TLDR: Statists measure success based on the state, so in order to convince them that anarchism us successful we would need to stop being anarchists.
"For anarchists who do know something about anthropology, the arguments are all too familiar. A typical exchange goes something like this:
Skeptic: Well, I might take this whole anarchism idea more seriously if you could give me some reason to think it would work. Can you name me a single viable example of a society which has existed without a government?
Anarchist: Sure. There have been thousands. I could name a dozen just off the top of my head: the Bororo, the Baining, the Onondaga, the Wintu, the Ema, the Tallensi, the Vezo…
Skeptic: But those are all a bunch of primitives! I’m talking about anarchism in a modern, technological society.
Anarchist: Okay, then. There have been all sorts of successful experiments: experiments with worker’s self-management, like Mondragon; economic projects based on the idea of the gift economy, like Linux; all sorts of political organizations based on consensus and direct democracy…
Skeptic: Sure, sure, but these are small, isolated examples. I’m talking about whole societies.
Anarchist: Well, it’s not like people haven’t tried. Look at the Paris Commune, the revolution in Republican Spain…
Skeptic: Yeah, and look what happened to those guys! They all got killed!
The dice are loaded. You can’t win. Because when the skeptic says “society,” what he really means is “state,” even “nation-state.” Since no one is going to produce an example of an anarchist state—that would be a contradiction in terms—what we’re really being asked for is an example of a modern nation-state with the government somehow plucked away: a situation in which the government of Canada, to take a random example, has been overthrown, or for some reason abolished itself, and no new one has taken its place but instead all former Canadian citizens begin to organize themselves into libertarian collectives. Obviously this would never be allowed to happen. In the past, whenever it even looked like it might—here, the Paris commune and Spanish civil war are excellent examples—the politicians running pretty much every state in the vicinity have been willing to put their differences on hold until those trying to bring such a situation about had been rounded up and shot."
Obviously this would never be allowed to happen. In the past, whenever it even looked like it might—here, the Paris commune and Spanish civil war are excellent examples—the politicians running pretty much every state in the vicinity have been willing to put their differences on hold until those trying to bring such a situation about had been rounded up and shot.
This is a very good argument against anarchism, at least in the foreseeable future. Reaction is foreseeable. If your movement doesn’t have a way to resist reaction, that’s a serious flaw.
Try again. This isn’t Lenin, you can’t just skim through and pretend you read it. And I know you just skimmed it because you Wylie Coyoted right into the point yet somehow missed it.
Graeber’s argument here is that you shouldn’t criticise anarchism/libertarianism through the lens of “success” or “material benefits” or “existing” because anarchism is an abstract, and to ascribe these concepts to it would be reification.
The ideology is not the thing, Anarchism does not exist as such, it is the absence of statism. This is all well and good, but I’m pretty sure people need healthcare and philosophy doesn’t feed people.
Wait, check your choice of words!
At the start of the last passage he explicitly states that anarchism cannot be measured through the lens of a state. Success and material benefits are never mentioned.
The point he is making is that if you assume that
State = Success and material benefits
then anarchism by definition cannot be successful. You are the one who defined the state as meaning success and material benefits.
You are incorrect about Graeber’s intent. The purpose of his statement is that you cannot critique anarchism in any way because it does not exist.
Please continue to educate yourself. Lukács’ Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein – Studien über marxistische Dialektik is necessary context for this reading.
If it doesn’t exist then you’re upset over nothing. Seems a bit silly, does it not?
I’m not upset at all, just trying to help you out since you’re clearly getting a lot of heat over this post.
My apologies. I found an english copy by Rodney Livingstone so I’ll take a look at it. Thank you
It’s Graeber who equivocates the two in his original argument by dismissing his imagined opponent’s arguments based on success and materialist outcomes as “statist skepticism.”
“The only way you could disagree is if you didn’t read it” – come on, we’re really doing this? It shouldn’t be surprising to find disagreement on this exact point on Hexbear, a predominantly ML forum.
