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Burn A Flag

12th November 2010, 02:53

Stephen Colbert

12th November 2010, 03:14

Anarchism wants nothing to do with the state and its protection of private property. Anarchists want the abolishment of both the market and the government which protects the private property exploited by it. Anarchism is much more "grass-roots".

Socialism is, from my understanding, in the basic sense, public ownership of the means of productions. And there is literally no flaw in worker ownership of their workplace. It's a safe position. Communism lite.

LiberalDemocraticMarxist

12th November 2010, 03:17

I have much respect for the ideologies of anarchism and socialism, and I would like to compare the two and their possibility for sucess or failure. From my limited knowledge about anarchsim, it seems like it would be more likely to fail if transitioned to immediately after capitalism due to the attitudes and culture of capitalism without a government, as seen in Somalia. I know anarchists do advocate organization and not just random anarcho capitalist society like Somalia, but I tend to think some people might behave that way in an immediate transition from Capitalism to Anarchy. What do you Anarchists think makes Anarchism better than socialism and more acheivable. What do you socialists think makes socialism a better ideology? I realize that Anarchism and Socialism are very broad notions but try to give a general comparison.

Anarchism will always degrade to the rule of violence, without a state security force to protect the people, groups will come together and seize control through violence. We cannot have an individual government for each person, the best we can have is a government of the people, and leave those people free to govern as they wish, knowing that liberalism will prevail because it is right that we all shape our own destiny. Anarchy will bring about injustice through violence and opportunism, the absence of the state creates the absence of character. The real way to freedom is a state that is liberal, that teaches freedom of the mind, and then presents us with all available options, socialism will follow because it is the government of the people, and it is the dream of all people to be free, and to lead themselves.

Fawkes

12th November 2010, 03:24

I have much respect for the ideologies of anarchism and socialism, and I would like to compare the two and their possibility for sucess or failure.
Anarchism is a form of socialism. Libertarian socialism is for all intents and purposes synonymous with anarchism, though there exists some variants that aren't exactly in line with anarchist thought, namely council communism.

From my limited knowledge about anarchsim, it seems like it would be more likely to fail if transitioned to immediately after capitalism due to the attitudes and culture of capitalism without a government
A revolution is a process, it's not like we'd go to bed one evening and it'd be capitalist and the next morning it would be anarchist. It's a long process during which there is a major shift (i.e. revolution) in attitudes and culture that eventually culminates itself in the takeover of the means of production by the producers. It's not like a small group of us is going to just storm the capital one day and then declare anarchy.

as seen in Somalia.
Somalia is a whole other can of worms about which I admittedly do not know a huge amount, but suffice to say, it is in no way anarchism. Also, it is a misnomer to say that Somalia does not have a government, just not an effective centralized one. A government is merely a body through which -- for lack of a better term -- public policies are administered, it is not synonymous with "state". Anarchists are not necessarily anti-government (meaning the existence of a government, we all are against the existing forms of government).

but I tend to think some people might behave that way in an immediate transition from Capitalism to Anarchy
It's not an immediate transition. And those people are called counter-revolutionaries, and will be dealt with accordingly.

What do you Anarchists think makes Anarchism better than socialism and more acheivable.
I'm going to assume that in asking this question, you mean what makes anarchism better than state socialism. What makes it better is that it is a fallacy to think that it is remotely possible for individual people to take control of the state, and then work for its destruction "in the name of the working class". In gaining control of the state, those in power have merely usurped the position previously held by the bourgeois, and will fight to defend their positions and perpetuate the state's existence in the name of "the revolution". All people are subjugated to the state and are unable to act independently of it. If they do so, for example, in the form of setting up their own workers' councils outside of the authority of the state, they will be a direct threat to the existence of the state and as such be viewed as counter-revolutionary, and those in power, regardless of their intentions, will fight to eliminate this threat to their own power. History has proven this to be the case (Spanish Civil War is a good example). One of the primary roles the state serves is the defense and perpetuation of itself, meaning that anybody operating outside the mandate of this centralized political structure will be a threat to its existence and dealt with as such.

Edit: Communism = stateless, classless society. I don't understand how anybody could possibly think that by putting people in a position of power in the state, a stateless society could be realized.

Post-Something

12th November 2010, 03:33

Well, Socialism, despite also being difficult, is obviously much easier to strive for. Anarchism is nearly impossible to actually strategize, and it seems to me that they just end up copying the marxists in most cases. At least for Socialism we actually have documented cases where it was a succesful movement and people tried different apporoaches to a multitude of problems. With Anarchism, its a totally new ball game. For one thing youd probably need people to be indoctrinated in Anarchist propaganda for a generation or two, at least be exposed to the ideas as a viable alternative. The conditions would have to be highly divided, and maybe even unsolvable, which isn't how it appears to most people. The other thing is that nobody really knows what Anarchism is, its like the word Democracy or freedom, everyone has a different conception of it and how it would work, I mean how many different kinds of Anarchists or on this board just now? To be honest, and I dont want to offend anyone or start anything; Anarchism is a nice idea with some really nice ideals, but if anyone honestly thinks that its what the world needs right now, I just dont believe theyre looking around enough.

Sosa

12th November 2010, 03:40

Fawkes

12th November 2010, 03:44

Well, Socialism, despite also being difficult, is obviously much easier to strive for.

I'm again going to assume that you mean state socialism. And of course it is easier to strive for, because it much more closely resembles the existing system.

Anarchism is nearly impossible to actually strategize, and it seems to me that they just end up copying the marxists in most cases.
When has this occurred? And copying? Ideologies are not property.

At least for Socialism we actually have documented cases where it was a succesful movement and people tried different apporoaches to a multitude of problems
Oh yes, cause people all over the world are experiencing the joys of an equal, classless, and stateless society. Those are, after all, the end goals of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", right?

With Anarchism, its a totally new ball game.
For one thing, anarchism has been around in certain forms for longer than Marxism.

For one thing youd probably need people to be indoctrinated in Anarchist propaganda for a generation or two, at least be exposed to the ideas as a viable alternative.
Indoctrinated? Dude, this isn't the gulags were talking about. Of course it would take time, revolutions are a process.

The other thing is that nobody really knows what Anarchism is, its like the word Democracy or freedom, everyone has a different conception of it and how it would work
And everyone knows what communism and socialism means?

I mean how many different kinds of Anarchists or on this board just now?
Most of the differences are trivial. In many ways, they're more semantic differences than anything. Also, what about Marxists, Marxist-Leninists, Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, Stalinists, Anti-Revionists, Hoxhaists, (wow, you guys love personality cults don't you?), need I go on?

To be honest, and I dont want to offend anyone or start anything
Nothing personal

Anarchism is a nice idea with some really nice ideals, but if anyone honestly thinks that its what the world needs right now, I just dont believe theyre looking around enough.
Well, considering that the end goals of anarchism and Marxism are the same, namely, a stateless, classless society, I'd say that at least all of us on this board agree that it is exactly what the world needs right now. The contention comes in the means by which we go about enacting that, at which point I direct you to my previous post.

Burn A Flag

12th November 2010, 03:45

Well I agree with you both. Fawkes in the point that communism will probably never happen with state socialism, since I personally believe that the state in general (all states) are simply a beauracratic nightmare which exists to perpetuate itself. But I also agree that transitioning to a society without a state would take lots of time and an almost complete restructuring of society. I mean, look at the RSFSR after the civil war. They tried to restructure the economy, but then ended up transitioning back to market capitalism with the NEP due to the huge drop in productivity. It's disheartening to see these things happen. One has to realize as well that it's not always someone (like Lenin) "selling out", sometimes there isn't much of an alternative. State socialism hasn't been too sucessful though due to that beauracratic ruling class (like the one in the USSR which capitulated to market reform formally in 1989 and degenerated long before that). It's all so unprecedented it makes these ideas hard to implement. Can someone give me some good sources to read about the Anarchist areas of Spain during the civil war that I can read about to exemplify some anarchist sucess? Also the Zapatistas, since they seemed pretty close to anarchist. The problems with both of those were that they were crushed by the state. It seems like state socialism is more powerful, but also more corrupt.

