I have no doubt that any MLs here are pretty based, I don’t think anyone needs to prove anything to me, but I’m curious as to why you think Marxist-Leninism is the best way forward towards liberating the working class. Personally, I lean more towards authoritorian tendencies I just don’t think anything other than anarchism is a viable path forward and I think all the theory and history I’ve read tracks with that.analysis. I suppose you could call me socially ML but fiscally anarchist, lol.
Because the only way to beat a bad guy with a state is with a good guy with a state.
can you say it without dumping on anarchists tho?
What's dumping on anarchists about "I haven't seen any anarchist plan to solve this problem, or any anarchist group do this successfully at scale"? If you have counterpoints bring them up, don't just complain that criticisms of anarchism are mean
Saying you take issue with certain aspects of anarchism isn't the same thing as telling anarchists they suck. If you can't respond to criticisms of your ideology without taking it personally or using it as an opportunity to educate, how do you expect other people to take it seriously?
No one was saying kill the anarchists, I've never seen anyone say kill the anarchists even on more ML-heavy and less left-unity boards than this one. Seriously how did you get "I haven't heard an anarchist plan for this problem I am concerned about" with "kill all the anarchists"?
Because they (this specific poster) tend to call out sectarianism even before it occurs on a thread and they believe that it is a good use of their time.
im not saying don't criticize.
im saying "is it possible to say why you're good without dumping on anyone else?" because if not, you maybe have a problem.
I've seen "kill the anarchists" said pretty frequently, it's just removed by mods pretty quick so you don't see it unless it shows up in your replies.
If you're doing a direct comparison, like the prompt in the post, it's worth mentioning why you prefer one ideology to another yes.
okay fair, even if that reply had way more anarchist dumping than was necessary, but can you?
also; great name.
I don't think we're ever going to reach a point of agreement that saying "I haven't seen an anarchist plan for this problem I am concerned about, and anarchists have not achieved revolution at scale" is "dumping on anarchists" because it really just reads as mild materially-based critique to me.
And thank u uwu
also I want to make a 'be gay do crime' joke. but i expect you've heard it too many times.
everyone should do crime more. assuming consent.
it's not that we don't have solutions, it's just that they're always dismissed as 'utopian nonsense that could never work (excpet where it kinda has)' by ml's in a way not too far off from how communism in general is dismissed as 'harmful evil utopian nonsense' by libs.
I totally get that — I don't consider myself an anarchist but there are plenty of anarchist ideas and organizations that I really like, I just align more with MLism in terms of how I think we should get to communism. My point is mainly that I don't think that saying you haven't heard any anarchist solutions to specific problems that resonate with you is necessarily "dumping on anarchists" — I'm not the OP of that comment but usually if I make remarks like that I'm always curious to hear of anyone more well-read about or more well-versed in anarchism has any solutions that I may not have heard before. Its not dumping, it's at most mild criticism with an opening for discussion or education on anarchist views on the topic.
whoops, duplicate, thought periodic TOR change ate my connection and I got an error message when I submitted this.
okay so the core idea behind anarchism is like... have you ever played a pen+paper RPG? have you played enough of them that you've seen good groups and bad groups and problem players and shitty GM's?
you can't make a bad group a good group with the rules sytem, and you can't make a problem player or GM not a problem with the rules. they'll either cheat, disregard the rules, or keep being a problem. a "no being rapey at the table" rule won't make someone less rapey. and severe consequences are just shitty and has a chilling panopticon bullshit effect on everybody else, unless you dehumanize the problem player before you shoot them in the head for being appropriate, which has the same effect just about dehumanization rather than whatever the initial punishment was gonna be, and also someone might get brains on their character sheet and claim that makes their character extra smart and cheat at rolls or something and then you have to kill TWO members of your group, and do you have any idea how hard it is to get enough players to show up consistently for a game? it's such a pain in the ass.
the way you fix that is to fix the people. which isn't always practical, but nothing else works, short of just killing them all, and jesus the whole hobby would be fucking dead if we spent all our time murdering problem players and none of it playing. and then new problematic people would join and we'd never actually be DONE and it would all just be a big dumb murder cult. which actually sounds pretty fun as like an organized hobby where we keep score, but I digress. also, when you fix a problem, it can help fix OTHER problems and be on your side next time instead of a problem!
except with geopolitics and genocide and war and inequality and rape and capitalism instead of dice and pencils. maybe still murder cults.
