The promotion of anarchism within capitalist media, coupled with the suppression of Marxist thought, is damning evidence against anarchism as viable opposition to capitalist hegemony. In fact, the two happen to be perfectly compatible. Meanwhile, history demonstrates time and again that revolutions require centralized authority to dismantle oppressive systems. Capitalism tolerates anarchism precisely because it poses no systemic threat, while revolutionary movements succeed only by embracing disciplined, organized force.
Capitalist media platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime glorify anarchist individualism with shows like Money Heist and The Umbrella Academy while demonizing Marxist collectivism. The narratives in the media fetishize lone rebels “fighting the system” through symbolic acts such as heists or sabotage that never threaten the core machinery of the system. By contrast, media vilifies Marxist movements as “authoritarian” as seen in The Hunger Games’ critique of collective resistance vs. glorification of individual heroism. Anarchism’s rejection of centralized power also neatly aligns with neoliberalism’s war on institutional solidarity. Capitalist elites amplify anarchism precisely because it atomizes dissent into spectacle, ensuring resistance remains fragmented and impotent. If anarchism actually threatened capital, it would be censored as fiercely as Marxism.
The reality of the situation is that every effective society of meaningful scale, be it capitalist or socialist, relies on centralized power. Capitalist states enforce property rights, monetary policy, and corporate monopolies through institutions like central banks, militaries, police, and courts. Amazon’'s logistics empire, the Federal Reserve’s control over currency, and NATO’s geopolitical dominance all depend on rigid hierarchies. On the other hand, anarchists refuse to acknowledge that dismantling capitalism requires confronting its centralized power structures with equal organizational force.
What anarchists fail to acknowledge is that revolutions are authoritarian by their very nature. To overthrow a ruling class, the oppressed must organize into a cohesive force capable of seizing and wielding power. The Bolsheviks built a vanguard party to crush counterrevolutionaries and nationalize industry in order to dismantle the Tsarist regime. Mao’s Red Army imposed discipline to expel bourgeoisie and landlords. Engels acknowledged this reality saying that a revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets, and cannon.
Rejecting this authority ensures that a movement becomes irrelevant in the long run. The Spanish anarchists of 1936, despite initial successes, were crushed by fascists because they lacked centralized coordination. Modern “autonomous zones” such as CHAZ dissolve quickly, as they cannot defend against state violence or organize production.
Anarchism’s fatal flaw is its lack of a cohesive vision. It splinters into countless factions such as eco-anarchists, insurrectionists, anprims, mutualists, and so on. Each one prioritizes disparate goals of degrowth, anti-work, anti-civ, etc., that are often at odds with one another. Movements like Occupy with their “leaderless” structure are effortlessly dispersed by the state. By contrast, capitalist states execute power with singular purpose of ensuring profit accumulation in the hands of the oligarchs. Marxist movements, too, succeed through unified strategy as articulated by Lenin in What Is to Be Done? where he prioritized a centralized party precisely to avoid anarchist-style disarray. The capitalist ruling class understands perfectly well that it is easier to crush a hundred squabbling collectives than a single disciplined force. Hence why anarchism becomes a sanctioned form of dissent that never coalesces into material threat.
Meanwhile, revolutions demand the use of authority as a tool for the oppressed to defeat capitalism. Serious movements must embrace the discipline capitalists fear most. The kind of discipline that builds states, expropriates billionaires, and silences reactionaries.
Ok, you’re raising solid points. I’m not going to pretend anarchism doesn’t have issues it needs to address. But I think the framing here misses what’s actually going on.
First off, the “anarchism” being promoted by capitalist media isn’t anarchism. It’s depoliticized rebellion. Aestheticized lone-wolf heists and symbolic sabotage that don’t touch capitalism’s foundations. It’s the same way capitalism promotes “feminism” as buying more stuff or “environmentalism” as using paper straws. Real anarchism (collective organization, mutual aid, dismantling hierarchy) gets either ignored or crushed. If anarchism really was compatible with capital, you’d see Amazon Prime making shows about federated workers seizing factories and abolishing landlords. Weirdly, they don’t.
Second, yea, revolutions need discipline, organization, and the ability to defend themselves. But the choice isn’t “be organized or be anarchist.” Real anarchists know this. The Spanish CNT had armies. The Makhnovists in Ukraine fought off both the Whites and the Reds. Rojava exists today under constant siege because they take organization seriously without surrendering to top-down hierarchy. Discipline doesn’t have to mean centralizing power into a new ruling elite. That just recreates the same shit under new colors.
