245
It will magically disappear
(thelemmy.club)
(Anarchists also can't explain how)
Trough force
Through direct action, mutual aid, dual power, revolutionary discipline, and international solidarity.
Anarchists don't wait for or ask the state to wither away, we actively work to undermine it by improving the lives of those around us wothout asking permission.
I've never had an anarchist convince me they're anything but a left wing contrarian.
It's so much like the right wing libertarians who think with 2 acres they'll have a homestead to feed themselves forever while still having Internet and their trash picked up.
Being against the state is definitely right. But the aftermath will never be what they imagine. A co-op style military will never hold power enough to maintain anything and will succumb to internal infighting where the most fascist and aggressive wing will seize power and assert likely an even more totalitarian state than whatever neoliberal democracy existed beforehand. You can't be an anarchist without an "archy" to an-.
I think most people just want to be accelerationists. Democracy is slow and corruption is inevitable in any government. Things develop as time moves forward but you'll never get to live under the utopia you want, it's not real.
Alright, ill bite
co-op style military will never hold power enough to maintain anything and will succumb to internal infighting where the most fascist and aggressive wing will seize power and assert likely an even more totalitarian state
And how exactly does setting up a state prevent that?
So I'm not totally clear what you're asking. I think you're asking "what prevents a fascist takeover in other government styles / how does having a hierarchy prevent a fascist takeover?"
And genuinely to answer this it would be a massive essay. The easiest way to sum it up would be A) It doesn't, see the constant rate of falling into fascism or military juntas or other forms of extreme centralized authority and B) Decision making, which relies on a degree of speed and authority to declare.
If a crisis unfolds, teamwork is gonna be the thing that gets us out. That's basically the crux of the human story. When shit hits the fan working together usually gets us through. But to work together there's a degree of discussion and agreement that has to take place under a total autocracy where one person rules all they don't engage in much of a discussion and make decisions quickly, as they like. In a total anarchy government all people would roughly have the same opportunity to share their points or at least work together to make a decision. That's a rough generalization though, kings have advisors and anarchists would likely have some degree of representation because it's unrealistic to have one voice one vote on every single issue. But you probably can see where I'm headed.
Spanish anarchists ran into two huge issues repeatedly in this area. They'd discuss a little too much with no avail as once you reach a peak of discussion sometimes people just don't agree and there is no mechanism to basically force a decision. People might just ignore it. Representatives make a call for a decision or a push for a choice and if people don't agree, there's no movement in engaging with these decisions. And if any move was made to sort of curtail that issue, you'd fall into the "no true Scotsman" thing where camps and factions viewed themselves or others as moving away from the core belief of anarchism. Without that backbone of saying basically, "fuck you I'm in charge" you risk paralysis which appears all throughout any government you could imagine. Democracies today struggle with this when people point out how slow change takes, and often that can directly lead into a fascist slip where people either lean on power believing it'll get things done(Julius Caesar) or just a straight up overthrow of a government (Burkina Faso coup).
It might sound like I'm advocating for a monarchy or something but I'm not they face the other side with basically the same problem. If a king declares a decision and people don't agree now it costs energy, money and people to enforce it which is kind of what led to the dissolution of monarchies in the first place.
Governments don't last forever basically is the answer. They change sometimes for the worse. But having authority to make decisions and having people's input feel represented in those decisions are two major ways you prevent a complete collapse of authority. Anarchy as a functioning form of government just lacks an overall authority portion of that which really encourages one wing to step over another in favor of a decision being made and raising the degree of crisis that asks for a decision raises those odds.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jose-peirats-the-cnt-in-the-spanish-revolution-volume-1
This is a breakdown of the internal logistics of Spanish anarchists. It basically repeatedly brings up this issue without stating it or having an opinion. It will just state how representatives made calls for X or asked for Y to no avail, no solution was implemented. It sometimes mentions how certain decisions were entirely ignored. But does not offer the author's opinion on the matter. So it is not arguing for or against what I'm saying. It's just a good example of what those issues anarchy faces looks like in reality, if there is no authority to assert a decision sometimes a decision might not be made.
At the point you become a credible threat to the military-capitalist machine, mutual aid is unfortunately unlikely to be effective against helicopter gunships. It's a hard pill to swallow, but revolution is inherently authoritarian.
a lot of ideas-only leftists on the internet have gotten furious with me when i ask "how." way too many terminally online leftists build their entire political ideology around the desired end result and have spent exactly zero time thinking or learning how we actually get there.
i don't have all the answers, either, but i openly acknowledge what i don't know because just getting angry and calling someone a right-winger in the comments of a random reddit or lemmy post over the tiniest bit of barely-pushback is not going to help me build actionable knowledge and strengthen my views.
