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Comment by TotalCrackpot | Hacker News Reader

Orwell was actually fighting FOR communism. Specifically anarcho-communist Catalonia. What you call Communism is actually ideology called Marxism-Leninism, there are libertarian variants of communists too, for example anarcho-communism or council communism. Communism is stateless, classless and moneyless society so you can ask yourself a question. Was USSR state communist? It was a state. That ideology postulated that it can impose communism top-down, which was always criticised by anarchist thought which operates on horizontalism and not hierarchy. Orwell was a democratic socialist till the end of his life, which a lot of people don't know. He was not a liberal or social democrat.

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1. At the time, Orwell was a socialist, not a communist, and perhaps even more importantly, he was fighting against fascism, rather than for communism. You really should distinguish your 2nd and 3rd Internationals.

2. The USSR was definitely founded by Bolsheviks, the leaders of the 3rd "Communist" International. They even went so far as to put the word "communist" in the party's name, and kill dissidents.

3. Anarchism leads to a lawless society in which the strongest will rule. It leads to Dark Ages, as it has done before. It may be moneyless, but it will have very clear class and ownership concepts.

4. "It wasn't true communism". Just like China, North-Korea, the GDR, etc. Sure. If it wasn't true communism, you can draw the historical dialectic conclusion that we cannot reach true communism.

> 3. Anarchism leads to a lawless society in which the strongest will rule. It leads to Dark Ages, as it has done before. It may be moneyless, but it will have very clear class and ownership concepts.

Why? Because of one sentence quote from a book published in 1651? Or maybe you have no idea what you are talking about?

If nobody feels like organizing social power structures I’d probably just go ahead and do it myself. What are you gonna do when there’s ten of us and one of you?

Generally anarchists accept power structures are inevitable and want different power structures, organized on the basis of mutual cooperation and collective decision making rather than a hierarchical system where a small number of people (usually the people furthest from the "facts on the ground") deliberate and decide. More like direct democracy than a power vacuum.

Individual anarchist would disagree with quite a lot of of this, which is why I don't define Anarchism, for me it's about fighting against relations of domination and subordination. This school is very broad.

Certainly. If you have ideas about how to oppose systems of domination and subordination without creating systems to replace them, I'm always interested to hear about it.

I'm confused why you don't want to define it. You seem passionate about advocating for it. If you won't define it, how can you respond to a challenge like in the GGP comment? Why should anyone be convinced by your argumentation if you won't tell them what you're arguing for?

Keep in mind, you don't have to provide a complete definition, only a definition for what you mean by it and what you are advocating for. You can make it clear that others might disagree.

I would say my approach is fairly economical, if GGP doesn't want to justify their opinion on anarchism being the rule of the strongest with private property then I just wasted my time. I wouldn't be surprised if he considered anarchism as only anti-statist ideology, if he wrote that then indeed I would probably write something more about ideas that usually correspond to this ideology. On one hand I try to engage him, on the other indeed I do that confrontationally. I think this has advantages to writing a monologue abut what Anarchism means, or at least what it means to me.

I guess I just don't understand what your goal are and what you're trying to economize. If you don't want people to think it's merely antistatism, snapping at them will seem, in their minds, to confirm their preconceptions.

I certainly am not suggesting you write a monologue, but snapping at them isn't a dialogue either.

So what’s the answer then when I show up at your door with ten guys with guns? What’s the social structure that prevents it in your ideal view?

I cared for my community so you have 100 people against you. Even if you were in a SWAT police uniform because of internet trolls, while in current system I would be probably get legally murdered by such entity.

> I cared for my community so you have 100 people against you.

Sounds pointlessly idealist to me. If you’re allowed to just assume large scale cooperative society then any system of governance is fine.

> while in current system I would be probably get legally murdered by such entity.

“X has problems therefore not X is better”

Ok. I'm current society you call police, in next 10 minutes you get to murdered. In an hour or 2 police comes and of your murderers were bad then they left evidence that makes them go to prison financed from other people taxes. You are dead.

And… what happens in your fantasy society?

It sucks that someone got murderer by police arresting the culprit and putting them into a publicly funded prison seems largely ideal plus or minus your view of the death penalty?

It tries to destroy incentives for these behaviors before they happen. You have to address that on case-by-case basis. A lot of acts we consider harmful stem from bad material situation, which is an inherent part of this system. System needs people in very bad situation to be willing to do the worst jobs. And anarchists overall think that you should put more action towards HELPING a person that got harmed than only punishing a persecutor of harmful act.

This is more or less the goal of every system of governance aside from strongman rule. You’ve proposed the common desireable end state with no explanation of how to get there, and then acted as if your solution is credible as a path to get there.

Governance is hard. And has problems. That doesn’t mean the opposite of governance is the answer.

