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So what exactly is the difference between communism and anarchism if both seek to eliminate the idea of a ruling class and create a horizontal power structure with everyone being equal? Am I misunderstanding something? Either way I fail to see how it would ever actually scale to work for an entire country.
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Nov 13, 2020 21:58
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Acerbatus posted:So what exactly is the difference between communism and anarchism if both seek to eliminate the idea of a ruling class and create a horizontal power structure with everyone being equal? Am I misunderstanding something? Yet somehow the zapatistas and cuba are both fine aside from the constant fuckery from Capital
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Nov 13, 2020 22:21
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Wait, have I been using "centralized" wrong? I feel like I meant it to mean a concentration of power, and you seem to be using it as a "undemocratic" power. Anarchists typically refer to things as 'centralized' when power/decision making is the part that's centralised in some group. For instance, EZLN has a planned economy and organisational structures to enforce it, but since every coop (and ultimately every worker) has a say in this planning and how it is enforced it is not centrally planned, but cooperatively, democratically planned. Contrast with Stalin's USSR where even though some people other than Stalin had a say what the plan was gonna be, it was ultimately a limited group that did not take into account the average worker's voice, and it unilaterally wielded power and coercion to enforce the plan. Ferrinus posted:Like what? People like to bring up the ELZN and Rojava here, but those are both formed in whole or part by MLs, have their own internal defense mechanisms and repressive infrastructure, and certainly in Rojava's case have made questionable bargains with the west for the sake of their own survival. This isn't to criticize them as bad or something, far from it - it just seems that all the same left-com critiques of classical socialist states could be applied to these institutions just as easily. They're also formed in whole or part by anarchists. What matters is their praxis is overwhelmingly anarchist and radically democratic in conception. You are correct that there are elements of ML in the praxis, but the differences in the way for example defense mechanisms are organised there vs what they historically looked like in ML states are not mere nuance. I will mention these two projects, by the way, is why I think a mostly-anarchist fusion with ML is the realistic way to go. Acerbatus posted:So what exactly is the difference between communism and anarchism if both seek to eliminate the idea of a ruling class and create a horizontal power structure with everyone being equal? Am I misunderstanding something? The difference is praxis - the way theory is implemented - because as you correctly identify, anarchist 'ideal end-game' is the same as what Engels himself says should be the end-game, the disappearance of the state. Anarchists tend to fall on the "you need to implement radical democracy from the get-go otherwise you are doomed to fall back to oppression" vs "you can start on the road to communism in smaller steps." dex_sda fucked around with this message at 22:33 on Nov 13, 2020 |
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Nov 13, 2020 22:27
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Acerbatus posted:So what exactly is the difference between communism and anarchism if both seek to eliminate the idea of a ruling class and create a horizontal power structure with everyone being equal? Am I misunderstanding something? both anarchism and communism have the goals of eliminating class structure and create a horizontal power structure. Anarcho-communism is a political philosophy. If you're looking for differences you're going to have to look between variants of either. Being unable to imagine how it scales seems like a lack of imagination on your part, however 
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Nov 13, 2020 22:30
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dex_sda posted:Anarchists typically refer to things as 'centralized' when power/decision making is the part that's centralised in some group. For instance, EZLN has a planned economy and organisational structures to enforce it, but since every coop (and ultimately every worker) has a say in this planning and how it is enforced it is not centrally planned, but cooperatively, democratically planned. Contrast with Stalin's USSR where even though some people other than Stalin had a say what the plan was gonna be, it was ultimately a limited group that did not take into account the average worker's voice, and it unilaterally wielded power to enforce the plan. But this isn't true. The five year plans were, themselves, democratically assembled with lots of participation and buy-in from single collective farms or villages or whatever. There are obviously technical limitations, guesswork, and time lag involved here, but why wouldn't they be? The USSR could only carry out its plans insofar as it had mass buy-in from its people. quote:They're also formed in whole or part by anarchists. What matters is their praxis is overwhelmingly anarchist and radically democratic in conception. You are correct that there are elements of ML in the praxis, but the differences in the way for example defense mechanisms are organised there vs what they historically looked like