Both Marxists and anarchists agree that the ultimate end goal is communism, right? A classless, stateless society.
So like in the first 100 days of the USSA would it be acceptable to most anarchists to allow them to pursue anarchy in like communes and extended formal boarders similar to, broadly, like how Hong Kong or the Vatican worked. A sort of city-state situation?
It involves boarders and some formalized trade agreements and everything else anarchists hate, but would something like that be possible in the name of revolution? A sort of temporary two state solution.
Maybe I'm completely missing the point but I'm just trying to think of how to make it work in a pragmatic sense
A couple of thoughts regarding this situation in the US:
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Any new socialist system will have some aspects of what existed before it. Given how interconnected the current economy is, there's no way that most individual communes could work imo without some kind of a larger organizational structure.
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Given its size and diversity, I doubt very many people in the US would support a strong centralized state, either, and it would likely do a poor job of addressing local issues and meeting people's needs.
Given these 2 points, I think we'd end up with something that incorporates a mix of decentralized and centralized, where it makes sense, which wouldn't be too far off from the federal structure we have now. You'd probably see "states" break up and reorganize according to population centers, and much more local autonomy where it makes sense. I just don't think absolute decentralization would be viable in the short term, though it's possible for the system to evolve more towards this over time by localizing key resources, like food and power.
This is kind of what I was getting at. I wonder if socialism with American characteristics is better suited to the task because of our federated history. Something like the EU but not neoliberal and regions are granted enough autonomy to pursue Anarchist thought.
Of course that brings its own host of issues about how things get split up, but thats a whole problem in itself
That reminds me of something I was pondering the other day but then forgot about again.
Imagine if you had something like an ML state with distinct regions organized within it as anarchist communes, doesn't that by itself challenge the notion that you would need the state at all?And would that be something that is by itself therefore unacceptable to the state, or at least to the bureaucrat class that necessarily forms within the state?
I think that would be the goal and probably what Lenin was hoping for in the USSR, after a radical restructuring, the state becomes basically just a trade organization.
That would make sense, basically something like a loose framework that can come together as is necessary at times and disband or go dormant when it is not needed anymore at a later point?
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I honestly can't think of a historical example where, after the bourgeoisie where defeated, the contradiction between Marxism and anarchism didn't fully come to its head and become antagonistic. Trotsky's Red Army vs. Makhnov's Black Army being the archetypal example. If anyone has an example where this doesn't happen I'd be very interested in reading about it.
One thing another user here made me aware of a few days ago, that might qualify as an anarchistic form of organization that existed within an ML state for at least some time, would be the Artels in Russia.
From the wiki:
An artel (Russian: арте́ль) was any of various cooperative associations that existed in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. They began centuries ago but were especially prevalent from the time of the emancipation of the Russian serfs (1861) through the 1950s. In the later Soviet period (1960s–1980s), the term was mostly phased out with the complete monopolization of the Soviet economy by the state.
Artels were semiformal associations for craft, artisan, and light industrial enterprises. Often artel members worked far from home and lived as a commune. Payment for a completed job was distributed according to verbal agreements, quite often in equal shares.[1] Often artels were for seasonal industry; fishing, hunting, harvesting of crops, logging, and gathering of wild plants, berries, and mushrooms were prime examples of activities that were in many cases seasonal (although not invariably).Additionally I found this stackexchange discussion off them which has some interesting numbers(don't know if they really check out or not):
Overall by the beginning of 1950s there were 114000 artels with about 2 million employees. They made up to 6% of GDP, including 40% of all furniture, 70% of metallic tableware, more than a third of knitted wear and hosiery, nearly all toys.
Artels owned about a hundred of R&D bureaus, 22 testing labs and two research institutes.
Artels pioneered production of the Soviet lamp-based radio receivers and CRT televisions.
During the war artels produced weapons and ammunition such as Sudayev machineguns and artillery shells.Otherwise I'm drawing a blank too at the moment.
So in America, what you're saying, is anarcho-gamer houses. Imagine the smell
It's more complex. A lot of anarchists joined Communist Party and collectivization was basically inspired by anarchist agrarian communes.