And sure, anarchism has a lot of tendencies and disagreements. So what? Diversity isn’t the problem. Capitalism is hyper-centralized and still constantly fractured by crisis and competition. It’s not fragmentation that kills movements, it’s lack of strategy, material support, and the overwhelming violence of the state. Saying “anarchism failed because it’s messy” ignores how much raw force is thrown at making sure it fails.
Honestly, history shows centralized “revolutionary” states usually end up as new oppressive regimes. You can seize power in the name of the people and still end up building gulags and secret police. Anarchists aren’t in denial about the need for revolutionary force. We’re in denial about handing that force over to a new class of rulers.
My bottom line is: the answer to anarchism’s problems isn’t “become authoritarian but with good intentions.” It’s building better ways to organize collective power; horizontally, democratically, and with real teeth when necessary. That’s way harder than just copying capitalist hierarchies, but in my honest opinion it’s the only thing actually worth fighting for.
First off, the “anarchism” being promoted by capitalist media isn’t anarchism. It’s depoliticized rebellion.
Sure, but the very fact that the ideology can be easily coopted by capitalist media is damning all of itself. Notice that it’s not possible to do with Marxism because it clearly identifies both the problems within capitalism and the effective way to fight against this system. Hence why Marxism is demonoized while Anarchism is repurposed.
That just recreates the same shit under new colors.
Except that it demonstrably doesn’t. Claiming that socialist states such as USSR, Cuba, China, Vietnam, or Laos are in any way comparable to capitalist ones is simply false equivalence.
And sure, anarchism has a lot of tendencies and disagreements. So what? Diversity isn’t the problem.
It is a problem when you’re trying to resist a well organized centralized system.
It’s not fragmentation that kills movements, it’s lack of strategy, material support, and the overwhelming violence of the state.
Lack of strategy, material support, and so on are all symptoms of fragmentation and lack of common vision, and shared support structures. Meanwhile, Marxists have time and again shown that it is very much possible to overcome state violence.
Honestly, history shows centralized “revolutionary” states usually end up as new oppressive regimes.
History shows the opposite of that.
Anarchists aren’t in denial about the need for revolutionary force. We’re in denial about handing that force over to a new class of rulers.
Anarchists are in denial of effective methods for a revolutionary force, and hence why Anarchists have little to show aside from rhetoric in the past century.
That’s way harder than just copying capitalist hierarchies, but in my honest opinion it’s the only thing actually worth fighting for.
The fact that you think Marxists merely copy capitalist hierarchies shows the profound ignorance on your part regarding the subject you’re attempting to debate.
Hence why Marxism is demonoized while Anarchism is repurposed.
Marxism has been repurposed as well, in a more sophisticated way, through the Frankfurt School and the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
The difference here is that Marxism has a clear and consistent theory behind it. Things like Frankfurt School and Congress for Cultural Freedom are less repurposing of Marxism as an attempt to drive people away from Marxism. The problem with Anarchism is that there is no consistent theory in place, it’s a bunch of different ideologies that are loosely similar. Furthermore, authority being seen as a negative and something to be avoided ensures that anybody can claim to be an anarchist and simply doing anarchism their own way. It’s a fundamentally atomized movement.
You’re claiming that because anarchism can be misrepresented by capitalist media, that’s proof it’s inherently weak. By that logic, the fact that “Marxism” has been weaponized by authoritarian regimes to justify gulags, purges, and secret police would mean Marxism is inherently corrupt too. But obviously you’d say that’s a distortion of Marxism, right? Same here. You don’t get to say “anarchism is fake because it’s misrepresented” and then handwave how Marxism has been used to justify new forms of domination for the last hundred years.
Second, claiming that the USSR, Cuba, China, etc. weren’t oppressive because they weren’t capitalist is just word games. Was there a ruling class? Yes. Was there state violence against workers who dissented? Yes. Were new hierarchies built concentrating power in the hands of a few? Yes. You can call it whatever you want, it wasn’t worker liberation. It was swapping out old bosses for new ones.
You also argue that “diversity of tendencies” is a fatal flaw. Maybe if your whole strategy is to seize the state and impose one line on everyone, sure. But if the goal is actually abolishing domination, not just repainting it, then diversity is resilience, not weakness. Monocultures look strong until they collapse. Ask the Soviet Union.
You keep saying Marxists “overcame” state violence. The examples you point to are movements that became state violence. That’s not liberation. That’s just flipping who holds the gun.
