this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
152 points (99.4% liked)
Memes of Production
1236 readers
611 users here now
Seize the Memes of Production
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the “ML” influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
Rules:
Be a decent person.
No racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, zionism/nazism, and so on.
Other Great Communities:
founded 1 month ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The part where that random guy with a bigger gun than mine will start making decisions for me.
What you're describing is the current state of the world
More like describing humanity.
Was there ever a time when it wasn't like that?
At least with a centralized body, you might get lucky and get one that has the best interest in mind for the entire group. And they can use their bigger guns to scare away those who would not have the best interest in mind.
You mean what literally happens today where the US does whatever it wants? And the states with their guns makes the citizens follow its laws?
And how would anarchy fix that if nothing would change?
Who said nothing would change?
We currently live in a top-down system, where a handful of rich influential people decide everything. Anarchism is a bottom-up system where the people directly decide everything.
Why would I want anarchism if it would not change this?
Then not only do I have to worry about the largest state, which may or may not want to kill me and is thousands of kilometers away. But I would also have to worry about my neighbors, which I have many at less than 100m away from me. And I would also have to worry about the largest state even more because I wouldn't be in a state myself that could defend me against the largest one.
"My system is not worse than the current one because your concerns about my system exist in the current one" is not a valid argument when "concerns about my system" is way larger than the ones in the current one.
The same people who overwhelmingly voted this shitshow into power?
This shit show one, has the electoral college (an anti-democratic institution in the first place), and two is a system where a simple majority gets to decide who's the leader (also not a democratic system).
Lastly, then what the fuck are you suggesting? Sounds to me like youbare saying "people are what got us into this mess in the first place." So whats your alternative? Fascism? Monarchy? Cause if your issue is that the people are stupid and thus shouldn't be trusted, then you are either a pessimistic/cynical anarchist or an authoritarian. One of which I can sympathize with. The other I have a hard time not punching in the face
"Simple majority is not democratic" raises the question of what is democratic, especially since numerous anarchist polities have had processes which are passed by majority consensus.
Call me an authoritarian if you like, but people are fucking blinkered when it comes to their own, personal interests. The same way that every conservative knows a 'good' member of the LGBT community, or every tax-and-spend liberal starts to balk when a 1% property tax increase is proposed on their nice suburban home.
Not only that, but people make much more trouble than can be easily solved, even if they don't mean to. It's easier to start a fire than put it out. People spread rumors out of ignorance, out of ideological delusions, or just out of fun - if Johnsonville upriver genuinely believes water with 500ppm of whatever toxin they produce is harmless and, like most people, refuses to change their opinion based on evidence; should Tablesville downriver suffer with no more than a stern word in response?
People make their best decisions as abstracts and generalities. "We need more X, we need less Y." People should decide goals; specialists courses of action, and oftentimes it takes several layers of specialists for the necessary precision for any given set of rules. And then the rules must be enforced evenly, upon all communities, even those who would rather continue spewing gunk downstream to save themselves an hour or two or work per day.
Christ, you don't want me making automobile engine regulations, and you don't want most car mechanics deciding what goes in the history books. For that matter, you don't really want me deciding what goes in the history books for anything except a very narrow subset of history; even very educated people can be very, very uneducated about matters even slightly outside of their specialization.
(actually, as I was never anything more than an undergrad, you probably don't want me deciding what goes into history books at all, in a specialist capacity, but you get my point, I'm sure)
This is what civilization enables. This is what modern democratic states enable, even if they still have a long fucking way to go.
The idea that small communes can enforce the same without systems of enforcement dependent on the monopoly of the community or confederation on violence I find strongly questionable.
My argument against anarchism is not so much against anarchist polities, which, historically, as libertarian socialist polities, have enforced monopoly of violence, just one with more decentralized and democratic processes than is usual; so much as it is against the idea of an ideal no-enforcement everyone-gets-along anarchy that sometimes is passed around under the justification that human society is shit because of capitalism.
Human society is shit. Capitalism is shit. Capitalism makes human society worse. But human society is not shit because of capitalism. Human society is shit because we have a limited number of tools and hours in the day with which to address all the problems of the world.
