this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2026
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This has nothing to say about anarchism itself. It just assumes that coercive authority would be required for industrial medicine production and large scale agriculture. Anarchism does not mean a lack of organization, just a lack of coercion and unjust hierarchy.
i mean, i have seen many naive anarchists who think "everyone has a garden" and "hi, my favourite hobby is making paracetamol in my garage!" are substitutes for organized agriculture and medical manufacturing…
The vast majority of capitalists believe in the possibility of an ever expanding market on a planet with finite resources.
There have been communist who believed you should plant seeds really close together because they would have plant class solidarity and not compete with each other.
There are anarchists who think chaos is a legitimate form of government.
There are fascist.
It's almost like naive and insane people exist within all political ideologies to different degrees.
actually that's not true. spaceflight is explicitely researched because they understand that you can't have an infinitely growing economy on a finite planet.
if that was true they'd be putting a lot more effort into it than "idk let's blow up rockets until it works"
I disagree. Space exploration is mostly still done on public sector money, with the goals of national prestige, scientific advancement and as an appeal to the biological human impulse to seek out the unknown. Private endeavors are mostly focused on using space to grow the terrestrial economy (satcom megaconstellations [Even spacex and their starship is primarily being developed to serve this end]) and as investor bait (the loonie space data center rush and every such impractical startup). The noble search to conquer the cosmos is just PR for them.
Economies and societies are so complex that none of the models we imagine on the whiteboard are able to stay stable across centuries (or even decades).
We know, for instance, that capitalism has to be heavily regulated to prevent things like pollution, mistreatment of workers, shoddy goods and anticapitalist practices. We also know that over time, government regulators will get captured by business interests. The environment and workforce / customer base suffer, small businesses cannot compete and all the money ends up at the top with everyone else bankrupt.
So far we haven't been able to implement any system that doesn't degrade into authoritarianism, and eventually a one-party state with a dictator, or that doesn't get overrun by another, more militant society intent on plundering their labor and resources.
I don't deny that there's plenty of naive anarchists around. But it's a false conclusion that anarchism itself would be naive because of that.
You can be an anarchist and poke fun at naive interpretations of anarchism. I don't think you have to read "all anarchists are like these hypothetical human pets" into that joke.
You don't have to, but that is absolutely the correct interpretation when 'anarchists' is further qualified only by, 'pet', which only implies ownership. That's even worse than calling anarchism naive. That's implying anarchists are so dumb as to be considered pets.
To be fair, I do have a harem of pet anarchists
Call that a polycule
No, in English a descriptor not only means that they're only refering to a specific subgroup, but that the general group doesn't universally have that trait. So it's saying both that only the specific anarchists described in the OP are pets, and that anarchists aren't usually pets.
Yeah, I think it's a fallacy to treat hobbies as work, and work as a hobby.
Whether we love it or hate it, work has to be done. It doesn't have to, or should be dreadful, but ultimately it is fundamentally different to a hobby. Completely different mindset too, everyone that has turned they hobby into their main source of income will tell you it just becomes "a job".
Work needs deadlines, planning, discipline, efficiency, communication, accounting, expectations and competition. Hobbies are relaxing and enjoyable precisely because it isn't these.
You can still love your job, but I wanted to convey that despite what many may wish, most people cannot handle, or enjoy, their hobby becoming their job
Industry in an anarchist society will need to heavily rely on organization, professionals, and education preparing the next generation of those professions. It's naive to think that members of a community garden could run a 500 acre farm, or similar.
“Workers own the means of production” is, in fact, anarchist but I can understand freshly-minted anarchists get turned off the idea at first by tankies lol
Tankies think that the state should own the means of production. Sure, they'll then claim that the workers own the state, but in reality it's just owned by the political elite.
Bingo. If your hands aren’t operating the equipment on the daily, you shouldn’t get to (co)own it. Statism bleeding into work life is effectively diet capitalism.
Honest question: is political work a valid form of labor?
Theory and reality are different things, absolutely - politics is labor. Whether that’s used for good or evil is separate. Politics also =/= statism, and nothing will ever be neatly cut and dry in the real world to fully divorce ourselves from these quandaries.
Re: statism, that's very fair, and it was what you said. I think I was partially responding to the "political elite" comment you were also responding to.