Famously as states aquire more power they let go of it without force. Famously.
When America absorbs more power, that's just how states and capitalism merge into fascism. When China absorbs more power and companies, that's uh... The people's movement. Just a few more 5 year plans and then it'll go away.
There's always so much to unpack in these discussions. The Marxist theory of the state is the historic mechanism of class rule. Both anarchists and communists believe this, that the ruling class of capitalism uses the state in order to oppress and exploit the masses.
Both left tendencies are revolutionary, both left tendencies want to seize production for the workers, both left tendencies understand that state power must be seized, and the capitalist state must be destroyed.
The difference seems to be, that Marxist communists believe in establishing a workers state to suppress the existing bourgeois elements, where anarchists more want to transition away from the state as a form of geographic organization.
Lenin's theory was that the worker state would not need all the functions of the bourgeois state, and would be able to phase out those functions. But Lenin's theory was also dependent on an international worker revolution. When the revolution in Germany failed, when Russia was invaded by capitalists and the remaining Tsarist forces allied with the invaders, it forced a crisis in Russia. From there, it was just crisis after crisis. Lenin originally said "all power to the Soviets (worker councils)" but when the civil war completely destroyed what little industrial capacity Russia had, then there were no factories in which to organize for. Without a place to work, there's no workers and hence no worker organization.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks did make mistakes, but the conditions were extremely fraught. In the process of smashing the state, there were many functions of state that were necessary in order to prevent the reactionaries and foreign capitalists from seizing state power for themselves. This led to rehiring the old tsarist state bureaucrats back into the roles that they had prior to the revolution, and this happened on a mass scale. But this wasn't by design, it was an accident, a quirk of necessity brought on by years and years of war. When the civil war was over, Lenin was sick, and the bureaucracy rallied around Stalin who had been working to replace the "old Bolsheviks" who had taken up roles of state functionaries, with people who were loyal to him. Stalin didn't create the bureaucracy, so much as the bureaucracy elevated him. Without worker councils the bureaucracy was the only power left in Russia.
Trotsky and Lenin's theory of permanent revolution never left the page, and Trotsky was able to wield it as a resistance to Stalinist bureaucracy, but conditions under Trotsky wouldn't have been much different. He would have faced the same challenges, and I don't have to tell a comm of anarchists about the utter tragedy that he oversaw at Kronstadt. But still, anarchist historian Paul Averich, critical of Lenin at every turn, still hesitates to lay responsibility for it at the feet of Lenin. But after that, the disastrous NEP.
Stalin developed the theory of socialism in one country, which established the "socialist state." But even without the theory, the contradictions of global capitalist statehood were still forced on the country of Russia.
I still think the theory laid out in State and Revolution is sound. I think there needs to be some way of organizing against foreign invasion and internal sabotage. I don't think Russia or even China are particularly good examples, but also, both cases were barely industrialized peasant societies when they defeated their weak domestic capitalist class.
I think if mass worker revolution happened in a highly industrialized then the possibility of a just and democratic worker state would be more possible than what happened in Russia. I consider myself a communist, but if I was in country presided over by a Stalinist bureaucracy, I'd be killed in the purges, along with the rest of you. I believe that you keep fighting for liberation until all are free and all are equal and in harmony with nature, that it is the fight for those things that moves humanity forward. And maybe I'm just not familiar enough with Anarchist theory, but the contradictions that reify into the state form do not go away just because the state is mired in contradictions. As long as there classes there will be the need to organize geographically.
I believe that no revolution will be possible until there's real worker control and democracy. And if the conditions actually get there, like on a global scale, then chances are I will want something more decentralized and consent driven for all people. But as long as there are classes there is the need to suppress one or the other, and the only way to do that is some kind of central organization that oversees those relations within a particular geographic area. As the bourgeois class is dismantled, so is the necessity for the worker state to dismantle it. This is how the state withers away. The fact that it did not, could not happen in Russia doesn't mean it is wrong, in theory. It just means the time of global revolution is still in the future.
This is not meant as a "gotcha" to anarchists, I just think the theory is explained, and isn't hard to understand. And there's lots of valid historical concerns about it. But with the most good faith intention, if a country found themselves in a revolutionary situation, and faced these very real problems, what alternative would there be bit central organization of one form or another? In my opinion, the problems of authoritarianism can be mitigated through direct participation and political education. If such an organization could take up the functions of state, then I think it would be more successful than either 20th century state socialism or decentralized anarchism.
Honestly I've felt that unfortunately the solution is literally a "no way around only through" thing.