Post-Something

12th November 2010, 04:23

I'm again going to assume that you mean state socialism. And of course it is easier to strive for, because it much more closely resembles the existing system.

Yes, I mean state socialism.

When has this occurred? And copying? Ideologies are not property.

Well, both want the reinvention of western civilisation as it appears to us now, so they are bound to use the same tactics. But the Marxists had to think about it on the spot because they were the ones actually in revolutionary positions. As a result, they have a much larger repotoire of tactics. Im pretty sure the KGB knew more about revolution than some anarchist group.

Oh yes, cause people all over the world are experiencing the joys of an equal, classless, and stateless society. Those are, after all, the end goals of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", right?

Haha, no, youre right they were failures. But they have introduced a lot of new ways of doing things, and the socialists, whether theyre revolutionary or not are almost always have a voice in countries. A lot of todays landscape has been influenced by socialism.

For one thing, anarchism has been around in certain forms for longer than Marxism.

Yeah, but that doesnt really matter. What matters is whether you can get power to actually change things.

Indoctrinated? Dude, this isn't the gulags were talking about. Of course it would take time, revolutions are a process.

How do you think revolutions happen? Revolution is civil war. Its the tearing up of society to start fresh. And you think you can just convince people, especially in our climate, to give it all up without having even seriously trying this system somewhere else? No, an Anarchist revolution would need a lot of people who were very aware that they were trying to install a new system. And they would have to be convinced..

And everyone knows what communism and socialism means?

You are right here, but at least socialists can open up the big book of history, and ask themselves what socialists before them have done on issues like immigration and defence. They dont need a name for it.

Most of the differences are trivial. In many ways, they're more semantic differences than anything. Also, what about Marxists, Marxist-Leninists, Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, Stalinists, Anti-Revionists, Hoxhaists, (wow, you guys love personality cults don't you?), need I go on?

I dont think they are trivial if Im honest. They are differences in how society should actually be structured in a post revolutionary society, and differences in how it should be implemented.

Well, considering that the end goals of anarchism and Marxism are the same, namely, a stateless, classless society, I'd say that at least all of us on this board agree that it is exactly what the world needs right now. The contention comes in the means by which we go about enacting that, at which point I direct you to my previous post.

...ok, states and class tensions are bad, I agree. But weve had those problems for a very long time now. I think there are other issues which need solving first before we turn our heads to these huge missions. Revolution towards that kind of society would take a very long time, hundreds of years, generations of people. And even then, it wouldnt be paradise. We have to realise its a utopian dream that wont solve all our problems, but that there are steps that we can take to make it closer to reality. For example, I think we have to look at the way the world manages its resources internationally, and maybe change this network to make it a bit more efficient and ecologically friendly. This is something that can be looked at in a concrete fashion, like an engineer would. But an Anarchist revolution, it just seems like a waste of life to me.

Widerstand

12th November 2010, 08:51

As said before, Anarchism = LiberalLibertarian Socialism. I have so far failed to see how Anarchism is different from orthodox Marxism - semantics aside.

Can you explain to me in what way communism, or whatever you define as "socialism", would deal with remainders of capitalist (or sexist, racist, etc.) ideology that Anarchism is not able to?

Anarchism will always degrade to the rule of violence, without a state security force to protect the people, groups will come together and seize control through violence. We cannot have an individual government for each person, the best we can have is a government of the people, and leave those people free to govern as they wish, knowing that liberalism will prevail because it is right that we all shape our own destiny. Anarchy will bring about injustice through violence and opportunism, the absence of the state creates the absence of character. The real way to freedom is a state that is liberal, that teaches freedom of the mind, and then presents us with all available options, socialism will follow because it is the government of the people, and it is the dream of all people to be free, and to lead themselves.

I really advise you to read ONE fucking book or text on Anarchism. Or Marxism for that matter. Statism is hardly Marxist.

edit: oops.

Property Is Robbery

12th November 2010, 08:54

Besides the relatively small group of most likely American Anarcho-Capitalists, Anarchism has always been a left movement synonymous with ideas of Socialism in many ways and is clearly more egalitarian because there is no state hence no one above you.

syndicat

12th November 2010, 17:06

Anarchism is historically a tendency in the socialist movement. so "anarchism or socialism" is a false dichotomy, unless you mean "state socialism". state and governance are not the same thing. that's why the objection of "not having a government like Somalia" is a strawman. The idea is to rebuild governance on the basis of assemblies and delegate democracy, and workers self-management in all sectors, hence no longer a hierarchical state machine.

Rakhmetov

12th November 2010, 17:42

I posted this before. I believe it needs to be reposted

Read, pause, and reflect Dr. Michael Parenti's ingenious observations!

Excerpt From his book Blackshirts And Reds:

A prototypic Red-basher who pretended to be on the Left was George Orwell. In the middle of World War II, as the Soviet Union was fighting for its life against the Nazi invaders at Stalingrad, Orwell announced that a “willingness to criticize Russia and Stalin is the test of intellectual honesty. It is the only thing that from a literary intellectual’s point of view is really dangerous” (Monthly Review, 5/83). Safely ensconced within a virulently anticommunist society, Orwell (with Orwellian doublethink) characterized the condemnation of communism as a lonely courageous act of defiance. Today, his ideological progeny are still at it, offering themselves as intrepid left critics of the Left, waging a valiant struggle against imaginary Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist hordes.

Sorely lacking within the U.S. Left is any rational evaluation of the Soviet Union, a nation that endured a protracted civil war and a multinational foreign invasion in the very first years of its existence, and that two decades later threw back and destroyed the Nazi beast at enormous cost to itself. In the three decades after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviets made industrial advances equal to what capitalism took a century to accomplish–while feeding and schooling their children rather than working them fourteen hours a day as capitalist industrialists did and still do in many parts of the world. And the Soviet Union, along with Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic, and Cuba provided vital assistance to national liberation movements in countries around the world, including Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress in South Africa.
Left anticommunists remained studiously unimpressed by the dramatic gains won by masses of previously impoverished people under communism. Some were even scornful of such accomplishments. I recall how in Burlington Vermont, in 1971, the noted anticommunist anarchist, Murray Bookchin, derisively referred to my concern for “the poor little children who got fed under communism” (his words).

But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic, cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this “pure socialism” view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.
The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.
The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundaments as to leave little room for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they “feel betrayed” by this or that revolution.
The pure socialists see socialism as an ideal that was tarnished by communist venality, duplicity, and power cravings. The pure socialists oppose the Soviet model but offer little evidence to demonstrate that other paths could have been taken, that other models of socialism–not created from one’s imagination but developed through actual historical experience–could have taken hold and worked better. Was an open, pluralistic, democratic socialism actually possible at this historic juncture? The historical evidence would suggest it was not. As the political philosopher Carl Shames argued:

How do [the left critics] know that the fundamental problem was the “nature” of the ruling [revolutionary] parties rather than, say, the global concentration of capital that is destroying all independent economies and putting an end to national sovereignty everywhere? And to the extent that it was, where did this “nature” come from? Was this “nature” disembodied, disconnected from the fabric of the society itself, from the social relations impacting on it? . . . Thousands of examples could be found in which the centralization of power was a necessary choice in securing and protecting socialist relations. In my observation [of existing communist societies], the positive of “socialism” and the negative of “bureaucracy, authoritarianism and tyranny” interpenetrated in virtually every sphere of life. (Carl Shames, correspondence to me, 1/15/92.)

