I’m hoping this doesn’t start a fight, I’m just curious what the political orientation is of this community. I grew up in a liberal (in the American sense) family, and I identify now as a socialist, though a lot of the liberalism I grew up in has stuck with me, like interest in LGBTQ and women’s rights, environmentalism, etc. Wondering where people here land?
I guess I should ask why do you think the state will dissolve?
If an anarchist revolution is successful, the dissolution of the state is inevitable.
If a socialist revolution is successful then the eventual dissolution of the state will likely occur in a framework such as Engels’ “withering away of the state”.
Since capitalism cannot sustain itself indefinitely, it is likely that one of these two revolutions will occur (or there will be a backslide into fascism).
Is there an anarchist model you cite as an example?
Pëtr Kropotkin wrote a lot about possible organisation of anarchist society after the revolution, at this point it’s a meme to recommend reading “the bread book” The Conquest of Bread and I don’t personally recommend starting with it and instead beginning with a pamphlet like Anarchism and Revolution.
The ZAD de Notres-Dame-des-Landes, is a good example of a long running commune that has managed to withstand assault from an external state. But the kinds of large scale anarchism that will do away with the state in its entirety has not yet been attempted.
I’m surprised you didn’t cite Catalonia or Zapatistas or Anarchist Ukraine? Guess you don’t like those?
I’ve got nothing against any of them, I just wanted to mention one that’s a bit less well known.
Well what do you think of those examples, since they’re large scale?
Revolutionary Catalonia provides a good example of an anarchist project where large scale industrial infrastructure was maintained and could help form the blueprint for decentralised industry. Much ink has been spilled pointing fingers about who was to blame for the sectarian infighting that ultimately led to its collapse, I think a more important question would be “how do we stop something like that happening next time?” A question that I have no clue how to answer.
Anarchist Ukraine - correct me if I’m wrong, but this is about the Mahknovists right? Despite being largely agrarian, they were able to rebuild destroyed infrastructure an astounding rate in the face of multiple invasions and an ongoing civil war. There are rumours of antisemitism within Mahknovshchina but a lot of them come from USSR aligned sources and are hotly debated by different anarchist groups, I don’t know enough about Ukrainian history to know if the accusations are true.
The Zapatistas are not anarchists and have never claimed to be. While they do have some similarities to historical anarchist projects it would do them a disservice to lump them into an ideology with which they don’t identify.
Fair enough on the Zapatistias, I just hear about them a lot from anarchists as a workable example of anarchosocialism.
And yeah I actually don’t know a lot about anarchist Catalonia, just that it’s basically the biggest example of anarchism on a society-wide level. Was actually goading you for more information lol.
Yes, them. Also don’t know much about them. I know far more about the Menshevik territories in Georgia and Russia, which were democratic socialist and not anarchist, and even more forgotten about.