thing is so massive there is no way this could have not been sanctioned by some higher force.

>>96666 This is what i'm talking about. We're still going through the files to find out what is actually in there. I could speculate why they redacted x but y but what would be the point when we haven't processed the information that isn't speculation?

>>96651 What warning? No one in the files suffered for it, even epstein faked their death and got away free. If something does happen it'll be fake and staged just like epstein's fake death. These people are deep in blackmail & cults & blood oaths, they already know they are completely owned human resources. >>96656 Epstein files is them bragging about how much they can get away with and how much power they have.

There should be a different thread for epstein discussion. >>>/r/48330

>>96438 Ha, yes, you need to give bread and circus or your power will be questioned, but only the side that is the most capable to apply violence have the opportunity and means to do so. >"The strong can do whatever they want with no regard" is the ideology that got Germany utterly obliterated By what? By words or by a better capacity to apply violence?

>>96095 Name a single president/king in the world that isn't a pedo, thief or murderer, even if Anarchy was full of criminals it wouldn't reach close to the amount of crimes committed by the elites.

how riveting. coinciding with the topic diversion the user base here went from mostly retards with the "muh human nature (but i'm not going to define what it is)" falseflag to almost entirely retards thanks to "le evil pedo" falseflag all i'm going to say with the lesser of these topics, i feel very disillusioned with anarchism right now, especially with the prevelance of boring left politics in it. it feels like a more pissy marxism than its own realized ideology considering its (pre)history, especially with the emphasis on collectivity and other redundant social "rights" movements conjoined with it too anyways, i'll post a pdf of a great collection of writings from a pessimistic individualist kindred spirit in some half-assed way of adding something new to the topic >>96244 ted didn't call himself an anarchist. so he's better than the vast majority of anarchists just through that

can't send files for some reason so here's the link instead https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/laurence-labadie-anarcho-pessimism entertaining for how you can see and read his slow loss of faith in humanity and civilization

>>96764 >By what? By words or by a better capacity to apply violence? By their utter blindness to the necessities of maintaining power. You need the stick *and* the carrot. Their enemies weren't better at applying violence. They weren't more brutal, they had worse technology, they were less focused and less organized. But the nazis believed that they were powerful enough to simply ignore statecraft and diplomacy, they thought all they needed to do was win wars and kill their political/racial opposition and nobody could stop them. basically, they thought they could be like the Mongols, except unlike the Mongols they didn't offer people a reason to surrender. I believe even if Operation Barbarossa had been a success, the German Empire would have collapsed within ten years. Dunces as big as that don't hold on to power for very long, they just get a lot of people killed.

>>96807 >>Their enemies weren't better at applying violence >meanwhile, the american industrial complex at peak production with zero pressure from bombings/supply chain issues/etc. pumping arms at mach 10 inb4 buh-buh-buh they could have diplomacy'd washington maybe, sure, but the ultimate deciding factor was violence, plain and simple. if america had been an agrarian nation with zero industry, thing would've ended differently. diplomacy is just a means for allocating violence, capacity for violence is still the deciding factory.

>>96820 >buh-buh-buh they could have diplomacy'd washington That's literally my entire point. Although getting the Americans involved was more of a Japanese blunder than a German one. The germans just needed rubber lol. >diplomacy is just a means for allocating violence, capacity for violence is still the deciding factor "guns don't kill people, bullets kill people" type of argument.

>>96821 the US was already fighting, and I'm not just meaning giving and selling large quantities of war material to the british/soviets/chinese/et cetera but directly shooting at germans before pearl harbour. Roosevelt wanted to get into that war so hard it didn't matter what the japanese or germans did. Maybe if they played an absolutely perfect game they could have avoided any credible causus belli and kept the US' involvement half hearted.

>>96438 >"The strong can do whatever they want with no regard" is the ideology that got Germany utterly obliterated. It has gotten emperors and kings deposed. It doesnt work, it never has. Machiavelli would agree but the USSR stood for a long time, soykafty, corrupt, unfair, abusive, and nobody could do a thing about it because it was just too much of a mass to move and replace. Also Germany got axed (hahahahaha) by brute force. The same brute force that forced Japan to open its borders to commerce and later to accept defeat conditions without arguing.