The pure socialists regularly blame the Left itself for every defeat it suffers. Their second-guessing is endless. So we hear that revolutionary struggles fail because their leaders wait too long or act too soon, are too timid or too impulsive, too stubborn or too easily swayed. We hear that revolutionary leaders are compromising or adventuristic, bureaucratic or opportunistic, rigidly organized or insufficiently organized, undemocratic or failing to provide strong leadership. But always the leaders fail because they do not put their trust in the “direct actions” of the workers, who apparently would withstand and overcome every adversity if only given the kind of leadership available from the left critic’s own groupuscule. Unfortunately, the critics seem unable to apply their own leadership genius to producing a successful revolutionary movement in their own country.
Tony Febbo questioned this blame-the-leadership syndrome of the pure socialists:

It occurs to me that when people as smart, different, dedicated and heroic as Lenin, Mao, Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Ho Chi Minh and Robert Mugabe–and the millions of heroic people who followed and fought with them–all end up more or less in the same place, then something bigger is at work than who made what decision at what meeting. Or even what size houses they went home to after the meeting. . . . These leaders weren’t in a vacuum. They were in a whirlwind. And the suction, the force, the power that was twirling them around has spun and left this globe mangled for more than 900 years. And to blame this or that theory or this or that leader is a simple-minded substitute for the kind of analysis that Marxists [should make]. (Guardian, 11/13/91)

To be sure, the pure socialists are not entirely without specific agendas for building the revolution. After the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, an ultra-left group in that country called for direct worker ownership of the factories. The armed workers would take control of production without benefit of managers, state planners, bureaucrats, or a formal military. While undeniably appealing, this worker syndicalism denies the necessities of state power. Under such an arrangement, the Nicaraguan revolution would not have lasted two months against the U.S.-sponsored counterrevolution that savaged the country. It would have been unable to mobilize enough resources to field an army, take security measures, or build and coordinate economic programs and human services on a national scale.

Decentralization vs. Survival
For a people’s revolution to survive, it must seize state power and use it to (a) break the stranglehold exercised by the owning class over the society’s institutions and resources, and (b) withstand the reactionary counterattack that is sure to come. The internal and external dangers a revolution faces necessitate a centralized state power that is not particularly to anyone’s liking, not in Soviet Russia in 1917, nor in Sandinista Nicaragua in 1980.

Engels offers an apposite account of an uprising in Spain in 1872-73 in which anarchists seized power in municipalities across the country. At first, the situation looked promising. The king had abdicated and the bourgeois government could muster but a few thousand ill-trained troops. Yet this ragtag force prevailed because it faced a thoroughly parochialized rebellion. “Each town proclaimed itself as a sovereign canton and set up a revolutionary committee (junta),” Engels writes. “[E]ach town acted on its own, declaring that the important thing was not cooperation with other towns but separation from them, thus precluding any possibility of a combined attack [against bourgeois forces].” It was “the fragmentation and isolation of the revolutionary forces which enabled the government troops to smash one revolt after the other.”

Decentralized parochial autonomy is the graveyard of insurgency–which may be one reason why there has never been a successful anarcho-syndicalist revolution. Ideally, it would be a fine thing to have only local, self-directed, worker participation, with minimal bureaucracy, police, and military. This probably would be the development of socialism, were socialism ever allowed to develop unhindered by counterrevolutionary subversion and attack. One might recall how, in 1918-20, fourteen capitalist nations, including the United States, invaded Soviet Russia in a bloody but unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the revolutionary Bolshevik government. The years of foreign invasion and civil war did much to intensify the Bolsheviks’ siege psychology with its commitment to lockstep party unity and a repressive security apparatus. Thus, in May 1921, the same Lenin who had encouraged the practice of internal party democracy and struggled against Trotsky in order to give the trade unions a greater measure of autonomy, now called for an end to the Workers’ Opposition and other factional groups within the party. “The time has come,” he told an enthusiastically concurring Tenth Party Congress, “to put an end to opposition, to put a lid on it: we have had enough opposition.” Open disputes and conflicting tendencies within and without the party, the communists concluded, created an appearance of division and weakness that invited attack by formidable foes.

Only a month earlier, in April 1921, Lenin had called for more worker representation on the party’s Central Committee. In short, he had become not anti-worker but anti-opposition. Here was a social revolution–like every other–that was not allowed to develop its political and material life in an unhindered way.
By the late 1920s, the Soviets faced the choice of (a) moving in a still more centralized direction with a command economy and forced agrarian collectivization and full-speed industrialization under a commandist, autocratic party leadership, the road taken by Stalin, or (b) moving in a liberalized direction, allowing more political diversity, more autonomy for labor unions and other organizations, more open debate and criticism, greater autonomy among the various Soviet republics, a sector of privately owned small businesses, independent agricultural development by the peasantry, greater emphasis on consumer goods, and less effort given to the kind of capital accumulation needed to build a strong military-industrial base.

The latter course, I believe, would have produced a more comfortable, more humane and serviceable society. Siege socialism would have given way to worker-consumer socialism. The only problem is that the country would have risked being incapable of withstanding the Nazi onslaught. Instead, the Soviet Union embarked upon a rigorous, forced industrialization. This policy has often been mentioned as one of the wrongs perpetrated by Stalin upon his people. It consisted mostly of building, within a decade, an entirely new, huge industrial base east of the Urals in the middle of the barren steppes, the biggest steel complex in Europe, in anticipation of an invasion from the West. “Money was spent like water, men froze, hungered and suffered but the construction went on with a disregard for individuals and a mass heroism seldom paralleled in history.”
Stalin’s prophecy that the Soviet Union had only ten years to do what the British had done in a century proved correct. When the Nazis invaded in 1941, that same industrial base, safely ensconced thousands of miles from the front, produced the weapons of war that eventually turned the tide. The cost of this survival included 22 million Soviets who perished in the war and immeasurable devastation and suffering, the effects of which would distort Soviet society for decades afterward.
All this is not to say that everything Stalin did was of historical necessity. The exigencies of revolutionary survival did not “make inevitable” the heartless execution of hundreds of Old Bolshevik leaders, the personality cult of a supreme leader who claimed every revolutionary gain as his own achievement, the suppression of party political life through terror, the eventual silencing of debate regarding the pace of industrialization and collectivization, the ideological regulation of all intellectual and cultural life, and the mass deportations of “suspect” nationalities.

The transforming effects of counterrevolutionary attack have been felt in other countries. A Sandinista military officer I met in Vienna in 1986 noted that Nicaraguans were “not a warrior people” but they had to learn to fight because they faced a destructive, U.S.-sponsored mercenary war. She bemoaned the fact that war and embargo forced her country to postpone much of its socio-economic agenda. As with Nicaragua, so with Mozambique, Angola and numerous other countries in which U.S.-financed mercenary forces destroyed farmlands, villages, health centers, and power stations, while killing or starving hundreds of thousands–the revolutionary baby was strangled in its crib or mercilessly bled beyond recognition. This reality ought to earn at least as much recognition as the suppression of dissidents in this or that revolutionary society.

The overthrow of Eastern European and Soviet communist governments was cheered by many left intellectuals. Now democracy would have its day. The people would be free from the yoke of communism and the U.S. Left would be free from the albatross of existing communism, or as left theorist Richard Lichtman put it, “liberated from the incubus of the Soviet Union and the succubus of Communist China.”
In fact, the capitalist restoration in Eastern Europe seriously weakened the numerous Third World liberation struggles that had received aid from the Soviet Union and brought a whole new crop of right-wing governments into existence, ones that now worked hand-in-glove with U.S. global counterrevolutionaries around the globe.

In addition, the overthrow of communism gave the green light to the unbridled exploitative impulses of Western corporate interests. No longer needing to convince workers that they live better than their counterparts in Russia, no longer restrained by a competing system, the corporate class is rolling back the many gains that working people have won over the years. Now that the free market, in its meanest form, is emerging triumphant in the East, so will it prevail in the West. “Capitalism with a human face” is being replaced by “capitalism in your face.” As Richard Levins put it, “So in the new exuberant aggressiveness of world capitalism we see what communists and their allies had held at bay” (Monthly Review, 9/96).
Having never understood the role that existing communist powers played in tempering the worst impulses of Western capitalism, and having perceived communism as nothing but an unmitigated evil, the left anticommunists did not anticipate the losses that were to come. Some of them still don't get it.

syndicat

12th November 2010, 18:10

It's an "argument" that is filled with enough strawman fallacies that it would take a long time to unravel. he might as well say he thinks liberation from class domination and exploitation is impossible. but in reality critics of Leninist state socialism have in fact addressed all of the issues that Parenti refers to here. That's why I say it's just one long strawman.