You are thinking of Communism mate.
There is more than one way to crack an egg, and some you can do at the same time. Hence anarcho-communism
Communism the thing with a vanguard party dictating the show and a top down state?
No, that is very clearly much not it.
But unless we kill everyone who has access to those big guns, they'll still have access to them after the system changes. I agree that a change needs to happen, but I can't really wrap my head around how we're going to stop people with city-destroying bombs, who wouldn't hesitate to use them on American soil if their lives were at risk. We either let them live, and keep their weapons, or we try to kill them and get taken out in a firestorm of mutually assured destruction. Taking about what we're going to do after we've won that battle just feels like planning a wedding before asking someone out on a date.
The ideal route to anarchist as I understand it wouldn't be taking away the weapons, it would be taking away the concepts of power. Musk's power is predicated on the idea that he owns more things ranked by percieved value than I do. That value is an agreed upon concept, enforced by the government that we participate in. If the stock market and dollar bill are replaced overnight with a barter system, his power would plumit to the value of assets he can physically provide himself.
Right now, oil executives have the power to dictate nations. If collectivly the majority of people just refuse to use cars, their power is now subject to a different scale. If enough of a given society makes this change fast enough, or change to something so rigorously coordinated that it cannot be exploited, then the power of the system fizzles and the ability to use force goes with it. How are you going to bomb a nation of hippy comunes if 90% of your soldiers are now in the comunes?
It's an interesting stance, but I don't personally buy it. It requires a level of group effort that we're not capable of. Personally, I feel a rigid and open source technocracy would be the easier option. Computers aren't subject to opinion or emotions and have been a billion times more capable than our best politicians for nearly a century.
Thatbis definitely an idealistic strategy on its own..it is close to an actual anarchist strategy called syndicalism, also prefiguration. However most anarchists also believe in using other strategies on top of that. And as you said, power is control over others. The people in power are not the ones who have the nukes or the buttons to launch them. The people who push the buttons have a lot more to lose in a revolution by pressing the button than the people in power (because the people in power will lose everything either way). Now do I think calling their bluff is a good bet? Yes. Do I think its enough on its own? No. I think an important thing that is being left out is that those in power are not going to order the buttons be pushed at the slightest hint of revolution. They will wait until all hope is lost. Which means before that point, seizing nuclear launch sites and anti-nuclear defenses is a priority. The dilemma is not between status quo and nuclear annihilation. Its between status quo (with possible nuclear annihilation anyways), or revolution (with possible nuclear annihilation if we fail in a very particular way). To me thats a much easier dilemma to choose from.
The only way it would be better under anarchy is that you would no longer be shouldering the moral burden of participating.
In a democracy you need to come to terms with the fact that things are shitty. I held my nose and voted for Harris because YES she would have still allowed Israel to continue their campaign of terror against Gaza, but there's a laundry list of terrible things that have happened under Trump that absolutely would not have under Harris.
To be an anti-democracy anarchist is to hide your head in the sand. To stand at the trolley switch without touching it, trying to convince yourself that the blood is not on your hands. Trying to pretend like we can sequester off pieces of this one planet into containers that do not impact each other.
It's a great ideology for teenagers explore. To see things in extremes and think more abstractly without getting bigger down with the details of reality.
Yes, something like that. But in case of governments we have a few sources of threat, while without the governments we have millions sources of threat, half of which are completely crazy.
What extra sources of threats do you imagine with a people led system vs a ruling class led system?
The exact same threats exist.
I think the point theyre making is that our current system has a consolidation of threat. We know the exact names of every one in the 1% and government agents advertise their affiliation. In an anarchist society, every member of your current community and every outside community has to now be assessed for their likelihood to take up arms and become a threat.
In our current system, the government functions as the biggest fish. If any one person or group attempts to exert their will on the masses without the government's approval, they become a big enough fish for the government to eat them. We in turn are the fish that survive by hiding in the shadows of the shark, too small to be a meal and too weak to exist without it, but safe from the larger dangers of the sea. To kill the shark would mean every fish bigger than us is now dangerous.