To all full-grown hexbears, NO DUNKING IN MY THREAD...ONLY TEACH, criminal scum who violate my Soviet will be banned three days and called a doo doo head...you have been warned
To all full-grown hexbears, NO DUNKING IN MY THREAD...ONLY TEACH, criminal scum who violate my Soviet will be banned three days and called a doo doo head...you have been warned
Anarchism is idealist, starting with an abstract principle of anti-hierarchicalism and individualism. It can be, but is not necessarily communist. Anarchists typically desire communism (a stateless and classless society) as an end state, but don't have a clear plan to get there, sense most are against all states for some reason. Scientific socialism or Marxism doesn't start from abstract ideals, it studies the material world using a dialectical understanding to come to its conclusions. It recognizes that states are not abstract oppressive entities. States are monopolies on violence legitimizing and protecting class rule. Historically the ruling class has been the exploiting class. Socialists aim to smash the current state, and make the working class the ruling class, in order to lift up the oppressed and subjugate the oppressors. When class distinctions cease the state will "wither away." Anarchists may use the Marxist method of analysis. Let me know if you have any more questions.
Anarchists don’t hate states for “no reason”, they recognize that a state will always do what it can to preserve itself, regardless of the intentions in it’s creation. This does not mean anarchists are universally right, but dismissing them out of hand is dangerous. We should at least understand why this concern isn’t the case, rather than assuming they have no reasons for their beliefs so that we may dismiss them.
Any organization is going to do its best to preserve itself. We recognize the necessity of criticism and self criticism within a socialist organization. I address the reason we all don't like states in my original comment. States are monopolies on violence. We all want to abolish the necessity for the existence of a monopoly on violence. But, as Mao said, "in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun." We must abolish class before we can abolish the state.
This seems unlikely to be true, at least, to the degree of the State.
Thats just because the state is massive and controls a lot of stuff about society. Ig you're right, but only in quantitative rather than qualitative difference.
Well, no, not all organizations are actually that zealous about their own existence. There are plenty of social organizations that form naturally and break apart naturally, sometimes dozens of times a day, in terms of friendships and groups and all manner of things.
Maybe so, but we marxists can solve the problems of our states without some principle of "anti-statism." Obviously, we want an end to the state, and a smashing of the existing state. It would be revisionism to have reverence for any state as an entity more than the people. However we can solve the problems of our own states through democratic centralism and criticism and self criticism like China's doing.
At what point does an attempt to change and modify the structure of the State to alleviate it’s issues distinguish itself from a principled anarchist attempt to create a new organizational structure? This isn’t me trying to “gotcha” Marxists, especially as one myself, but it seems to be approaching the same problem from both sides?
Not in the naive sense of us “having the same goal” of liberation, that notion that Lenin himself criticized, but the much more concrete common goal of the alleviation of the state’s negative features.
As Engels said, "These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves." We scientific socialists seek to smash the bourgeois state and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. That means that the interests of the majority will be guarded and workers of the state will not be payed more than anyone else, or have a prioritized existence, and so on. The most successful anarchists (like the Catalonians) establish a dictatorship of the proletariat and refuse to call it such. I encourage you to read or re-read Lenin's State and Revolution. Also, a primer on how China's socialist system actually works, like Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: a Guide for Foreigners, might be helpful.
An anarchist could easily turn this back on you: Do you really think, if you’ve successfully removed the state’s overbearing inclination towards self preservation, that you can really call it a state anymore? Surely after a certain point you’re just calling it such out of a desire to be separate.
Lenin addresses this directly. Historically states are means of oppression of the working class by the ruling class. We smash the state and create something ceases to be the same sort of state, but still is a state. For once the majority suppresses the minority that would wish to exploit. It is a very unique state, but it is still a state as such, for a state is a mechanism of class rule. When there are no longer classes there shall be no state.
This is tautological, a state is a mechanism of class rule and since it’s a mechanism of class rule, it’s a state.
Edit: My point here is that there’s more to the state than merely a mechanism of class rule, because plenty of mechanisms of class rule exist. The state is merely one obvious example.
The state is defined as the monopoly on violence. We agree, it seems.
Thank you for the explanation!