Rakhmetov

12th November 2010, 19:04

syndicat

12th November 2010, 19:42

Engels offers an apposite account of an uprising in Spain in 1872-73 in which anarchists seized power in municipalities across the country. At first, the situation looked promising. The king had abdicated and the bourgeois government could muster but a few thousand ill-trained troops. Yet this ragtag force prevailed because it faced a thoroughly parochialized rebellion. “Each town proclaimed itself as a sovereign canton and set up a revolutionary committee (junta),” Engels writes. “[E]ach town acted on its own, declaring that the important thing was not cooperation with other towns but separation from them, thus precluding any possibility of a combined attack [against bourgeois forces].” It was “the fragmentation and isolation of the revolutionary forces which enabled the government troops to smash one revolt after the other.”

This is a traditional Marxist strawman argument. To see this, I'd advise looking at how the CNT national federation organized tens of thousands of workers into a union army in 1936. This was not a "parochialized rebellion" but a coordinated effort throughout the revoluutionary territory. They also proposed an alternative to the state. They proposed that the two union federations, the UGT and CNT, create national and regional defense councils (a workers government), elected by regional and national workers congresses, to run a unified people's militia.

You see, Parenti probably knows about Spain. why, then, does he go to Engels' comments in 1871?

They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

But we do explain these things. In fact Marxists of the Parenti ilk more usually complain about "utopianism" if revolutionaries try to suggest a plausible structure. The example above of the proposed unified militia, with training schools and so on, proposed by the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists is an answer to the question about external attack.

The Spanish anarcho-syndicalists also had some concrete ideas about how to avoid consolidating a bureaucratic class....through workers taking over and self-managing the various industries.

And the revolutions in China and Russia "succeeded" only in putting a bureaucratic class into power. They were failures from the point of view of working class liberation.

What Parenti avoids is the necessity to come up with a vision and program of a socialism that can inspire support. What he's proposing is that one group of bosses be replaced by another. Why is that something worth fighting and dying for?

Fawkes

14th November 2010, 03:24

So what do some Libertarian Socialists on here think about this Noam Chomsky quote about using the power of the state until it can be overthrown?

"There is no conflict. You should use whatever methods are available to you. There is no conflict between trying to overthrow the state and using the means that are provided in a partially democratic society, the means that have been developed through popular struggles over centuries." (I got this from wikipedia)

I don't entirely agree with it. I'd like to see it contextually so I could get a better idea of his argument. Do you know the original source?

Can someone give me some good sources to read about the Anarchist areas of Spain during the civil war that I can read about to exemplify some anarchist sucess
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/spain/pam_ch1.html
Also, Homage to Catalonia offers a pretty good first-hand account of the war and the communes that were set up.

Also the Zapatistas, since they seemed pretty close to anarchist.
I don't know of any good ones off hand, but they shouldn't be hard to find if you search around. Also, I don't know of any particularly good sources for this either, but you could look into Ukraine during Makhno's time and Kronstadt.

The problems with both of those were that they were crushed by the state.
Yeah, by the Soviets.

post-something:

But the Marxists had to think about it on the spot because they were the ones actually in revolutionary positions.
Huh? The above instances are cases where anarchists found themselves in revolutionary positions.

As a result, they have a much larger repotoire of tactics
All of which have proven so successful.

Im pretty sure the KGB knew more about revolution than some anarchist group.
No, but they knew more about utilizing similar tactics to those of the CIA and NSA.

But they have introduced a lot of new ways of doing things
Once again, none of us are enjoying the freedom of a stateless, classless society, so what is so great about the introduction of new ways of doing things if they all proved unsuccessful?

What matters is whether you can get power to actually change things.
Yeah, but how is that a critique of anarchism?

How do you think revolutions happen?
Through violence or the threat of it.

Revolution is civil war. Its the tearing up of society to start fresh. And you think you can just convince people, especially in our climate, to give it all up without having even seriously trying this system somewhere else? No, an Anarchist revolution would need a lot of people who were very aware that they were trying to install a new system. And they would have to be convinced..
And you think you can convince people after having tried this system ("Dictatorship of the Proletariat") and having had it fail? Of course people need to be educated, but indoctrination implies uniformity of thought and brain washing.

You are right here, but at least socialists can open up the big book of history, and ask themselves what socialists before them have done on issues like immigration and defence. They dont need a name for it.
Anarchists can do that too, it's called critical examination.

I dont think they are trivial if Im honest. They are differences in how society should actually be structured in a post revolutionary society, and differences in how it should be implemented.
Excluding primitivists, the differences are really not as huge as they're made out to be.

...ok, states and class tensions are bad, I agree. But weve had those problems for a very long time now. I think there are other issues which need solving first before we turn our heads to these huge missions. Revolution towards that kind of society would take a very long time, hundreds of years, generations of people. And even then, it wouldnt be paradise. We have to realise its a utopian dream that wont solve all our problems, but that there are steps that we can take to make it closer to reality. For example, I think we have to look at the way the world manages its resources internationally, and maybe change this network to make it a bit more efficient and ecologically friendly. This is something that can be looked at in a concrete fashion, like an engineer would.
I don't disagree at all, a revolution is a process, not a single event. Do I see it as positive in the event that the state raises the minimum wage? Of course, but that doesn't do anything to diminish the fact that the state is not a mechanism through which a stateless, classless society can be reached.

But an Anarchist revolution, it just seems like a waste of life to me.
Unlike all those incredibly successful and bloody ones in the name of Leninism or some other personality cult variant of state socialism. And how does it seem like a waste of life?

Anarchism will always degrade to the rule of violence, without a state security force to protect the people, groups will come together and seize control through violence. We cannot have an individual government for each person, the best we can have is a government of the people, and leave those people free to govern as they wish, knowing that liberalism will prevail because it is right that we all shape our own destiny. Anarchy will bring about injustice through violence and opportunism, the absence of the state creates the absence of character. The real way to freedom is a state that is liberal, that teaches freedom of the mind, and then presents us with all available options, socialism will follow because it is the government of the people, and it is the dream of all people to be free, and to lead themselves.
Come back when you know what you're talking about.

Read, pause, and reflect Dr. Michael Parenti's ingenious observations!
I'm good for now.

Sosa

14th November 2010, 04:38

I don't entirely agree with it. I'd like to see it contextually so I could get a better idea of his argument. Do you know the original source?

http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20040714.htm

Jimmie Higgins

14th November 2010, 05:57

If anarchy means communism, I seem them as part of the same process - it's like asking what tastes better the batter or the cake?

But IMO the end goal, anarchy/communism would be preferable.

If you mean which is a better way to achieve communism, the anarchist approach or the socialist approach, I'd say that the socialist apporach is much better because I think it will be necessary for people to organize themselves to both transform a for-profit society into one that is built around popular decision making. But that's in general - I think what Syndicat describes and what many anarchists describe as a "transition" is more or less the same as what I talk about when I say "socialism" ... whereas other people who talk about "socialism" in Cuba or Venezuela are not talking about what I mean as socialism. So, concretely, I perfer the "anarchism" Syndicat describes compared to, say, the "socialism" that the RCP wants (rule of society by one party which has "internalized the lessons of the working class" and in which a few individuals have "generalized" these lessons and will "carry through" with the revolution on behalf of working class interests").

The working class needs to rule (probably in alliance with other elements - like small "mom and pop" shop-owners, professionals, and traditional agricultural producers in some places - who can be won to supporting direct and working class rule) not just because they are now numerically dominant in the world and most industrial countries, but because they have no class interest in exploiting other people. So, whatever the specific form of socialism, the main thing is that the working class has direct and cooperative control (I prefer democratic process) of collective decisions from the workplace up to whatever regional organizations are needed to facilitate larger questions about distribution of resources.