in ML states are not mere nuance. I will mention these two projects, by the way, is why I think a mostly-anarchist fusion with ML is the realistic way to go. The thing is, that's also true of "regular" socialist states. As much as we might wish otherwise, you don't actually get socialist (here "socialist" encompasses the entire range of left-wing thought from anarchism to communism) states in which everyone's a socialist. Socialist revolutions are carried out by masses that are led by socialists but actually contain people of almost every ideological persuasion who've had it up to here with the status quo and are willing to trust the socialists because of pre-existing relationships or precedent. Anarchists (as well as liberals, as well as wishes-they-didn't-have-to-care-about-this-crap "apolitical" Joes Schmoe) helped carry out the Russian Revolution and build the USSR, even though later on many of them were suppressed or marginalized such as in the Kronstadt uprising. And events like Kronstadt, or the dissolution of the factory committees, or all the other tough decisions the Bolsheviks had to make were all messy and regrettable and less than ideal, but were outcomes of difficult circumstances and external pressures rather than the creeping influence of some demon called "the state". To put this another way, and to echo someone else in this thread, there were reasons that Lenin was (ultimately wrongly) called an anarchist, and the Soviet and Chinese and other revolutionary projects were also radically democratic in conception and execution. Nevertheless, historical contingency meant that those projects were caught on the horns of difficult decisions arising from the general fact that no revolutionary coalition actually comes out the other end of that revolution intact, and the same is true or going to be true for the ELZN or Rojava or whatever else. In the course of coordinating their own growth and self-defense, they're going to have to repress or even expel well-meaning people who simply don't agree with the way things are going, and the fact that they had to do that is going to be used as proof that they've been corrupted by hierarchy or whatever.
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Nov 13, 2020 22:44
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Acerbatus posted:So what exactly is the difference between communism and anarchism if both seek to eliminate the idea of a ruling class and create a horizontal power structure with everyone being equal? Anarchists dress cooler.
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Nov 13, 2020 22:50
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Ferrinus posted:But this isn't true. The five year plans were, themselves, democratically assembled with lots of participation and buy-in from single collective farms or villages or whatever. There are obviously technical limitations, guesswork, and time lag involved here, but why wouldn't they be? The USSR could only carry out its plans insofar as it had mass buy-in from its people. This is the thing often said by MLs to rebuff the critiques, but the proof is in the historical pudding: 1) mass movements by workers were overwhelmingly fought against by USSR. You've mentioned Kronstadt, another good example from much later is say, the first Solidarność, which was a syndicalist movement of trade unions and workers wanting enhanced ownership of the means of production. 2) as mentioned upthread, if the power was not actually centralised in the anarchist conception of the word then a) unilateral purges by a person higher in the chain wouldn't have been a thing since there wouldn't have been a coercive element of this magnitude, and b) a purge would not as significantly hamper the capability of the system since there wouldn't be a consolidation of power that could be 'struck against.' Regardless, Stalin purged people and this significantly damaged USSR's capability near the start of the second world war. I didn't say there weren't good/democratic elements in USSR too, but the claim that power was not centralised in it is laughable. Ferrinus posted:The thing is, that's also true of "regular" socialist states. As much as we might wish otherwise, you don't actually get socialist (here "socialist" encompasses the entire range of left-wing thought from anarchism to communism) states in which everyone's a socialist. Socialist revolutions are carried out by masses that are led by socialists but actually contain people of almost every ideological persuasion who've had it up to here with the status quo and are willing to trust the socialists because of pre-existing relationships or precedent. Anarchists (as well as liberals, as well as wishes-they-didn't-have-to-care-about-this-crap "apolitical" Joes Schmoe) helped carry out the Russian Revolution and build the USSR, even though later on many of them were suppressed or marginalized such as in the Kronstadt uprising. And events like Kronstadt, or the dissolution of the factory committees, or all the other tough decisions the Bolsheviks had to make were all messy and regrettable and less than ideal, but were outcomes of difficult circumstances and external pressures rather than the creeping influence of some demon called "the state". No disagreements with the overall message, except I'd say the centralisation in the hands of the State helped make these regrettable decisions and ultimately led to more and more problems. dex_sda fucked around with this message at 23:02 on Nov 13, 2020 |
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Nov 13, 2020 22:55
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:Anarchists dress cooler. 
