Sally Strange (@SallyStrange@eldritch.cafe)
eldritch.cafe
It strikes me that all the people who are like "OMG anarchists, how can you possibly run a society without laws and cops and prisons, how will you ever stop the bad guys" had better start listening to the actual answers because those are going to be our most effective tactics going forward. None of the apparatus of power is going to be on your side.

With everything going on in the US I am seeing more and more of these takes by Mastodons anarchists and I once again fail to understand how their alternative would work. Especially coming out of an intensively individualized system like capitalism, how do you just do no hiearchies? And why is the State always just the cops and military, would someone think about the infrastructure, hospitals, schools…

I am biased, because I am most definitely a statist. Mainly because I have studied them and work in the public sector. It is surprisingly a lot that goes into seemingly mundane things like city planning or the planning and implementation of services of any kind, you do need experts for it. Even in luxury space communism, someone is going to have to steer the ship and design it.

I don’t know, from real life experience I know that when for example there is an emergency, people do self-organize. But at the same time I have not once experienced this happening without a hierarchy forming almost instantly.

  • keepcarrot [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    11·
    3 months ago

    At least a start is that “the state” is not the things under government control as written, but rather the collection of forces and interests that maintain class separation/hierarchy. A sort of pair of demonstrative examples of this point: A private security force that mercs striking workers in the third world are more a part of “the state” than the city council worker who fills in potholes, regardless of who is paying them, their legal connection to the government, or where the profits of their activity go.

    Now, you might disagree with this framing, but when you hear someone on the left talk about “the state”, this is what they’re talking about. You can call it whatever you like if you are unhappy with the word choice.

    It is also a little grey, its not like “this is definitely the state” and “this is definitely not the state”. Teachers, for instance, tend to lean left and do important work teaching kids and caring for them out of their parents workplace, but will often repeat hegemonic talking points (e.g. Israel good, supply and demand, Gorwell etc.). To say that an individual teacher is a member of comprador statist forces is getting lost in the weeds. We want to focus mostly on structures and institutions (especially at this early stage)

    The specifics of how to engage with the state in revolutionary strategy is a (the?) key difference between anarchists and marxists.

    At some point, productive forces would mean that all the ships that need to be steered are steered by people who are actualised by steering ships, all the ships will be designed by people who are interested in designing ships etc. At least, that’s the idea. I don’t know if either political philosophy claims to resolve cliques. Either way, it seems like a long way off here in the rich West so I’m not sure if its worth getting too hung up on hypothetical futures.