How do you achieve anarcho-communism???

[Kingbruh]

I used to firmly believe that you needed a state in order to achieve Communism, so how do you even get to communism without a state?

[Asero]

By making a state and not calling it one.:rolleyes:

[Prof. Oblivion]

Nobody knows

[Sinister Intents]

I used to firmly believe that you needed a state in order to achieve Communism, so how do you even get to communism without a state?

The anarchist communists believe in direct action against the state, to destroy it outright, and establish freely associating anarchist federations that seek to carry the revolution forward. The anarchocommunists have their own methodology, it's suggest Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread, or you could look up Kropotkin on MIA and read all of his works, there's also Errco Malatesta who helps provide a lot of great information.

Also read Berkmans ABCs of Anarchist Communism

As per my views, they've changed. I believe in the necessity of the proletarian transitional state

[Alet]

I think before we can talk about whether it is possible to achieve communism without a socialist state we should discuss the arguments which support the necessity of one. So, maybe you can blame me for my lack of knowledge of Marxist theory, but why do we need a state to achieve communism?

[G4b3n]

By dumpster diving and busting bank windows obviously. Though it is essential that participants be dressed in all black for it to actually work though. That has always been the fundamental issue in anarchist struggles, not enough black clothing to go around.

[#FF0000]

Joke answers aren't helpful, y'all

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

The proliferation of techniques of self-organization. The creation of autonomous spaces which can serve to both prefigure communist forms of life and support the offensive capacity of their participants in daily struggle against the state and capital. Increasing density of these spaces to the point that they overwhelm the existing order as a cancer kills its host.

[#FF0000]

Anarchists influenced by syndicalism support the idea of the General Strike (though it's not exclusive to anarchists at all) -- where revolutionary unions reach a critical mass to the point where they are able to call for a strike across all industries, simultaneously, grinding the capitalist system to a halt and collapse, allowing the means of production to be reclaimed by the workers and the unions.

[G4b3n]

Joke answers aren't helpful, y'all

Fair enough. Anarchist satire is just hilarious. Even though I don't identity with the ideology nearly as much as I used to, I am still sympathetic to many of the key principles, but the question is a good one and deserves a decent answer regardless.

The idea is to rely mainly on organic community institutions as vehicles of class struggle so as to keep the structure of the movement decentralized and highly democratic from the bottom up. Anarchists, like Marxists, typically view the state as nothing more than a tool of the ruling class. The fundamental disagreement is that anarchists do not view the tool as necessary in the building of socialism. From the anarchist perspective, the state is a tool foreign to the working class and cannot be anything more. Therefore after the state is "smashed" anarchists seize power through a variety of other outlets (labor committees, community councils, and other worker's institutions). And a major Marxist criticism is that this seizure of power typically resembles a state, i.e., an armed body of persons protecting specified class interests. This being one of the key characteristics of a state from the Marxist perspective. Engels on development of states "The second distinguishing feature is the establishment of a public power which no longer directly coincides with the population organizing itself as an armed force".

So to put it short and simple: Anarchism is thought to be achieved through grassroots community organizations in decentralized cooperation with each other.

[consuming negativity]

By making a state and not calling it one.:rolleyes:

"how do you even get to communism with a state?"

"by taking over the state and telling everyone you'll disappear in about 30 years"

i've always found it funny how as the USSR got older and older, the party got more and more accepting of "true communism" being farther and farther away

it's almost like they were waiting around for something that was never going to happen, precisely because they were willing to sit around waiting for generations in order to make it happen

you either want it now or you don't - we can either do it or we can't. do what's necessary or don't. the only point of seizing the state is to destroy it, and any actions apart from that are reactionary. the biggest lie lenin ever told was that state power was necessary for a class which controls all production to produce for themselves rather than for the state.

[ckaihatsu]

This issue of 'seizing' versus 'smashing' the state in order to overthrow bourgeois rule really just feels like *semantics* -- while each camp has its own position neatly described and carved-out, in practice I think it would be two slightly different paths that both arrive at the same summit.

My understanding is that state power *can* be seized so as to functionally invert its purpose, either neutralizing it and/or wielding it against the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie, as real conditions call-for.

Likewise, if a *general strike* turned out to be sufficient to foment revolution, then *that's* what would happen.

Basically this boils down to a *public sector* (state) vs. *private sector* (industries) schism of *strategy* -- a schism that can't be resolved because it depends on *actual conditions* which are unknowable here in the present.

[RedWorker]

"how do you even get to communism with a state?"

"by taking over the state and telling everyone you'll disappear in about 30 years"

This is not a valid analogy. While anarchists have created or aimed to create structures practically indistinguishable from a state, or even participated in the management of the bourgeois state, Marxists do not claim that we should take over the bourgeois state then dissolve it. We rather claim that we must create our own proletarian state which will wither away as a result of a series of developments, not voluntarily giving up power.