As for anarchists “having little to show,” you’re acting like the only valid measure of success is building a new state. If the goal is liberation, not new domination, then actually anarchists have a lot to show. The CNT’s collectivizations in Spain. Makhno’s Free Territory in Ukraine. Rojava today with their federated councils and militias. Were they perfect? No. But none of them built gulags or cults of personality. I’d rather fail fighting for real freedom than “win” by building a new boot to put on people’s necks.
And calling me ignorant because I won’t pretend that copying centralized hierarchies counts as revolutionary isn’t an argument. It’s just coping. You think seizing state power is the only path because you can’t imagine anything beyond it. That’s fine. But don’t act like history has proven you right. Some of us are trying to actually build something better. Not just repaint the old cage.
“I’d rather fail than achieve anything” is the funniest thing i’ve read today
peak anarchist lmao
By that logic, the fact that “Marxism” has been weaponized by authoritarian regimes to justify gulags, purges, and secret police would mean Marxism is inherently corrupt too.
The fact that you keep talking about AuThorItAriaNism is proof that you’re a deeply unserious person. If you spent even a modicum of time actually learning history then you’d see how idiotic this line of argument is.
But obviously you’d say that’s a distortion of Marxism, right?
No, I would say that bad things happen under every system because real world is not utopian. As a materialist, I understand why certain types of power structures form, and how historical and material conditions affect the way socialist states are the way they are given that they exist under siege from capitalism which is the dominant power in the world.
The actual question that a rational person would ask is whether socialist states improve material conditions compared to capitalism, and the answer is unequivocally that they do. Socialists lifted over a billion people out of poverty, provided them with food, housing, education, healthcare, and other necessities of life. That’s what Marxism accomplished time and again.
Yes. Was there state violence against workers who dissented?
There sure was, and it was necessary to prevent counter revolutions by capitalists.
Were new hierarchies built concentrating power in the hands of a few? Yes.
No, as can be clearly seen if you look at actual facts of the situation. All the communist parties from USSR, to Vietnam, to Cuba, to China are composed of regular working class people. There is no oligarchy.
It was swapping out old bosses for new ones.
Repeating nonsense over and over isn’t going to make it true.
You also argue that “diversity of tendencies” is a fatal flaw. Maybe if your whole strategy is to seize the state and impose one line on everyone, sure. But if the goal is actually abolishing domination, not just repainting it, then diversity is resilience, not weakness. Monocultures look strong until they collapse. Ask the Soviet Union.
I grew up in Soviet Union, and it collapsed precisely because it started liberalizing and allowed a counter revolution to occur. Again, learn a bit of actual history on the subject to have informed opinions on it.
You keep saying Marxists “overcame” state violence. The examples you point to are movements that became state violence. That’s not liberation. That’s just flipping who holds the gun.
That’s right, it is flipping who holds the gun. Marxists understand that it’s a question of class dictatorship. They understand that the working majority has to wrest power away from capitalists and then safeguard the revolution.
As for anarchists “having little to show,” you’re acting like the only valid measure of success is building a new state. If the goal is liberation, not new domination, then actually anarchists have a lot to show.
If the goal was liberation then it would translate into tangible and effective action. The actual goal is coping under capitalism without actually challenging the system in a meaningful way.
The CNT’s collectivizations in Spain. Makhno’s Free Territory in Ukraine. Rojava today with their federated councils and militias. Were they perfect? No. But none of them built gulags or cults of personality. I’d rather fail fighting for real freedom than “win” by building a new boot to put on people’s necks.
And none of them exist today precisely because they were not effective in the long term. Utopian ideology is a roach motel for the left that you’re living in.
And calling me ignorant because I won’t pretend that copying centralized hierarchies counts as revolutionary isn’t an argument.
I’m calling you ignorant because you spew ahistorical nonsense as form of argument.
You think seizing state power is the only path because you can’t imagine anything beyond it. That’s fine. But don’t act like history has proven you right. Some of us are trying to actually build something better. Not just repaint the old cage.
Nah, I can imagine lots of things, but having a functional brain I understand that tangible improvement in conditions and defeat of capitalism is far more important than pseudo intellectual moralizing that achieves nothing. That’s the difference between Marxists and anarchists in a nutshell.
GOOD post!
I feel like anarchists share the idea with capitalists that the worst aspects human nature are inherently stronger. They believe that authority is a cursed object that will inevitably corrupt all who possess it. While simultaneously they seem to think that after the revolution everything will be alright and that counter revolution will never happen. Needless to say it isn’t based in historical materialism.