Os Cangaceiros

14th November 2010, 07:27

Anarchism will always degrade to the rule of violence, without a state security force to protect the people, groups will come together and seize control through violence.

Yeah, because as we all know, the state wasn't conceived or maintained by groups of people coming together and seizing control through violence.

I suggest you pick up an book on anthropology. Even a cursory glance at history reveals stateless human societies that managed to exist without everyone biting each others eyes out.

Whether anarchism can exist as a system that can maintain people's wants and needs is a seperate matter, but this notion that the state is the only thing that's keeping me from grabbing a cudgel and cracking skulls is a nonsense liberal notion.

William Howe

14th November 2010, 13:29

I'm more for the 'vanguard communist party' government style.

Manic Impressive

14th November 2010, 13:39

tl;dr

aren't anarchists socialists as well?

Old Man Diogenes

14th November 2010, 13:58

As someone else said, this is a pointless argument. I've always thought that anarchism was about self-governance, and that socialism, "common ownership and cooperative management of the means of production and allocation of resources", was the best way to achieve this. Neither is better or worse, and it would be better to have both than one without the other.

"Freedom without Socialism is privilege and injustice and Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality." - Mikhail Bakunin

Post-Something

14th November 2010, 22:17

Huh? The above instances are cases where anarchists found themselves in revolutionary positions.

I know that there were movements in Spain, Ukraine etc, and though I probably dont know enough about them as I should, I do know that these didnt really last very long. The thing about Russia, Yugoslavia and China is that there were generations of people living there over long periods of time that dealt with many changing problems that evolved in those areas.

All of which have proven so successful.

Actually, they were pretty successful, I mean just look at how the USSR was able to spread. Those guys knew how to bring a country to revolution :)

No, but they knew more about utilizing similar tactics to those of the CIA and NSA.

Theyre both the same thing in reality in my book.

Once again, none of us are enjoying the freedom of a stateless, classless society, so what is so great about the introduction of new ways of doing things if they all proved unsuccessful?

I dont know maybe you are right on this, but I think we really need a new way of approaching these issues, and the experiments of the 20th century have taught us so much we probably wouldnt know how to begin without them.

Yeah, but how is that a critique of anarchism?

Because without power you cant do anything. Anarchism has a great deal to say about co operative industry and and radical ownership models, but thats no way to reach communism. If you have hostile capitalist states surrounding you, whats the use? You have to defend yourself.

And you think you can convince people after having tried this system ("Dictatorship of the Proletariat") and having had it fail? Of course people need to be educated, but indoctrination implies uniformity of thought and brain washing.

I dont know why you are under the assumption that Im some kind of leninist or something, but I dont really subscribe to this whole DoP thing.

Look, I think there is a lot to be taken from Anarchism. But a lot of those models have been tried. Look at Yugoslavia in the 1950s man, they tried Syndicalism there, they tried community socialism, and serious decentralization. Theres a lot to be said about these kind of models, but we're living in a different world now. Everyone is closer knit and we still dont understand how the global division of labour functions. It doesnt make sense to me how Anarchists can say things like "the state is not a mechanism through which a stateless, classless society can be reached." I mean, what else are we supposed to use?

Property Is Robbery

14th November 2010, 22:39

Burn A Flag

14th November 2010, 22:59

Sosa

14th November 2010, 23:30

Look, I think there is a lot to be taken from Anarchism. But a lot of those models have been tried. Look at Yugoslavia in the 1950s man, they tried Syndicalism there, they tried community socialism, and serious decentralization. Theres a lot to be said about these kind of models, but we're living in a different world now. Everyone is closer knit and we still dont understand how the global division of labour functions. It doesnt make sense to me how Anarchists can say things like "the state is not a mechanism through which a stateless, classless society can be reached." I mean, what else are we supposed to use?

As I pointed out in a earlier post, Chomsky is of the opinion that we should use the state to overthrow it. I don't know how anarchists feel about that but Chomsky is a Libertarian Socialist.

Revolutionair

14th November 2010, 23:35

I found the points of the Anarchists to be much more satisfactory to me. I am definitely going to read more into Anarchism. Also Orwell as a anti communist lol. That's why he worked with the Party of Marxist Unification in Spain. :laugh:

I think he wrote that he actually wanted to be in the CNT-FAI. Also I think that he was mainly opposed to Communists, with a capital C. He wrote about the 'evil' Communist propaganda makers, there was a wounded boy who fought for the anarchists. He said that in Moscow there are stories being made up that this boy was actually a fascist.

I'm not an Orwell-expert though, you will have to look it up yourself.

syndicat

15th November 2010, 04:43

when Orwell went to Spain initially he wanted to be in the International Brigades. he only developed a critique of the CP's role in Spain based on his experience. and then he became more sympathetic to the anarcho-syndicalists, and wished he'd join their militia, which was the largest militia anyway.

Tablo

15th November 2010, 23:46

As I pointed out in a earlier post, Chomsky is of the opinion that we should use the state to overthrow it. I don't know how anarchists feel about that but Chomsky is a Libertarian Socialist.
That is not what Chomsky thinks and Chomsky really isn't an intellectual authority in anarchist theory. He says it is good to strive for short term gains through electoral politics, but ultimately, in the long run, we will need revolution. But yeah, Chomsky is kind of an Anarchism newbie anyway.

Sosa

16th November 2010, 02:10

That is not what Chomsky thinks and Chomsky really isn't an intellectual authority in anarchist theory. He says it is good to strive for short term gains through electoral politics, but ultimately, in the long run, we will need revolution. But yeah, Chomsky is kind of an Anarchism newbie anyway.

I'm a newbie myself so allow me to plead ignorance and ask how is it different?

EDIT: Nevermind I think I understand. Chomsky was speaking in the context of pre-revolution, not post (or during) revolution right?

Tablo

16th November 2010, 03:27

I'm a newbie myself so allow me to plead ignorance and ask how is it different?

EDIT: Nevermind I think I understand. Chomsky was speaking in the context of pre-revolution, not post (or during) revolution right?
Pretty much. Whatever the case Chomsky has some weak politics.

NGNM85

16th November 2010, 03:32

This is really a false dichotomy. Anarchism is Socialism, specifically, a Libertarian Socialism. I personally, think, as has been the predominant tendency in Socialist thought, that REAL Socialism is free and democratic in nature. However, there are authoritarian Socialists who (Wrongly, I believe.) disagree, there are plenty lurking about. The question should be rephrased, something like; "Authoritarian Socialism vs. Anarchism", or something similar.

NGNM85

16th November 2010, 03:43

As I pointed out in a earlier post, Chomsky is of the opinion that we should use the state to overthrow it. I don't know how anarchists feel about that but Chomsky is a Libertarian Socialist.

Chomsky prefers to refer to himself as a ‘Libertarian Socialist’ rather than an Anarchist in recent years, however, his politics remain unchanged. Furthermore, there is no major substantive difference. Anarchism and Libertarianism (The Socialism was considered implicit.) were often used interchangeably, in the past.

Pretty much. Whatever the case Chomsky has some weak politics.

I suspect something’s just getting lost in translation.

I'm a newbie myself so allow me to plead ignorance and ask how is it different?

EDIT: Nevermind I think I understand. Chomsky was speaking in the context of pre-revolution, not post (or during) revolution right?

I’m not his spokesman, but I would guess that he would agree with the sentiment that the method of political change is dependent on the circumstances. The circumstances in a police state like Russia or North Korea, are not the circumstances in present-day Norway, or the United States, therefore necessitating different tactics.

If you’re really interested I’d recommend you check out “Chomsky on Anarchism” by AK press.

