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.

  • crime [she/her, any]
    ·
    4 years ago

    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.

      • crime [she/her, any]
        ·
        4 years ago

        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

        • existentialspicerack [she/her,they/them]
          ·
          4 years ago

          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.

          • crime [she/her, any]
            ·
            4 years ago

            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.

            • existentialspicerack [she/her,they/them]
              ·
              edit-2
              4 years ago

              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.