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Nov 13, 2020 22:55
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Acerbatus posted:So what exactly is the difference between communism and anarchism if both seek to eliminate the idea of a ruling class and create a horizontal power structure with everyone being equal? Am I misunderstanding something? Perhaps you have heard of Punk music theses anarchists listen to...versus the aria symphonies the communist comrades do
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Nov 13, 2020 22:57
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Acerbatus posted:So what exactly is the difference between communism and anarchism if both seek to eliminate the idea of a ruling class and create a horizontal power structure with everyone being equal? Am I misunderstanding something? Communism is a far-off ideal that both MLs and anarchists would like to achieve, or at least to constantly work towards in an endless dynamic of consistent improvement. MLs think you can get there by concentrating power amongst the right people and anarchists think that's just going to reproduce feudalism or capitalism. Nobody said that classless society can be achieved overnight, even with global revolution. It seems likely to scale better than capitalism however, which we've seen has the unpleasant side effect of causing an epoch-defining mass extinction.
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Nov 13, 2020 23:06
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dex_sda posted:This is the thing often said by MLs to rebuff the critiques, but the proof is in the historical pudding: I'm not saying power wasn't centralised. I'm saying it was democratic. Soviet citizens deliberated and voted same as we do (indeed, much more meaningfully than we do) and decisions made by central authorities flowed from popular support and indeed couldn't have been carried out without that support. You can't actually make people collectivize their farms with main force. There literally aren't enough soldiers per peasant. Putting aside the fact "mass movements by workers" have often been straight up CIA plots, you're discounting the most massive workers' movement on the field, which was the Soviet state itself. Like, okay, Kronstadt wasn't a machination of the US state department, and even Solidarity didn't start out as one. But, you know, a lot of other workers, certainly those who had volunteered to march in the Red Army, sharply disagreed with the tack the Kronstadt sailors were taking, which is why they suppressed them with brutal violence. The entire rest of the union needed a Baltic seaport and didn't appreciate that seaport being held hostage. If Kronstadt had genuinely represented a mass movement it might have earned more support across the wider USSR, such that the popular will wouldn't have allowed its suppression and actually forced the Bolshevik government to the negotiating table, but it wasn't that massive, and so it didn't get that much support, and so it ate poo poo. I don't think it's good that it ate poo poo; Kronstadt was a tragedy. But I also don't think the Bolshevik government made the wrong choice, because the needs of everyone else in the Union outweighed the ideological convictions of a specific political faction based in one specific city. Purges, too, weren't actually unilateral. The Bolsheviks were a fractious lot and a lot of people had a lot of ongoing disagreements, including pretty vituperative ones with Stalin himself, without getting summarily fired and/or shot. And the (perceived...?) need for those purges came as a consequence to the Bolsheviks arguably being too democratic - letting too many new people into the party too quickly and with too little oversight, such that the ranks were now swelled with newbies that the old guard didn't know well or have a good handle on how to deal with. As above, these represented a fuckup and a huge tragedy, but they weren't the result of "centralization" - they were a probably-unavoidable growing pain in a federation which, in fact, had been attempting to act as democratically as it could. To echo myself from above, when I say "regrettable" I don't mean "incorrect". I think it's a general fact of revolution that the coalition that carries out a revolution will never be exactly the same one that defends it afterwards, and there'll inevitably be rifts and power struggles between people who agree that the Tsar had to go but who fervently disagree whether grain should be getting sold on the free market. These power struggles aren't the fault or the cause of centralized decision-making, and are going to be resolved in messy and tragic ways pretty much whichever way you go.
