>>104277>"Trickling down" of ideas implies that there is an authority or hierarchy, and that dude, Alexander something is on top of it. In the beginning of the thread anarchists were dunked on for not having a hierarchy, but now you just assume as part of your argument that they do?I wasn't here for the beginning of the thread so I can't comment on that. And yes, of course anarchists have informal hierachies! It's also a fair assumption that anarchists, in regards to how much they are platformed in media, politics or academia, have thought leaders that will influence a lot of young anarchists, like that aforementioned guy, or Noam Chomsky, or David Graeber. This isn't necessarily their own fault, but simply due to the fact that institutions in capitalism reproduce those hierachies.
>like Chiapas, Mexico?The EZLN isn't exactly anarchist, but sure, isolated movements can exist, but I was speaking about the general tendency. The Zapatistas also are allowed to florish in the constraints of Chiapas because they represent a resistance struggle of indigenous people against their looming enclosure into global capitalism. Working off indigenous communities can allow you to be an autonomist, but those material conditions barely exist on the fringes today. A lot of Western anarchists would probably also take issue with their policies of social permissiveness when it comes to drugs, alcohol and prostitution or lack thereof.
>Circular reasoning. Anarchists don't want anyone "in charge". Yes, if there was someone "in charge" they would reproduce the system that keeps them in charge, but we're not talking about the Soviet Union here, we're talking about anarchism. When I talk about "in charge" I mean the general dominance of a tendency over the stratas of society represented by personas and institutions formed in the wake of that. This is true for the Soviet Union, the Revolutionary United States or the CNT-FAI in Catalonia.
>That sounds clever, but it isn't saying anything. You just threw in the word "power" in a marxist truism, thus making it not a truism but actually wrong, interestingly enough. If "power relations" truly are unavoidable as you claim, then the whole Marxist/communist project is a wash, because the point of Marxism is to abolish the power relations that arise from private property and the capitalist mode of production.I can elaborate on that though. Marxists are materialists and "power" is an abstraction, right? This means, the way power reasserts itself in different class societies (and yes, a dictatorship of the proletariat even in a supposed "libertarian" formation is still a class society) may look similar in appearance but is very different in substance, e.g. dependent on relations of production and level of development of productive forces which forms the base of any socio-economic formation (anarchists tend to see the state as a separate, distinctive quality parallel to those things but let's table that for now). So "power" in feudalism is fundamentally different in quality than power in capitalism, even if it looks similar in appearance (for example: both formations use a monopoly on violence, in one case of only noblemen being allowed to swing the sword, in the other one the institution of the police). This means that if you want to sublate those structures, you have to somewhat operate in formal similarities even though it's already containing the kernel of a new society.
Of course I don't want a vanguard party to be organized the exact same way like a bourgeois party, and to a degree, they aren't - for example, in democratic centralism every member can directly submit motions to the party leadership bypassing their local chapter. So there is a subversive, criss-crossing relationship between formal representative authorities and horizontal organization - it was actually that element that got Stalin into power!
Think about this in a Napoleonic, dialectical way - why was Hegel thinking he was observing the
Weltgeist when Napoleon crossed the alpes? Because the dialectic was that he had to put a crown on his head to end feudalism - or as Lenin put it: "The capitalists will sell us the ropes with which we will hang them."
So the alternative is to opt out of capitalism and form direct communes according to anarchists because they already reject everything I just said. But what's the negation of the negation here? By superficially rejecting all notions of "bourgeois right" and "bourgeois morals" they end reproducing bourgeois morals in an even more ideologicallly pure sense - those values of community work, purity, austerity, asceticism and autonomy are not just compatible with capitalism, they are in fact the true kernel of bourgeois morality as it emerged through Calvinism in the Law Countries in the 16th century. This is why so many anarchist projects are so quickly fully recuperated by capital, see for example Christiana which is now a tourist destination. This does in now way mean I'm some kind of Jordan Peterson or Christopher Hitchens type of essentialist that says "power will always prevail, it's hooman nature dude!!" - ironically that's also what anarchists think they are just in opposition to it.