this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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Communism stateless anti authoritarian? Are we not confused with Anarchism?
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch06.htm
This is all so wrong. First of all, most anarchist advocate for prefiguritive politics, or "building a new world within the shell of the old" which is why things like Food Not Bombs exists, along with many many other anarchist projects specifically aimed at building a stateless, moneyless, classes society. They don't NOT want to simply abolish the state completely overnight.
Anarchists have come up with a WHOLE lot of ways that a society could be run, and they generally don't think that there's a one size fits all solution that would work for everybody.
You haven't read a single thing about anarchism that didn't come from a Marxist source, have you?
There still has to be a point where there is a state and then a point where there is not. Are you advocating for seizing control of that state before it seizes to exist, or does your political program want to stay outside of the state until the state stops existing?
The fact that anarchists can't agree on a unified course of action is a big part of the reason why all these different ways of running society that people have dreamed up remain firmly in the realm of fantasy.
I'm not an anarchist but in their defense, while anarchism proper has never had lasting success the Zapatistas are much less centralized than other socialist experiments and have taken a lot of inspiration from anarchist principles. Left unity should mean that we take an earnest and good faith approach to learning about what we have in common, not just seizing any opportunity to dunk on the other "team."
Also, even MLism still recognizes that different contradictions demand different approaches. Marx doesn't prescribe a one-size-fits-all approach either. For some revolutions the right move is a guerilla struggle. For others a general strike. For others it's about landless peasants doing protracted struggle. So on and so on.
I generally agree that there's no one size fits all approach. However, any effective organization needs to be grounded in material reality. Discussing concrete examples of organization like Zapatistas is useful because they are achieving something tangible, but saying that people dreamed up plenty of ways to organize society is not very useful of itself.
There are at least six feuding Marxist orgs where I live, I don't think this is a valid critique of anarchism.
Sure, in initial stages you'll have many different orgs. This was the case during Russian revolution as well. However, eventually a single unified vanguard emerges and people get on the same page regarding how to move forward. There is no mechanism for creating a unified vanguard under anarchist approach where there is no central authority by design.
Good point.
See my comment here.
You better not be sending me into recursion when I click this
Lmao, I've tried to minimize my copy-pasting of comments over time so there's more links in my comments now, haha.
I'm clicking all the "read my other comment" links until I've basically read Capital Vol. 1 in its entirety through Lemmy posts.
You'll get vol. 2 and vol. 3 from watching all the dang lectures we link too.
Here's the latest one I linked, Michael Hudson on Marxism, Parasites, and Debt Cancellation
Plenty of communists see a form of Anarchism as the goal endpoint, but realize the need for strong state power in the hands of workers to get there.
Do you have any examples? I'm not aware of this, Marxists generally advocate for a centralized stateless society while Anarchists advocate for horizontalist structures, generally.