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Nov 13, 2020 23:19
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I think in many ways we're arguing past each other because of a different perspective on concepts.Ferrinus posted:I'm not saying power wasn't centralised. I'm saying it was democratic. Soviet citizens deliberated and voted same as we do (indeed, much more meaningfully than we do) and decisions made by central authorities flowed from popular support and indeed couldn't have been carried out without that support. You can't actually make people collectivize their farms with main force. There literally aren't enough soldiers per peasant. And my anarchist contention is that as long as power is centralised to the extent it was in Soviet society, it cannot be meaningfully called democratic. Most people today don't rise up against the neoliberal states, but does that mean they have real buy-in with real democracy? Inside a company, if people listen to the CEO out of a fear of losing their job, does the CEO and shareholders have buy-in and follow the will of the worker? These are not exact parallels to USSR but they illustrate my broader point. The truth was that USSR has at the start addressed the material needs of the populace, which is one of the Good Things I mentioned. This bought it enough support to start with, and later as the state degenerated towards power consolidation there simply weren't enough people organised together to rise up any more. But that does not a participative democracy make. Notice I am much less critical of Lenin himself than I am of what followed after, even though he was the 'architect' of Kronstadt - because I agree with you that his mistakes were borne out of genuine, if sometimes mistaken, drive towards communism. dex_sda fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Nov 13, 2020 |
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Nov 13, 2020 23:26
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:Anarchists dress cooler.
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Nov 13, 2020 23:33
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dex_sda posted:I think in many ways we're arguing past each other because of a different perspective on concepts. Most people don't rise up against neoliberal states because to some extent those states do serve their interests, make their lives comfortable, and respond in some way to the popular will. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie isn't negotiable, obviously, but a preponderance of citizens of the first world do get a trickle of imperial spoils and also get to participate in the exploitation and repression of the most marginalized. Americans aren't hopelessly in thrall to centralized power of the evil dictator Donald Trump; Donald Trump is simply within their range of tolerance (though that range is slipping, especially with the horribly botched COVID response). Even though living in this context condemns most people to selling their labor-power day by day to a dictatorial boss just to be able to survive, that is actually not bad enough on its own that they're willing to withdraw their consent from the government en masse. I just don't think this thing called "power consolidation" (or "centralization" or whatever) is legibly to blame for the strife and violence which will necessary accompany any revolution, either immediately or in the aftermath. To say it is is to discount the judgment and agency of countless socialist citizens and revolutionaries, none of whom were foreign to concerns about democracy, bottom-up accountability, and similar.
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Nov 13, 2020 23:46
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I think one of the key takeaways from this discussion is thay pitting any two Isms against eachnother in a theoretical dual is inevitably circular and largely fruitless. Looking at specific historical situations and applying the theories of those two Isms to see which had better explanatory and predictive power and which may have better served the moment is a great conversation to have. Again, if you are confused about the idea that self professed anarchists would, for example, participate in a 'democratic socialist [liberal]' electoral campaign in the demon cracker nation of Amerikkka in 2020 then a lot of things will probably confuse you because basically no one ever has the desire or the luxury to dogmatically apply their favorite philosophy to espouse irrespective of their material situation! People are correct that in many ways 'socialism and anarchism sound the same', in practice they often are or at least are seperatedonly by degrees rather than kind. I would really, really appreciate if people could find specific thinkers espousing a given position so we can interrograte it together rather than ascribing a wholedale belief to e.g. 'Socialists' or 'Anarchists'. In my opinion this type of reduction is making it harder to discuss stuff, rather than easier at this juncture. And its not that I think the objections akong the lines of 'how do hou rapidly expand an anarchist society if all the new members have not been socialised into anarchism' are invalid, they are critical in fact! I just don't think their resolution lies in trying to mine out contradictions in a nebulously defined ideology of someone you spoke to in the past, if you see what I mean.
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Nov 13, 2020 23:49
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Ferrinus posted:I just don't think this thing called "power consolidation" (or "centralization" or whatever) is legibly to blame for the strife and violence which will necessary accompany any revolution, either immediately or in the aftermath. To say it is is to discount the judgment and agency of countless socialist citizens and revolutionaries, none of whom were foreign to concerns about democracy, bottom-up accountability, and similar. That's fine, and I will point out I'm not even disagreeing on the matter of revolution. Even the EZLN revolution that I am a huge fan of started off with some consolidated power and an ML leader. But my point is that where I think USSR failed and EZLN is so far succeeding is that the grip on power has relaxed very quickly after the revolution and was replaced with radical participative democracy. Hell, on a larger timescale this relaxation is starting to apply to Cuba, and it outlasted USSR! By comparison, USSR's power only consolidated with Stalin and thereafter often ended up aimed at it's constituents even if they were asking for more socialism and in the 80s, this led to internal strife that was exploited by external agents. In other words, even though I'm a self-described anarchist, I definitely do not wanna condemn the October Revolution or Lenin, just wish it had gone differently afterwards. Anyway, good discussion. 
dex_sda fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Nov 14, 2020 |
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Nov 14, 2020 00:02
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:Anarchists dress cooler.