Totally agree, we can only speak certainties about real-world conditions, and the tendency toward abstraction and hypotheticals IMO is sort of a negative tendency in many ways.
I keep writing more, but I don't wanna get way in the weeds. Def appreciate the thoughtful response
Honest personal opinion: Absolutely not.
Why not? Politics happens either way. There are going to be people who are more influential than others, name any famous anarchist, my favorite was Malatesta, and they were 100% absolutely engaged in political work.
Is it just that political work is okay until after the workers seize the means? IMO denying the necessity of political work as a means of suppressing the possibility of political domination of a minority, which is a real concern, drifts into authoritarianism almost instantly. Its just denying reality. Denying that political work is work is a political opinion. Enforcing it would be political work!
This is not a gotcha question, genuinely want to hear your opinion. I don't think pointing out a contradiction is, on its own, a total invalidation of any given viewpoint. Contradictions are everywhere, people are contradictory.
Also that's not my downvote, I don't do that shi
"banning" politics is a wild concept anyways, because as we bang on about everything is politics.
Yeah, and I def relate to the person I respond to. I fully accept the necessity of political engagement, and volunteer time and money and energy toward that goal. That being said, I'm someone very concerned with truth and criticism, whereas there are others who are very concerned with politics. And in my experience, people who are very talented, committed and active politically are prone to always wanna come down on this or that side of an issue, or have a very clearly developed line even when maybe the conditions for having a hard and fast line are not all the way developed.
Meanwhile, a lot of people just aren't really experienced with that kind of engagement. It's very frustrating, and perhaps counter productive, to collapse every issue and practical activity into politics. Like actually, not everything is politics. Every movement has a political character, and denying that is a political stance! But culture isn't politics. Culture is political, it has a political character, but it isn't in and of itself politics. Just like politics has a cultural character but is distinct. I like the Marxist framing of economic base and superstructure; so that politics, law, and culture, and all associated institutions, are superstructure -- closely related and categorically similar but still distinct. While the motivations behind those things have a basis in economics, or maybe to simplify even further, the real human need and creation/social distribution of resources -- which is the economic base.
In many cases I wish for more cultural engagement than political engagement. And peoples experience with politics, and how easily and thoroughly it becomes corrupted, is a real objective obstacle to mass political engagement. So while I am active in and very proud of the political gains the left has made in recent years, the absence of a real leftist culture, or counter hegemony, is a red flag for our movements. And I think I would prefer to have many spaces for people to engage with politics indirectly, than to just insist that people engage with politics directly. There's wrong headedness in believing that all politics is inherently a path to corruption and centralization of power. But its perhaps just as wrong to insist that the only path to engagement with left mass politics is through direct political engagement.
As someone whose talents lie more in pedagogy and art and culture than politics, I think I am less effective than I could be if there was more to our movements than just winning people to this or that political line through campaigns and clear victories of legal/organizational legitimacy.
Do they extract the same fraction of resources for their own pleasure? Did Stalin or others have car collections, horse stables or private islands?
Ownership means control. If you own something, that means that you have control over it. Obviously with something as large as a country, most of what that asset produces will go into sustaining said asset. A factory owner doesn't invest the full revenue of his enterprise into personal luxuries, he has to first pay all the running expenses.
And even then, that person doesn't need to be fond of luxuries in order to still be an owner. I haven't looked into what luxuries Stalin enjoyed and I don't much care. My point is that he had power over everything in the country, and the proletariat had little power over the supposed "dictatorship of the proletariat".
How else would you do it? As long as everybody can join the party and rise in ranks I would say that it can't be more open.
uhhh, you'd structure it from the ground up? Like we have this right now, co-operatives exist and they work really well.
Less centralized control. Lenin sowed the seeds for Stalinism when he centralized the political system after the revolution. Selfish actors seek power, and the selfless find themselves corrupted by it. The position being open for everyone just means that anyone can become a tyrant.
How do you want to deal with the overhead of decentralization in case of war?
Well, the obvious solution would be to appoint a temporary supreme leader who, wait a second, he just abolished the republic and appointed himself emperor for life. Nevermind.
