I was institutionalised and experienced first hand "benevolent" state violence and turns out it's indistiguishable to to all other state violence and is utterly immoral . It will only ever alienate people and plant the seeds for it's eventual distruction. Now if global revolution was successfull maybe that destruction would be into communism but I don't see it ever going forward only backwards because heirarchy and violence still present in those societies.

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Because I don't give a fuck about any "revolution" that responds to workers striking for:

• Immediate new elections to the Soviets; the present Soviets no longer express the wishes of the workers and peasants. The new elections should be held by secret ballot, and should be preceded by free electoral propaganda for all workers and peasants before the elections. Freedom of speech and of the press for workers and peasants, for the Anarchists, and for the Left Socialist parties.

• The right of assembly, and freedom for trade union and peasant associations.

• The organisation, at the latest on 10 March 1921, of a Conference of non-Party workers, soldiers and sailors of Petrograd, Kronstadt and the Petrograd District.

• The liberation of all political prisoners of the Socialist parties, and of all imprisoned workers and peasants, soldiers and sailors belonging to working class and peasant organisations.

• The election of a commission to look into the dossiers of all those detained in prisons and concentration camps.

• The abolition of all political departments in the armed forces; no political party should have privileges for the propagation of its ideas, or receive State subsidies to this end. In place of the political section, various cultural groups should be set up, deriving resources from the State.

• The immediate abolition of the militia detachments set up between towns and countryside.

• The equalisation of rations for all workers, except those engaged in dangerous or unhealthy jobs.

• The abolition of Party combat detachments in all military groups; the abolition of Party guards in factories and enterprises. If guards are required, they should be nominated, taking into account the views of the workers.

• The granting to the peasants of freedom of action on their own soil, and of the right to own cattle, provided they look after them themselves and do not employ hired labour.

• We request that all military units and officer trainee groups associate themselves with this resolution.

• We demand that the Press give proper publicity to this resolution.

• We demand the institution of mobile workers' control groups.

• We demand that handicraft production be authorised, provided it does not utilise wage labour.

with the wholesale slaughter of workers and then defiling their names by spreading lies that they were working with counter-revolutionary forces (We're not sure which ones, it keeps changing, but all we know for sure is that there was SOME counter-revolutionary forces behind this). At that point you're no different than the fucking Tsar no matter how much you talk about putting power in the hands of the workers if you just consolidate it into the elite party officials while claiming to be socialist, and brutally repressing any actual attempt at workers liberation.

If you don't care about or sympathize with those demands, you have no place claiming you support the emancipation of the working class. Chances are all you want is a revenge fantasy where you and your buddies get to be the new Bourgeoisie and relish in the power to crush anyone who disagrees with you or gets in your way.

People are gonna see straight through you if when the time comes you proclaim support for rebelling against the capitalist scum who keep you toiling in factories 12+ hours a day with no say in what happens in their workplace in return for meager wages and no autonomy with brutal repression for those who dissent politically, but then when you take over, you do those exact same things while proclaiming, "Sorry, but its necessary for the good of the revolution". Then again, fuck your revolution, and you'll never use us as your pawns again.

I dont see the question as rigidly either ML or anarchist, rather I think people see the state in a highly idealised way, rather than focusing on the material basis of the state which is military power. I think a strong organized and even hierarchical military power is needed to wage war and defend the nascent prolet state but unlike MLs I don't think that this military power should be excluded to just the standing army or "loyalists" or the "vanguard", but effort should be made to include the entire proletariat into it.

Can you be more specific? Otherwise I would just be rehashing typical ancom talking points as to why I prefer it. This debate has been done countless times.

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is a good read to get a start on understanding some of our perspective

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when I was a very very young, through absolutely no fault of my own (really before anything could have been considered my fault), tossed into a bunch of bullshit systems. everybody else had control of my life, and they used it with no regard to my well being.

some of those systems were out to punish me when they were supposed to be educating me, and ended up holding me back in the places I excelled-I was once expelled for writing poetry as part of a writing assignment I'd misunderstood and gone WAY above and beyond on. after this happened twice, I didn't write any poetry again for twenty years, and I'm pretty fucking good at it. I was told not to read novels in class because it made the other students insecure. I was told I had to go out at recess, even though I'd have much rather enjoyed a book in peace and avoid the possibility of fights with other kids. it wasn't malevolent, at least not at first. they couldn't have hated me from moment one (though it definitely got to that point because I was a pain in the ass who insisted things make sense), it was just... the way the system was designed. and they couldn't bring themselves to deviate, even when it went exactly against the stated goals of that system.