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Nov 14, 2020 00:09
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Crumbskull posted:I would really, really appreciate if people could find specific thinkers espousing a given position so we can interrograte it together rather than ascribing a wholedale belief to e.g. 'Socialists' or 'Anarchists'. In my opinion this type of reduction is making it harder to discuss stuff, rather than easier at this juncture. And its not that I think the objections akong the lines of 'how do hou rapidly expand an anarchist society if all the new members have not been socialised into anarchism' are invalid, they are critical in fact! I just don't think their resolution lies in trying to mine out contradictions in a nebulously defined ideology of someone you spoke to in the past, if you see what I mean. As someone who's a huge anarchist-theory noob, I'd like to echo this request. Which is not to say I haven't been enjoying reading the thread - far from it, the discussion going on at present is very informative and interesting - but it might help with clarity if we could make clearer which beliefs follow which strand of thought where possible. Falstaff fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Nov 14, 2020 |
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Nov 14, 2020 00:10
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Still continuing my way through Capital, I'm going to try to cover (my understanding of) commodity fetishism and money in this post. I do this to lay the foundation for my next post sometime later this weekend (I hope), covering the C-M-C and M-C-M` cycles (which I would argue form the most important core of Marxist analysis.) As always, if anyone thinks I've misunderstood or missed something, please feel free to correct me. I'm doing this at least as much for my own learning as any other reason. So... Commodity Fetishism Many societies believe that particular objects have mystical powers. Usually this is something relegated to so-called “primitive” societies, but in fact it’s no less true of modern capitalist societies. As consumers, we tend to think about commodities as having relationships with one another – and that these relationships are natural and spontaneous, like the relationship between sugar cubes and tea, matches and cigarettes, or money and everything else. What actually happens is that society divides its labour between many different private producers, who relate to each other through product exchange. This is the process that transforms simple use-values into exchange-values. Without these relationships between people as producers, money and other commodities would lose their exchangeability. Without this, a florist would only ever have flowers – the florist needs to produce for exchange (grow flowers as commodities) and engage with the overall system in order for exchange to take place. No single commodity-producer can use indefinite quantities of any one use-value. Beyond a certain point, getting more of any particular commodity does nothing (or less than nothing) for you, and these commodities lose their use-value. (Even if you’re so enthusiastic about television programming that you want a television in every room of your house, sooner or later you’ll reach the point that making more televisions does nothing to meet a need you have – and probably just clutters up your place.) And yet, a newly-manufactured television with all the latest bells-and-whistles appears to us as though it is naturally exchangeable for money or other goods. Commodities just seem to attract money like magnets attract iron, as a force of nature. When we think of a television of a particular brand and size and with certain features, we often think of it as being “worth” just so much – no more, no less – naturally. This is commodity fetishism. And nothing is quite so fetishistic in a capitalist system as money. Money Value exists in three forms according to Marx: As commodities, as money, and as capital. Commodities are use-values produced for exchange. Money is the universal commodity, equivalent to all others. Capital is money invested to generate more money. Before we can discuss capital, we need to better understand money. Value-relations, in order to form a system, have to be established through aggregate exchange. Someone trading a bushel of apples for a car tells us almost nothing about the value relations between those things – it could simply be an unequal exchange, one person cheating the other out of a great deal of value. But if it happens enough, then you can begin to draw conclusions that one car is equivalent to one bushel of apples within a system of exchange. And so on with linen, tea, gold, etc. These exchange ratios become more fixed, are drawn closer to the value-based centre-of-gravity, and before you know it you have a system of commodity production where the relative value of commodities are systematically established. Before long this grows too complex for a system of barter, and money as the super-commodity necessarily emerges to act as the standard measurement of the value of all commodities.* Once you have money established as the super-commodity, other commodities generally can only be exchanged for money. It has a unique power of exchange. As the playwright Ben Jonson put it: Ben Jonson in The Alchemist posted:Riches – the dumb god that giv’st all men tongues, that can’st do naught, and yet mak’st men do all things. Money works its way into the centre of the system, and all commodities fix themselves price-wise against money as the super-commodity that facilitates massive-scale exchanges. * Historically, gold was the commonly-accepted super-commodity used as money. With the gold standard, it was no longer that a coat was worth 10 meters of linen which was worth 15 kg of tea, but that $20 could be exchanged for your choice of one coat, 10 meters of linen, or 15 kg of tea.