[Sewer Socialist]

This issue of 'seizing' versus 'smashing' the state in order to overthrow bourgeois rule really just feels like *semantics* -- while each camp has its own position neatly described and carved-out, in practice I think it would be two slightly different paths that both arrive at the same summit.

My understanding is that state power *can* be seized so as to functionally invert its purpose, either neutralizing it and/or wielding it against the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie, as real conditions call-for.

Likewise, if a *general strike* turned out to be sufficient to foment revolution, then *that's* what would happen.

Basically this boils down to a *public sector* (state) vs. *private sector* (industries) schism of *strategy* -- a schism that can't be resolved because it depends on *actual conditions* which are unknowable here in the present.

I feel that there is quite an important distinction between siezing and smashing the state. To simply sieze bourgeois institutions of state control and manage them is not a break with the bourgeois dictatorship; it is its continuation by a different name.

The failure to recognize this is maybe the first step down the road to reformism and social democracy.

[ckaihatsu]

I feel that there is quite an important distinction between siezing and smashing the state.


Okay.





To simply sieze bourgeois institutions of state control and manage them is not a break with the bourgeois dictatorship; it is its continuation by a different name.


I think the misconception here is this idea of an *abstract* 'management' -- it implies that the system would co-opt the revolutionaries when what's at stake is a revolutionary movement that *usurps* the functioning of the state as we know it.

So, in other words, I'm claiming apples-and-oranges -- either there *is* an effective overthrowing of the state's bourgeois politics -- a sea-change in policy -- or there isn't.





The failure to recognize this is maybe the first step down the road to reformism and social democracy.


This would be the 'isn't' part -- if revolutionaries don't prevail then your description here of the status quo would be the default, whatever actual circumstances and events play out.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

The idea is to rely mainly on organic community institutions as vehicles of class struggle so as to keep the structure of the movement decentralized and highly democratic from the bottom up. Anarchists, like Marxists, typically view the state as nothing more than a tool of the ruling class. The fundamental disagreement is that anarchists do not view the tool as necessary in the building of socialism. From the anarchist perspective, the state is a tool foreign to the working class and cannot be anything more. Therefore after the state is "smashed" anarchists seize power through a variety of other outlets (labor committees, community councils, and other worker's institutions). And a major Marxist criticism is that this seizure of power typically resembles a state, i.e., an armed body of persons protecting specified class interests. This being one of the key characteristics of a state from the Marxist perspective. Engels on development of states "The second distinguishing feature is the establishment of a public power which no longer directly coincides with the population organizing itself as an armed force".

It goes deeper than that. The state is, in the last instance, political coercion. We Marxists admit openly that it will be necessary in the transitional period, but also that it will disappear after the final victory of the global revolution. But there is a sort of populist anarchism that does not position itself against political coercion at all, merely asking that it be "local", "decentralised" etc. This often leads to a vision of the stateless (or "stateless") society as a loose collection of "communities" (and a lot can be said about the infatuation of a certain kind of anarchist with "communities) controlling the lives of their members. Apparently some anarchists think that people are not happy if they are beaten with the "people's stick", but if it's a "community stick", well that's alright then. And the more serious anarchists, who I imagine make up a majority of the actual anarchist movement but are underrepresented on the intertubes, don't really have an answer as to how something that still has a coercive public power is not a state or semi-state, in my experience.

Another problem is, of course, the opposition to what Engels calls authority in the production process, which actually ends up as an opposition to all coordination and specialised management. So communism, which for a Marxist is defined by the social control of and planned, rational use of the means of production, has to be reconciled with this vision of every "community", workplace, whatever, being autonomous.

(And Marxists don't think the state is necessary to "build socialism", but to defend and extend the revolution. Socialism isn't something that is "built", as if reaching socialism were a matter of the Ministry of the Economy ordering X thousand new factories, but of the relations of production changing. Only the workers can do that, the state can provide the gantry for the first planning etc. bodies, but it can do little more than that since, as long as the state exists, planning is necessarily limited and the law of planning is in tension with the law of value.)

[ckaihatsu]

Maybe the sublimated and overlooked question here is whether the worldwide revolutionary movement will provide the social organization used immediately after and onwards for *collectivist production*.

I think the assumption is usually in the affirmative, due to the already-existing centralization that the revolutionary movement would lend to collectivist efforts, but I wouldn't be certain that this is a *given* -- perhaps the process of revolution is distinctly different from the process of *production*, and the global industrial apparatus would have to be 'rebooted' from scratch to ensure bottom-up organization, for a new, *emergent* kind of centralization over global collectivist production.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I think the most natural assumption to make is that the various organisations that would manage production in the period of revolutions and civil war - the glavki, the centres, the syndicates and who knows what else - would coalesce into a unified system at the end of the civil war. Of course this means they would be fundamentally changed - there would be a new system in place, but it wouldn't be an entirely new organism. At the same time the state - the coercive organs etc. - would simply fall into disuse.

[Comrade Jacob]

step 1: Get rid of the state
step 2: ?????

Communism

(I'm joking an-coms :grin:, I know you have strategies)