Centralized decision making is more efficient than its decentralized alternative, but that would be race to the bottom, the culmination of which would be a society of drones controlled by the central authority in every regard. So decentralization may be a losing position, but I still consider it worth it. The means are the ends.
Also worth noting that asymmetric warfare and guerrilla tactics benefit from the agility afforded by decentralization.
Anarchy is more about dissolving ownership. Why would it be right to keep people out of a factory by force just because you work there?
If you have reason to believe they will cause direct or indirect harm, sure, but ownership is no indication of that. In fact production may be causing more harm than good, in which case it would be right to stop the factory's operations, with force against the workers if necessary.
The beautiful thing about anarchism is it’s a space for hundreds of differing viewpoints (so long as they’re centered on non-hierarchical structures).
That said, I at no point mentioned force or violence in anarchist production ownership. Also where in my comment is there “keeping people out of a factory by force?” Having say over the day to day operations for the place you work is pretty typical of syndicalism, at least.
The beautiful thing of maths is that there are an infinite amount of numbers between 0 and 1 but none of them are 2. Hierarchy of worker-owners over non-owners is unjust.
What else do you mean by "owning" a thing? In capitalism, it means you socially deserve to have people punish others on your behalf for using it in a way you don't consent to. Workers owning the means of production is contrasted against capital owners (bourgeoisie, aristocracy, church, etc.) owning the means of production; it doesn't re-examine ownership as a relation.
This is why state capitalism is such a natural outcome of Marxist thought: people expected ownership to continue, so all they had to convince people of is that the state represents the workers now. Hence also the prometheanism of state capitalist nations; since workers own the land, exploitation is still natural and convenient.
Yeah, and syndicalists are often hierarchical towards scabs and non-workers.
When I say “ownership,” which is a messy word yes, I mean right to consensus on operations. There is no real world without pushback, so that probably does involve defense against forces looking to reclaim it in a capitalist capacity.
That doesn’t negate the rights of “outsiders” to also co-influence or join in a democratic fashion in the context of wider community.
I think, like in another sub-thread with another commenter, there is a fuzzy line between theory and reality that can get confused in anarchist discussions and that may have also happened here for both of us.
In genuine interest of further understanding your viewpoint (in a non-antagonistic way), how do you envision just and sustainable production in this context? What does fairness look like? How does it operate?
These aren’t rhetorical or “gotchas,” just interested in widening my perspective if you so choose to share your time :)
The phrase is usually used to refer to the social class of workers as a whole (the people who work to live), as opposed to the capitalist class who simply own things for their livelyhood.
Absolutely, but it's still pretty funny.
So much misinformation out there, people can't even define it anymore
well the problem is more that there's a whole lot of high-quality crap literature about anarchism out there. so even if people do read up on it, it's confusing.
Whenever we organize a society big enough, it becomes susceptible to culture war and strongman leaders that reorder the society so that it's authoritarian.
Actually teaching kids anarchist values and critical thinking skills might help, but this is why the power-mongers attack education and religious doctrine early on.
We've seen Marxists systems that get pretty big and work for a while, but even they have internal troubles that are resolved with political violence, and are put down by overwhelming foreign invaders (such as the United States invading Grenada).
I'm interested in anarchist theory. I'm just trying to figure out how it's going to resist the consolidation of power, which is has been a problem for every civilization in history up to the present day.
I view consolidation of power to be a consequence of thermodynamics.
Two non-consolidated power structures interacting have a natural friction between them owing to differing leadership and communication styles, not to mention redundancy. When they merge the redundancy is eliminated and with it goes the friction, bringing the whole system closer to equilibrium.
The other issue is simply the limitations of human brains and our capacity for relationships and managing reputation. In large structures we simply can’t know everyone, so we have to outsource our relationship management to an external entity. Naturally, central authorities are better at enforcing the rules (than decentralized ones) due to aforementioned friction issues and the ability of bad actors to move between jurisdictions or to form their own competing power structures.
That is the biggest issue, agreed. But as pessimistic as it is to say it, I'm willing to bet that humanity will scale back in the size and complexity of societies, willingly or not. The current systems are unsustainable, and what can't be sustained, will not be.
I'm hanging my hope on whatever parallel societal structures people start to form in the cracks as the old systems start to crumble.