As the slogan goes, "no government doesn't mean no governance." Anarchism is about a different way of doing governance where decisions are, as much as possible, made by the people directly effected by them, as close to the problem as possible. Anarchists are generally not opposed to governance, they're opposed to the particular form of governance represented by the state.

You'll have an easier time if you explain what anarchism is instead. Eg, "anarchism doesn't seek to abolish all power structures, it seeks to replace hierarchical power structures with horizontal ones; to narrow their scope of responsibility; and to form systems of accountability to ensure the power structures serve the purpose intended, rather than their own interests. The problem of power structures expanding to consume all of society is a result of the tendency of power structures to serve their own ends and expand their scope of responsibility (analogous to the classic quip about how every application will eventually send email)."

Discussions of political theory in a general audience, where you can't assume everyone is on the same page about what terminology means (and the term anarchism most especially), usually go better if you explain what you mean in long form rather than using the jargon term.

If you tell someone you're an anarchist and don't elaborate on what you mean, they're gunnuh think of Gavrilo Princip.

> Communism is stateless, classless and moneyless society so you can ask yourself a question.

Communism is a specific historic movement. As Nietzsche famously said, “all ideas, in which a whole process is promiscuously comprehended, elude definition; it is only that which has no history, which can be defined.” It also rhymes nicely with what Marx said, “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”

> What you call Communism is actually ideology called Marxism-Leninism

Well, why what you call it is how it’s actually called and what someone else calls it is wrong? Language is arbitrary. I think it is a purely political question. Just like deciding whether to define racism as racial prejudice or as racial prejudice with power. It’s all about rhetoric, not about what’s something “actually called”.

Ok, so can you call it how I want from now, ok? Why am I supposed to submit to your newspeak that is just to attack all leftist as authoritarians and to ommit anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist movements? Imprecise vocabulary is great tool for authoritarian, that's why I write about these other meanings and ideologies.

> Why am I supposed to submit to your newspeak that is just to attack all leftist as authoritarians and to ommit anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist movements?

Well, it is simply a fact that in public discourse both left and right mainly associate communism with Marx and Lenin because of the early influence of Marx on communist movements and of later Bolshevization of the Comintern in 1920s. I don’t see what is newspeak-y about it, it is a natural linguistic and cultural development.

> Imprecise vocabulary is great tool for authoritarian, that's why I write about these other meanings and ideologies.

Yeah, that’s why I always look at “anarchists” with suspicion. They seem to consistently support measures that empower the government.

But that kind of state Marxism happened in other countries as well. The state Marxists might ask the anarchists how they expect to accomplish a sateless, classless, moneyless society. The state Marxists didn't succeed, but it does still pose a question toward anarchists. How do you get rid of the state? To that I'd add, what makes you think people want a classless, moneyless society?

Or another question would be, how do you have a revolution to overthrow the state and not just replace it with another state setup by whoever ends up leading the revolution?

You can read about Zapatistas, who ideologically are the closest to anarchist territory in practice. They have quite a bit higher standard of living then the rest of Chiapas, so it seems the experiment is successful.

A lot of people don't like liberalism anymore and because they think the only alternative on the left was Marxist-Leninism they slowly go in the direction of fascism. Anarchism is another direction.

Anarchist revolution wouldn't have leaders and it in theory wouldn't have to be violent - anarcho-syndycalists postulate that a general strike would be enough. Probably some violence would happen, especially from the state or fascist paramilitary groups but who knows.

Anarchist main strategy is prefiguration, so create spaces that are anarchist in nature and grow them from there, show as many people they don't need a state or private property or if you are a communist a money too.

"Zapatistas"

If they practice anarchism, it is of a kind where everyone must work and they do seem to have clear power structures as far as I understand.

So they sound more socialist than anarchist to me with authoritian tendencies in reality. But it is hard to tell, as they are very closed up and not very open to outsiders. But for context, they do fight for survival in a hostile environment and that probably does not help with nice and clean solutions. Still, there seems to me a big discrepancy between their writings and their actions, so I would be careful with choosing them as a role model. But their slogan I very much like "The world we want is one where many worlds fit".

I've read they try two find consensus which doesn't seem authoritarian, do you have any sources for that?

And what happens if they don't find a consensus?

And it has been a while that I tried to find out more about them, but I mainly found it hard to get neutral sources at all. They are very closed up and you cannot just visit them. Or in some ways you can, but you won't get to see the inside structures. How they actually make decisions. At least that's what the people I read reported.

(But there is a study I just stumbled on, I will read later, maybe there is sonething more concrete inside:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S073805931...)

All in all it sounds more like tribalism. A indigenous culture that is trying to survive with some autonomy in a world of nation states.

>And what happens if they don't find a consensus?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_Zapatista_Autonomous_Mun...

