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Not reporting is bourgeois


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What's the best way to convince anarchists that power and hierarchy aren't inherently bad?

Anarkids act like they understand theory and sociology better than Marxists do. They love getting on their moral high horse by calling everything "oppression". Yet when you actually pick apart their arguments you'll see that they're full of hot air 95% of the time. They talk a good deal about intersectionality and anti-oppression, but when pressed on how to abolish those oppressive structures in society they have no clue.

Marxism, OTOH, is scientific. We understand that political power is necessary to reshape society. We also understand that hierarchies need to exist until we reach the stage of communism, and even then you will still see things like hierarchies of intelligence, talent, beauty, strength, and so on that can't simply be abolished through idealist methods.

But how do you explain this without looking like you're making apologia for oppression? I've tried the Hegelian way of simply saying "the real is rational" but that doesn't get through anarkids' heads very well.
102 posts and 11 image replies omitted.

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>>2497825
Nice in theory but we have yet to see a situation in which this has happened and in fact we seen in most cases the return to capitalism.

>>2497830
i would expect here an alternative(non-idealist) explanation for how the state reproduces itself that isn't economic. how is the structure supposed to do that?

>>2493952
anarchism lasted for less than a year
USSR lasted for 70 years

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>>2497835
>non-idealist
I don't know what you mean by that, but the workers aren't allowed to organize their farms and factories outside the state. The system is set up so that the idea of self abolishing is a pipe dream, case in point the Soviet Union. The bureaucracts had a higher standard of living especially the top level ones than your average soviet citizen and because of that just like the capital there is a material interest in keeping the status quo. For an average soviet citizen to get anywhere they had to join the party and not just that but also tow the party line or risk expulsion. From there they had make the right connections to get conformable jobs, and that means not going against the bureaucracy and brown nosing higher level bureaucracts. And it was the same higher level bureaucracts that wanted and benefited off of Perestroika and eventual liberalization of the Soviet Union because they had the connections and the money to buy off the state assets and convert them to captial. That's how the post Soviet nations got there oligarchs.

>>2497852
Anarchism had to be crushed the soviet union dissolved because of its own internal contradictions.

>>2497879
>I don't know what you mean by that
arent you the one who called marxists idealist? you just gave an economic explanation.

so how does anarchist state abolition differ from this? where are the anarchist not-states? we have yet to see a situation in which this has happened and in fact we seen in most cases the return to capitalism.

what is the non-idealist anarchist theory for how to get rid of the state and keep it gone?

>>2493215

It's kind of a given that implementing anarchism means doing away with large industrial nation states and returning to small decentralized tribal societies, thus there wouldn't be any need for something so huge and complex as a nuclear power plant. But that doesn't mean we would have to go all the way back to the stone age; we would still have access to our accumulated knowledge. Maybe a small tribe of people couldn't run a nuclear power plant but they could understand the basics of how electricity works and figure out how to make batteries and generators and light bulbs and radios and telephones and all kinds of other electrical devices.

I'm admittedly not the most astute reader of Marx but from what little I have gleaned of his work, he wasn't saying "this is my model for how to build our future industrial society and we must now go restructure our society to fit this model", but rather, "this is how I think societies will naturally progress in the future in response to the technological developments of the Industrial Revolution." It was meant to be a theory, not a blueprint.

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>>2497925
>It's kind of a given that implementing anarchism means doing away with large industrial nation states and returning to small decentralized tribal societies, thus there wouldn't be any need for something so huge and complex as a nuclear power plant. But that doesn't mean we would have to go all the way back to the stone age; we would still have access to our accumulated knowledge. Maybe a small tribe of people couldn't run a nuclear power plant but they could understand the basics of how electricity works and figure out how to make batteries and generators and light bulbs and radios and telephones and all kinds of other electrical devices.
>>2497948
>I'm admittedly not the most astute reader of Marx but from what little I have gleaned of his work, he wasn't saying "this is my model for how to build our future industrial society and we must now go restructure our society to fit this model", but rather, "this is how I think societies will naturally progress in the future in response to the technological developments of the Industrial Revolution." It was meant to be a theory, not a blueprint.
You will never be real anarchists

>>2497881
so we agree!

There were free people but we killed them and despoiled the earth so that way of life is closed off for the foreseeable future except for a small collection of tribes pushed out to the least productive lands. Enjoy your advanced society.

Not necessarily an answer to OP, but having been on the far-left for my entire adult life, and having run in anarchist, ML, and Trotskyist circles, I can confirm that the reasons for why people become anarchists is like night and day when compared to the reasons people become Marxists.

