I have maintained a mostly hands-off approach to moderation in this comm (in true anarchist fashion) but I feel I must remind that this is the anarchism community, not the anarchism ghetto.
Be respectful of one-another and try to act in good faith. The bulk of this site is ML-adjacent, and I do feel that having a space for anarchists to express themselves and to share anarchist media without being dogpiled or insulted is helpful.
It goes both ways of course - I'm also expecting anarchists to follow the rules and to not be argumentative. Learning is an endless process - I advise against absolutism and dogmatism.

Who knows, maybe we're doomed to repeat the antagonism of yore - even Marx and Bakunin couldn't figure out how to co-exist in the same forum.
Thanks to those who help maintain the comm - we do read the reports, even if it seems to fall on deaf ears. I try to avoid banning people or removing comments if I can help it, because sometimes people just make mistakes and they can't learn if everything is censored.

Authoritarian Leftism Only Achieves Capitalism: XXX Responds to @YYY and @Z​ZZ

Maybe it's not what I'm expecting

[ . . . ] four successes [existing socialist projects] out of 196 failures is still an incredibly good record compared to absolutely anything else

No, it absolutely isn't. Especially because I'm considering the four currently existing state capitalist nations successes because of the incidental fact that they just so happened to be the ones that still exist. Any of these might fail in the future and all of them appearing to be degenerating into traditional private capitalism as we speak. There is a 0% success rate when it comes to making progress towards socialism using the state and a roughly 2% success rate when it comes to bare survival. That is abysmal.

You support projects which are literally incapable of making progress toward worker control and that have a very high failure rate even though they have an extremely high birth rate. Unlike you, anarchists are honest about our failures. We know that we haven't survived external pressure. But we know that we can cite the furthest progress towards socialism in human history.

If you'd like to learn more about how anarchists achieved that, you should learn about anarchist Spain during the Spanish Civil War

It's what I was expecting

PS in the poorly organized (lmao) video that goes on way too long (I read the transcript instead), it fails almost immediately by deciding that the metric of whether something is capitalist is whether there are various forms of alienation per Marx, something that they also fail to describe accurately later. Imagine declaring that you read Marx, Lenin, etc, and your summary of what capitalism is, allegedly per Marx, not about the social relations of production and how they are organized, or class conflict, but simply how connected you are to the commodity you produce. But more importantly, it fails to recognize the basic Marxist conception of transformation through contradiction, of the fact that not everything simply changes at once, but builds incrementally even after rupture through opposing forces. In other words, the Marxist conception of immediately post- revolutionary society is not particularly prescriptive, and is definitely not an instantaneous destruction of all wage labor relations or even most aspects of capitalist society - just as capitalism and its conquests revolutions occurred over a period of 500+ years, never fully displacing feudal relations until extremely recently, but instead usually working under/alongside. It was the establishment of capitalists as the major ruling class that led to the more rapid (but still centuries-long!) conquest.

In other words, it is a tellingly ignorant conception of the Marxist description of post-revolutionary society that it would simply shed all aspects of capitalist society, and in fact, it just plainly flies in the face of what Marx actually said about the topic. This is because Marx's conception is quite a bit more realistic, that what emerges from workers becoming the dominant class will not be a retreat from all of the relations and associated productive capacity they live in, but a reorientation that places actual dominant power in their hands. In fact, Marx specifically predicts that workers will rationalize otherwise capitalist production, slowly freeing it from the anarchy of the market, not throwing out all of the "hitherto" (gotcha!) relations immediately.

White trust fundies have sent in a silly letter.

We shall neither print it nor reply.

has he read The Jakarta Method?

Lol I got banned in the db0 anarchist sub over refuting this garbage. A white guy filming himself sitting in a big chair in front of a giant lawn in a giant house dares to claim that the non white revolutionaries who liberated their nations from colonialism and imperialism are actually just capitalists

If you ask a person like this to describe nonauthoritarian socialism they will describe projects that failed in the scale of days or months and projects that can only exist, and have ever existed, as pockets within "authoritarian" states. The term authoritarian doesn't seem to actually mean much at all, it is a reaction to a level of organization (mystified by the term "hierarchy") that they disagree with, and because it is so poorly thought about so often, it can be part of strong critiques of organizing failures grounded in real action and history or it can be a 20-something in 2026 in Maine getting angry because of their very personal grievance in the 1930s in Spain or it can be a lofty theoretical book by someone whose main understanding of anarchism is that community gardens are cool and their work in protecting one from real estate interests is definitely comparable and superior to nation-level revolution and construction. Unfortunately this falls somewhere between the latter two.

Well, I will say that I am interested in some of the arguments Anark was bringing, particularly the unity of ends and means. But I'm not a big fan of the case he brings against the USSR, China, etc. I think there's a theoretical disconnect there, which I suspect centers around whether or not you accept / utilize the dialectic. Anark, actually very much like S4A who he is criticizing here who also does not think China is socialist, does not utilize the dialectic when analyzing whether or not something is socialist. Can't fault him for it since the dialectic isn't part of anarchism (right?) but if you are going to somehow be attempting to refute Marxism, you're going to need to touch on the dialectic otherwise the Marxist analysis is going to sound like gibberish. Instead, he just kind of responds to that gibberish strawman instead of taking on the dialectical form of the argument.

As succinctly as I can: Anark is taking a snapshot view of China and asking whether or not X or Y trait associated with capitalism is present. If those traits are still present, it's capitalist. This is a very common take even among Marxists, but not a dialectical one. Think about it this way. Imagine looking at a still picture of a car driving down a road. You can look at all the features of the car, all the traits of the car in that snapshot, the engine, tires, interior, but it's not going to tell you the direction it's headed, the road it's on, whether there is a cliff 500 meters in front of the car, etc. The internal traits of the vehicle itself don't necessarily dictate a specific direction that it can be driven in, or a past direction that it came from. The Marxist argument is that taking a snapshot of China right now doesn't tell you about whether it's on the road to socialism or not, because you have to zoom out and look at the history of the country, the material conditions over time and the general tendency of those conditions to see the road the vehicle is on, the surrounding environment that the vehicle exists in. Anark didn't respond to this point, probably because S4A himself doesn't understand it.

But this is where the disconnect on ends-means unity comes in because my understanding is that Anark believes that the internal traits of the social machine do necessarily dictate a direction. So that by looking at its current traits you can determine something about a future state, e.g. liberatory means result in liberatory ends. The problem I'm having with that argument though is, how did Anark come to that conclusion? What gets you to ends-means unity as something that is valid and sound? What would make a Marxist accept that claim?