My question to you is this, what vision should we strive for in your opinion?
If feel like, that was what my comment was about. Of course it did not address every minute detail, but I tried my best. If you want a more complete vision of anarchism, I would highly suggest you do your own research, there are a lot of great anarchist scholars, that could do a way better job than me, a random person on the internet. As I said, “The Dispossessed” is great, also you could watch this great introductory video by Andrewism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrTzjaXskUU. He has some great and informative videos on his channel.
The problem of anarchism is that it goes basically against everything, that we were taught to assume about the world, because the system can only work, if the people, who are oppressed by it think, that it couldn’t have been different. We need to work hard to be open minded and challenge our most basic assumptions.
But this a contradictory notion, is it not? Marxism is an inherently authortarian ideology in both theory and practice, which is why every attempt at it in history has resulted in some tyrannical regime.
That is just wrong. Marx was actually stonchly against authoritarianism, he argued for workplace democracy and was against nation states as a concept. He defined communism as a stateless, classless society. So, even though the Soviet Union pretended to be Marxist or communist, they were wrong. At least if you go by what most leftists thinkers understand as communism.
The idea that you can collectivize an entire economy and redistribute resource as the “collective” (read: government) deems necessary is simply impossible without a great deal of violence, coercion, and theft involved.
You seem to be conflating authoritarianism and violence. Yeah, a revolution might be violent.
But the status quo is already incredibly violent, so it might be the most sensible option we have.
One of the hallmark defining features of civilization is inequality, not in the sense of wealth, but in the sense of power.
The way that we survived in nature is by forming small communities that we depended on our survival. If you lost your community, you’re screwed. Therefore, we evolved to become very protective of our tribes.
Like I was saying earlier, things like this don’t exist because of capitalism. If your claims about capitalism were true then there wouldn’t be any notion of things like war, racism, crime, and so on before the 17th and 18th centuries when capitalism formed
Almost as if there were other authoritarian systems, that tried to protect the interests of their ruling classes before capitalism.
In fact, a lot of these traits can be found in our closest ape relatives, which means that they’re a product of our evolution.
Apes are racist and wage war? That seems interesting, where can I learn more?
Impressive how? I think all three are considerable failures. They didn’t manage to last long and they didn’t achieve anything notable.
Almost as if every capitalist government is doing everything they can to strike down these attempts because if they became successful, they would make other systems look bad.
But also, the Zapatistas still exist and have existed since 1994, so we don’t know yet, how long they will last. And yeah, it is really impressive to build an egalitarian, system with flat power structures amidst overwhelming resistance by governments with hugely powerful military force.
If feel like, that was what my comment was about. Of course it did not address every minute detail, but I tried my best. If you want a more complete vision of anarchism, I would highly suggest you do your own research, there are a lot of great anarchist scholars, that could do a way better job than me, a random person on the internet. As I said, “The Dispossessed” is great, also you could watch this great introductory video by Andrewism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrTzjaXskUU. He has some great and informative videos on his channel.
The problem of anarchism is that it goes basically against everything, that we were taught to assume about the world, because the system can only work, if the people, who are oppressed by it think, that it couldn’t have been different. We need to work hard to be open minded and challenge our most basic assumptions.
That is just wrong. Marx was actually stonchly against authoritarianism, he argued for workplace democracy and was against nation states as a concept. He defined communism as a stateless, classless society. So, even though the Soviet Union pretended to be Marxist or communist, they were wrong. At least if you go by what most leftists thinkers understand as communism.
You seem to be conflating authoritarianism and violence. Yeah, a revolution might be violent. But the status quo is already incredibly violent, so it might be the most sensible option we have.
What makes you think that? There is actually quite a bit of evidence pointing to the contrary (https://newrepublic.com/article/163941/dawn-everything-book-review-earliest-societies-anarchists) (while I find the evidence cited in that article to be quite interressting, I don’t agree with all the conclusions they come to).
Community does not necessarily need violence towards outsiders. In fact, according to a lot of scientists, human societies were very peaceful for a very long time (https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/debate-continues-stone-age-people-were-peaceful-or-warlike-020303). So the claim, that war or racism is in our human nature is ridiculous.
Almost as if there were other authoritarian systems, that tried to protect the interests of their ruling classes before capitalism.
Apes are racist and wage war? That seems interesting, where can I learn more?
Almost as if every capitalist government is doing everything they can to strike down these attempts because if they became successful, they would make other systems look bad.
But also, the Zapatistas still exist and have existed since 1994, so we don’t know yet, how long they will last. And yeah, it is really impressive to build an egalitarian, system with flat power structures amidst overwhelming resistance by governments with hugely powerful military force.