A lot of anarchists tend to become anarchists out of their own personal trauma. I’m serious. In every anarchist circle I’ve been in it always seems like about 80% of AFAB anarchists are CSA survivors (or they were SA’d by an ex-boyfriend when in college or something). So many anarchist comrades of any gender have CPTSD or other neurodivergent or mental health issues. Lots of former addicts too. They literally believe the entire world is their enemy because others have screwed them over so badly. Surprisingly though, the vast majority of anarchists happen to be white or white-passing/functioning. In American anarchist circles you’ll usually have the one or two token Hispanic comrades and in Canadian anarchist circles you’ll have the one or two token indigenous comrades. But overall, anarchist spaces are full of young white people who have very severe issues with trauma and who become anarchists mostly due to said unresolved trauma.

On the other hand, most of the Marxists I know (mostly MLs and Trots) became Marxists out of their desire to understand how capitalist society works. They usually start out as intellectually inquisitive and go from there. It’s not so much a personal thing but rather a desire to collectively work together for tangible solutions. Marxist circles tend to attract more people of colour, immigrants, and genuine working-class people because it presents them with a logical and intellectual explanation for why things are as fucked up as they are, and a scientific way for dealing with said fuckery. Plus, Marxist revolutions have a decent history of success whereas every anarchist revolution inevitably falls apart after a few years. That provides real inspiration to the oppressed rather than sheer fantasy.

Plus, if you ask a Marxist how they envision the future, they will usually cite real-world examples. Ask an anarchist the same thing and they will give you a very vague response and denounce you as an oppressor if you ask for them to elaborate. Anarchism is always argued with emotion, it seems.

>>2507836
My point is that anarchist circles are basically exclusive clubs of social misfits who base their politics on their trauma whereas Marxist circles are usually full of people who are actually marginalized who are looking for an intellectual explanation for why they’re so exploited.

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I'm not even dogmatically anti-authoritarian but the level of Dunning-Krugerite circlejerking ITT is insane

>>2507857
Contemporary "anarchists" have done more damage to the movement and history of anarchism than any stalinist repression has before. Contemporary "anarchism" is liberalism and socialdemocracy's attempt at usurping anarchism to turn it away from class struggle, material analysis and immanent critique towards bourgeoisie wars, intersectionality and cultural analysis among other horrid garbage. T

>A lot of anarchists tend to become anarchists out of their own personal trauma. I’m serious. In every anarchist circle I’ve been in it always seems like about 80% of AFAB anarchists are CSA survivors (or they were SA’d by an ex-boyfriend when in college or something). So many anarchist comrades of any gender have CPTSD or other neurodivergent or mental health issues. Lots of former addicts too. They literally believe the entire world is their enemy because others have screwed them over so badly.

I can't speak for other people, but anarchy was something that already made sense to me from the beginning when I was a young child - the idea that people can make decisions as a group without some leader or higher authority figure. Authority figures don't make sense to me and never did.

To envision an anarchist world all you have to do is envision what the world was like before the Neolithic Revolution, how humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years before they figured out how to grow crops and domesticate animals and build permanent agricultural settlements. Small tribes where everyone knows everyone and can govern themselves through direct arbitration and no central governing body. Obviously such a thing is not very feasible for a modern nation state with a population of hundreds of millions, or even a city with a population of a few thousand. Permanent human settlements eventually grow too large and complex to manage their affairs without some kind of hierarchy beginning to form out of necessity. Anarchy isn't a means, it is an end - anarchy was the original form of human governance that existed in a time when our species was so primitive that all humans across the Earth were more or less on equal footing. Technology fucked all that up because technology doesn't develop uniformly, it develops sporadically and randomly all over the world and it disrupts power dynamics and gives people advantages that they didn't have before and our technological progress has always vastly outpaced our social progress.

But eventually civilization could reach the point where maybe our social progress can finally catch up, or maybe some combination of technological and social progress could once again make it no longer necessary for humans to live in giant cities or have nations or borders or to treat land as property, humans would return to their rightful place as children of the earth rather than suzerains of it, just go find a spot somewhere and throw your Dragon Ball Z capsule house on the ground and you're all set. And when huge complex cities of millions of people are no longer necessary for humans to live and meet their needs, government will also cease to be necessary and tribal living and anarchy will return. And we'll be a lot happier because that's what our brains evolved for, humans were not meant to live like ants in an ant colony, we're a tribal species and we always have been.