Graeber is saying that if everyone in a modern nation-state voluntarily dissolved their state and tried to live by anarchist principles, they would face violent reaction. He’s right! But he doesn’t follow this by arguing how anarchists could avoid, deter, or resist this violence, short of forming a state themselves. He suggests that discussing the violent reaction he foresees is basically an unfair line of reasoning: “The dice are loaded. You can’t win.” The ML response is that it’s not only fair, but crucial to discuss the entirely predictable problems your movement will encounter. If you don’t have an answer to those problems, you need a different plan.
The ML answer to the problem of violent reaction is a state that serves the interests of working people. That’s only “loading the dice” in the argument about the necessity of a state if anarchists can supply a better answer. Graeber has none, at least not in this excerpt.
I don’t measure success based on the state, I measure success based on improvement of living conditions and abolition of feudalism/capitalism/imperialism.
Trying to turn back the clock towards primitivism is simply antimaterialist, you can’t undo the progress of history. Mondragón is hardly anticapitalist, and the Spanish anarchists lost the war and condemned Spain (my homeland) to 40 years of fascism.
I’m not asking for an example of anarchists assembling a state, I’m asking for an example of anarchists defeating capitalism and imperialists large-scale, such as the USSR did. No anarchist project even comes close to the scale of poverty alleviation, life expectancy, literacy rates or housing access of Cuba, for example.
This isn’t trying to convince you because you are not the intended audience.
You entered a space not meant for you,
you offended yourself,
you then tried to blame the locals and proceeded to call me “primitive”.
You didn’t need to tell me that you’re Spanish, I can smell the colonialism wafting off of you.
Debate around theory is welcome on hexbear. Your post is an overt misrepresentation of many brands of socialism using words such as “statist”, and the people directly referred to by this post will naturally respond. It’s literally a deliberate strawman explicitly making up a “skeptical statist” and their talking points.
I didn’t call you primitive, primitivism is an ideological tendency which defends the return to pre-city-state societies, and it’s anti-materialist and therefore unfeasible.
The author, by praising the Spanish Second Republic and the Commune of Paris, is engaging in worship of martyrdom. He explicitly explains how “all countries around will join arms and kill them”, and somehow doesn’t see how this is a very strong argument against what he’s proposing. He’s more concerned with the purity of the revolution than with its material results, and that’s really, really bad. Here’s a Redsails article titled “Western Marxism, the Fetish for Defeat, and Christian Culture” which explains this much better than I possibly could.
You can still respond to the points I made if you want, instead of attacking me personally.
~~Ok, how about ending the transatlantic slave trade? Proudhon didn’t invent anarchism, he himself admits that, only the word. He observed the slave abolitionists. All anarchism is is a banner to follow, not a book written by a man.
The entire point of the post is that statists cannot accurately assess anarchism because it would require accepting that the western world is not better than what came before. And the assumption that it is is just cultural hegemony.~~
Edit: Actually, scratch that. It’s clear based on your edit as well as your choice of article that you don’t read these things, you just skim. And my words deserve better than skimming.
I’m not knowledgeable enough about the end of transatlantic slave trade in particular, but wasn’t the idea to bring in African slaves to the lands genocided by the Europeans to have slave labour? If so, how was this ended by anarchism? Again, from my very surface-level understanding, slavery in North America outlasted its efficacy and was substituted by wage labor once capitalism was developed and industrialized enough, and much of the rest of the Americas slavery existed well into the 1900s as American companies reaped the profits of slave plantations, and many of these were stopped in its tracks by socialist revolutions such as that of Cuba. Can you elaborate on your point regarding Proudhon, anarchism and the slave trade?
The entire point of the post is that statists cannot accurately assess anarchism because it would require accepting that the western world is not better than what came before
But I do accept that the western world is a genocidal monster, in many ways much much worse than what came before. I don’t see how that relates to inaccurately assessing anarchism, I definitely believe primitive societies are/were more fair and moral than modern capitalism, I just don’t believe the clock of history can be turned back and dissolve modern capitalism into primitivism.
And my words deserve better than skimming.
Given your clear eurocentric views on socialism and your Reddit tier demeanor is this really true?
I don’t know anything about european socialism. Only in Kerbal Space program.
This is you:
The entire point of the post is that statists cannot accurately assess anarchism because it would require accepting that the western world is not better than what came before. And the assumption that it is is just cultural hegemony.~~
The author is telling anarchists that you can’t convince statists that anarchism is a good idea because they do not respect things that don’t adhere to western imperial values.
