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.
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”.
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:
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
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.
It’s more like what authoritarian state put up as rules that i can’t get around. For one, death penalty is so final, and I have never been popular. It feels like it’s so abusable. I understand all the other concerns about subversion of the ideal and such but … I don’t know, it still make me very uneasy… I feel like i’d be targeted for who I am by those who dislike how I am… I know the situation is not that good in the usa… But as an autistic person of first nation descent, it make me feel very uncomfortable.
FWIW, your concerns about it make sense to me, especially with you saying you are of first nation descent. In the US context and others like it, such as Canada and Australia, I don’t think it will ever be as simple as just making a socialist state and it working the way the Soviet Union did or the way China has. Something has to be done about the fact that millions of people are raised to think and act like colonizers and sometimes not even recognize as still existing, the indigenous people, much less care about their sovereignty and survival (let alone ability to thrive). I don’t know what would be a good solution, exactly, but I think it would have to be designed by indigenous nations in significant part, not just have them included in the design like it’s a charity act to include them. Otherwise, I’d think it would just fall prey to the continuing erasure of indigenous peoples.
So yeah, I’m glad you told me that. I think it is important context and helps me understand your hesitation.
Well, my grand father says a lot of stuff which is unverifiable.
But what I know is my father died when I saw 5. My mom say it’s a suicide.
My grand-father say he was killed by “La surete du Quebec” which is a provincial police in Canada/Quebec.
I tried to get the police report with information access laws but it’s not accessible.
It’s already here. I live in an aparteid state which care not at all what happens to 1/40 of its physical inhabitants…
I fear what it would look like if it became more authoritarian than it is already… The people, the proletariat here, are not allies to my people…
Unverifiable maybe, but sounds believable to me, considering what I’ve heard in broad strokes about the treatment of indigenous peoples in Canada. I think a de-colonial view has to be a critical part of any communist efforts in general, but especially in places like Canada or the US. There are real problems with people focusing too much on the working class exclusively as a concept and not taking into account other aspects of caste and problems of lingering colonialism. I don’t think it’s a significant problem on Lemmygrad, but the western “left” definitely can have problems there.
At any rate, I’m sorry you lost your father, especially so young. I hope we will see in our lifetimes, a world where indigenous peoples in the west have liberation and can thrive again.
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/ ↩︎
That absolutely make sense. In the west the actual job of a politician is to get re-elected. They are not held accountable to anything and are protected by their political apparatus. It seems to work very differently in china, with politicians being measured by their actual effectiveness and not only how well they appear.
Thanks for the information!