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I actually bothered to read "Defending an Anarchist Society", it wasn't very good (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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u/Means-of-production - originally from r/GenZhou
remember this post? k well I actually went on over to the Anarchist Library and read that essay. On top of the fact that it doesn't actually talk about Leninist theory regarding the state withering away at all,(it actually acknowledges that Leninism was successful while Anarchism failed, it's just trying to prove Anarchism is better) it wasn't very good. It's mostly "Anarcho-Communism can defend itself as well as the USSR did ~~ignore that historically it hasn't that's bc they didn't have me commanding them~~ and so therefore Anarcho-Communism is superior to "Authoritarian-Communism" (they insist on calling AES that the entire way through) and we should all be Anarcho-Communists that follow exactly my definition and interpretation of Anarchism". It's like the Hoi4 Wheraboo "Germany would've won if I was in charge" but applied to Catalonia. Don't bother.

He also goes on a weird tangent to attack Engels in one paragraph, and then proves Engels' point like two sentences later, take a wild guess at which 1872 pamphlet he felt the need to try to refute

Can't be arsed making a full reply. "Why should we bother to reply to Kautsky?" it's just the usual recycled anarchist bullshit but it copies Marxism-Leninism slightly more openly, and with as much idealism (read: industrial quantities of it) as you'd expect.

TVTropes Summary:

it's not the state, it's the people's democratically elected mutual-aid voluntary fun guardians
muh commies betrayed us
what if the bourgeoisie didn't attack us
Anarchy works, see, like in this [random obscure society that hasn't existed in centuries]
me and my hoi4 tactics would've won the war
logistics are magic
lol no we don't need a command structure
Anarchism is perfect and will work because I said so wait wdym "what if people are racist"
incoherent gibberish that isn't related to the discussion

read it for yourself if you've got a couple hours to waste.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

u/emisneko - originally from r/GenZhou
reminds me of this from Why Marxism?

Many westerners come to socialism not out of necessity, but out of disillusionment. We are raised with the idea that Liberal Democracy is the best system of political expression humanity has devised. When confronted with the reality of its shortcomings, rather than narrowly discard liberalism or electoralism, the western anti-capitalist tends to draw sweeping conclusions about the inadequacy of all existing systems. Curiously, though it would at first seem that such denunciations are more principled and severe, they are in fact more compatible with existing and widespread beliefs about the supremacy of the western system. That is to say, when a Marxist-Leninist asserts the superiority of existing socialist experiments, they are directly challenging the idea that westerners are at the forefront of political development. By contrast, the assertions from anarchists and social democrats that we need to build a more utopian future out of our current apex are compatible not only with each other, as discussed earlier, but also do not really offend bourgeois society at large. They in fact end up not sounding too different from the arch-imperialist Winston Churchill holding forth on how ours is the worst system, except for all the others which have been tried. Western chauvinists, consciously or unconsciously, struggle with the idea that they should study and humbly take lessons from the imperial periphery. [15] It is much easier for the chauvinist, psychologically, to position oneself as at the very front of a new vanguard.