They strive to reach consensus, if they cannot find it they make decisions through majority and they are federation composed of popular assemblies of around 300 families each.

Zapatistas are indigenous Americans whose culture was almost completely destroyed, but calling them tribalist is unfair I would say, given that e.g they promote sexual equality.

What has tribalism got to do with sexual equality?

Tribalism is a vague term, that describes societies that live in tribe like structures. Modern or ancient. But does not say much about how that tribe is structured.

Also about consensus: I think allmost all states and societies claim they try to find a consensus.

According to Wikipedia: "With a negative connotation and in a political context, tribalism can also mean discriminatory behavior or attitudes towards out-groups, based on in-group loyalty." I would describe their organization as federation of general assemblies, not tribalism.

Well, I did not use tribalism with a negative connotation.

And as far as I understand, their "assemblies" are pretty much reserved to members of their ethnicity/tribe. Thats why it is more tribalist to me, than anarchist, which is usually rather internationalist.

They seem to have closed borders which is not typically considered anarchists indeed. About assemblies - that's fine, anarchists postulate freedom of association so you don't have to let random people from outside inside your structures, still they seem to be some inspiration to the rest of residents of Chiapas and in practice there is nothing that could stop them from fighting for their self-determination too.

When it comes to discussing anarchism I think a principle of physics - horror vacui - neatly translates to sociology. When there are no greater powers, there is every incentive to collaborate to create ones, so soon there will be greater powers, ruling the relatively powerless ones again.

Anarchist thought is centered around fighting against that.

I just cannot see how they could be successful in preventing power accumulation in the long run. Unless the thesis is that all (as in "each and every") humans by themselves want to prevent power accumulation, so nobody even tries. To me that does not sound very realistic.

It's enough for significant majority to strive for that type of society to stabilize this type of structure. Sure, some people don't like anarchist framework, that's why anarchists are propagating their way of thinking. Consider that we are from the beginning of our life indoctrinated into authoritarian structures like nation state, school, workplace and a lot of people go through the motion because they don't think alternative is possible. Probably not unsignificant fraction of slaves too thought that that's how it is. We know that slave owners were justifying slavery as natural, same as a lot of people justify liberalism as such. I would say anarchists want to create a world for anarchists and want to spread anarchists thought, because they think that there is actually nontrival part of humanity that would be to some extend interested in these ideas. Anarchism was very significant movement in the beginnings of XX century before it lost to Marxism-Leninism and these people were interested in these types of organization that prevent power accumulation. Marxism-Leninism damaged every anti-capitalist tendency in the west unfortunately in minds of big part of population, but I think it's still workable to spread the idea, especially considering that anarchists were repressed everywhere where Marxists-Leninists got to power.

There is a strong assumption here that those striving for an anarchist society will be able to subdue local collaborations of a different persuasion. This majority would need to be very well armed and at all times willing to risk their life to defend the non-order. This seems unlikely.

Also, this does not explain how that significant majority is supposed to come into existence. Some sympathy for those ideas in intellectual circles more than 100 years ago are not exactly a good indicator for current trends.

For me it's clear, that if these ideas don't grow in popularity then such a society will not come to existence. Then this movement is mostly a counter to various authoritarian tendencies and it functions mostly in small scale experiments and in fight against oppression inside other structures.

There has never been an anarchist "experiment" capable of sufficient coordination to produce modern (for its time) medicine, or the agricultural technology needed to feed current populations, or housing and infrastructure fitting of modern standards, and so on for many other goods and services we consider necessary to life today. Anarchism has almost sort of worked for a handful of small-scale, already-impovershed revolutionary/resistance groups, who can rely heavily on pre-existing infrastructure and some trade with capitalist or state communist industries, but there is little evidence to suggest it would be able to work on a meaningful scale. It also has a tendency (such as in Spain) to be co-opted by wannabe dictators anyway who simply establish oppresive state communist regimes regardless.

Soviet-style command economies are already notorious for being unable to match capitalist economies in terms of efficiency, due to the simple fact that it's far easier to use natural pricing (maybe with some interventionism) to reach equilibrium than equations and top-down production quotas. You can make an argument this could change with help from modern data science and machine learning but that's beside the point. With anarchism, you are taking all of the issues of soviet-style economies and making them even worse in that now each individual commune is responsible for coordinating with every other one it relies on. Even if you don't prevent natural currency systems from developing you still lose massive amounts of efficiency and still end up with inequality (due to resource, skill, etc. distributions being inherently different), though this time maybe you get lucky and the ienquality is between communes as opposed to being within them, between classes.

Also, there are practically no cases of lasting nonviolent anarchist revolutions. The haves tend to really not like giving up belongings and lifestyles to the have-nots when forced to. That's obviously not an argument against anarchism, though.