that's the general-case anarchist thing. causes have effects, and if you pull the problem at the root, cutting the underlying causes, it may be harder, but you're actually stopping it, rather than just chopping down weeds forever and having to buy a machete and spraying the ground with pesticides and causing all sorts of other problems that are usually at least a significant fraction as bad as the weeds were. and having a cool machete.
as much as punishing people and their symptom behavior might be satisfying, it's not an actual solution. it doesn't really fix the problem long term, and there's always collateral damage to deal with that will eventually coalesce into a cancerous ecosystem of oppression. you gotta change the culture and the people, or they'll always be vulnerable to expoitation and authoritarianism. until that's done, there is no fix.
and don't give me "strong central planning is necessary to oppose imperialism", it's super close to hitler's "fascism is cool because it necessitates your enemies becoming at least a little fasch if they want any hope of beating you". modern (by which I mean "the past hundred and three years") military doctrine requires a certain amount of decentralization and autonomy of ground level commanders, and just about every time a more decentralized autonomous 'modern' doctrine influenced force has come up against a more ridgid old fashioned absolutist top-down command structure, it's been a blatantly one sided slaughter. even in the americas where the technology was wildly mismatched, the indigenous peoples still fought more than 1-1 against better armed better equipped colonizers with top-down authoritarian structures, who didn't fully win until they had repeating rifles, artillery, and long range electrical communications-against the almost-naked spear-and-stolen-musket-wielding apaches. you also see this play out among the steppe nomads who were basically a force of nature to the ancient world (and while ghengis/kublai were more authoritarian and disciplined than their predecessors, they were still less absolutist than their opposition with more autonomy granted to low level commanders)
as far as economics and distribution goes, there are a lot of subcategories, but generally it's creating independent infrastructures. take community gardens as an incredibly cliche example: you don't just set out a plot of land and say "okay, land here, seeds here, shovels here, go nuts!", you find the most passionate people who will take an interest in the project long term, and naturally gravitate to stewardship roles once they've devoured some knowledge. not in charge like managers, but more like docents or curators at a museum who can pass on knowledge and keep things organized/maintained according to the needs and desires of the community. but with everything. and a general despecialization. demystifying the world so generally everyone sees fewer black boxes,and can do more of their own stuff if they want to, having to rely less on toxic systems and infrastructures of capitalism so people are more free to resist. creating less wasteful transportation-not necessarily 0-and useful resiliency/decentralization in case of disaster or conflict. some climates just can't grow some things. some things take a long ass supply chain to build. sometimes those fuckers over there just make really kick-ass chairs. and ofc there's wonderful art everywhere so obvs you gotta spread that shit. collaboration across communities is natural and good, and keeps people in touch and reminds us that the world is not small. but not having to, having local stockpiles in case the river floods or the pass is snowed in or whatever, is good and efficient and lovely.
if you want to be less solarpunk and way more nerdy about all this: kind of like using bittorrent(an excellent analogy to anarchism) instead of FTP(a good analogue to state communism in the metaphor) (or streaming, fuck streaming and the capitalism it represents) for all downloads-data transmission is neither free nor carbon neutral. there might still be trackers and central repositories, some users may have better seed ratios, but all in all it's less wasteful more resilient and more humanizing to store+create your shit closer to where it's gonna be used. those are the general solutions behind anarchist thought, and if you want them applied more specifically, im sure somebody (possibly me, but maybe not) can help you there.
i know less about spain than ukraine, but anarchist projects have existed and been stable until the communists stabbed them in the back. you are our libs.
but also, say why you're good without mentioning why anyone else sucks. I want to see if you can.
nah sorry done here. if you think the anarchists in ukraine and spain were in the wrong relative to the soviets, im not having this discussion with you.
ive heard mixed things about makhno, but generally more positive than I have about lenin and his ilk. The situation was extreme, but I don't think there were any ways his people were worse than the red army.
I know less about spain, I mostly read lib shit on the subject so I don't entirely trust my knowledge base there.
every criticism I have for the USSR is tempered, like, there was never a reason to expect it to be less awful than it was and a lot of reasons to expect it to be worse, and the reasons it wasn't worse were probably entirely down to communism, but it was not a good or nice place. not that it ever had the chance to be, having been a pre-industrial shithole full of illiterate peasants used to being ruled by a king with barely any concept of their own authority spread out over 11 time zones with almost no infrastructure in most of them and immediately, from the moment of its conception, which only happened because everyone was already angry and hopeless and wracked by grief and loss at taking the ass end of the worst war humanity had known to date, attacked by capitalist world powers looking to sabotage it and cutting it off from anything it couldn't produce domestically(in their extreme climate) while it had to play at being a first world country AND defend itself from literally the entire rest of the continent plus like three others. they punched way above their weight class in a lot of things, and did far better than they had any right to. but also it was a totally reactionary shit hole that pumped its people full of xenophobic propaganda out of fear, and should never be held up as the example of 'communism works'. cuba or vietnam both work better for that, not that they don't have their own problems.
you could always just leave out these parts:
I’ve yet to see that happen through anarchism.
