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[Raphael]

I'd say "communism" does, to some extent, refer to something concrete.

[bradrn]

I'd say "communism" does, to some extent, refer to something concrete.

Then again, so does ‘neoliberal’, and you have no problem with using that as an example. (You even acknowledge its concreteness in the blog post!)

[Moose-tache]

I'd say "communism" does, to some extent, refer to something concrete.

Only in the minds of Communists, and even then not every Communist is using the same concrete.

[Travis B.]

I'd say "communism" does, to some extent, refer to something concrete.

It may refer to something concrete, but what that concrete thing is varies wildly - Stalinists' "Communism" has very little in common with anarchists' "communism" besides the name.

[rotting bones]

My understanding is that Communism always means an anarchist utopia where you only work out of an inner drive to actualize your latent abilities, and your needs are always taken care of.

Even in Marxism, Communism denotes this final state that combines post-scarcity with "from each according to his ability; to each according to his need". Marx imagines that this society is so advanced that everyone can afford to be a dilettante and change professions on a whim without starving.

The difference between anarchism and Marxism is one of strategy. Anarchists think Communism can be built directly. Marx argued, based on the experience of the Paris Commune, that the nascent socialist regime must defend itself from internal saboteurs and external forces. For this reason, it needs a mighty transitional socialist state to kill all its enemies. "The dream of a people, their fortress secure..."

If you force me to answer this hyper-specific question, I'm inclined to agree with Marx against his critics. On the other hand, you can already see the traces of Stalinist paranoia in the form of this argument.

While Marx and the anarchists were right about capitalist incentives preventing the advent of Communism, I don't think either had sufficient appreciation of how economic incentive structures would play out over the course of a socialist transformation. This is why it's important for leftists to read Mesquita's work despite the fact that he's something like a right-libertarian.

Personally, my takeaways are:

1. I don't think the Third International failed because it was Communist. I think it failed because it was authoritarian.

2. The only practical method to hold "leaders" accountable is to dictate the relevant policies to them by means of direct democracy.

3. Marx's idea about rights being a sign of Bourgeois alienation is a wild fantasy. Without rights, you can't even guage the will of the people or guarantee that a sincere socialist will be free to work towards Communism. Inalienable rights must be enshrined in a constitution and guaranteed by any means necessary.

In practice, these positions make me not a "Communist" as commonly understood.

[Raphael]

I'd say "communism" does, to some extent, refer to something concrete.

Then again, so does ‘neoliberal’, and you have no problem with using that as an example. (You even acknowledge its concreteness in the blog post!)

OK, fair enough.

[Travis B.]

My understanding is that Communism always means an anarchist utopia where you only work out of an inner drive to actualize your latent abilities, and your needs are always taken care of.

Even in Marxism, Communism denotes this final state that combines post-scarcity with "from each according to his ability; to each according to his need". Marx imagines that this society is so advanced that everyone can afford to be a dilettante and change professions on a whim without starving.

The difference between anarchism and Marxism is one of strategy. Anarchists think Communism can be built directly. Marx argued, based on the experience of the Paris Commune, that the nascent socialist regime must defend itself from internal saboteurs and external forces. For this reason, it needs a mighty transitional socialist state to kill all its enemies. "The dream of a people, their fortress secure..."

If you force me to answer this hyper-specific question, I'm inclined to agree with Marx against his critics. On the other hand, you can already see the traces of Stalinist paranoia in the form of this argument.

While Marx and the anarchists were right about capitalist incentives preventing the advent of Communism, I don't think either had sufficient appreciation of how economic incentive structures would play out over the course of a socialist transformation. This is why it's important for leftists to read Mesquita's work despite the fact that he's something like a right-libertarian.

Personally, my takeaways are:

1. I don't think the Third International failed because it was Communist. I think it failed because it was authoritarian.

2. The only practical method to hold "leaders" accountable is to dictate the relevant policies to them by means of direct democracy.

3. Marx's idea about rights being a sign of Bourgeois alienation is a wild fantasy. Without rights, you can't even guage the will of the people or guarantee that a sincere socialist will be free to work towards Communism. Inalienable rights must be enshrined in a constitution and guaranteed by any means necessary.

In practice, these positions make me not a "Communist" as commonly understood.

Anarchists and Marxists differ in that most Marxists, with the exception of libertarian Marxists such as council communists and left communists, have the view that a state is necessary to build a socialist society whereas anarchists have the view that a socialist society can only be built from the bottom up by the workers themselves and the workers alone, and that any state that acts in the name of the workers will simply replace the old capitalist society with a new form of oppression. I would have to say that the events of the 20th century have only shown the anarchists to be right here.