It seems like a trauma response rather than a plan for a better world. Most anarchists that read theory and history eventually come round to realizing that centralized authority is a necessary part of revolution.
Most anarchists that read theory and history eventually come round to realizing that centralized authority is a necessary part of revolution
honestly playing a sandbox game with spawnable NPCs could tell you this but that’s neither here nor there
I very much agree. Another common trope I’ve encountered in discussions with anarchists is their belief that most people inherently want the same things they personally desire. Their argument often rests on the assumption that if we could just tear down the current system, everyone would magically become anarchists overnight. They ignore the fundamental reality that people are products of their society, and that any meaningful transition would require a socialist period before we could even begin discussing whether the state could wither away.
Anarchism requires a privilege that capitalism can afford to accomodate.
Mmm yeah but how about abolish bed time?
On a serious note,very well written!
Abolishing bedtime would also require authority. You need authority and power to prevent people from enforcing bedtimes.
Very good point, maybe we should rely on human nature where people will use their inherit desire to do whatever they want and hope that enforces it :P
Every times someone here post about anarchism, I feel like I’m reading a lib write about communism, it’s so funny.
I’m not sure what purpose saying this is supposed to serve, cause nobody can guess how you think anarchism is being misunderstood and because they can’t, they can’t discuss it either. Unless you think your point of view on it just wouldn’t even be allowed here for discussion, I don’t see why say this without saying something about what the point of view on anarchism is that makes this such a misunderstanding of it.
It’s more like me being annoyed because here, anarchism ssems to be whatever is the ideology of street punks, while there are anarchist philosophers who wrote very interesting things.
Oh ok, that makes a kind of sense to me. I would agree that we shouldn’t disregard the works of everyone under the anarchist umbrella. I remember reading some Kropotkin earlier in my introduction to communism (if I’m not mistaken he was more anarchist leaning) and while I would probably not agree with all of his views considering I am more definitively ML now, I remember some interesting stuff from Mutual Aid I think it was, about observations of nature and commonly communal behavior among animals, contrary to the narrative of it being little more than a vicious and predatory cycle.
Exactly!!
Also most anarchist philosophers are not against human organization like op is trying to say. They are against fixed hierarchy. They think that leadership should be attributed by situations for a situation and so on. It’s the princple of self organization, which is by the way in use in most open source coding projects - which is a concrete example of where anarchist organization (yes, it’s not mutually exclusive) has great success. Even linus let other people lead where he feel he does know jack shit!
Thanks for that, it was cathartic to me.
To be fair, I feel like there are situations where autority is the correct answer, but most of the time, it’s overkill.
As an example, most local leadership in china have a low success rate (because the citizens are unhappy with their results) and the chinese model of local authority is the most authoritarian structure of their government. This part could be improved by letting some communities self organize (again, depending on the situation)
It’s the rigid mindset of one solution fits all that I see a lot of ML take that irks me. That’s not compatible with material reality because details do matter in the day to day life, and you need aome sort of agility and rule bending to make things work at the detail level.
From what I’ve read about China’s governing thus far: https://news.cgtn.com/news/whitepaper/China+Democracy+That+Works.pdf
I got the impression they already do quite a bit at the local level. I’m not sure what you mean about it being “the most authoritarian structure of their government”.
It’s the rigid mindset of one solution fits all that I see a lot of ML take that irks me. That’s not compatible with material reality because details do matter in the day to day life, and you need aome sort of agility and rule bending to make things work at the detail level.
I think you may be in more agreement with MLs here than you think, but maybe how some talk about it comes across as rigid. Where I find MLs, myself included (as I generally consider myself to land there) in agreement is that a dictatorship of the proletariat / working class is needed to transition to communism and that you won’t get there with a loose collective who cannot stand against the military might of imperialism on the one hand, and internal reactionary pushback on the other hand. Beyond that, what form things take is, in my understanding, supposed to adapt some based on the conditions you’re dealing with (while still sticking as best you can to the principles of communism and its goals, of course).
Re: the form authority takes, I think one of the crux arguments here:
It’s the princple of self organization, which is by the way in use in most open source coding projects - which is a concrete example of where anarchist organization (yes, it’s not mutually exclusive) has great success. Even linus let other people lead where he feel he does know jack shit!