Entirely skipping over the fact the largest and most successful socialist experiment thus far is China. Or the experience of the DPRK leading to it’s formation of a socialist state from the original people’s committees. You have a clear issue with viewing things with a Eurocentric lense.
Obviously this would never be allowed to happen.
has another commenter has said, this is an argument against anarchism. leninist “statist” approach was developed in order to defend what the paris commune attempted
Try again. This time try asking what the author is trying to say before coming up with a response.
what is the author saying?
Good question!
Does it seem that the author enjoys debating? Why would an author who does not enjoy debate write something about debate?
This is a weird and condescending way of engaging with comrades.
How so?
Try again. The intended audience for my comment isn’t you.
i was sincerily asking what you thought the author was saying. answering questions with a question is kind of rude. is your point that debat = bad? why is enjoying debate relevant to this conversation
I’m not a chatbot, I don’t spit out answers on demand.
My point is not about debate, it’s that the intended audience is not you. Which means you cannot understand what it is trying to say unless you read it from the perspective of an anarchist.
The author is telling anarchists that you can’t convince statists that anarchism is a good idea because they do not respect things that don’t adhere to western imperial values.
the intended audience is not you. Which means you cannot understand what it is trying to say unless you read it from the perspective of an anarchist
Shouldn’t a revolutionary movement attempt to make itself understandable and convince everyone? Why the focus on the intended audience?
The author is telling anarchists that you can’t convince statists that anarchism is a good idea because they do not respect things that don’t adhere to western imperial values.
What are the western imperial values that you are referring to? Because all the “statist” successes I would reference come from the periphery. As another commenter said, statist measure success in healthcare, literacy, employment, defence of the revolution. I wouldn’t call them western imperial values.
If you are measuring success outside of the creation of a state then you are not the demographic being discussed.
The author is telling anarchists that you can’t convince statists that anarchism is a good idea because they do not respect things that don’t adhere to western imperial values.
You are genuinely using “statist” as a descriptively worthless snarlword if you characterize it as synonymous with western imperialism.
In more practical terms, a society, anarchist or statist, that doesn’t have the means to launch ICBMs at the capital city of nuclear powers is destined to be walked all over by those nuclear powers. We saw this in real life with Venezuela and are seeing it right now with Iran. If Venezuela or Iran have the ability to glass Washington DC with nukes, Maduro would still be in Venezuela and Khamenei would still be alive. Just from reading about how those nuclear powers became nuclear powers, I do not see an anarchist society having the ability to acquire nuclear ICBMs without either reorganizing their society into a non-anarchic one or submitting to one of the nuclear powers for protection under a nuclear umbrella like what Belarus has done towards Russia. A PM of Pakistan said that they would rather eat grass if it means they could get nukes as protection against India. This is completely anathema to an anarchist society because that PM was more or less saying that Pakistanis starving from malnutrition was well worth the human cost for getting nukes as soon as possible, but in the end, Pakistan did get nukes (with the help of China depending on who you ask). If Pakistan didn’t rush to get nukes, I’m not even sure if Pakistan would still exist today since Pakistan’s military is completely outgunned by India’s military and the stretch of land between Pakistan’s capital and the Pakistani-Indian border is completely flat.
Statists measure success based on the state
“Brickists measure success based on the trowel”. — person dogmatically against building houses out of bricks.
The state is a tool not something you measure success off of. Success is measured off of material results (poverty alleviation, progress towards abolition of feudalism/capitalism, class power, etc.)
Ok, and so if you saw an example of something that is not a state which has managed to do just that then would you l consider it successful?
Yes success is success.
i am someone who is quite convinced that socialist state building projects are the primary and most effective way of fighting capitalism and imperialism. not trying to “gotcha” but i have been curious for some time like others in the thread what the anarchist template for defending the revolution looks like.
That’s a great question! And is actually the point of the chapter this comes from. This is a brief explanation, I highly recommend checking out David Graeber’s work if you’re interested in more (he’s a very funny writer).
To start, who are we safeguarding it from? Without a state or a central authority you would need to convince every single neighborhood, workplace, household and so on that they should change. There’s no military to coup, there’s nowhere for a dictator to sit, and as for occupation, doesn’t work too well against guerilla tactics which are entirely decentralized.