>>2507891
>>2507899

I'm not gonna read all this dribble drabble but I'll just say that I'm not a Luddite and I don't think there is anything good or bad about technology, I think technology is what it is and it doesn't take sides. Humans can use technology to create a more egalitarian and dignified world for everyone, or they can use technology to create the most repressive authoritarian nightmare you could ever imagine, it's entirely up to how we choose to use it.

>>2493213
anarchist organizations always have power dynamics and hierarchies all they do is act like they don't exist thus often causing even worse abuses

>>2493213
The simplest accurate argument against anarchism is just that an anarchist society will be easily conquered by a non-anarchist society, so it doesn't matter how good anarchism is in theory. There's a reason why the majority of history's dominant institutions - militaries, governments, churches, corporations - are based on hierarchy. It's because hierarchy works to make an organization powerful. Not too much hierarchy, of course - you want ideas to be able to flow from the bottom to the top so that the organization does not start to stagnate and behave stupidly - but still a large amount of hierarchy compared to anarchy.
A theoretical society that cannot actually be implemented without being conquered within weeks or months unless it hides in deep mountains or jungles like a prey animal evading predators is pretty much useless except as a thought experiment.
>Marxism, OTOH, is scientific
Maybe Marx was, I don't know, haven't read him. Marxism as a movement is not particularly scientific. Marxists tend to have a remarkable talent at not learning from empirical observation. So do people who have all sorts of other ideologies, of course, but in any case it's clear to me that Marxism is not distinguished as a movement by any unusual degree of being scientific.

>>2507908

I can understand the nuclear weapons thing, but mass surveillance and data mining are not really technological problems, they're social problems. How do you bring about the "destruction" of mass surveillance techology? Uninvent video cameras? The technology is here to stay, there's nothing you can do about that. All you can do is come up with social solutions, public policy decisions to regulate how these technologies can and can't be used.

>>2497925
But the small tribal society would be soon conquered by big hierarchical societies, since the latter would be much more powerful. The small tribal society can exist in theory, but in practice it cannot exist for any long period of time. The only exceptions are if it becomes a vassal of some strong society, in which case it stops being actually anarchist, or if it ekes out an existence somewhere on the periphery where it is not worth conquering.

>>2507891
>towards space exploration, immortality and greater aspirations
>Tribal aspirations remain individualist deviations

Which of these sounds like a more individualist and petty dream to you?

To create a world where everyone has their basic needs met and be free to fulfill their humble human creative desires?

Or to create a world where quadillionaire tech titans can become immortal demigods and blast off into outer space to colonize the galaxy?

most of the people in this thread don't understand what anarchism actually is, and most people refuse to understand it, it is genuinely infuriating to read this

You don't. The anarchist's position is not a rational one, but an emotional one borne out of cowardice and the most willful and strident ignorance. Anarchists aren't worth convincing.

The thing you should think about is why you want power or why you are imposing authority to rule others. I know your argument because it's a child's belief; that authority is "just-so" and can be dictated without purpose or any actual wellspring of authority beyond the display of violence. Power is only useful if there is a moral argument for it. If the goal is to rule because you insist on it, no one has any reason to ever regard that. It does not require a great intellect to see how pointless such a world is.

If we weren't stupid, the political question would have a limited purview, and private life would not be state business. This doesn't prevent the government from establishing or facilitating sharing of the wealth, for the best interests of those involved and so we're not stuck in an interminable cycle of struggles and opportunism. We all know people like you do not want that; that for you this is about some impetuous and idiotic barking. All you do is managerialism. I really wish stupid people like you weren't allowed to lead. You're the inheritors of the cowardliness of the anarchists.

Is it too much for you to offer a single good reason why anyone should follow you? Are their personal interests in security and having food to eat met? That is the most basic condition of any socialist society. You can't have anything if people are starving or live with a knife at their throat. Managerialism insists on the knife at the throat, and only feeds the people the barest minimum while depleting anything else they would have to live for. Once sufficiently emaciated, managerialism kills off the surplus population without fail. It can't not do this. It doesn't matter if the managerialism is the eugenic creed or some other, equally ill-considered form of managerialism.

What you think of as "politics" is just a managerialist credo to justify some shitty power grab. You aren't ruling men. You're barking conceits at people and insisting anyone else should respect it. Until you can speak again of sharing the damned wealth, you don't stand for anything. The positions of communism in any form anyone should want are lost.

