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.>>2493952anarchism lasted for less than a year
USSR lasted for 70 years
>>2497835>non-idealistI 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.
>>2497879>I don't know what you mean by thatarent 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?
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.
>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.
>>2493213The 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 scientificMaybe 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.
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.
>>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.
>>2507955Hierarchy 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.
>>2493213That 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.
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