Is that this kind of organization still requires some type of dynamic of enforcement, even if less explicit than, say, a system that would proclaim him president. That, for example, the reason linus can “let other people lead where he feels he doesn’t know anything” is because he has a system in place where he is the primary person with the keys to the architecture. And without that system, it would just be him wanting someone else specific to take the reigns with no guarantee that anyone listens to him on anything.
I don’t think MLs are opposed to all flexibility in leadership, but there can be a bit of an argument going on like, “Okay, but that’s still a hierarchy, the leader is just granting others power some of the time.”
Personally, I would probably argue that flexibility can be beneficial in some circumstances, as long as we’re clear on where it derives from and systematize it such that it’s consistently possible. That if the flexibility is dependent on the “charity” of a leader deciding to let someone else lead for a time, then we’re already in more dictatorial territory than we might be in a more formalized and bureaucratic system. It’s one of those things of contradictions, similar to how a routine can be freeing in a way because now you know when you have time to do what you want to do, without worrying that you are neglecting important things. If the form of flexibility is enforced as consistent under certain conditions, then we have the reliability it will happen consistently unless the enforcement is undermined somehow. If it’s not enforced as consistent, we are leaving it up to the whims of who is in charge and whether they personally continue to believe in said flexibility.
Hope that makes sense. (I did not downvote you BTW, willing to discuss this in good faith.)
Woah, the “China+Democracy+That+Works.pdf” is a good document!
I get were you are at!
I read a few studies that tends to show that chinese citizen are most critical of the local leadership, because they are often inflexible and self interested or interested in proping up self interest/interest not shared by a lot of the local residents.
I have no idea if this hold up now because it’s been more than 5 years and they were made by so called neutral entities.
Those studies often showed that the citizen would have liked to be involved themselves in the solution instead of outsourcing it to another authority.
Again, this is from memory and a way back.
But from what I see, most arguments against these type of organization seems to be motivated by fear of bad intents.
Like you said, you think that linus delegates because he os the main architect… but that’s where I think you’re wrong in that analysis.
Linus delegates because when he gives an opinion, it is taken into account and acted upon, because the guy is very often right (even if git is an abberation in code form - those commands are insane) and his opinion is valued.
He is also very abbrasive and does not fear to say what he thinks, which is valuable in itself.
Also the fact that this opinion is just downvoted with only you engaging shows what I meant. I feel a lot of people here are just larping and not thinking for themselves -kinda like the libs on Reddit.
Btw you are awesome
I have no idea if this hold up now because it’s been more than 5 years and they were made by so called neutral entities.
Yeah, I’d need to look at the sources myself. I know sometimes western imperialist stuff masquerades as “neutral”, so you never know with that kind of thing.
That said, I see nothing wrong in principle with local communities having a certain amount of autonomy and, in fact, that is more what I would expect end stage communism to look like after, as Lenin put it, the state has “withered away”. It’s the transition period where contention seems to more arise and that’s where, in my understanding, MLs tend to be on the side of carefully enforced forms of transition, in order to protect from imperialist and reactionary meddling. At a glance, this might sometimes look obsessively controlling (which I can only guess is where some anarchists get shy of it, but maybe I’m wrong). But in practice, I don’t think the ML approach is any more controlling than what liberal capitalist governments are doing and sometimes even arguably less so; socialist projects are just more transparent about the fact that they desire to direct society toward a certain kind of path and are not willing to bend on certain explicitly laid out principles. They are not, for example, hiding it behind a pretense of freedoms that don’t exist, such as in how the US pretends to be a bastion of freedom while having one of the highest (if not the highest, I forget if it still is) incarceration rates in the world.
Re: Linus, I admit I’m not well-versed in how all that goes down with him, but I assume he is at least one of a few people who has the final say in what happens to it. That’s usually how open source projects are, if for no other reason than the fact that there has to be an approval process or any and every change can get approved without discernment. We might be talking past each other a bit on that, I’m not sure, but the point I’m trying to make is that at some stage of it, there are barriers, explicit or implicit, and if you don’t have the means to get past those barriers, you don’t get approved. And that this is how all human organizing is. Even a group of friends going out to eat, while it might seem like a strange place to consider the question of authority, has to make a decision about where to go eat. This decision might be determined by a vote or by whoever is the strongest and most belligerent personality or some other more vague exchange of preferences and deferring and taking charge, but there is some kind of process going on. I can’t speak for all those who identify as marxist-leninist, but I believe in understanding and making those processes concrete, so that we are not taking for granted why they work or don’t work. A process, for example, that depends greatly on a single individual behaving a certain way can mean that if that individual dies or loses their post, the whole system collapses and changes drastically in the aftermath.
