On the internet I don't see too many Anarchists give arguments past "communism doesn't work because communists are doomed to repeat the same exploitative power structures of the capitalist state" and "we dont know what an anarchist society will look like we gotta wait til we get there!" Which like...is not convincing to me at all. I've engaged in what was supposed to be consensus based decision making systems and there were a ton of flaws, though that's purely anecdotal.
So, I'd really like to have some suggestions on what to read that you think might really challenge where I stand/take anarchism more seriously. It might take me 5 years to get to them bc executive dysfunction but I really want to see if my mind can be changed on if it would be a better system from the get go than communism.
I think it would be super interesting to hear from anyone who shifted into anarchism from Marxism on why it made more sense to you
Something seems backwards here. It's not like the Zapatistas call themselves anarchists but the rest of the world refuses to acknowledge it. The Zapatistas have on multiple occasions said they do not care for anarchism, but they are often portrayed by the rest of the world as anarchist.
Yeah, that's what I meant. The world calls them Anarchists, they don't call themselves Anarchists, but many of their methods can be analyzed in dialogue with Anarchist theory and methods. The name is less important than the praxis.
Ah okay. Understood, thank you for clarifying and sorry for misunderstanding.
One thing it will say as a critique is that while there is a lot of misrepresentation of anarchism online, it's worth being careful not to go to the opposite extreme of being a terminally offline anarchist, as it were. In its experience with organizing, there's a lot of anarchists out there who are intensely insecure about not wanting to be one of "those" anarchists online. The consequence is that they don't just resist NATO propaganda, but genuinely important additions to structural analysis because they basically assume anything new is like, terminally online stuff that doesn't matter. it's had to waste a shitton of time and energy organizing to resist anarchists who will not get with the times and end up being incredibly chauvinistic because they're too busy throwing out dogwhistles abt how the other anarchists are children with no experience with REAL organizing, when everyone would've been better off if they sat down and listened and evaluated things they were being educated on instead of desperately trying to detect and avoid "terminally online" elements of anarchism.
For that reason it pretty much never tells anyone to be wary of "internet anarchism" because they overcorrect into this incredibly out of touch terminally offline anarchism that really slows down organizing and causes a great deal of harm.