there seems to be intelligent anarchist thought/thinkers/people/stuff out there in the world. there's also this undercurrent of "oh no, marxisms vs anarchists, fight"
as far as i can tell the anarchist view of marxism is "that is all great but you're using the state until it melts away by itself magically in the future, how is that actually going to improve anything, the structures of power still exist and will be abused/mishandled and/or will never be completely correct and/or require some sort of top-down application of structure or theory."
and the marxist view of anarchism is "lol"?
i've actually thought out a whole symbiotic relationship and agreement that could (to use a terrible fucking word) synergise their strengths. Suffice it to say it bears some resemblance to both tsarist russia's relationship with cossacks and mongol's relationship towards already subjugated people.
but aside from that weed thought, anarchy is definitely something that has some value. i can understand the criticisms of marxists completely, and even those of anarchists towards leninists, but i've gradually came around to the idea that the state is the most powerful force, and to believe you can overcome an opposing state without some overall military force, relying on local militias that usually have difficulty being motivated to move and, possibly stay, too far away, is...optimistic at best. and once you have the military force, then you need the weapons, and the replacements, and the vehicles, and the cash to pay for it. so basically, a state.
the anarchist thought is that once enough people believe in it, it'll reduce all states to dissolve themselves peacefully, or be crushed in a very short campaign by autonomous cells combining and disbanding and being self-providing....like I said, optimistic.
but i admire optimism. besides, anyone who's played civilisation knows that you have to go through a period of anarchy before you make drastic changes towards your governing system.
they don't generally understand what was meant by it "withering away," also, because again the anarchist theory of state is basically a hot, full diaper
bonus: whenever they do actually attempt revolution (or something revolution-adjacent) they invariably wind up cobbling together a state apparatus anyway just to get the damn thing off the ground -- e.g., the Makhnovists had secret police
further reading:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch04.htm#s2 (lenin describes marx & engels' arguments with anarchists in the 1870s)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch05.htm (what the actual deal is with the "withering away" of the state, see also chapter 1)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm (engels' most famous polemic against anti-authoritarians)
Constantignoble posted:marxists and anarchists want the same thing in the long term
this is only true in a long term of like 100 years and even then only in the most abstract sense possible so i don't think this family resemblance holds much practical utility
drcat posted:so what's the deal with anarchism
jerry
drcat posted:seems ok
kramer
drcat posted:aside from that one kid who yelled about violating the NAP while he got beat up in greece or whatever.
george
there seems to be intelligent anarchist thought/thinkers/people/stuff out there in the world
elaine
there's also this undercurrent of "oh no, marxisms vs anarchists, fight"
newman
blinkandwheeze posted:Constantignoble posted:marxists and anarchists want the same thing in the long term
this is only true in a long term of like 100 years and even then only in the most abstract sense possible so i don't think this family resemblance holds much practical utility
anarchists say they want exactly the things Marx describes, just without the dictatorship of the proletariat as the first step. once the state has withered away, I'm not sure you'd be able to distinguish one from the other (aside from the aforementioned philosophical wedge). where do you see the longer-term divergence?
Constantignoble posted:blinkandwheeze posted:Constantignoble posted:marxists and anarchists want the same thing in the long term
this is only true in a long term of like 100 years and even then only in the most abstract sense possible so i don't think this family resemblance holds much practical utility
anarchists say they want exactly the things Marx describes, just without the dictatorship of the proletariat as the first step. once the state has withered away, I'm not sure you'd be able to distinguish one from the other (aside from the aforementioned philosophical wedge). where do you see the longer-term divergence?
i mean that's pretty vague and most marxists believe the stage of dictatorship of the proletariat would take at least ~100 years, so what blinkandwheeze said.
and then of course by the very nature of their ideology creating a lack of party structure or discipline they are incredibly prone to police infiltration, adventurism, and a lot of simply bad or infantile ideas.
the more interesting question is how far that "melting away" can really go. Like how can you not centralize if you want socialism? yeah it's Jacobin but I liked this critique of "pare-con": https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-red-and-the-black/ Looks like there's a paywall or something now though.
aerdil posted:i mean that's pretty vague and most marxists believe the stage of dictatorship of the proletariat would take at least ~100 years, so what blinkandwheeze said.
i was asking because, vague or not, it seems to me that the two camps have a greater chance of converging rather than diverging beyond the given timeframe
look, ive met great anarchists and im not trying to criticize, but i just want to say that ive never seen an M-L eat food out of the garbage
— Turing Police (@turing_police) May 3, 2017
The conditions for that anarchism no longer exist in the first world and the anarchists of today have no real interest in the third world. Despite anarchists being obsessed with Spain and Ukraine, there is no commonality between western imperialistic petty-bourgeois anarchism and those movements in concrete reality. The success of anarchists in liberal movements like occupy is for the opposite reasons: it does not seriously challenge imperialism or the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and at its worst is liberal anti-communism masquerading as leftism. It has no mass influence and had no scientific method to understand why.
Anarchism proves itself useless again and again.
Constantignoble posted:i was asking because, vague or not, it seems to me that the two camps have a greater chance of converging rather than diverging beyond the given timeframe
this convergence is only true in an abstract sense because there's no reason to believe that the withering away of the state would give way to the particular social forms prescribed by 20th century syndicalists or whatever. anarchists don't just hold to the abolition of the state and class as a generic principle, they forward particular forms of community level organisation - often spontaneously and ad-hoc - and it's impossible to say whether these will be practically useful prior to the establishment of the dotp
ilmdge posted:I have.
george: i am already eating from the trash can all of the time.
le_nelson_mandela_face posted:drcat posted:so what's the deal with anarchism
jerry
drcat posted:seems ok
kramer
drcat posted:aside from that one kid who yelled about violating the NAP while he got beat up in greece or whatever.
george
there seems to be intelligent anarchist thought/thinkers/people/stuff out there in the world
elaine
there's also this undercurrent of "oh no, marxisms vs anarchists, fight"
newman
Edited by orchestra_hit ()
tears posted:whats the deal with airplane food?
did we ever get an answer on this
le_nelson_mandela_face posted:non aggression principle isn't a real anarchist thing. it's a libertarian thing. you know how when people get into conflicts in things ranging from playgrounds to marriages to international relations there's always some dispute about who started it, and more than that, about what would constitute "starting it" and what "starting it" even means? well you know wrong because no, there isn't. we just use the infallible science of hermanism-randism to determine who started it and now we don't need government.
drwhat was talking about this probably completely fake thing that's popular with libcoms on the Internet, a supposed testimony of an "anarchocapitalist" who went to Greece and hung out with anarchists there and assumed they would be down with him defending NAP and capitalism and so on, which caused the anarchists to throw a cream pie into his face with enough force to make his half-buttoned overalls fall into a pile around his ankles and emit the sound of someone flicking the blade of a hand saw.
it's probably fake because it's written as though NAP dude was genuinely confused at the situation when IRL it's the full time job of "anarchocapitalists" to write blogs about how anarchists are bad.