Agnapostate

16th November 2010, 04:15

Yes, it's a matter of reformist policies contingent on the existence of statism and capitalism. In that context, some of these policies can temporarily ameliorate living conditions. In terms of Chomsky, his exact words on this were, "despite the anarchist 'vision,' I think aspects of the state system, like the one that makes sure children eat, have to be defended - in fact defended very vigorously...There much depend, are practical problems of tomorrow on which people's lives very much depend, and while defending those kinds of programs is not the ultimate end we should be pursuing, in my view we still have to face the problems that are right on the horizon, and which seriously affect human lives."

However, it is always necessary to remember that modification of capitalism, hacking at tree branches and ignoring the roots, is not sufficient, and we must work to foster an anti-capitalist consciousness even while reaching out to people that already share our objections to its worst elements. In a sense, these reforms act as a tourniquet in that they can temporarily alleviate some of the worst conditions of the traumatic injury that is capitalism, but if we allowed liberal/social democratic ideas to dominate and their proponents to claim that they represented legitimate end results without challenging them, we would be pretending that the tourniquet was the only necessary treatment.

NGNM85

16th November 2010, 04:35

RadioRaheem84

16th November 2010, 05:23

This is a traditional Marxist strawman argument. To see this, I'd advise looking at how the CNT national federation organized tens of thousands of workers into a union army in 1936. This was not a "parochialized rebellion" but a coordinated effort throughout the revoluutionary territory. They also proposed an alternative to the state. They proposed that the two union federations, the UGT and CNT, create national and regional defense councils (a workers government), elected by regional and national workers congresses, to run a unified people's militia.

You see, Parenti probably knows about Spain. why, then, does he go to Engels' comments in 1871?

But we do explain these things. In fact Marxists of the Parenti ilk more usually complain about "utopianism" if revolutionaries try to suggest a plausible structure. The example above of the proposed unified militia, with training schools and so on, proposed by the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists is an answer to the question about external attack.

The Spanish anarcho-syndicalists also had some concrete ideas about how to avoid consolidating a bureaucratic class....through workers taking over and self-managing the various industries.

And the revolutions in China and Russia "succeeded" only in putting a bureaucratic class into power. They were failures from the point of view of working class liberation.

What Parenti avoids is the necessity to come up with a vision and program of a socialism that can inspire support. What he's proposing is that one group of bosses be replaced by another. Why is that something worth fighting and dying for?

Not sufficient. Seriously, this is why I am sometimes at odds with my Anarchist comrades, save for a few points of agreement.

I's way too idealist for me and it desperately ignores the hard reality on the ground and attributes anything not to their liking as a problem of 'bureaucracy', 'statism' etc. Sometimes it borders on liberal blather.

Sorry, had to say it. No offense to my anarchist comrades. It's mostly the Pinot Grigio talking.

Parenti has the anarchist movement nailed and such an explanation by anarchists like Syndicat prove it much more. The little mini-states these federations formed in Spain was enough for me to propose that the anarchist movement in Catalonia was doomed to fail, because it outright neglected what itself was forming; a "bureaucracy". The way anarchists describe it, you would think any actual historical analysis was omitted in favor of mythologizing it. At least Parenti offered an analysis, a scathing one at that, of the Soviet style ML States.

The fact that Anarchist Spain fell to both Stalinist and Fascist hordes says more about them than anything else. One could only speculate as to how they would've turned out in the end, but as noted before they were not strong enough to hold back an offensive. That is the entire point.

Parenti goes to great lengths to describe the historical development of the ML states and shows how and why they fell to internal corruption and bureaucracy, mostly (not all) as a result of strenuous attacks from without. So his is not a defense of a certain "ilk" but a rational account of history. He is not proposing that one form of "corrupt men/institutions" replacing another.

I cannot believe you would even suggest that.

I mean,to describe the revolutions as merely power grabs by corrupt men from their advent and to blather on about certain institutions as if they're some abstract entities that by definition emit powers that corrupt men and therefore will entice them to fight against their abolition is bananas.

That type of rational borders on anti-communist blather I hear from the right when they talk about why communism cannot work; because men are corrupt as are our institutions, i.e. the State.

RadioRaheem84

16th November 2010, 05:28

This would be a meaningful statement if that's what he was actually suggesting.

How is it again that you always seem to be the only one that truly understands Chomsky?

The circumstances in a police state like Russia or North Korea, are not the circumstances in present-day Norway, or the United States, therefore necessitating different tactics.

Must you peddle this nonsense again?

Anarchism: Exhibit A. j/k

MagÃ³n

16th November 2010, 07:46

I found the points of the Anarchists to be much more satisfactory to me. I am definitely going to read more into Anarchism. Also Orwell as a anti communist lol. That's why he worked with the Party of Marxist Unification in Spain. :laugh:

It's because you'll find those who disagree with Orwell, find his criticism and personal experience with the CP of Spain/USSR to be "propaganda" or "anti-communist". In fact, when POUM was being dismantled, it was the Anarchists who stood by them against the CP of Spain/USSR by saying they weren't on Franco's side and other propaganda thrown at them.

NGNM85

16th November 2010, 09:29

How is it again that you always seem to be the only one that truly understands Chomsky?

He never said anything of the sort. I don't know how someone who's read any of his work could get that impression. It's not particularly obscure or convoluted. Anyone who has read several of his books and understood them will say the same thing.

Must you peddle this nonsense again?

I know, you're allergic to facts, but there's no way around it. Again, it is due to tendencies unique (As far as I know.) to the radical Left that the painfully obvious is so hotly debated.

Yes, the circumstances of activists in Newark, NJ, and in Beijing, under the PRC, are facing fundamentally different circumstances. The activist in New Jersey is probably not likely to be shot or beaten to death for criticizing the government, if arrested he will actually get a trial, the kind where the verdict isn't already decided, he will be sure not to get the death penalty, or life imprisonment. The activist in New Jersey can actually interact with the state, he can vote, and he can mobilize people to create political pressure around a particular issue, and even achieve at least modest success. In a police state it is almost impossible to create political change without violence, because there is no apparatus with which to change the policy; they either don't have elections, or they have rigged elections. These differing circumstances require different strategies. Of course, I expect none of this to sink in.

Thirsty Crow

16th November 2010, 10:43

Anarchism will always degrade to the rule of violence, without a state security force to protect the people, groups will come together and seize control through violence.So, you are basically saying that communism - as a classless, stateless society - is unatainable due to...what, human nature?
Wow, no wonder the ruling class flourishes with such Marxists

We cannot have an individual government for each person, the best we can have is a government of the people, and leave those people free to govern as they wish, knowing that liberalism will prevail because it is right that we all shape our own destiny.Um, yes, anarchy, that is - statelessness, a classless society

Anarchy will bring about injustice through violence and opportunism,How and why?
Because of human nature?

the absence of the state creates the absence of character. Wow, you sound like Hegel...the state as the incarnation of Reason and the Absolute. Ironic that you consider yourself a Marxist.

The real way to freedom is a state that is liberal, that teaches freedom of the mind, and then presents us with all available options, socialism will follow because it is the government of the people, and it is the dream of all people to be free, and to lead themselves.
How to disentangle this confused mumbo-jumbo?
Well, first of all, every state is a class formation, designed by and for the ruling class. If there is a clear separation between the State and other spheres of social life, on which the rule of the State is superimposed, it is clear that you're dealing with a network of institutions that correspond to the workings of class society. Furthermore, if these networks of institutions possess a means of demarcation between themselves and other institutions (such as State agencies vs. unions in the USSR, for example), that implies a specific mechanism of reproduction of the specialized character of the institution, and in turn that means that there exists a separate class which in fact reproduces itself as a class using those very same mechanisms.

So, no, a "liberal", "enlightened" state will not "present all the options" - it will not present the option of its abolition as a sperate, on society superimposed, institution which generates a new class.

Thirsty Crow

16th November 2010, 10:56

The fact that Anarchist Spain fell to both Stalinist and Fascist hordes says more about them than anything else. One could only speculate as to how they would've turned out in the end, but as noted before they were not strong enough to hold back an offensive. That is the entire point.

