Maybe as an experiment, let's try to understand each other's positions ITT and not have the same boring old arguments (because they're boring).
Edit - nice discussion everyone, thanks <3. I'm seeing a lot of responses from ML and not many from anarchists, but maybe I'm the only anarchist on this site lol
Simple as the state has a great capacity to harm people. States are necessary in a world with international competition. The capacity to harm innocent people is directly tied to capacity to harm bad actors who would seek to destroy a socialist project. I pray for a world that does not require states. But I've never seen anything like it.
Matt Christman's criticism of Graeber and Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything" does a decent job of explaining why all these, honestly beautiful and inspiring, rather anarchist societies universally fell to people with an advanced state apparatus for violence. You cannot defend yourself from violence with a system of non-control. Any examples to the contrary are an exception, usually of a people who are unusually aligned toward resisting by an awful outside force. Yes a lot of farmers and forest-living people can kill invaders, but they cannot maintain control and they cannot organize to resist other forms of invasion. Thus the state.
I am not a fan of Stalin. But he was absolutely the man for the job at that time and he performed excellently. We live in a world of terror and it sucks. I want to live in a world where I can just grow potatoes in the woods and voluntarily associate with nice people who have wool or cotton, but that is not this world. Maybe someday we'll get there, but there will always be the threat of someone with the exploited surplus value of a gun to fuck it up.
I love anarchists. I don't even think they're naive. They understand a fundamental problem of society. They want what's best. And they perform an essential duty to make things better by destroying the existing state and its apparati. But fundamentally it is not sustainable. Regrettably, coercion and violence are necessary to sustain a project contrary to capitalism.
i agree with this but there may be future conditions that make states different from what they are now.
i used to identify more or less ancom and see anarchism in modern conditions as an attempt to speedrun communism which is absolutely admirable but like you said it can be easily crushed by state power.
i do think there may be future conditions where state power could be circumvented completely. crazy sci/fi hypothetical stuff like being able to take control of a non-state apparatus such as a friendly artificial superintelligence or if decentralized manufacturing and power generation becomes viable or common. or more likely neoliberalism or whatever we are doing now continues to weaken state power to the point where anarchist solutions to anticapitalism become the most likely to arise. or fragmentation/weakening of global systems due to climate change or catastrophe causes state power to be so distorted that a bottom-up approach becomes the most efficient becaus there is simply no state to seize nor even be crafted from the ashes. some of these scenerios may imply a severe reduction in technology and living conditions where an ancom solution simply becomes a way to stave off a return to feudalism and provide starting point to rebuild into an unknown future.
maybe i'm just a go-with-the-flow marxist at the moment but i do think it's good to have a full set of tools and that includes everything from strict ideologically principled marxist-leninism to anarcho-communism and every conceivable synthesis and adaptation in between or in the future.
We will have that, but it will be you scavenging for water and food during the climate change apocalypse 50 years from now at best.