And to use an example of a socialist state of the past relating to that point, even the CIA said that Stalin was more of a “captain of a team” and the notion of him being a dictator was confused. This is the kind of thing I support, of processes that are more team-based and not too dependent on one individual. Obviously for going out to eat, it could become burdensome to do that, but for the day to day operations of a broad community even, the bureaucratic type stuff can help ensure that the system stays together more effectively. And within that, in the question of state level vs. community level, I can understand concerns with the idea of a socialist state that imposes too much and delegates too little, but there is also the concern that if they delegate too much, the transition process to communism is allowed to come off the rails and the state-level project of it becomes fractured. I’m also just not convinced that’s a major issue with most socialist projects. In my understanding of the facts, they are generally pretty allowing of, and supportive of, bottom up power and variations in ethnic groups, culture, and leadership, as communal self-determination and bottom-up organizing is an imperative part of communism. Of course they make mistakes some of the time, as anything human does, but I don’t see evidence of them consistently making the same major mistakes across different attempts. China, for example, seems to have learned from the Soviet Union’s failures in how to deal with US imperialism and is right now positioned very well to handle the US’s warmongering.
The issues with local leadership in China has to do with how the Chinese political system is set up in a multi-tiered electoral system. Let’s say you live in a big city. You’ll elect someone you’ll probably know to the district congress. Then the district congress will elect people to the city congress. Then the city congress elects someone amongst themselves to the provincial congress and the provincial congress elects someone to the National People’s Congress. [1]
Communist party officials, governors and other non-congressional civil servants have to follow a very similar tiered election process. For example, before becoming General Secretary and President, Xi Jinping governed a village for 6 years, a county for 3 years, three cities for 11 years and three provinces for another 11 years [2] The CPC deliberately moves aspiring governors between different cities and provinces where they do not have connections to test whether they can fix problems even in unfamiliar environments and without benefitting from local connections.
This tiered selection and election process means that any incompetence is filtered out and judged by other congresspeople, and creates a competitive political ladder. If a local politician ever commits any grave mistakes, the other ambitious congresspeople will tear him a new one.
Naturally, this also means that the highest concentration of incompetence will be at the lowest governmental levels, which is why Chinese people tend to have more grievances with them compared to the upper levels. Of course, if you compare the trust Chinese people have in their overall political system with the complete failure of the U.S. governmental system, the difference in quality becomes very clear. [3]
In the US, local government officials have more approval because the national politicians are so useless in comparison. In China, the national politicians have been selected to be the best of the best, such that compared to them, the local officials look a lot worse.
Of course, Westoids will complain that because Chinese people can’t elect someone as incompetent as Marjorie Taylor Greene directly to the National People’s Congress, that the Chinese system is undemocratic.
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2023-03-02/Understanding-China-s-whole-process-people-s-democracy-at-Two-Sessions-1hQ673eDKCc/index.html ↩︎
https://www.sinification.com/p/why-chinese-democracy-is-better-than ↩︎
https://rajawali.hks.harvard.edu/resources/understanding-ccp-resilience-surveying-chinese-public-opinion-through-time/ ↩︎
Good start. What would make your writing stronger is if you attempt to identify one counterargument that an anarchist might make, articulate it well, and then argue against it.
For example, you state that capitalism tolerates anarchism because it poses no systemic threat. What might an anarchist say against that? They might try to provide examples of the state infiltrating and fighting against anarchist movements. They might say they absolutely can pose a systemic threat by doing X + Y + Z. They might say a systemic threat is not needed. If you could articulate one or more of these counterarguments and then argue against the counter, your position would be stronger and we would all learn more.
I find that what often happens is that people start saying that this isn’t what anarchists are actually saying and that it’s a straw man, and then the whole discussion devolves into that. I find I’d rather have anarchists articulate their own counter argument and then address that head on. This actually resulted in a broader discussion over at lemmy.ml where anarchists did chime in.
That puts the burden on them, which is fine for discourse. But to improve our own understanding we need to engage with well written texts from the ideology and formulate our own understanding. Much like with capitalism where communists must know more about capitalism than capitalists do, we need to do the same for any ideology that we argue against. Eventually, I’m saying. As part of a process. Not as a necessary precondition for doing this sort of thing.
The anarchist sleeper cell at that other place deleted their account already 😢
😆