It's like vaccinations or the complete economic collapse into the new deal for worker's rights. The problem is kind of the solution
Globalization is inevitable, it's a Pandora's box. People utilizing resources from all over and being able to reach each other will degrade the concept of culture and international borders. It won't happen overnight, it'll just happen. Society will melt into something else with its own set of problems and much like points of history for us they'll have a hard time conceptualizing why we didn't just do certain things because the hurdles will be invisible to them.
When you say "globalization," what are you referring to? I mention the international worker's movement in my comment, and how it was defeated after ww2. Incidentally, I do place much of the blame for that on Stalin as he used the Comintern not as a "communist international" but as yet another way to build a base of power and loyalism for himself and the bureaucracy.
But capitalism is already global. Imperialism is global capitalism. It is international banking and finance, it is the relation and exploitation of the second and third worlds by the first world. Its trade agreements, energy policies, embargoes. It is support for Israel and its role in destabilizing the middle east for resources.
It is absolutely true that there are no shortcuts to a better world, no hack that tricks the masses into emancipating ourselves. When I talk about revolution, i'm not talking about a putsch or a coup, although those things are inevitable as violence has consequences and the ruling capitalist class is incredibly violent, and will not hesitate to use extreme violence to suppress even legal and nonviolent forms of organizing and protest. By revolution, I mean a significant change in the way society is structured, for whose benefit. And this is deeply connected to what gets made, for whom, and why.
So the socialist revolution is a mass struggle for a better way of life. Its people no longer accepting exploitation, but real democratic organizing on local, regional, national, and international scale, on the basis of working class interests, and opposed to capitalist class interests.
This is a radically different basis for society. But the potential for it is already here. Capitalism is historically unique in many ways; and one way, is that its tendency is toward the development of two distinct classes whose interests are totally opposed. Basically, it tends to concentrate power in fewer and fewer hands, while increasing the exploitation of more and more people. Furthermore, the capitalists of our era aren't like the capitalists of the 1700-1800's, who like actually knew how to build shit and keep it running. Now, our billionaire capitalists just know how to shift money around, its the workers who actually run things.
So the way through, is solidarity, education, unity in struggle against exploitation, racism, sexism, etc., everything that the capitalists use to divide the working class. But since racism/sexism/homophobia are structural, intrinsic to capitalist rule, we can't just kumbaya it out of existence. We have to collectively and democratically smash and dismantle them. WO before we can win that fight, we have to build the basis for the alternative. Wars are won decades before they are ever fought. The basis for victory is social and structural, not pure military (although military is a part of the social structure.)
Sorry I'm so long winded, I just like to make it clear what my ideas are to avoid talking past another person in a discussion. But yeah, if you can help me understand what you mean by "globalization," then it will be easier to fully understand your comment.
It's not like I dont see where they're coming from. The USSR withered away after nearly a century of internal strife and immense corruption at pretty much every level of government.
Wasn't this was the original idea behind cryptocurrency? A lot of government legitimacy rests on currency and contract enforcement. If one of those was underminded, it'd go a long way towards eroding the government.
Don't get me wrong, cryptocurrency fundamentally misunderstood money, so it didn't work... but it's a really interesting idea. It'd require a lot. Decentralized conflict resolution (to prevent scamming/theft), some means of managing inflation without destroying supply-demand responsive markets, a way to manage wealth inequality without destroying savings / retirement. I can think of some mechanisms, but it'd probably take many tries - parallel systems and institutions are the effective path to change anyway, but after crypto it'd probably get the scam label. Plus writing the code in the first place would be a massive pain.
Proudhon and Kropotkin also basically say this though.
But they don't start by saying "first we put everything within the state"
No, but the ultimate argument is similar. That as a state is no longer required to fulfil the duties of a state then it will shrink and ultimately wither to nothing.
You can argue about methods but a lot of anarchist theory has approximately the same vague "and when we successfully build enough communism the state will wither away" so mocking that last part is silly.
I think a communist state focused on centralised national control systems makes this far less likely than an anarchist system that aims to distribute power as locally as possible, no?
But they don’t start by saying “first we put everything within the state"
No, but the ultimate argument is similar [...] You can argue about methods but a lot of anarchist theory has approximately the same vague “and when we successfully build enough communism the state will wither away” so mocking that last part is silly.
emphasis added for clarity
I don't think there are many anarchists calling for the establishment of state socialism and then just hoping it goes away after. Means, and intermediate systems matter, path dependency is a thing.
If they are, they're not anarchists.
If only there was theory written about it, supported by a scientific method of historical analysis that was way ahead of it's time...
Lenin ditched that in favour of vanguardism and the rest is history.
"Classless society"
look inside
the political elite has assumed the role of the capitalist class
Yep. Communism by Revolution has shown again and again to simply replace the thing they wanted to abolish with a class of untouchable leaders reigning like the kings of old.
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2026
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