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Nov 14, 2020 00:20
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Ideologically, I'm an anarchocommunist, as best epitomised by Petr Kropotkin's "The Conquest Of Bread." However, I recognise some limitations of that book (specialists are needed in modern society, as is global interconnectedness) and so in my praxis I am more accurately a follower of neozapatismo, on which that wiki article is not a terrible tl;dr. Bear in mind that this ideology in itself admits adapting to conditions, so it is not as rigid as some strands of anarchism. Another prominent thinker I would reference is Bookchin, and certainly the ideas we've touched on during this discussion can be found in his work.
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Nov 14, 2020 00:24
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Centralization, in my opinion, is when federated bodies get the authority (delegated or otherwise) to dictate the behavior of their constituent members without consent or consult. And its a spectrum not a binary condition, a given federation may have its level of centralization wax and wane over time or have its domain of authority changed by the circumstance or member will or whatever. So take a trade syndicate of factories say, if elected representatives from each factory go to meetings and discuss the annual production needs for the coming year and then they go back to their meetings and make decisions for their factory based on that discussion, or even if all of the constituent factories decide by consent to follow some joint production plan, I think that can be called decentralized. Now, if the syndicate has its own production managers who are evaluating the coming years production needs and then distributing a plan to all of the factories that they must follow, this would be centralization. It is a question of where the decision making and authority is taking place.
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Nov 14, 2020 00:26
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Oh also everyone, irrespective of politics, ahould read Subcommandante Marcos' writing because its genuinely incredible literature and he is extremely funny to boot.
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Nov 14, 2020 00:32
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Crumbskull posted:Oh also everyone, irrespective of politics, ahould read Subcommandante Marcos' writing because its genuinely incredible literature and he is extremely funny to boot. Yup, absolutely.
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Nov 14, 2020 00:33
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Crumbskull posted:So take a trade syndicate of factories say, if elected representatives from each factory go to meetings and discuss the annual production needs for the coming year and then they go back to their meetings and make decisions for their factory based on that discussion, or even if all of the constituent factories decide by consent to follow some joint production plan, I think that can be called decentralized. Now, if the syndicate has its own production managers who are evaluating the coming years production needs and then distributing a plan to all of the factories that they must follow, this would be centralization. It is a question of where the decision making and authority is taking place. This, to my mind, is a difference between hierarchic centralization and heterarchic centralization. The decision making has been centralized in your representative consensus democracy because the representatives have gathered in a fork of centralized organization. You are not relying on peer-to-peer dynamics to create organization as an emergent property. However I would still absolutely call this an anarchistic organization because of the absence of top-down decision making: your proposed structure is definitely flat from a power-relationship perspective (assuming the representatives have been appropriately chosen to best represent the individual syndicates). Edit: I would sum up my running "point" as: Anarchy doesn't require decentralization but, at the same time, centralization is very prone to creating hierarchy and so must be treated carefully. Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 00:37 on Nov 14, 2020 |
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Nov 14, 2020 00:35
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Disnesquick posted:This, to my mind, is a difference between hierarchic centralization and heterarchic centralization. The decision making has been centralized in your representative consensus democracy because the representatives have gathered in a fork of centralized organization. You are not relying on peer-to-peer dynamics to create organization as an emergent property. However I would still absolutely call this an anarchistic organization because of the absence of top-down decision making: your proposed structure is definitely flat from a power-relationship perspective (assuming the representatives have been appropriately chosen to best represent the individual syndicates). Yes, with one caveat to stress: "consent" is a required part, and strong coercive elements preclude that.
