I really wasn’t trying to insult you. I’ve given you the benefit of the doubt each time we have spoken, which is a courtesy you have not returned. I have read your recommendations, I have made attempts to understand your perspective, and I have been patient with you, despite your smug condescension.

If you have been here from the beginning then I finally understand why none of the members of hexbear seem to know what an anarchist is and why they think we are all illiterate fools.

That is an insult.

Genuine question, what do you think a revolution looks like?

I’m going to be honest with you, and I don’t mean this as an insult, I’ve had several conversations with you and each time I end up asking myself if you’re an ML pretending to be an anarchist specifically to confuse people. Because you seem to consistently have the least anarchist takes every time I see you comment on something. You don’t appear to see the good in people, you don’t appear to trust decentralized movements, and any time you bring up theory it’s always an ML writer. Again, no disrespect, just wondering.

When you go to open a pickle jar do you start with a hammer or do you work your way up to it?

There are two things David Graeber defines as the “high theory” of anarchism.

1. A better world is possible.

2. There is no vanguard.

These people have met both criteria. They believe in a better world, and they are not following a vanguard. I also like to add a third rule:

3. “the ends are the means.”

This means there’s no point in killing for peace unless you are out of options.

Why?

I see. May I ask, how familiar are you with modern anarchist movements? Post globalization era.

Their demands seem fairly clear from my perspective. Remove the existing far right government from power, stabilize the lumpenproletariat, appoint auditors familiar with various affinities to their respective positions and take an audit before making long term commitments.

This is fairly bog standard takeover procedure. You really shouldn’t make sweeping claims and long term plans if you don’t even know how many people are in need of homes. That’s how you get mass starvation.

Respectfully, what am I supposed to take away from this article?

Care to explain?

‘Against the State: Anarchists and Comrades at War in Spain, Myanmar, and Rojava’ by James Stout

To clarify on some details I mixed up:

• The first tanks to roll out were trucks which had been armored by the Boilermaker’s union

• The specific region which skipped labor vouchers was an Astrurian city.

I remember James Stout said it, but my notes don’t say where it was from. I’ll do some reading and let you know.

Davis Graeber talks about this in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.

At the very least, one would imagine being an openly anarchist professor would mean challenging the way universities are run—and I don’t mean by demanding an anarchist studies department, either—and that, of course, is going to get one in far more trouble than anything one could ever write.

Graber was on track to become a tenured professor at Stanford University. But they fired him. The school made the typical politically neutered statement, but his peers said it was because he refused to fire his grad students who were forming a union, as well as his insistance on writing academic text in an accessible way. And his is not an uncommon story when you begin reading anarchist theory.

And I think this is because Marxism is not a moral framework, and it never really was. And as we see with Chomsky, anarchism is not immune to this problem, but it’s less likely to become an issue because there is no position of authority for these people to occupy.

Ok, so I was understanding correctly. It’s a limit, like in calculus; infinitely approaching, never reaching. And that would make feudalism the other limit of pure authority; It can never be reached because it is a contradiction of ultimate control, which is a contradiction.

And the state is a way by which traversal occurs, but since the purpose of a thing is what it does the state by definition cannot approach anarchism and therefore will never wither away?

@[email protected] oh, it clicked! I think I understand what you meant now. Anarchism doesn’t exist in a material sense. And the reason you referenced Lukács is because he clarified class consciousness. So if I understand correctly Graeber is saying is not that you cannot convince a statist, but that you cannot explain anarchism to someone who lacks class consciousness and therefore cannot imagine communism how Marx imagined it.

I see. Personally, no idea. Communalism seems to be working quite well at holding off fascism. Security culture works well in the imperial core, and decentralized affinity groups seem to be the most effective thing from inside the imperial core.

Graber talks about the two laws of anarchism. First, a better world is possible. Second, there is no vanguard; nobody has all the answers. This is why anarchist tactics today are unrecognizable from a decade ago, let alone a century.

Of course!

If we put things in the most straightforward terms, a state is a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. That’s it, that’s all a state is. If there is no monopoly of violence then it’s not a state. A monopoly on violence is maintained by a standing military occupation, in most cases this means police.

That’s the jist of it. There’s more nuance and different approaches to it, but that’s the core difference between anarchism and statism; are cops needed for communism? Anything else is just policy.

You make some great observations and raise even better questions!

Im terms of a “stripped down version of the state”, shortly before the above passage the author gives his definition of the state, which is a monopoly on violence. Essentially this means that all forms of violence within the boundaries of the state are either done by or permitted by the state. This can be a double edged sword, because while the state might not tolerate invasion or random manslaughter in the streets it also might stop you and your community from starting a militia and fighting nazis.

The comedian Brennan Lee Mulligan describes it really well when he paraphrases Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky “Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic class within a given society, and police act as a sort of occupying military to enact those threats…” The police are the arm of the state.

Also, you said something really funny without realizing it. There is no such thing as “pure anarchism”. Anarchism is rooted in anthropology, not sociology, so it’s observed rather than created.

As for those other issues you mentioned, there is a lot of anarchist theory on each of those, but I can give a few examples.

I can’t say that anarchism will keep you safe from fascists as we are fascisms first enemy. Bakunin fought them back before they even had a name for their ideology, the Spanish Republic was the first to wage war against them, and it was anarchists who retook Paris. Even now anarchists have been explicitly targeted by name by the Trump regime. The anarchist philosophy when it comes to surviving fascism is that it’s safer at the front. There’s a really good article by Crimethinc about this if you’re interested.

As for poop lettuce and infrastructure, when the Fascists began their coup of the Spanish Republic the syndicalists were able to roll out tanks within days. They moved so fast that they completely skipped the labor voucher phase Marx theorized and went straight to distribution based on need and labor from ability. The accounts of life during that brief period changed our understanding of communism forever, but they are often ignored because anarchism was involved. People don’t even mention the Marxists and Leninists, they pretend it was a failure. I recommend you look into some firsthand accounts of it (Not from Orwell, fuckin war tourist)

/gen

If the author is an anarchist and the audience is anarchist then why would the author try to convert the audience to anarchism?

They wouldn’t.

The passage is saying that it doesn’t make sense to argue with people who have already made up their minds. The Socratic dialogue at the start is an example of the logical fallacy of appeal to authority and circular logic, and Graeber’s paragraph at the end is him explaining the dialogue.

Do you see the irony of your original comment now?

Let me know what you think!

Good question, that’s likely because this is out of context and he spends several paragraphs after this section breaking this down further. This Socratic dialogue is actually the introduction to a chapter of a fairly small pamphlet which is available on theanarchistlibrary.

While I could try to sum up his thoughts in a few sentences I don’t have the energy to effortpost at the moment.