Sorry RR, but if anyone is being an idealist here - it is you since it seems to me that you are forgetting some important facts - like the attitude of the Comintern (USSR, in fact) towards the social revolution in Spain (they basically opposed any kind of proletarian revolution, supported the bourgeoisie in its supposed revolution which must preceed the proletarian revolution), which in turn resultued in gross imbalance between Republican Spain and Fascists in terms of weaponry they could get hold of, on one hand, and on the other there was an internal imbalance between the "Republicans" - the bourgeois parties and their allies from the Communist Party, and the revolutionaries.

RadioRaheem84

16th November 2010, 14:41

Sorry RR, but if anyone is being an idealist here - it is you since it seems to me that you are forgetting some important facts - like the attitude of the Comintern (USSR, in fact) towards the social revolution in Spain (they basically opposed any kind of proletarian revolution, supported the bourgeoisie in its supposed revolution which must preceed the proletarian revolution), which in turn resultued in gross imbalance between Republican Spain and Fascists in terms of weaponry they could get hold of, on one hand, and on the other there was an internal imbalance between the "Republicans" - the bourgeois parties and their allies from the Communist Party, and the revolutionaries.

Not to mention the embargo placed on Republican Spain too by the Western Powers. There's a lot more to mention, none of which I deny. This further makes my point that the last thing that is needed is fragmentation in situations like that to defend a revolution.

RadioRaheem84

16th November 2010, 14:54

He never said anything of the sort. I don't know how someone who's read any of his work could get that impression. It's not particularly obscure or convoluted. Anyone who has read several of his books and understood them will say the same thing.

This would be a meaningful statement if you actually understood what the comrade was saying. Chomsky does in essence stress the legitimacy of certain institutions and laws in a manner of implicating the Western powers by using their own rhetoric against them. I like this tactic but it also serves to blur the lines between what's legitimate and what's really just liberal bourgeois clap trap.

I know, you're allergic to facts, but there's no way around it. Again, it is due to tendencies unique (As far as I know.) to the radical Left that the painfully obvious is so hotly debated.

Yes, the circumstances of activists in Newark, NJ, and in Beijing, under the PRC, are facing fundamentally different circumstances. The activist in New Jersey is probably not likely to be shot or beaten to death for criticizing the government, if arrested he will actually get a trial, the kind where the verdict isn't already decided, he will be sure not to get the death penalty, or life imprisonment. The activist in New Jersey can actually interact with the state, he can vote, and he can mobilize people to create political pressure around a particular issue, and even achieve at least modest success. In a police state it is almost impossible to create political change without violence, because there is no apparatus with which to change the policy; they either don't have elections, or they have rigged elections. These differing circumstances require different strategies. Of course, I expect none of this to sink in.

I still don't think you get it NGN. And despite all of your blatant Chomsky plagiarism, I am very surprised.

The varying degrees of freedom between a police state and a liberal democracy rarely ever overcome the contradictions found in a capitalist society. Even going through the institutional measures can be just as dangerous in the democratic society. During the 70s it was deadly as evidenced by COINTELPRO. Today, there is fear of marginalization or fear of losing one's profession or lack of social mobility.

I do not think that anyone in here denies the obvious differences between the political activism of say here in the States or Canada vs. Suharto's Indonesia or Pinochet's Chile. The point is that while different circumstances require different strategies as you've said of the activist, the same can be said for the State. So do not act like all of a sudden the State has been neutralized due to the "beauty" of liberal democracy. It's still very much active in opposing reform or even radical reform just as much as the police state.

Now, how much of this was lost in translation? Is there a problem of language? Did I not understand you again, like everyone else?

Thirsty Crow

16th November 2010, 15:41

Not to mention the embargo placed on Republican Spain too by the Western Powers. There's a lot more to mention, none of which I deny. This further makes my point that the last thing that is needed is fragmentation in situations like that to defend a revolution.

There was no completed revolution to defend, it was practically a matter of proceeding on with the revolution or giving in to the Fascists' firepower. The Comintern and the official Spanish CP chose the later, as well as the Spanish bourgeoisie (no surprise here), despite the fervent revolutionary upheaval led by the anarcho-syndicalists and revolutionary Marxists.
So, it is really a question of who does incite the fragmentation and to what aims. Historically, one of the most shameful episodes of Communist history took place between 1936 and 1939.

syndicat

16th November 2010, 20:37

Parenti has the anarchist movement nailed and such an explanation by anarchists like Syndicat prove it much more. The little mini-states these federations formed in Spain was enough for me to propose that the anarchist movement in Catalonia was doomed to fail, because it outright neglected what itself was forming; a "bureaucracy". The way anarchists describe it, you would think any actual historical analysis was omitted in favor of mythologizing it. At least Parenti offered an analysis, a scathing one at that, of the Soviet style ML States.

sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about. the working class of spain acted through large labor federations, UGT and CNT. the anarcho-syndicalist CNT was organized throughout Spain. its militias were controlled by a committee, the National Defense Committee. get it, national? They weren't interested in forming "mini-states". they were interested in a federal unity of self-managed industries and self-managed communities.

As to Parenti's criticisms of the Soviet union, this was not based on a frank recognition of the class character of the Soviet Union. That's because Parenti has no analysis of the bureaucratic class. You can see that in the way he analyzes capitalism. There is the tiny elite at the top and then the working class allegedly takes in everyone else. so the bosses workers are subject to day to day, the middle managers, corporate lawyers, judges, etc...the bureaucratic class within capitalism...isn't recognized. after all, if he were to recognize this class, and its power over workers (subordinate to the capitalist elite with capitalism), then he'd have to recognize that the Soviet Union was a class system, based on the domination and exploitation of workers.

RadioRaheem84

16th November 2010, 23:59

they were interested in a federal unity of self-managed industries and self-managed communities.

If it helps. Call it what you will.

There is the tiny elite at the top and then the working class allegedly takes in everyone else. so the bosses workers are subject to day to day, the middle managers, corporate lawyers, judges, etc...the bureaucratic class within capitalism...isn't recognized.

Come again? Apparently, one hasn't read Land of Idols in which he talks about this class and their dependence on the ruling class.

Have you even read Blackshirts and Fascists? One chapter is wholly devoted to the inconsistencies of the Soviet System including it's class system.

Os Cangaceiros

17th November 2010, 00:07

But yeah, Chomsky is kind of an Anarchism newbie anyway.

I don't agree with a lot of what he says, but he did write his first pro-anarchism essay at age 11 (according to Chomsky On Anarchism). Unless you meant "newbie" in a non-literal sense.

RadioRaheem84

17th November 2010, 00:29

Chomsky is a beast. I love the guy's work. He can come off liberal-ish at times but his work is definitely strongly linked to a class analysis that benefits leftists of all stripes.

Agnapostate

17th November 2010, 18:26

This would be a meaningful statement if that's what he was actually suggesting.

I'm quite confident that it was. That was quoted from Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, and the full text of that passage is this:

WOMAN: Noam, since you're an anarchist and often say that you oppose the existence of the nation-state itself and think it's incompatible with true socialism, does that make you at all reluctant to defend welfare programs and other social services which are now under attack from the right wing, and which the right wing wants to dismantle?

Well, it's true that the anarchist vision in just about all its varieties has looked forward to dismantling state power - and personally I share that vision. But right now it runs directly counter to my goals: my immediate goals have been, and now very much are, to defend and even strengthen certain elements of state authority that are now under severe attack. And I don't think there's any contradiction there - none at all, really.

For example, take the so-called "welfare state." What's called the "welfare state" is essentially a recognition that every child has a right to have food, and to have health care and so on - and as I've been saying, these programs were set up in the nation-state system after a century of very hard struggle, by the labor movement, and the socialist movement, and so on. Well, according to the new spirit of the age, in the case of a fourteen-year-old girl who got raped and has a child, her child has to learn "personal responsibility" by not accepting state welfare handouts, meaning, by not having enough to eat. Alright, I don't agree with that on any level. In fact, I think it's grotesque at any level. I think those children should be saved. And in today's world, that's going to have to involve working through the state system; it's not the only case.