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Nov 14, 2020 00:37
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Crumbskull posted:Oh also everyone, irrespective of politics, ahould read Subcommandante Marcos' writing because its genuinely incredible literature and he is extremely funny to boot. Do you have a link to a good collection?
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Nov 14, 2020 00:39
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Yes, and ideally the representatives are really delegates who are going to effectively restate the decisions that were already made at the factory level at a previous assembly. I'd argue that while the second arrangement I describe is still 'anarchist' assuming these managers are recallable, elected, accountable etc. but the decision making is still being centralized which suggests that the two things are not mutually exclusive (although the philosophically anarchisy may be wary of the arrangement).
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Nov 14, 2020 00:40
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I would probably question what you do when the factories need representation at the central government and the representatives elect other representatives and they go to a committee which talks to the central planning office as part of a wider consultation and oh dear you have invented the european union.
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Nov 14, 2020 00:41
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VictualSquid posted:Do you have a link to a good collection? Heres a collection of some of his most recent work: https://www.akpress.org/the-zapatistas-dignified-rage.html.
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Nov 14, 2020 00:41
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dex_sda posted:Yes, with one caveat to stress: "consent" is a required part, and strong coercive elements preclude that. Absolutely. Clearly there is a big risk in representative democracy of any kind as the representatives can use their demos-granted power to create friction In the removal of that power from them, and thus start to accumulate power further. Any anarchist society (and I'd include communism.in the literal reading of that) would need to be constantly working to eliminate non-consensual dynamics when they occur or, in the case of rear end in a top hat emergence, minimize the coercion to the greatest extent possible.
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Nov 14, 2020 00:44
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OwlFancier posted:I would probably question what you do when the factories need representation at the central government and the representatives elect other representatives and they go to a committee which talks to the central planning office as part of a wider consultation and oh dear you have invented the european union. I think the point here is that you wouldn't have a central planning office. It would be a temporary structure formed by a moot of all the representatives. A permanent nexus of control like that seems at high risk of forming a power concentration.
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Nov 14, 2020 00:45
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OwlFancier posted:I would probably question what you do when the factories need representation at the central government and the representatives elect other representatives and they go to a committee which talks to the central planning office as part of a wider consultation and oh dear you have invented the european union. I mean, if there is a 'central planning office' that is making decisions on its own and industry associations are having to lobby it then that sounds pretty 'centralized' to me. The anarcho-syndacalism I'm (clumsily) describing wouldn't likely have a 'government central planning' body because the 'government' IS the distributed decision maing aparatus of the various industrial syndicates.
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Nov 14, 2020 00:48
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Acerbatus posted:So what exactly is the difference between communism and anarchism if both seek to eliminate the idea of a ruling class and create a horizontal power structure with everyone being equal? Am I misunderstanding something? Not trying to attack you but I just cracked myself up inagining someone going 'o.k. wait so one guy "owns" all of this land and we can only do anything on it with his permission and we have to give him half of everything we produce and he'll kill us if we don't??? I fail to see how that would ever actually work for an entire country...'
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Nov 14, 2020 00:50
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Crumbskull posted:I mean, if there is a 'central planning office' that is making decisions on its own and industry associations are having to lobby it then that sounds pretty 'centralized' to me. The anarcho-syndacalism I'm (clumsily) describing wouldn't likely have a 'government central planning' body because the 'government' IS the distributed decision maing aparatus of the various industrial syndicates. What I was kind of getting at is that is what the problem with centralization is. If you start doing it the impulse is to keep doing it because it facilitates managing larger and larger groups of people. But it does so by abstracting the decision making further and further away from the majority of people. It might be fine to centralize the decision making for a small number of people who elect immediate delegates but I do not think it scales up. Or rather I do think it scales up but it scales up by alienating the people it governs.
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Nov 14, 2020 00:55
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As an anarchist: I broadly agree.