Also, an anarchist revolution won’t look like a state takeover. Rather than chopping off the head and taking its place we work on hollowing out the state and replacing it with secondary support structures. Which is what we’ve been doing since the fall of Spain. We were told to sabotage the enemy and stay hidden, and we never stopped (This is called security culture, and it was adopted when black anarchism became the dominant anarchist strain after the collapse of syndicalism) Like roaches, if you start seeing anarchists then we’ve already taken over.
To start, who are we safeguarding it from?
The other states, for example. Soviet Russia got immediately invaded by other capitalist states.
guerilla tactics which are entirely decentralized
Sadly, guerilla tactics don’t work too well without outside support from industrialized states. With a firepower difference between a modern state and a decentralized collective, you don’t have much of a chance. Even in ancient times, when that difference was absent, states tended to win simply due to organizational advantage, allowing them to consistently concentrate their forces better. This was how states came to dominate to world.
Okay you’ve identified that capitalist nations and projects around any revolution will put it down with utmost force, even overcoming great internal barriers and obstacles to do so, because an example of the alternative allowed to exist unmolested would be a death blow to them.
Now what? How has this problem been effectively navigated
That’s not the point of the passage. Try again, but consider where this was posted and who the intended audience is. Are you the intended audience?
I don’t understand. Why would me being or not being the intended audience matter, that’s a pretty basic thing to have to think through. Do you want to be morally pure in an abstract sense or do you want to make the world a better place? If the only response to asking how this revolution would defend itself is “you’re the wrong person to ask that” then I think you’re just dodging the point.
/gen
If the author is an anarchist and the audience is anarchist then why would the author try to convert the audience to anarchism?
They wouldn’t.
The passage is saying that it doesn’t make sense to argue with people who have already made up their minds. The Socratic dialogue at the start is an example of the logical fallacy of appeal to authority and circular logic, and Graeber’s paragraph at the end is him explaining the dialogue.
Do you see the irony of your original comment now?
But I haven’t made up my mind, genuinely. I’d really actually like to know the answer; if there’s something I hadn’t yet considered I would want to know it
Of course!
If we put things in the most straightforward terms, a state is a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. That’s it, that’s all a state is. If there is no monopoly of violence then it’s not a state. A monopoly on violence is maintained by a standing military occupation, in most cases this means police.
That’s the jist of it. There’s more nuance and different approaches to it, but that’s the core difference between anarchism and statism; are cops needed for communism? Anything else is just policy.
That’s clearly not what I meant; I meant the original question I posed
I see. Personally, no idea. Communalism seems to be working quite well at holding off fascism. Security culture works well in the imperial core, and decentralized affinity groups seem to be the most effective thing from inside the imperial core.
Graber talks about the two laws of anarchism. First, a better world is possible. Second, there is no vanguard; nobody has all the answers. This is why anarchist tactics today are unrecognizable from a decade ago, let alone a century.
There have been all sorts of successful experiments: experiments with worker’s self-management, like Mondragon
Mondragon is an anarchist experiment?
It fits a model of how some anarchists may view economic organization in an anarchist society (worker co-ops)
i dont think any “statist” is arguing that worker co-ops dont work. its that woker co-ops on their own are not enough to defeat capitalism/fascim (and mondragon is an example of how capitalism easily coopts this project)
Afaik, it is a normal ML position that co-ops are fine as an intermediary step but that labor organizing needs to develop further and cannot stop there even besides the military obstacles because the means of production must be owned by the proletariat as a class rather than a given site being owned by the workers at the site. Among other things, having a democratic and centrally-planned economy doesn’t work if everything is essentially still just working on the basis of private interests (and therefore capitalist anarchy of production) that just happen to be owned by the people who work at the given facility rather than by a capitalist paying a wage to propertyless workers.
How about a “collective” of millions? Not for size’s own sake, but millions of people cooperating in solidarity with one another? That’s what I’d want to see, because how else will (what have been historically small) anarchist enclaves ever defend themselves against the much more efficient organizational capabilities of a state? I want to believe, but so far I can’t, actually. With due respect to Graeber and all my anarchist homies.