So despite the anarchist "vision," I think aspects of the state system, like the one that makes sure children eat, have to be defended - in fact defended very vigorously. And given the accelerating effort that's being made these days to roll back the victories for justice and human rights which have been won through long and often extremely bitter struggles in the West, in my opinion the immediate goal of even committed anarchists should be to defend some state institutions, while helping to pry them open to more meaningful public participation, and ultimately to dismantle them in a much more free society.

There are practical problems of tomorrow on which people's lives very much depend, and while defending these kinds of programs is by no means the ultimate end we should be pursuing, in my view we still have to face the problems that are right on the horizon, and which seriously affect human lives. I don't think those things can simply be forgotten because they might not fit within some radical slogan that reflects a deeper vision of a future society. The deeper visions should be maintained, they're important - but dismantling the state system is a goal that's a lot farther away, and you want to deal first with what's at hand and nearby, I think. And in any realistic perspective, the political system, with all its flaws, does have opportunities for participation by the general population which other existing institutions, such as corporations, don't have. In fact, that's exactly why the far right wants to weaken governmental structures - because if you can make sure that all the key decisions are in the hands of Microsoft and General Electric and Raytheon, then you don't have to worry anymore about the threat of popular involvement in policy-making.

So, take something that's been happening in recent years: devolution - that is, removing authority from the federal government down to the state governments. Well, in some circumstances, that would be a democratizing move which I would be in favor of - it would be a move away from central authority down to local authority. But that's in abstract circumstances that don't exist. Right now it'll happen because moving decision-making power down to the state level in fact means handing it over to private power. See, huge corporations can influence and dominate the federal government, but even middle-sized corporations can influence state governments and play one state's workforce off against another's by threatening to move production elsewhere unless they get better tax breaks and so on. So under the conditions of existing systems of power, devolution is very anti-democratic, under other systems of much greater equality, devolution could be highly democratic - but these are questions which really can't be discussed in isolation from the society as it actually exists.

So I think that it's completely realistic and rational to work within structures to which you are opposed, because by doing so you can help to move to a situation where you can challenge those structures.

Let me just give you an analogy. I don't like to have armed police everywhere, I think it's a bad idea. On the other hand, a number of years ago when I had little kids, there was a rabid raccoon running around our neighborhood biting children. Well, we tried various ways of getting rid of it - you know, "Have-A-Heart" animal traps, all this kind of stuff - but nothing worked. So finally we just called the police and had them do it: it was better than having the kids bitten by a rabid raccoon, right? Is there a contradiction there? No: in particular circumstances, you sometimes have to accept and use illegitimate structures.

Well, we happen to have a huge rabid raccoon running around - it's called corporations. And there is nothing in the society right now that can protect people from that tyranny, except the federal government. Now, it doesn't protect them very well, because mostly it's run by the corporations, but still it does have some limited effect - it can enforce regulatory measures under public pressure, let's say, it can reduce dangerous toxic waste disposal, it can set minimal standards on health care, and so on. In fact, it has various things that it can do to improve the situation when there's this huge rabid raccoon dominating the place. So, fine, I think we ought to get it to do the things it can do - if you can get rid of the raccoon, great, then let's dismantle the federal government. But to say, "Okay, let's just get rid of the federal government as soon as we possibly can," and then let the private tyrannies take over everything - I mean, for an anarchist to advocate that is just outlandish, in my opinion. So I really don't see any contradiction at all there.

Supporting these aspects of the governmental structures just seems to me to be part of a willingness to face some of the complexities of life for what they are - and the complexities of life include the fact that there are a lot of ugly things out there, and if you care about the fact that some kid in downtown Boston is starving, or that some poor person can't get adequate medical care, or that somebody's going to pour toxic waste in your backyard, or anything at all like that, well, then you try to stop it. And there's only one institution around right now that can stop it. If you just want to be pure and say, "I'm against power, period," well, okay, say, "I'm against the federal government." But that's just to divorce yourself from any human concerns, in my view. And I don't think that's a reasonable stance for anarchists or anyone else to take.

Actually, that stance (which I share), seems to tie in rather neatly with your comments about contextual adaptability and the varying nature of circumstances. In a politically unstable period of revolutionary upheaval, destruction of all centralized structures, including state power, is desirable, but in circumstances where statism is firmly entrenched, the solution is to devise other means to reach limited aims.

Tablo

17th November 2010, 18:59

I don't agree with a lot of what he says, but he did write his first pro-anarchism essay at age 11 (according to Chomsky On Anarchism). Unless you meant "newbie" in a non-literal sense.
When I meant newbie I meant his politics are kinda weak. I didn't mean it was new to him.

Joe Payne

17th November 2010, 19:06

Christ, who'd of thought a website like "revleft" would have such an immensely ignorant and misinformed view of Anarchism!

Most of these posts I could barely even read without wanting to throw my computer through a wall. Boojie Poli-Sci kids have a better grasp of anarchism than most of those who have posted here. If it wasn't for Syndicat this whole thread would be lost.

As the old saying goes: Every anarchist is a socialist, but not every socialist is an anarchist. Which means that anarchism as it developed in the First International was merely the libertarian wing of the broad socialist movement. Anarchism is concerned entirely with the emancipation fo the Proletariat and the abolition of class society by way of the Proletariat itself.

There is absolutely no example of a libertarian communist/socialist revolution (Anarchist, essentially) degenerating into wanton violence. These revolutions in fact didn't even "fail" or "degenerate" as the State (Authoritarian wing of the socialist movement) socialist/communist revolutions did, well, as claimed by the misguided supporters of these movements (Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, etc.) The States created by this wing have always drowned the revolutionary working classes in blood. Much of the resistance to these regimes was always fought by the libertarian wing of socialism/communism. In Russia we have Kronstadt, in China we have the Shanghai Commune, in Korea we have the Band of Heroes, and so on and so forth.

In the examples of libertarian revolutions such as Germany, Ukraine, Spain, Hungary, Paris '68, even the St. Louis and Seattle Communes (to throw in simply but significant uprisings) these revolutions were essentially completely successful but were drowned in blood by Fascists, Boojie's, and in several instances by the Authoritarian socialists themselves working to destroy any real attempt at a Wroking class revolution because it would destroy their own legitimacy and general influence and power over the broad socialist movement.

However there are examples of successful uprisings that have not been drowned in blood but are still examples of libertarian uprisings such as the Oaxaca and Zapatista uprisings, Exarchiea in Greece, and etc.

And of course the historical movement made mistakes or else we'd be living under anarchist-communism, but these mistakes were at least made by workers on their own terms, and we today are doing whatever we can to learn from them, instead of following a blueprint for a Leninist paradise written by the "master" almost a hundred years ago to stroke the egos of leftist politicos. The CNT should never have joined the gov'y, free communes in Ukraine should never have trusted the Bolsheviks, just to name a couple of easy examples.

However, in terms of contemporary class struggle the Syndicalist movement still has millions of members and-at least in North America- the most vibrant theories and strategies to emancipate the Proletariat from its chains under Capital are found in the libertarian orgs (whether libertarian Marxists or Anarchists). I've also never met a non-working class persyn in these orgs, which is far more than I can say about contemporary State Socialist groups, or Parties.

One more thing, drop this "immediate Transition" nonsense. No one believes that, the anarchist position is that Revolution is impossible by way of using a State. ANd time and time again this has been proven completely true.

RadioRaheem84

17th November 2010, 19:10

Agnapostate, you quoted Chomsky in an accurate manner, it's just that NGN thinks only he has the "right" insight into what Chomsky is actually saying.

Do not worry about him. There may be some similarities in what you two are saying but I highly doubt that you also believe that these firm entrenched centralized structures are actually wholly legitimate in and of themselves. He has a habit of actually believing the legitimacy of these institutions so much as to cite them as "obvious examples" of his presupposed conclusions. Hence, his citing of the Economist's guide to Free Countries, which was itself inspired by criteria used by Freedom House.