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Nov 14, 2020 00:59
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Crumbskull posted:Not trying to attack you but I just cracked myself up inagining someone going 'o.k. wait so one guy "owns" all of this land and we can only do anything on it with his permission and we have to give him half of everything we produce and he'll kill us if we don't??? I fail to see how that would ever actually work for an entire country...' So wait we're just going to let one guy build fences around the pastures that everyone in the village use to graze our sheep and force us to pay him money to take our sheep into those pastures anymore and he's going to use the money we pay him to hire more guys and put up more fences around the pastures of the village next door? And then after we have to sell more and more of our sheep paying him that money until we can't make our living on sheep anymore he's going to offer to pay us to plant crops on the land that he put fences around except he'll only pay us a fraction of what we used to make raising sheep and then his guys are going to take all the crops we grow and sell them for money so that he and his friends can buy a bunch of ships and go to the next island over and start putting up fences around the pastures in their villages? Seems like a pyramid scheme to me, I don't see it working.
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Nov 14, 2020 00:59
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dex_sda posted:That's fine, and I will point out I'm not even disagreeing on the matter of revolution. Even the EZLN revolution that I am a huge fan of started off with some consolidated power and an ML leader. But my point is that where I think USSR failed and EZLN is so far succeeding is that the grip on power has relaxed very quickly after the revolution and was replaced with radical participative democracy. Hell, on a larger timescale this relaxation is starting to apply to Cuba, and it outlasted USSR! By comparison, USSR's power only consolidated with Stalin and thereafter often ended up aimed at it's constituents even if they were asking for more socialism and in the 80s, this led to internal strife that was exploited by external agents. What does "USSR's power only consolidated with Stalin" mean, exactly? Did Stalin have more personal authority than Lenin, and then Kruschev more personal authority than Stalin, or whatever? There was a lot of political maneuvering in the 20s and 30s in which Stalin's faction got its way over Zinoviev's and then Bukharin's, for instance, but I'm pretty sure this was an instance of a greater proportion of the party being won over to Stalin's side rather than Stalin pulling a series of Emperor Palpatine maneuvers where he votes himself more and more powers and is suddenly arch-president for life rather than a humble secretary. In general, I'm skeptical of your measurement of how tight or relaxed some person or institution's grip on "power" is, and therefore how centralized or consolidated or whatever a given socialist society actually is. If the ELZN's grip on power is so relaxed, how can they enforce a COVID lockdown that prevents citizens from traveling between regions? Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 01:09 on Nov 14, 2020 |
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Nov 14, 2020 00:59
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Also as to the whole problem of 'doesn't this system inherently contain the seeds of its own destruction' well thats dialectics baby. There is a reason 'taoist anarchism' is a thing.
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Nov 14, 2020 01:00
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Ferrinus posted:What does "USSR's power only consolidated with Stalin" mean, exactly? Did Stalin have more personal authority than Lenin, and then Kruschev more personal authority than Stalin, or whatever? There was a lot of political maneuvering in the 20s and 30s in which Stalin's faction got its way over Zinoviev's and then Bukharin's, for instance, but I'm pretty sure this was an instance of a greater proportion of the party being won over to Stalin's side rather than Staling pulling a series of Emperor Palpatine maneuver where he votes himself more and more powers and is suddenly arch-president for life rather than a humble secretary. Well, because everyone voluntarily consented to the idea after community discussion. (I'm mostly kidding and more or less agree with you, although I know basically notbing about the USSR which is why I'd never personally hazard to make a judgement on who had what power and how)
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Nov 14, 2020 01:04
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| # ? Jun 4, 2024 03:57 |
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Ferrinus posted:What does "USSR's power only consolidated with Stalin" mean, exactly? Did Stalin have more personal authority than Lenin, and then Kruschev more personal authority than Stalin, or whatever? There was a lot of political maneuvering in the 20s and 30s in which Stalin's faction got its way over Zinoviev's and then Bukharin's, for instance, but I'm pretty sure this was an instance of a greater proportion of the party being won over to Stalin's side rather than Stalin pulling a series of Emperor Palpatine maneuver where he votes himself more and more powers and is suddenly arch-president for life rather than a humble secretary. Ferrinus posted:In general, I'm skeptical of your measurement of how tight or relaxed some person or institution's grip on "power" is, and therefore how centralized or consolidated or whatever a given socialist society actually is. If the ELZN's grip on power is so relaxed, how can they enforce a COVID lockdown that prevents citizens from traveling between regions? By... individual regions agreeing to it?  Don't need a centrally wielded stick when individual regions agree to work together.
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Nov 14, 2020 01:09
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