I've seen so much sniveling from internet Marxists about basic shit that is first year political knowledge or even something you would have learned in high school, if not for this complete garbage-tier education that insisted on turning the world into the shitshow we see today.

>>2507948
Its pointless running a discussion on this site, there is no metric to preventing retardation.

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>>2507942
>Which of these sounds like a more individualist and petty dream to you?

>To create a world where everyone has their basic needs met and be free to fulfill their humble human creative desires?


>Or to create a world where quadillionaire tech titans can become immortal demigods and blast off into outer space to colonize the galaxy?

>>2507950
the retardation of many on this website causes many reasonable positions to get reduced to super-strawmen, and then arguing based on that premise rather than actually learning about what the fuck they're arguing to form a real argument against it, if i want to argue against MLism, i can do so by reading what they believed, how it worked in practice, and its problems, but i might as well not, since there's no reason to when anyone will just pull out every singular imaginable insult, due to their minds being rotted

>>2507933
>But the small tribal society would be soon conquered by big hierarchical societies, since the latter would be much more powerful. The small tribal society can exist in theory, but in practice it cannot exist for any long period of time. The only exceptions are if it becomes a vassal of some strong society, in which case it stops being actually anarchist, or if it ekes out an existence somewhere on the periphery where it is not worth conquering.

This is why I don't think anarchy can happen on a widespread scale until some major technological development causes a major paradigm shift in the way humans live. For instance, imagine we develop pre-fabricated self-sufficient "smarthouses", you just unbox it somewhere with access to sunlight and water and watch it self-assemble and you've got a multi-bedroom house with electricity, plumbing, etc. When you're done with it, you just pack up your belongings and push the button and it disassembles itself and goes back in the box. The whole off-the-grid weirdo Slab City-type subculture I think would go nuts with something like that, there'd probably be like a whole mass exodus of people fed up with city life moving out into anarchist enclaves and communes in the middle of nowhere in their self-sufficient mobile homes, having drones deliver whatever random shit they might need to their doorstep.

>>2507823
>In every anarchist circle I’ve been in it always seems like about 80% of AFAB anarchists are CSA survivors (or they were SA’d by an ex-boyfriend when in college or something). So many anarchist comrades of any gender have CPTSD or other neurodivergent or mental health issues. Lots of former addicts too.

I mean…. yes? It's almost like anarchism appeals to the most hated and despised in society who have zero lifelines. Do you know how trauma makes it impossible for you to function according to capitalist norms? Or how having trauma alienates you from others? Have you ever spoken to a CSA survivor yourself?

You should try and re-enact a factory atmosphere, complete with the machinic onomathopeia while narrating the possibilities of progress. You're simultaneously doing political work and debunking the anarchist myth that Marxist-Leninist art is conservative. I'm serious.

>>2507955
Hierarchy in society exists for purposes. It is not arbitrarily defined nor can it be if it is to be functional. The arrangement of political offices of increasing rank can only persist if it is functional, and all of these offices incur an inherent cost. The primitive society couldn't arbitrarily start barking orders and declare that they have consuls and the whole apparatus that Rome built. Also, freedom from that Roman system was usually the reason why tribal societies fought against the Romans bitterly, while the people of the East usually didn't fight for long and fared little better than the primitive Gauls or Germans. Considering the Germans survived and eventually broke the Empire, despite their society being predominantly tribal and lacking any of the sophisticated hierarchy the Romans have, you probably should reconsider the shit coming out of your mouth.

Today, hierarchy is diffused on purpose, because doing this obscures any center of power that a resistant population would attack to free themselves. If you could assassinate POTUS and the justices on SCOTUS to change the world, everyone and their mother would want a shot at President Retard. If you're up against a faceless and cruel machine whose informants are crawling everywhere, with an unnerving ability to foment discord and turn people against each other, it is much more daunting. All of the ways this can be done were known to the Romans, and the smart Emperors were able to win power because they commanded the Roman mob and knew how to keep the Legions loyal. Every government, no matter how despotic, rules by making sure the subordinates are placated and set against each other, and by systematically shutting out those who are not in the political class.

When you look at the American apparatus today, it is ruled largely by fear and instigation rather than its very large and inefficient command structure. Remarkably few ghoulish people are able to instigate Americans so easily and clamp down on anyone who gets any idea that this country could be different. It is a far more effective despotism than anything European monarchical fags could make.

