NERD FIGHT!
Anarchist in their most pure form lmao
Naive idealism is sweet but not productive.
I know this is a tankie instance so I didn’t downvote but I’m surprised again and again how ignorant tankies are about the concept of prefiguration or “unity of means and ends” or “building the new in the shell of the old” or what ever you want to call it. It’s not about the state vanishing over night but about building a dual power that will fight the authority of the state. It’s the same type of people who say anarchists can’t read that have no idea about actual anarchist theory. Do better. Leave this strawman behind. It never was true and didn’t age well.
Marxists aren’t ignorant of prefiguration, we agree with some of it, such as building dual power. We don’t agree that doing so erases the basis of class, and thus doesn’t also erase the basis od the state. Marxists in general take the opposite approach to solving class struggle, believing in collectivization of all production and distribution to suit the needs of all, rather than creating loosely organized communalist cells, and this is because of analysis of class struggle being different for Marxists (and I believe more correct).
So building a rival state?
Build a stateless, hierarchy-critical, egalitarian society that rivals the hegemony of states
Where?
Take Rojava as an example: they built a system of councils that didn’t yield any real power until their day came (2011 if I’m not mistaken) and after the revolution, there was no power vacuum but this decentralized system took over. Same idea is anarcho syndicalism: they do union work now but are ready to run the factory/company when the opportunity is there.
In what way is anarchism effectively different in 2025 than neoliberalism or libertarianism, the ideologies of the two existing duopoly parties? We ALREADY live in a do nothing state, where private and foreign interests just YOLO across us with no state to advocate for us.
We ALREADY live in a do nothing state, where private and foreign interests just YOLO across us with no state to advocate for us.
This is wrong. We have a strong police force. Take squatting for example. The anarchist view would be, if you don’t use a house in any form, it isn’t yours anymore and someone else can take it. The neoliberal police state will force you out of it. The state enforces private and foreign interests. You can’t tell me that ICE is a sign of a do nothing state to take another example.
@bubblybubbles “…in the Russia of to-day it is not at all necessary to express your dissension in word or act to become subject to arrest; the mere holding of opposing views makes you the legitimate prey of the de facto supreme power of the land, the Tcheka, that almighty Bolshevik Okhrana, whose will knows neither law nor responsibility.”
1922
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1922/bolsheviks-shooting-anarchists.htmlGoldman is a horribly biased source for the Russian Civil War. She lived in Russia during the Civil War, 1920-1921, wrote that piece in '22 from Stockholm, and then the Civil War concluded in '23. She grew up with anti-Russian biases common of western Europeans (still continues today), spoke relatively broken Russian, and chiefly was entirely wrong about the anarchist movement in Russia.
The anarchists, who were faced with a dillema between supporting the bolsheviks and the Whites, majority decided to support the bolsheviks and were comrades in arms. Bandits like Makhno’s faction that were slaughtering villagers and stealing soviet supplies were killed, but the overwhelming majority of anarchists joined the Red Army, called “soviet-anarchists.” Goldman is primarily pointing to the minority of anarchists that denied the bolsheviks as the only anarchists.
Goldman was also contested by other anarchists at the time. Kropotkin, while displeased that the revolution wasn’t an anarchist one, supported the revolution nonetheless. Lucy Parsons was another principled anarchist that nonetheless supported the bolsheviks, and also agreed with labelling Makhno a bandit. Goldman, however, was a friend of Makhno, showing the real allegiances Goldman had.
Goldman’s anti-communism was ultimately based in unprincipled chauvanism. Her writings on anarchist theory are valuable, but we should not take her as any sort of authority on actually existing socialism, which she had denounced before it even finished fighting for its own existence.
@bubblybubbles Tankies do hate anarchists.
Marxists and anarchists get along far more often than not, the problems arise when one group takes up arms against the other and fighting ensues. Given that Marxists have had more success establishing systems, there are more examples of those minority of anarchists taking up arms against the Marxists. Marxists and anarchists may take opposite approaches, ie collectivization instead of communalization, but history proves that the two groups can and do work together far more often than not.
