This is the hallmark of the chronically online western dilettante “anarchist” mentality.
You cannot achieve statelessness in a material sense if the world is an assortment of states. What do you imagine happening? A country like the USSR just declares statelessness, dissolves the government, and no longer administers its territory while at every border is a state run by capitalists who would immediately annex territory?
That’s no way to run a socialist revolution.
Even by your own definition of a state, the actually existing examples of anarchism in history met that definition - Revolutionary Catalonia literally had customs houses and strictly controlled their borders, the Makhnovshchina administered and defended its territory while imposing the will of the government over that territorial claim. (I’m not going to discuss AANES since they aren’t even socialist by their very constitution and I’m not gonna entertain idealist Orientalist nonsense by discussing it and as for MAREZ they openly reject the label of anarchism so out of respect for them I’m not going to lump them into the anarchist category but, if someone were to, they would still meet that definition.)
That leaves Freetown Christiania which enforces a drug policy over its borders (enough said) and KPAM, and we both know that you haven’t done anywhere near enough reading to even start to discuss that example.
So why is it that the anarchists who have attempted socialist revolutions recognize the necessity of state apparatuses and territorial borders (i.e. the existence of the state) and yet you do not? What do the anarchists who have actually put the hard work in to advance their political project understand about the material conditions of reality that you do not?
I am a dialectal materialist. My position is that you cannot just dissolve a state by pressing the button labeled “statelessness” and that it’s not possible to achieve a full moneyless, classless, stateless society until the contradictions that give rise to these phenomena have been resolved; capitalism didn’t displace feudalism until the contradictions of feudalism were surpassed by centuries of development of the material conditions (and feudalism itself only ended in 2008 btw) so obviously it’s naive to argue from a position that countries that only existed for lean than a century and achieved socialism (or at least made major strides in achieving socialism) while being beset at all sides by war, subversion, and gray zone warfare at the hands of reactionaries should be able to just press the communism button immediately. But if that really is the position you’re going to be arguing from then perhaps you should be asking yourself why actually existing anarchist projects never achieved socialism, let alone anarcho-communism and the statelessness that is implied therein.
I can tell you two things about this though:
Following this thread until you reach the conclusion will be where you discover that you are no longer an anarchist, as long as you step out of the axioms and into matters of history.
You and I both believe in the idea of the withering away of the state already, although I doubt you would admit that openly and it’s likely that you haven’t even admitted it to yourself yet; the only difference between you and I on this matter is that we disagree on the timeframe that this takes place within.
I can go beat for beat on this but trust me when I say that you’re talking to a person who was a committed anarchist likely longer than you’ve been an adult for and we’re gonna do the “guac is extra” routine if it gets that far in the discussion.
Man wrote a book for me, so I’m actually going to stop and read it, then edit this comment later (=
Oh yea, my idea is that people will fight for their own self-interest, obviously. So if I design an uh…“living package” that is minimally expensive, and makes you not-dependent on outside factors for your basic survival, encourage trade between communities, an ethical system that means those who seek to exploit or subvert this new movement, get shunned (as all have to agree to a set of ethical terms, and they will see how those working against this system will go against their own self-interest).
I have a lot of kinks to work out there, in free time. I need to buy and test a “living kit”, and stick to it. This needs to be a start to something bigger. As for how I plan to deal with violent outside interference, a good part of the plan is that I would be sapping those outside, malevolent forces of their power, by denying them subjects. The movement would basically by leaderless, and based on economics by the time it takes off, and trying to regulate it, would draw aggro, and drain support away from The Powers That Be.
To make things even more interesting, these communities would be able to operate independently by design, so violence against them would be quite hard (good luck cutting supply lines, electricity, destroying food). If I have plans other than hoping people organize to defend themselves, I am sure as fuck not revealing them.
I’m not baiting you into fedposting and I reject it entirely but it is possible to make references to historical examples or to talk in hypotheticals without signing your name to it, for example, after mentioning what you have then following up by saying “I’ve heard that the Venezuelan Colectivos are armed and trained to act as a community self-defense force so it will be interesting to see how effective they are and what can be learned from their model of community self-defense” - you aren’t saying “we should do this” or “I’m forming this myself where I live” but the allusion is enough to gesture at an example without getting yourself dragged before a court, that is assuming you even want to discuss something like this publicly online in at all. It’s easy enough to read between the lines but also you have boatloads of plausible deniability if you ever had to account for posting a comment like that. OpSec is always priority.
I get what you’re saying about draining away the power from capitalisms and/or statism but my question is - what has happened to every utopian commune to ever exist? Either they pose a threat and they get taken down (and it’s not like any commune could resist against the forces of a power like the US military) or they peter out.
In my opinion what you’ve described is a way of building the new world within the shell of the old, except with extra steps. This is going to come off as uncharitable but this is the exact trajectory that Revolutionary Catalonia took in terms of defending the revolution - they started largely with very classic anarchist-ish policy (including economic policy) and over time the issues with public safety, a mafia-like org holding too much power as a sort of shadow state, labor discipline and economic productivity, attempts to organize production and logistics etc. all led them to start reinventing the Bolshevik wheel. In a smaller, shorter way (that has much less in terms of documentation) this is also the trajectory that the Makhnovshchina took as well.
You’ve also never seen a world without the United States, whomst spends 60% of the world’s military budget and has financed 100000000 coups
Until all capitalists are destroyed and every single human endeavor on Earth is being democratically directed by the working class, a state will have to exist to wage class war
I never see communists actually achieve statelesness.
I will start my own “communism”, with blackjack, and hookers!