You make interesting assumption that centralization is more efficient then decentralisation but if that was the case then soviet style economy should be more efficient than capitalist market. In capitalism you effectively have a bunch of corporations with internal command economy that trade with each other. In Anarchism hypothetical companies are much smaller so you don't have in efficiencies stemming from these long chains of command with a lot of beaurocracy. Anarchism didn't have opportunity to create bigger project because the tendency is violently repressed by rulers of the current world. It actually eliminates the lot of losses of efficency of current society like economic rents which are proved to be negative to economy, just currently capitalism has relatively extremely strong violence potential and great propaganda machine. This obviously makes Anarchism a very hard and ambitious project but to me its clear that it would be more efficient in creating societies with higher standard of living than what we have currently. Please consider that it can both have markets and currencies AND decentralised planning depending on what is better in specific situation.

> Anarchist revolution wouldn't have leaders

we're talking humans here, right ? there's always a jerk who takes over

Who was the leader of Catalonia revolution would you say? Sure people from CNT-FAI engaged in agitation etc. but were they actually leaders?

if the revolution had been successful, i guarantee you there was going to be a leader, maybe after intense and bloody infighting.

Nobody said there would be one leader. That's a pretty communist thing to assume.

The core problem is how to have redistributive system, from each according to their ability, to each according to their need, without a dictatorship. Someone has to determine what the needs are and do the redistributing.

Some variant of decentralized planning.

That can work at a local level, I have a friend who was born into a Kibbutz, but what happens at the national level? Most Kibbutzim are agricultural, but there are some that operate capital intensive high tech manufacturing, including one that makes advanced military products, with huge revenue relative to the number of members. Somebody needs to allocate and manage strategic resources for big projects, and have the power to make it stick.

The problem with communism has always been accountability. This is why in the 1860s Bakunin was arguing that Marxist regimes would be one-party dictatorships unrepresentative of the actual proletariat, and that it would lead to the worst tyranny the world had ever known. He was saying this before Lenin was even born. Marx eventually kicked him out of the International for it. IMHO it's one of the most stunningly prescient political predictions of all time.

Zapatistas falsified your statement, Rojava is too argument against scaling issues. We can arbitrary move scales from these hundreds thousands or a few million for Zapatistas and Rojava, but I would argue that if these structures work on that scale then they should on scale of tens of million too. The trick is to add some federational or confederational structure where locals can easily undelegate chosen delegates. Currently in federational states its usually impossible or very hard to undelegate representatives and so they do what they want for a few years.

The Zapatista movement is almost entirely rural. What capital intensive industry have they built and run? In fact they are adamantly opposed to big infrastructure projects in their region. That's remarkably prescient because they would erode economic equality.

Of course communitarianism can absolutely work at the community level, I discussed that above, the problem always comes when you try to scale that up to more 'lumpy' and specialised economic activities. As soon as some economic and social activities have dramatically more economic and social consequence, or are dramatically more resource intensive than others, the problems start setting in.

The Marxist view is that communism can only work in industrial settings because Marx viewed it as about the control of capital. The actual evidence in reality is that it only works in culturally and economically homogenous societies, which mostly means rural ones.

I would say with both Rojava and Zapatistas we see very oppressed minorities who were fighting for self determination, I think that's one of of the reasons they are more interested in these horizontal structures. Revolutionary Catalonia was somewhat similar in their identity being questioned by Spanish conservatives. People in urban areas usually consider themselves privileged compared to inhabitants of rural areas so they are less interested in these modes of social organisation, even if they are usually still oppressed by capitalist mode of production as workers.

In the western world we already have many forms of wealth redistribution. Why wouldn't normal democratic government suffice for communism under right circumstances? You might as well say that the core problem of capitalist west is how to collect taxes without dictatorship. The people choose the government and give it the power to implement policies. Of course implementing communism wouldn't be easy if big part of society was absolutely against it (as civil wars have shown), but if enough people wanted communism and voted democratic communists into power, I can imagine democratic communism happening. If it would succeed in the long term is another question.

It's good to remember that in Russia (and most? other countries that were/are communist) there was never any real democracy. Not before communism, not under communism, and not now. I think the outcome could be different (less authoritarian) if communists were chosen by people who actually lived under democracy before.

And the party for capitalism and private property would be allowed to participate in the elections? :)

USA was financing coups and assassinating anti capitalists in Latin Americans even when they were elected, so just choosing them doesn't work. Capitalist power structure is fine with using violence to keep its hegemony even against Liberal rules.

Oh absolutely, of course that's the point and it's why Orwell was a democratic socialist. In democratic mixed economies we have some redistribution, and some private property, and some state capitalism all mixed together. In truth all 'western' economies are mixed, not even the USA is anywhere even close to being purely capitalist; not even the most socially minded European economies are anywhere even close to being purely socialist.

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