One point, I will specifically respond to is your claim about Marxism. This random article neatly summarizes the views of Marx towards revolution: https://polsci.institute/western-political-thought/marx-vision-capitalism-to-communism/#the-proletarian-revolution.

Marx’s theories consisted mostly of criticizing capitalism and it’s exploitation and international inconaitancies. He believed that there was an inevitable progression from feudalism to capitalism to socialism to communism, mostly because the internal inconsistencies of capitalism would lead to collapse. In my opinion, he was right about the internal inconsistencies of capitalism, but wrong about that this would necessary lead to a workers revolution. One such breaking point of capitalism was the great depression in 1929, where a some states actually went the opposite route and fell to fascism. Facism ensured, that the working class was pacified with making the lives of minorities worse, which was almost as good as actually making their own lives better. Capitalists could continue what they were doing and after Germany was defeated, they could roll back the worst excesses of facism and call it progress (Fyi: I am obviously not saying, that it was not progress in comparison to facism, what I am saying is that facism successfully prevented a workers revolution in Germany).

So you could criticize Marx for predicting this wrong.

Another aspect, that you could criticize Marx for is that he never really specified how a revolution would exactly work. This seems to be the core of your confusion. He only said, that the workers would rise up, establish majority rule by workers, seize the means of production and finally abolish the state. He never specified how they would do that. That was also the reason, why it was so easily abused for establishing essentially facism in China or the Soviet Union. Because Marx was much more clear about what capitalism was than what Communism was and especially how we could get there.

Like I said, most of his work was focused on analyzing the inconsistencies of capitalism and establishing a framework for historical analysis of societies and economical systems (historical materialism, dialectical materialism).

A revolution in itself is neither necceraly authoritarian nor violent. If you want an example for that, just look at how the Soviet Union fell. The revolution there was actually quite peaceful. It was also anti-authoritarian, because it destroyed a facist, authoritarian state. By your definition, it would be authoritarian though because it forces the view of the revolutionaries on the other people, that liked the Soviet Union (yes, there were a lot of them aswell), or did I understand you wrong there? Because that is not how authoritarianism works, maybe you should look it up.

Anarchists are also not necessarily opposed to violence (as long as it is against our oppressors, because our oppressors enforce a much more violent system), we are opposed to hirarchy and state violence. Unfortunately, pacifism, which you seem to think anarchism is, just doesn’t work in a world like this.

Alright, I read your answer and obviously I don’t agree. But I don’t have the time, nor the energy to respond to all these claims.

If you are generally curious about anarchism, try to watch the video I had linked or read the book I reccomended. Also, read the Wikipedia articles about Marxism, Communism and Anarchism, the, are a good summary. But I can only encourage you to stay open minded. You don’t have to agree, just try to understand the other perspective. Maybe you can also expand your own ideas with some of the ideas of anarchist thinkers.

But, I can’t force you to, I guess. I am honestly quite happy that this discussion stayed very civil for internet standards.

As to my own open mindedness, I always try to work on it. I always change my views on the world, only about a year ago, I was a really convinced democratic socialist. It’s just that, a lot of your arguments, I’ve engaged with before.

With others, like the human nature thing, I will admit that I specifically tried to look for evidence, that supports my beliefs. But, it’s also really hard to find out the truth about a subject like this, because even most scientists are shaped by their own biasses and the institional biasses of their employers or the people that give them grants. And the journalists, that report on them are shaped by the biasses of their own billionaire employers. I mean, just look at the shit that Fox News tells you. But also, CNN where they have “experts” on, who keep saying “the economy is fine, just look at these numbers I got here, no matter the lived reality of the Americans”.

I hope, that I was able to make you look at the world in a bit of a different way or at least make you curious.

Also the crime thing, what I meant about coming together as a community was assembling councils of people that have expertise in how to handle this, who decide together and enforcing the decisions not through state violence but through collective action by the community.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

That’s a hard one. And I will admit, that I don’t know everything. I generally think of anarchism not as a perfectly thought out system, that I could implement tomorrow, but as a utopian vision, we should strive towards. But I will give my best shot at answering this.