Note that this has nothing to do with whether the new society needs to be defended from enemies from without and within; anarchists, pacifists aside, are often of the view that the capitalists will not simply acquiesce to the replacement of the old capitalist order but rather will fight tooth and nail to defend it, and hence will need to be fought against by the newly empowered workers.

If anything, anarchists are of the view that the new society will also need to be defended from those who would seek to institute a party dictatorship. This has been borne out by the experiences of the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Civil War where the Bolsheviks and the Stalinists proved to be just as much enemies as the Whites and the Nationalists, respectively.

[rotting bones]

I agree that anarchists are in favor of fighting the enemies of the new society. The Marxist position is that this fight won't be effective without state organization.

According to Marxism, the socialist state is supposed to use force to restructure society and then abolish itself to create an anarchist utopia that Marxists call "Communism". This "Communist" society doesn't have a state. Law and order is enforced by local militias. This is made possible by the fact that the socialist state that preceded it used mass organization to destroy the capitalist militaries against which local militias don't stand a chance. See Marx's comments about the Paris Commune on the Wikipedia article.

IIRC online tankies accuse anarchists of hypocrisy. They say that anarchists also organized armies with state power when they were in charge. This is a Marxist position, not an anarchist one. To be strictly anarchist, you should abolish the state immediately and rely on volunteer militias alone.

According to some Marxists, the socialist state also serves other functions like ramping up production to aim for post-scarcity. There is infighting among Marxists on this point. Some Marxists think that ramping up production should be left to capitalism, and the socialist state should concern itself with the transition to Communism.

There are too many problems with this whole idea for me to list them all, but that is the Marxist position as I understand it.

[Raphael]

I agree that anarchists are in favor of fighting the enemies of the new society. The Marxist position is that this fight won't be effective without state organization.

According to Marxism, the socialist state is supposed to use force to restructure society and then abolish itself to create an anarchist utopia that Marxists call "Communism".

As Alex Harrowell once put it in a review of some book about the Soviet Union, Soviet officials who were relying on the state as their pension scheme generally weren't that keen on the idea of their state actually withering away...

IIRC online tankies accuse anarchists of hypocrisy. They say that anarchists also organized armies with state power when they were in charge.

It's EXTREMELY rare for me to agree with tankies on anything, but I'm afraid they have a point there. Some anarchists seem to theorize a lot about social institutions that, if they would actually exist, would effectively be a state. And on this very board, former anarchist Travis even once explicitly said that anarchists just want to rename the state.

There have been a lot of political systems in modern history that were effectively brutal dictatorships, but officially democracies. So I think it's perfectly possible to have a system that would be effectively a brutal dictatorship, but officially an anarchy.

[Travis B.]

I agree that anarchists are in favor of fighting the enemies of the new society. The Marxist position is that this fight won't be effective without state organization.

According to Marxism, the socialist state is supposed to use force to restructure society and then abolish itself to create an anarchist utopia that Marxists call "Communism". This "Communist" society doesn't have a state. Law and order is enforced by local militias. This is made possible by the fact that the socialist state that preceded it used mass organization to destroy the capitalist militaries against which local militias don't stand a chance. See Marx's comments about the Paris Commune on the Wikipedia article.

IIRC online tankies accuse anarchists of hypocrisy. They say that anarchists also organized armies with state power when they were in charge. This is a Marxist position, not an anarchist one. To be strictly anarchist, you should abolish the state immediately and rely on volunteer militias alone.

According to some Marxists, the socialist state also serves other functions like ramping up production to aim for post-scarcity. There is infighting among Marxists on this point. Some Marxists think that ramping up production should be left to capitalism, and the socialist state should concern itself with the transition to Communism.

There are too many problems with this whole idea for me to list them all, but that is the Marxist position as I understand it.

The thing is to an anarchist, anarchist militias differ from state militaries based on the fact that they are not rooted in authority (e.g. the soldiers elect their officers), and not being rooted in authority makes them no less capable of fighting the capitalists' armies.

Of course, I think that the Marxists you allude to do have a point there - Free Ukraine and Catalonia under the CNT/FAI were more state-like than anarchists would like to admit. Thing is, that does not mean that I would have opposed them! Rather, they were effectively trying to build a more direct democracy than your typical parliamentary kind, and this is something I would have definitely supported had I been there at the time. This is a big part of why I consider myself a democratic socialist these days, because I see what anarchists are really for as being a more democratic state than is possible through traditional democracy, and I support this while recognizing that it really is not stateless as anarchists would like to believe.