>>96640 >People march in the street, vote or volunteer because it is a ritual associated with a stance. It says outwardly "I support whatever. I am the change" with no thought as to whether anything material is affected. "nothing ever happens" is the sincere prayer of the american people Virtue signaling and posturing is an addictive cultural mindset in itself. Immature societies love to do it a lot to fill the vacuum left once the fundamental truths went away. It's all show by that time and very superficial.

>>96823 >the US was already fighting, and I'm not just meaning giving and selling large quantities of war material to the british/soviets/chinese/et cetera but directly shooting at germans before pearl harbour. Source? >>96826 >the USSR stood for a long time, soykafty, corrupt, unfair, abusive, and nobody could do a thing about it The USSR didn't stand *only* because of violence, though. In fact internally, neither did the Nazi party. Both had massive propaganda and secret police wings of the government. The difference is that the USSR was very measured in how they approached diplomacy, they made as many friends as they could, and because they knew they couldn't really compete with the US military they avoided direct conflict. That's why the USSR lasted for 70 years instead of 10. >Also Germany got axed (hahahahaha) by brute force. The same brute force that forced Japan to open its borders to commerce and later to accept defeat conditions without arguing. Yes, there was indeed a war that was fought. But there's a side of fighting wars that a lot of people miss: what aim are you going to accomplish through war that you cannot accomplish through some other means? How can you minimize the number of people you're fighting? When you win, how will you hold the territory you've conquered? You cannot simply hold a gun to everyone's heads forever, economically it does not make sense. All societies that depended on slaves long-term knew that you couldn't treat all of them too badly, most of them needed to believe that they could either end up free due to good behavior or that their master had clear, tolerable rules for them to follow. Even in a state of absolute nature, when two animals fight over something, they usually don't go for the kill if they don't have to. The reason is simple: as long as they think they have a chance at escape, people will preserve some of their strength. Once you force them to commit, they will attack you with every ounce of strength they have. FWIW I believe that most people in the state apparatus of germany and japan understood this. It was the ideology from the top that made them do such stupid things.

>>96863 https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/undeclared-war-in-the-atlantic/ this is a decent looking article that covers some of it and also the US occupation of {ice,green}land prior to pearl harbor.

>>96866 Uh huh. So the list of US aggression is: 1) running escorts for their allies 2) occupying some icy rocks because they were in the sphere of influence I don't even disagree that Roosevelt wanted to get in the war, but that's just because wasn't an idiot and he knew the Germans and Japanese (who were idiots) would come for the US eventually if they won. He didn't have backing of the American people until Pearl Harbor, though. How could they have avoided it? By not starting so many wars of aggression, by not broadcasting the fact that they were interested only in attacking and dominating everyone else. They made themselves enemies, nobody did it for them.

>>96874 IDK about you but to me it seems like a country (a), being handed control by a country (b) of a territory (t)(iceland here) of strategic significance, t which is not considered to be the rightful possession of b, for the apparent purpose that a may ship b material including food, fuel and explicit war materials, these materials not even being given in the course of regular commerce but being given under special arrangement by the government of a that they be delivered without payment in order to help b's war effort, appears to pretty directly involve a in b's war. When you add onto this the supreme military commander of a ordering his navy that they shoot on sight when encountering b's wartime enemies, there is no doubt that a is b's co-belligerent. This happened months before pearl harbor.

Why are some leftists so opposed to travelmnaxxing? It literally enrages them to a level usually only reserved for nazis.

Does anyone wanna buy a foreskin off me?

>>96859 >they have smaller brains. It's literally been shown multiple times that leftists have an average higher IQ than right wingers

>>96877 Because when people frequently to some destination they they raise the cost of living or some soykaf that what I understand Not really the best thing for lefties to worry about since traveling also increases the local economy and sone countries literally build their entire economies around tourism

>96887 cattle always have smaller brains than its wild relatives. the more centralized the cattle the smaller the brain since the common denominator is bigger. cattle that has been domesticated for long periods of time no longer can survive in the wild.

I like how this thread got completely hijacked is there seriously nothing done about that on this place?