Good question! I’d look at communalism for this as they seem to be the best at handling direct hostility from states. There are currently two major projects you can look at, Zapatista in Chiapas which is just under a million people, or Rojava (Their actual name is Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria which is a mouthful) which is a confederation of many different groups in West Asia with roughly 4.5 million people.
It’s easier to get theory from the Zapatistas in English, though Rojava is the larger project. Both have managed to hold off significantly larger forces and states. Rojava also has its fair share of contradictions, but they seem to be their own biggest critic and actively try to resolve them.
If you want to read more about these Bill Gales made a number of English translations on the Zapatistas official website under the theory section of the English version.
Zapatista
They explicitly reject being labeled as anarchists. They also have in recent years become more vertical and “statist” in their organisational structure:
I appreciate getting another perspective even though some comments in this thread are close to the PPB-zone…
The issue I have with this debate is there’s this implicit definition of “the state” and a pre-determined way to define how it works.
For starters, at a very stripped down level, isn’t a state just a very large group of people organized under one system? So wouldn’t the quality of that state vary based on which people are running it and how malleable the structure is in the first place?
So the U.S. is an F-Tier state because it doesn’t give people control over it, it is driven by corporations, and all sorts of mechanisms including its founding documents (the Constitution) prevent that from changing without a complete revolution. OTOH China is a much better state because of the way their Democracy works, the amount of state-owned (i.e. people-owned) industry, and actually holding the richest people accountable for their crimes.
I believe we all have the same goal of a classless, stateless, moneyless society. I just don’t trust pure Anarchism to get us there.
I need people to protect me and my family from Fascist violence.
I need someone to inspect the food we are harvesting to make sure literal shit on the lettuce isn’t giving us mega-diaharria. This literally is happening now under Capitalism!
I need a medical system that takes of us, actually heals us instead of treating us in a way that maximizes profit, and let’s all of us heal without requiring us to be wealthy or go into lifelong debt.
I need housing that I have control over, not some landlord. I need rent control, housing to be for living and not speculation, and people to be able to have basic housing regardless if they are working or not.
I could go on and on. Heck, how do you handle public transport without a strong state?!? The US is a joke outside of a few cities, while China has bullet trains and systems that make it so I can live without a car.
For starters, at a very stripped down level, isn’t a state just a very large group of people organized under one system?
This is a little imprecise. A large company or a religion would meet this definition.
Your mainstream non-leftist definition of a state will usually include something like “a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence in a defined territory.” Leftists have a similar definition, but usually phrased in terms of one class dominating another (…by a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence).
You make some great observations and raise even better questions!
Im terms of a “stripped down version of the state”, shortly before the above passage the author gives his definition of the state, which is a monopoly on violence. Essentially this means that all forms of violence within the boundaries of the state are either done by or permitted by the state. This can be a double edged sword, because while the state might not tolerate invasion or random manslaughter in the streets it also might stop you and your community from starting a militia and fighting nazis.
The comedian Brennan Lee Mulligan describes it really well when he paraphrases Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky “Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic class within a given society, and police act as a sort of occupying military to enact those threats…” The police are the arm of the state.
Also, you said something really funny without realizing it. There is no such thing as “pure anarchism”. Anarchism is rooted in anthropology, not sociology, so it’s observed rather than created.
As for those other issues you mentioned, there is a lot of anarchist theory on each of those, but I can give a few examples.
I can’t say that anarchism will keep you safe from fascists as we are fascisms first enemy. Bakunin fought them back before they even had a name for their ideology, the Spanish Republic was the first to wage war against them, and it was anarchists who retook Paris. Even now anarchists have been explicitly targeted by name by the Trump regime. The anarchist philosophy when it comes to surviving fascism is that it’s safer at the front. There’s a really good article by Crimethinc about this if you’re interested.
As for poop lettuce and infrastructure, when the Fascists began their coup of the Spanish Republic the syndicalists were able to roll out tanks within days. They moved so fast that they completely skipped the labor voucher phase Marx theorized and went straight to distribution based on need and labor from ability. The accounts of life during that brief period changed our understanding of communism forever, but they are often ignored because anarchism was involved. People don’t even mention the Marxists and Leninists, they pretend it was a failure. I recommend you look into some firsthand accounts of it (Not from Orwell, fuckin war tourist)