[Travis B.]

I should note that the reason why anarchists do not consider the social structures they are for as constituting a state is because they see them as being purely bottom up and not rooted in authority, and the see the state as being inherently based in authority. For instance, a commonly-proposed anarchist structure is the workers' council, where each entity within it selects delegate(s) based on voting one or more persons from amongst themselves to carry out their will within the workers' council. Unlike representatives in a typical democracy these delegates serve solely to do the will of those they delegate for, and can be arbitrarily and immediately recalled and replaced for any reason as such. Furthermore, they are supposed to be regularly rotated to avoid developing a professional political class. Thing is, these workers' councils to me still constitute a form of government, because to function their decisions must be binding, even if anarchists may not see them as constituting authority. So in essence the anarchists more attempt to define away the state with their proposed structures than actually eliminate government itself. And yes, I personally support workers' councils as a structure, but I do not attempt to explain away their being a form of state.

[rotting bones]

As Alex Harrowell once put it in a review of some book about the Soviet Union, Soviet officials who were relying on the state as their pension scheme generally weren't that keen on the idea of their state actually withering away...

I was about to say this, but to its credit, the Soviet Union really did abolish itself eventually.

Of course, I think that the Marxists you allude to do have a point there - Free Ukraine and Catalonia under the CNT/FAI were more state-like than anarchists would like to admit. Thing is, that does not mean that I would have opposed them! Rather, they were effectively trying to build a more direct democracy than your typical parliamentary kind, and this is something I would have definitely supported had I been there at the time. This is a big part of why I consider myself a democratic socialist these days, because I see what anarchists are really for as being a more democratic state than is possible through traditional democracy, and I support this while recognizing that it really is not stateless as anarchists would like to believe.

Marxists have also supported democratic socialist states. Vanguardism is a Leninist thing that leads to authoritarian control. If hypocrisy is allowed, anyone could support anything, really.

Personally, I think it's more fruitful to look at the structure of a just state instead of obsessing over who to kill to have the whole rotten structure come crashing down. Possibly, this puts me outside the far left altogether. On the other hand, I'm told direct democracy is a far left idea.

[Moose-tache]

obsessing over who to kill...

Stop reading my diary.

[hwhatting]

As Alex Harrowell once put it in a review of some book about the Soviet Union, Soviet officials who were relying on the state as their pension scheme generally weren't that keen on the idea of their state actually withering away...

I was about to say this, but to its credit, the Soviet Union really did abolish itself eventually.

Well, there were people trying to stop this, and a lot of (then often former) bureaucrats in the former Socialist countries continued to hanker after the old system. For a long time, the PDS (successor party to East Germany's ruling SED, now merged into the Left Party) had its best election results in the parts of East Berlin that had housing estates built for and inhabited by the nomenklatura.
But more to the point, the opening under Gorbachev showed the party elites that the privileges that they had (three-bedroom appartments, small summer houses with a garden, an assigned car, a somewhat better selection of consumer goods) were stuff that the Upper and Middle Middle classes (to whom they would compare themselves) in Capitalist countries took for granted and often exceeded, and that by using their positions to grab, exploit and (later, when privatisation started) sell the parts of the state under their control, they could afford a much more affluent life style. Those who did became oligarchs or at least filthy rich, those who didn't indeed often ended up with a pension eaten away by inflation and a lot of resentment.

[Raphael]

Question: Does anyone know of a good book on the phenomenon known as "normalcy bias"? Preferably an affordable book, that is, a book sold at "academics writing for the general public" prices, not at "academics writing for other academics" prices.

[Raphael]

These things that the US military keeps shooting down over North America are starting to creep me out.

notsaying.jpg (70.45 KiB) Viewed 1579 times

[rotting bones]

Those who did became oligarchs or at least filthy rich, those who didn't indeed often ended up with a pension eaten away by inflation and a lot of resentment.

Definitely. So it's conceivable that another form of government might dissolve itself for other reasons.

[WeepingElf]

These things that the US military keeps shooting down over North America are starting to creep me out.

You see WWIII right around the corner again?

[rotting bones]

These things that the US military keeps shooting down over North America are starting to creep me out.

You see WWIII right around the corner again?

Maybe probes before Taiwan? I don't think anyone is looking for colonies like in the old days. Besides, who would be looking to challenge American hegemony except China and Peter Thiel?

[Raphael]

You see WWIII right around the corner again?

Nah, I just wonder who's sending these things, and what they're up to.