...and I've yet to see how anarchists plan to handle that besides hoping they’ll realize the error of their ways.
since they don't really add anything to your point anyway
That's not even my post, it's just not mean spirited and the OP of the thread is directly comparing anarchism with MLism, and it's a huge pet peeve of mine when any critique of an ideology is met with "but you could just not critique :angery:"
yeah fair enough, i didn't mean to jump on you. i think maybe for us it doesn't always feel something like that is being said in good faith and it can be hard to tell
totally but this wasn't a critique, it was 'why is x good' 'because y is bad' which is usually a tell that the person in question doesn't actually know any virtues of x, whether they exist or not.
oh, got it. you might wnat to mention other shit so it doesn't seem so hostile and sectarian. the amount of 'kill anarchists' i see from a particular brand of stupid ml is... a lot. and there's no superficial way to tell who's who. sorry for the hair trigger.
i report pretty often, and you are better about removing it than a lot of places .it just gets under one's skin after while, because you're human and finite and have human reaction times. it feels like I can't avoid summoning a swarm if I say the C word along with anything less than glowing praise and appropriated nationalistic fervor.
also, in part because you're good at removing it, i often here people deny that it happens. which is frustrating as fuck.
Until full communism is established, a strong state is the only way to deter existing capitalist states from trying to stamp out socialist ones. Central planning is vital for responding to crises like climate change, natural disasters, food shortages and famines, and pandemics, and I don't believe that a decentralized system would be able to handle those appropriately.
Part of the reason why the us is such a clusterfuck when trying to handle anything (like the pandemic) even compared to other failing capitalist states is because of its decentralization.
And without a central party and an established party line, at scale there will be too much infighting and directionless action to seize or smash the state, and too much opportunity for reactionaries to seize or reestablish the state in the aftermath - you'd need many more anarchists to defend the new society until everyone was on board than you would need members of an organized party.
your argument is nonsense and bullshit when stalin was obviously cuter.
look, we generally nope out of team sports because they're pointlessly jingoistic bullshit. this is all we've got.
Effectiveness and the fact an ML state is clearly better than a capitalist state.
I want all hierarchy gone. But I'm not naive about anarchism's survival chances while capitalism still exists in the world.
Hierarchy will be easier to defeat in a socialist state than in a capitalist state. If we even need to "defeat" it at all. It all comes down to whether the theory of the state fading away is true or not. If it's true, that's fine. If it's not then I will join the fight to end it.
I mean, good luck to any anarchist tryingtto form a community with people that believe that fast food workers should be paid below living wage, let alone that shit like Tom hanks was replaced by a body double or whatever q shit.
We in America definitely need a vanguard party and a huge re-education effort on like 80 percent of the population.
Luckily if America ends,you probably don't need to much of a military to defend against external threats,tthough.
you need a movement with more than just educated western leftists and ML seems to work in the third world
Do I have to call myself anything? It doesn't feel like anything real. I call myself a communist and sometimes a Marxist but who really gives a shit. I want a better world.
I hate the weird internet pressure to define myself in some clique when I live in the USA without an organized nationwide left to speak of
am I being a lib or what
Honestly it sounds like we have the exact opposite reasons for approaching either: I think anarchism is an ideal and confederated autonomous but connected communes, collectives or militant unions is dope, and by temperament I have an innate opposition to authority and resent any impositions. But, I don't see that form of organization surviving out of the gate with the forces of capital arrayed against it. For its success I would have to imagine a very high level of political education and consciousness across society, and while we should strive for that I don't know how much can be achieved and in what timeframe. Leninism has the advantage of allowing a minority at a crucial juncture to exploit crises for advances in socialism. I also believe that the actions taken in defence of a successful socialist revolution out of necessity, what ensures its survival may inevitably resemble a "statist" solution.
But I'm not a secular prophet and don't know what shape anything will take, I have had crucial friendships with anarchists and think building a coalition of anti-bigotry revolutionary socialists (regardless of which dead guy's name is next to their tendency) is mutually beneficial for everyone.