This is the hallmark of the chronically online western dilettante “anarchist” mentality.
You cannot achieve statelessness in a material sense if the world is an assortment of states. What do you imagine happening? A country like the USSR just declares statelessness, dissolves the government, and no longer administers its territory while at every border is a state run by capitalists who would immediately annex territory?
That’s no way to run a socialist revolution.
Even by your own definition of a state, the actually existing examples of anarchism in history met that definition - Revolutionary Catalonia literally had customs houses and strictly controlled their borders, the Makhnovshchina administered and defended its territory while imposing the will of the government over that territorial claim. (I’m not going to discuss AANES since they aren’t even socialist by their very constitution and I’m not gonna entertain idealist Orientalist nonsense by discussing it and as for MAREZ they openly reject the label of anarchism so out of respect for them I’m not going to lump them into the anarchist category but, if someone were to, they would still meet that definition.)
That leaves Freetown Christiania which enforces a drug policy over its borders (enough said) and KPAM, and we both know that you haven’t done anywhere near enough reading to even start to discuss that example.
So why is it that the anarchists who have attempted socialist revolutions recognize the necessity of state apparatuses and territorial borders (i.e. the existence of the state) and yet you do not? What do the anarchists who have actually put the hard work in to advance their political project understand about the material conditions of reality that you do not?
I am a dialectal materialist. My position is that you cannot just dissolve a state by pressing the button labeled “statelessness” and that it’s not possible to achieve a full moneyless, classless, stateless society until the contradictions that give rise to these phenomena have been resolved; capitalism didn’t displace feudalism until the contradictions of feudalism were surpassed by centuries of development of the material conditions (and feudalism itself only ended in 2008 btw) so obviously it’s naive to argue from a position that countries that only existed for lean than a century and achieved socialism (or at least made major strides in achieving socialism) while being beset at all sides by war, subversion, and gray zone warfare at the hands of reactionaries should be able to just press the communism button immediately. But if that really is the position you’re going to be arguing from then perhaps you should be asking yourself why actually existing anarchist projects never achieved socialism, let alone anarcho-communism and the statelessness that is implied therein.
I can tell you two things about this though:
Following this thread until you reach the conclusion will be where you discover that you are no longer an anarchist, as long as you step out of the axioms and into matters of history.
You and I both believe in the idea of the withering away of the state already, although I doubt you would admit that openly and it’s likely that you haven’t even admitted it to yourself yet; the only difference between you and I on this matter is that we disagree on the timeframe that this takes place within.
I can go beat for beat on this but trust me when I say that you’re talking to a person who was a committed anarchist likely longer than you’ve been an adult for and we’re gonna do the “guac is extra” routine if it gets that far in the discussion.
Man wrote a book for me, so I’m actually going to stop and read it, then edit this comment later (=
Oh yea, my idea is that people will fight for their own self-interest, obviously. So if I design an uh…“living package” that is minimally expensive, and makes you not-dependent on outside factors for your basic survival, encourage trade between communities, an ethical system that means those who seek to exploit or subvert this new movement, get shunned (as all have to agree to a set of ethical terms, and they will see how those working against this system will go against their own self-interest).
I have a lot of kinks to work out there, in free time. I need to buy and test a “living kit”, and stick to it. This needs to be a start to something bigger. As for how I plan to deal with violent outside interference, a good part of the plan is that I would be sapping those outside, malevolent forces of their power, by denying them subjects. The movement would basically by leaderless, and based on economics by the time it takes off, and trying to regulate it, would draw aggro, and drain support away from The Powers That Be.
To make things even more interesting, these communities would be able to operate independently by design, so violence against them would be quite hard (good luck cutting supply lines, electricity, destroying food). If I have plans other than hoping people organize to defend themselves, I am sure as fuck not revealing them.
I’m not baiting you into fedposting and I reject it entirely but it is possible to make references to historical examples or to talk in hypotheticals without signing your name to it, for example, after mentioning what you have then following up by saying “I’ve heard that the Venezuelan Colectivos are armed and trained to act as a community self-defense force so it will be interesting to see how effective they are and what can be learned from their model of community self-defense” - you aren’t saying “we should do this” or “I’m forming this myself where I live” but the allusion is enough to gesture at an example without getting yourself dragged before a court, that is assuming you even want to discuss something like this publicly online in at all. It’s easy enough to read between the lines but also you have boatloads of plausible deniability if you ever had to account for posting a comment like that. OpSec is always priority.
I get what you’re saying about draining away the power from capitalisms and/or statism but my question is - what has happened to every utopian commune to ever exist? Either they pose a threat and they get taken down (and it’s not like any commune could resist against the forces of a power like the US military) or they peter out.
In my opinion what you’ve described is a way of building the new world within the shell of the old, except with extra steps. This is going to come off as uncharitable but this is the exact trajectory that Revolutionary Catalonia took in terms of defending the revolution - they started largely with very classic anarchist-ish policy (including economic policy) and over time the issues with public safety, a mafia-like org holding too much power as a sort of shadow state, labor discipline and economic productivity, attempts to organize production and logistics etc. all led them to start reinventing the Bolshevik wheel. In a smaller, shorter way (that has much less in terms of documentation) this is also the trajectory that the Makhnovshchina took as well.
Interesting. Sigh tons to crunch over when I have actual time
You’ve also never seen a world without the United States, whomst spends 60% of the world’s military budget and has financed 100000000 coups
Until all capitalists are destroyed and every single human endeavor on Earth is being democratically directed by the working class, a state will have to exist to wage class war