>>96892 That has fuarrrk all to do with what I said, you spaz It's literally been proven repeatedly that left wingers are smarter than right wingers Literally dozens of studies available for public viewing You are mentally handicapped

>>96896 "Domestic animals generally have 15%–35% smaller brains relative to their body size compared to wild counterparts, a phenomenon linked to reduced survival demands (less need for fear/hunting responses), increased reliance on humans, and the domestication syndrome (e.g., smaller sensory organs, floppy ears). Significant reductions are observed in pigs (~34%), cats (~24-30%), sheep (~24%), and dogs (~29%). " just google domestic animals have smaller brains left-wing is basically common denominator , with absolute centralized power over the entire globe.

>>96896 Lol lefties believing in IQ. Tell me more about how reliable and determinative IQ is. Alternatively, if your only intention is credentials from a university, I and every other grad alive knows they graduated side-by-side with remedials. It means nothing now

>>96897 Right wingers are closer to cattle since they eat up every word a clergyman says >>96898 I bet you think IQ is unreliable because you're brown And your country has an average national IQ of 85

>>96897 >left wing >having power

Well, it looks like MAGA and the Republicans have slain 160 young ladies in a wild anti-female gender-critical misogynist massacre as the opening move in this war with Iran.

>>96911 >having power absolute centralized power* left wing is for blacks and females, the servants.

>left vs right argument this is the most adolescent thread i've seen on lainchan, this week, because this leads not to genuine political discussion (futile) but to nothing but directionbrained tribal infighting (because at the end of the day both sides are on the same coin). imagine being so retarded as to fight over meaningless, simplified and abritrary labels like poltroons. you users don't get enough thrills in your lives

I understand in theory this idea that at some future point through practice we will have engrained no hierarchies and so if anyone were to try and build an evil corporation or something everyone would just unanimously not buy in or maybe even all just storm it and tear it down. I dont believe human nature is "evul" I understand this idea that if everyone heals all their traumas why couldnt we live in a anarchist self organized society. I really dont see it happening, Its all very big what ifs, I think even if we all hold these same ideals and give up on greed and whatever else my self organized self sustaining anarchist town and yours are going to end up getting in eachothers way. Many little towns and buroughs and what have you I completely agree could run on anarchism, some basically do outside of when the police are around and up to no good. Scaling this globally is my problem, we quite literally can only keep track of and feel for so many people (usually those in our immediate community). Not every sub community will hold the same values forever, disagreements will arise. Some areas will have less resources than others and need from those with more, people will have disputes and argue. Even in the most dream of scenarios existing in real life when these disputes are solved by volunteers in the community, they still are organized and command more respect than your average person. This is all imagining you somehow move everyone past bad or dangerous patterns too that would muck this all up immediately. If its this far off end goal why would you not instead be focusing on the kind of system that could even instill in people a shared value system around this across large swathes of people, and that would prioritize research into how you reform people and whatever else. I cant imagine anyone thinks from right now where we stand if we jump into anarchism its gonna be great.

>>96915 >I really dont see it happening, Its all very big what ifs, I think even if we all hold these same ideals and give up on greed and whatever else my self organized self sustaining anarchist town and yours are going to end up getting in eachothers way. Many little towns and buroughs and what have you I completely agree could run on anarchism, some basically do outside of when the police are around and up to no good. Scaling this globally is my problem, we quite literally can only keep track of and feel for so many people (usually those in our immediate community). Not every sub community will hold the same values forever, disagreements will arise. Some areas will have less resources than others and need from those with more, people will have disputes and argue. Even in the most dream of scenarios existing in real life when these disputes are solved by volunteers in the community, they still are organized and command more respect than your average person. This is all imagining you somehow move everyone past bad or dangerous patterns too that would muck this all up immediately. If its this far off end goal why would you not instead be focusing on the kind of system that could even instill in people a shared value system around this across large swathes of people, and that would prioritize research into how you reform people and whatever else. I cant imagine anyone thinks from right now where we stand if we jump into anarchism its gonna be great. Fair point and pleasant read. I'd only add perhaps, that some people need reform and some need more freedom. I am also of the opinion that the natural way of the world appears to be evil no matter what.