I don't know any serious anarchists who talk about imposing anarchy as a political system at the national level; it's kind of a given that if you want a return to anarchy, you have to eliminate the inequalities that give rise to the hierarchy to begin with, which is why I say that anarchy is an end and not a means. The state is like training wheels on a bicycle and eventually human progress may reach the point where we don't need the training wheels anymore. That's all.

It's communists who seem to be obsessed with shoving their ideology down everyone's throat as the universal solution to all problems, that all societies must convert to communism and the entire world must be communist, that communism is the future, etc. One of things that always drew me to the idea of anarchy is that it isn't really an ideology, because I hate ideology.

>>2493213
>They talk a good deal about intersectionality and anti-oppression, but when pressed on how to abolish those oppressive structures in society they have no clue.

Because they literally don't. Anarchists love fantasy because they have very little to nothing they can point to when it comes to proving that their ideas work in practice.

>>2507823
Most anarchists are neurodivergent because they don't fit in and see through the propaganda of capitalism and the state.

>>2507963

Gaul wasn't really a tribal society, they were a bunch of clans and villages with chieftains and elected councils, sort of like Norse society. They had horses, they had iron weapons, they had ships, they raided and pillaged, etc. Small nomadic tribal societies were long gone in Western Europe by the time of the Iron Age.

>>2507823
>>2507840
Most American "anarchists" are only interested in running soup kitchens. There's a reason they prioritize what's essentially just charity work over actual organizing.

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>>2493213
That decentralization leads to mob based violence and dismissal/cancel culture. That dencentralised systems typically end up far more authoritarian and arbitrary in dishing out said authoritarian violence, than central managed control systems.
Look at how CHAZ descended into vigilante and decentralised authoritarianism and then murder almost immediately. Look at the Cultural Revolution, people were given largely complete grassroots democratic freedoms and instantly used them to carry out petty grudges, vendettas, and petty hooliganism.
https://thepointmag.com/politics/dismissal/
There is a 99% chance that any form of "anarchism" will turn out to be mob violence directed by the hands of charismatic narcissists and sociopaths. Look at the result of pretty the vast majority of Anarkiddie communes from the 60s-90s, they pretty much all became sex abuse farms controlled by a charismatic/strong willed cluster B who used their charisma and aura to gain yesmen to bully everyone else.
>>2507823
>A lot of anarchists tend to become anarchists out of their own personal trauma. I’m serious. In every anarchist circle I’ve been in it always seems like about 80% of AFAB anarchists are CSA survivors (or they were SA’d by an ex-boyfriend when in college or something).
I mean, no shock here, Punk and Anarchism has always been the culture and ideology of Borderline Personality Disorder.
Every time I get dragged to a punk gig or squat by BPDs I know, my eyes can't help but roll out of my fucking head by how 99% of people there check off every BPD diagnostic criteria in the most stereotypical way imaginable.

>>2508033
"BPD" is just autism + narcissism + trauma

>>2507979
Is it really that? Or is it because they're all closeted authoritarians in their own right and flock to "anti-authoritarian" spaces because it enables them to be authoritarian towards others?

>>2507948
How about you explain it to us then? Oh enlightened one. From my experience anarchism is just white people called sock or spoon or whatever squating in abandoned buildings and wokescolding you for not considering that to be revolutionary praxis

>>2508043
You're conflating Bushwick trust fund kids with legitimate anarchists.

>>2508042
Not ChinAnon (>>2508033), but you're literally describing BPD. People with BPD are full blown control freaks.

>>2507840
Reminds me of what we were saying in the Catholicism thread: people convert to Catholicism out of intellectual curiosity whereas people become born-again Evangelicals simply out of MUH FEELS.

>>2508046
That might be, but it's not like the more serious less trustfundy anarchists I know are that different really. Where are these "real" anarchists and how are they different from Sock and Spoon?

>>2508033

Aren't people with BPD typically people pleasers with abandonment issues who never want to say no to anyone? That sounds like the opposite of anarchy/punk to me.

>>2508058
Sometimes but most of the time they're control freaks. Like they're so afraid of losing the person they have that they go overboard to keep that person with them.

>>2508059

I feel like if you were going to pathologize the spirit of punk rock into a psychiatric illness, a better fit would probably be something like oppositional defiance disorder.

>>2508060
I'm not ChinAnon so you'll have to ask them.

>>2508033
>That decentralization leads to mob based violence and dismissal/cancel culture. That dencentralised systems typically end up far more authoritarian and arbitrary in dishing out said authoritarian violence, than central managed control systems.

Proof?


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