I’ll start with the easiest one: inequality. My vision of anarchism is very inspired by the ideas of Marx, so I believe that all economic activity should be full owned and controlled by workers in some kind of democratic system. My idea would be to organize the economy via “workers councils” where decisions are reached through mutual negotiations ideally with concencus based decision making. In these councils, every worker, that would be affected by the decisions could participate and have equal power. Of course there would ideally be mechanisms to encourage all to partipate in these decision making processes etc.

There would of course be no one at the top, that makes much more than other people so I don’t really see a way, where inequality would meaningfully arise.

The general societal order (I guess you mean decision making processes) would be handled in a similar way, so in councils where everyone can participate.

Crime, and general disturbances to the social order would have to be handled through social conditioning and preventative action. One important factor in this is that most crimes happen due to inequality and people acting out of desperation. That source would be probably mostly eliminated. Things like bigotry or rape or something are also, in my opinion happening in a lot of cases because of external social conditioning, so we would have to radically rethink things like education, parenting etc. The capital class also loves to push racism, sexism etc. through the media they controll to protect their own interests. The bugiorsy would of course not exist in my vision of anarchism. Trauma from war or other forms of capitalist exploitation, which could cause you to be sick and do crimes would of course also not exist, because there would be no capitalism nor imperialist nation states.

And still, we could not control for everything. For these cases, we would have to come together as the affected communities and decide on a cases by case basis. There should of course be general rules the community agreed on, but the circumstances should also be considered. A potential action for these cases could be rehabilitation, therapy ect., helping the victims fix the harm caused by the crime and in extreme cases maybe shunning an individual from a community. Maybe we would also need something prison-like for really extreme cases, but I am not really sure about that.

If you want to look at some real world examples, of how (imperfect, but still impressive) real world implementations of this could look like, look at anarchist Spain, Rojava or the Zapatistas. I will note though, that Rojava and the Zapatistas don’t call themselves anarchist, but their ideas are still really closely aligned with what I am talking about.

Another recommendation of mine would be reading “The Dispossessed”, where Ursula K. LA Guin presents a utopian, but also realistic and imperfect vision of an anarchist future.

There is none. That’s why I am an anarchist. I guess, I worded that in a bad way.

Edit: Maybe, the one exception, I can think of is parents and their children, because children are not fully developed and are missing some important abilities to fully participate in society. Still, of course I believe in letting your child participate and encouraging them to exercise and their autonomy, but there are limits.

Where shitpost?

Um no, that is not what the “left” thinks.

There are a lot of radically different “left wing” ideologies. The quote, you claim to be left wing could probably be attributed to social democrats, maybe socialists, although not really. And that quote doesn’t really represent a good summary of what they believe.

I, for example am pretty far to the left, I am an anarchist. I believe, that all forms of unjust hierarchy are a bad thing, be it a companie’s CEO or a government and I advocate for flat hierarchies and the organization of society via specialized assemblies. And of course the ownership of workers of the means of production.

So, I guess I would agree with your quote, as I am against exploitation from the government and from billionaires. I just think, that corruption is the wrong way to look at it. The way, capitalism is going right now is not corruption in the sense that is an “error” in the system. Nor is it the fault of individuals or a group of people. It’s just that capitalism is set up in a way, that it naturally produces and needs these crisees, like faciasm to once again violently reinforce itself and live on. Capitalism will inevitaly lead to concentration of wealth, because of the power imbalance between worker and employer. And this leads to imbalances in power, which you could call corruption.

So, in summary, your statement could be considered leftist, as that is pretty close to what leftists believe. It’s just that a lot of leftists go a bit further and analyze the issue on a systemic level rather than an individual one.

Also, the right is not authentically against governmental corruption, look at them cheering on ice raids or the war in Iran. Wanting to spend more money in state violence is the most “pro-government” thing, I could think of.