>>96915 >Scaling this globally is my problem, yeah, this is the main problem with social (or for the sake of this soykaf thread, "left-wing) anarchism, it has sensible ideas that have been proven to work on a small or individual scale but it seems a lot of anarchists suffer from utopianism/an overdose on marxism and assume that it can just be dropped upon everybody with no adverse effects. this is why i respect individual anarchists a lot more, they seem more like realists >I don't believe that human nature is "evul" i don't wanna make broad assumptions about human nature too, unlike the rest of this thread, but i think the most sensible idea of human nature is how suspectible they are to circumstance, especially ones experienced in youth, as child is the father of the man i hate this world as much as any non-retarded people do, but i think the current circumstances people are raised under has made people more intrinisally anxious, insensitive, violent, delusional and selfish (to the disadvantage of others, i don't think selfishness/egoism is inherently bad), but trying to untangle all of the hydra heads of the system which makes people this way is a collossal task thanks for the on-topic post by the by

>>96915 >Some areas will have less resources than others and need from those with more, people will have disputes and argue I think the dream of anarchism isn't a world with no conflicts, but a world where the norm is conflicts being resolved without coercion. I think in fact most philosophies and religions are interested in this, they just have differences of opinion on how it can be accomplished. It is true that anarchism must be more of a culture than a governance system. Bedouins are more anarchist than most anarchists. The central cognitive dissonance of most online lefties is that they want to establish anarchist governance within a statist culture, and it never works. Just look at Occupy and all its cancerous offshoots.

>>96892 >>96897 Cattle brain shrinking is about fear response, not intelligence. Interestingly, right-wingers are both extremely fear driven and brain dead. Enough to believe lefties have conquered the whole world.

>>96921 but you can have state like organizations without coercion IF the people are sufficiently cooperative/honest/etc. Also what does coercion look like ? If the farmer tells the blacksmith that the farmer won't give food if he doesn't get some metal work now and then, is that coercion ? Some people would take it as a threat. Maybe a definition of coercion as threatening to actively seek to harm, as opposed to mere withdrawl of support would be most suitable.

>>96807 >winning by force and squashing your enemy is not a win >they were so ebil they'd have collapsed within ten minutes after winning Pure brainrot and cope.

>>96923 >but you can have state like organizations without coercion IF the people are sufficiently cooperative/honest/etc. That is essentially the contents of confucianism. >Maybe a definition of coercion as threatening to actively seek to harm, as opposed to mere withdrawl of support would be most suitable. That seems like an ok definition. I would also add that threatening to withdraw necessary support can be coercive if it is extractive. For instance, if the blacksmith is just not doing any work, then the farmer won't be able to grow food as effectively, so the farmer is really just telling the blacksmith that they have to work or society will fall apart. But if the blacksmith is doing enough work, and the farmer wants to do less work and get more materials from the blacksmith (using his monopoly power to force it), that is coercive.

>>96931 I never said they would have collapsed because they were evil. I said they would have collapsed because they were stupid. Their strategy was "we'll just win all the wars and have a better army and force everyone to do what we want" which is the dumbest long-term strategy ever if you want to build an empire. Didn't work for Hitler, didn't work for Napoleon, didn't work for Alexander.

>>96084 The closest we have to an anarchist "state" are religions. > levy taxes without the use of force > (mostly) flat hierarchy The problem is coordination: without a strong hierarchy it's impossible to carry over massive projects like an aqueduct or a nuclear plant. A slightly more efficient option is an "hybrid" state with simple, high-level religious/cultural/moral principles and low-level laws. Moral principles are enforced by social pressure and laws are enforced using violence.

>>97020 >levy taxes We don't do that in Anarchy >Violence must be exercised to maintain order the ordering of society without violence has been deployed in statecraft for thousands of years, lao tse writes of it. That it should become magically obscured when its use is anarchist in nature is nothing more than the knee jerk reaction of a statist.

>>97040 anarchy merely means leaderlessness, you can have anarchy and still have a massive functioning bureaucracy and state apparatus just so long as its not lead by anyone

>>97041 Words oftentimes have definitions that are different from their implied meaning due to things like linguistic drift and polysemy. When I say "anarchy" or "anarchism" then people like the one I was replying to know that I am not just referring to a society without leaders like prime minister or president, but to stateless society on the whole.

>>97042 In your anarchy can there be leaders or is there not only no state but also no leadership?