a system designed, supposedly, to give me a stable home, was being used to destroy any sense of home space or stability I had in ways that should be a crime against humanity when done against people in that developmental phase. I was treated like a criminal and ferried arbitrarily from place to place, by state thugs when I objected. I'd come home from school to find home was different and all the pets had died, kept from leaving the state, banned, week to week, from totally arbitrary activities (video games? reading? the park?) by literal court orders-not because I was 'criminal' or 'bad', but because some delusional asshole who had never met me decided it was 'for [my] own good'. some of them were corrupt as fuck, some of them meant well, but all of them hurt me. they didn't know how to do anything else, and no matter how loud I screamed or how hard I kicked or clawed at the doors of the police car or bit the thugs who dragged me away from home twice or more a week, I didn't seem to have a voice in my own life. that shit fucked me up for a long time. I had to do a lot of crimes to heal from that. an immoderate amount of violence and destruction too.

I also had some pretty early experiences with monsters. the bad kinds. the kinds that we think of as the boogeyman around here. pedophiles, CIA fuckers, the military industrial complex. and they always had reasons for the shit they did. no matter how horrible the shit they did, they did it for reasons. real material reasons. sometimes delusional, sometimes bullshit, but there was always a reason, always a cause to the effect, and a reason they believed it, if you dug deep enough. and I figured, if you can change the reason, fix the cause, pull the problem out by the root, maybe you don't have any more monsters in the first place?

I saw class disparity between the sides of my family. saw how some people had SO MUCH and others had nothing, and I couldn't find anything to justify it. there was no reason. they both worked s hard, they both cared about others the same amount. being a more or less morally upstanding person didn't seem to make a difference. but one side were kept from having nice things and cool toys and stable well kept homes, and the other had servants, and WTF? and there were armed thugs to enforce these distinctions? so I asked myself, "why thugs?", and came to the conclusion that if we all stopped being so stratified and unfair, there wouldn't be any point in thugs.

and then I actually talked with people who had been suffering from addiction, who I'd been told were the cause of everything bad. and every single one of them had some deep pain they were trying to soothe with drugs, some old wound they couldn't find a way to heal. often that this shit society wouldn't let them heal.

I saw people with money get away with things nobody should ever be able to do. because it was in line with the toxic culture. because it was in line with the 'social order'. im not even talking about bribes, they werejust 'the right sort', so they got off. I realized laws aren't shit. they don't protect shit. they don't fix shit. they don't stop shit. they have only ever been a tool of oppression, a way to make the weak oppress themselves.

I was homeless and saw the difference between how I was treated when it was known I was connected to the moneyed side of my family. the difference in what I could get away with when I dressed certain ways vs others, and what I could do as opposed to darker skinned comrades. it was like fucking magic, and it was absolutely disgusting.

and of course all manner of philosophy and theory and lived queernesses and meditations on identity and self and experiences in activism, some revelations while being actively suicidal that the more you give, the less possible it is to exploit you, and some other stuff at other times about how anyone in a cage is everyone in a cage, but I was mostly there before all that.

so I can't respect authority, and I can't respect toxic systems, and I know laws and authority cause more problems (most of them) than they fix (none of them), and obviously capitalism is evil. and I can't stop thinking/seeing in terms of systems. you can't legislate away human error, you can't create a system that makes bad DM's or problem players not a thing, and trying just ruins the game for the rest of us. it's all made of people, and if you want to change it, you need to change people.

I spent time making myself into who I wanted to be, and deciding where I wanted to go and who i wanted to be and what I would need if I wanted to do that, and I realized I would need a better world, or at last to be someone in the process of making a better world.

I saw in various lefty spaces and histories (some of them ML, credit where due), how giving people agency and purpose made them so much more. I felt like that was a thing that the world should optimize for. and I saw how horrible it was when that was crushed out of people, reduced to bland delusional lib survival.

so I'm an anarchist, because everything else leads eventually to something unpleasant and shitty. because any unfairness or coercion requires whole ecosystems of unfairness and coercion, like maintaining one lie requires telling other lies. its a cancer, and there's no room for that in any kind of world I want to live in. you can't half-ass doing the right thing, and you can't count on ridgid inhuman systems to act humanely without human influence and agency.

and also black and red is just really aesthetically nice and something I naturally gravitate towards anyway, and it works with my complexion.

though recently, while still believing all of this, I've become much more skeptical about the possibility of improving people at scale. i still don't think any other way can work long term, that ends to not exist independently from the means used to achieve them, and that everything we do shapes us. im just less optimistic about people and whether THIS will work these days. its still the most rewarding thing to attempt, until we can openly murder nazis.