>>97043 I am of the opinion that leadership refers to a sense of responsibility that everyone can and should cultivate for what are basically same reasons as the distribution problem. There is a sense of responsibility that is sorely lacking in our society. This is in part because power is given to some unreasonable authorities, but we have also become used to this deprivation of agency and struggle with things like anxiety, learned helplessness, resentment, etc. People seem to have an overall feeling of being trapped, but also lacking in ideas on how to direct their own lives without being told. You speak of anarchy as if I have a personal definition based presumably on internal ideation or reading online, but my idea is based on my experiences with Food not Bombs irl. I could show up to a food distribution and ask how to help out, and be told to grab the paper plates and put them on the table, etc. likewise I could tell or ask people to do things that are obvious to the activity, and they will do so. There is no hand wringing over the true nature of authority and whether it is right of us to act this way, even as political theory or philosophy might sometimes be discussed while people idle or do simple tasks. Things like cooperation and coordination are completely intuitive in this context, and there is also a spontaneous emergence of agency and help as well - if someone notices something that can be done they will mention it or just do it themselves, and the non-immediately-apparent needs of people who come for food become recognized pretty quickly as well. Oftentimes, they are quite lonely and just looking for someone to talk to. What's more, the people served are largely grateful and don't try to cause problems for the volunteers. I've heard the phrase "leader-ful, not leaderless" thrown around in organizing before to refer to a common problem of agency and how to address it. Personally I don't think verbal gymnastics like this are necessary, and it is often ironically the more seasoned anarchists who have this problem the least. It's not really helpful to anyone to act without agency. This is what I basically think: anarchy requires a sense of responsibility that is not to be taken lately. I nevertheless believe that we should all have this autonomy. It is not some far-off utopian state but rather the ability to take responsibility for your own life and actions and exercise your freedom, legal or otherwise. Anarchy exists when anarchists can come together successfully. I think this should be spread.

>>97040 >the ordering of society without violence has been deployed in statecraft for thousands of years, lao tse writes of it. Laozi lived during the spring and autumn period. That's early feudalism with taxes, bureaucracy, and a professional army. I haven't personally read Tao Te Ching or any of his other works but he was either referring to a fictional utopia or egalitarian tribes from the Paleolithic. That kind of society can not compete with a more organised, technologically superior, centralised state.

>>97047 Interesting take, but his wisdom was considered to be insightful to statecraft of the time and is still taken as a legitimate philosophy today. The whole text is generally anti war and discouraging of it, but I'm specifically referring to when he describes the tending of crops and agriculture and management of society through this as a greater way to rule than through armed force. This involves a degree of social complexity and so on, but I couldn't help but make a connection to the way of syndicalism and worker oriented forms of order.

>>96863 >The USSR didn't stand *only* because of violence, though. In fact internally, neither did the Nazi party. Both had massive propaganda and secret police wings of the government. That's just shifting the topic by one degree. It's still about a group's exclusive ability to be able to resort to violence. >The difference is that the USSR was very measured in how they approached diplomacy Measured is not the word I'd think to associate to the USSR. Stalin didn't look very measured, nor any intervention in satellite countries appeared measured either. >That's why the USSR lasted for 70 years instead of 10. It was a slow burn because it could not regenerate itself, it consumed its own original material wealth. The USA avoided a frontal war and still exist, but waged many a war in other parts of the globe because it could apply violence and nobody could stand against the country when it wasn't too poor and too badly managed. Nobody is saying that resorting to violence is an evergreen strategy as there is no evergreen strategy, all empires and nations rise and fall. >what aim are you going to accomplish through war that you cannot accomplish through some other means? Forcing new protocols? Forcing others to accept the new mob boss in town? Seizing resources? Killing enemies? >When you win, how will you hold the territory you've conquered? With a mix of contentment and a possible resort to violence against enemies, internal or not. >You cannot simply hold a gun to everyone's heads forever, economically it does not make sense. Violence doesn't mean you have to be an aggressive asshole 24/7 either. >All societies that depended on slaves long-term knew that you couldn't treat all of them too badly, most of them needed to believe that they could either end up free due to good behavior or that their master had clear, tolerable rules for them to follow. That's the bait, but these slaves didn't get into serfdom by their own volition either. >Even in a state of absolute nature, when two animals fight over something, they usually don't go for the kill if they don't have to. Violence doesn't have to always mean murder, it can also merely mean combat. >Once you force them to commit, they will attack you with every ounce of strength they have. Yes, and they may die or not. In fact if they do so it pushes them to embrace violence too so that all is judged through how one applies violence. You just need to know how to play your cards, and sometimes if you're too weak your trick is to play ball.

uh oh i seen a niggy cross the street