Comments by "BlackFlagsNRoses" (@blackflagsnroses6013) on "Communism Is “Overpowered” Cries Players Of Simulation Game ‘Victoria 3’" video.
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@spacedragon1453 Anarchism is a political theory which aims to create anarchy, “the absence of a master, of a sovereign.” [P-J Proudhon, What is Property] In other words, anarchism is a political theory which aims to create a society within which individuals freely co-operate together as equals. As such anarchism opposes all forms of hierarchical control — be that control by the state or a capitalist — as harmful to the individual and their individuality as well as unnecessary.
In the words of anarchist L. Susan Brown:
“While the popular understanding of anarchism is of a violent, anti- State movement, anarchism is a much more subtle and nuanced tradition then a simple opposition to government power. Anarchists oppose the idea that power and domination are necessary for society, and instead advocate more co-operative, anti-hierarchical forms of social, political and economic organisation.” [The Politics of Individualism]
Anarchy does not mean chaos nor do anarchists seek to create chaos or disorder. Instead, we wish to create a society based upon individual freedom and voluntary co-operation. In other words, order from the bottom up, not disorder imposed from the top down by authorities. Such a society would be a true anarchy, a society without rulers.
Noam Chomsky sums up the key aspect when he stated that in a truly free society “any interaction among human beings that is more than personal — meaning that takes institutional forms of one kind or another — in community, or workplace, family, larger society, whatever it may be, should be under direct control of its participants. So that would mean workers’ councils in industry, popular assembly in communities, interaction between them, free associations in larger groups, up to organisation of international society.” Society would no longer be divided into a hierarchy of bosses and workers, governors and governed. Rather, an anarchist society would be based on free association in participatory organisations and run from the bottom up. Anarchists, it should be noted, try to create as much of this society today, in their organisations, struggles and activities, as they can.
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@DemonDante1000 I address you and @ToxicAudri kindly to my following responses here and lower on the comment chain, I will give a lengthy response.
Many anarchists, seeing the negative nature of the definition of “an- archism,” have used other terms to emphasise the inherently positive and constructive aspect of their ideas. The most common terms used are “free socialism,” “free communism,” “libertarian socialism,” and “libertarian communism.” For anarchists, libertarian socialism, libertarian communism, and anarchism are virtually interchangeable. As Vanzetti put it:
“After all we are socialists as the social-democrats, the socialists, the communists, and the I.W.W. are all Socialists. The difference — the fundamental one — between us and all the other is that they are authoritarian while we are libertarian; they believe in a State or Government of their own; we believe in no State or Government.” [Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti]
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@ToxicAudri I address you and @matthew Higgs kindly to my following responses here and lower on the comment chain, I will give a lengthy response.
Many anarchists, seeing the negative nature of the definition of “an- archism,” have used other terms to emphasise the inherently positive and constructive aspect of their ideas. The most common terms used are “free socialism,” “free communism,” “libertarian socialism,” and “libertarian communism.” For anarchists, libertarian socialism, libertarian communism, and anarchism are virtually interchangeable. As Vanzetti put it:
“After all we are socialists as the social-democrats, the socialists, the communists, and the I.W.W. are all Socialists. The difference — the fundamental one — between us and all the other is that they are authoritarian while we are libertarian; they believe in a State or Government of their own; we believe in no State or Government.” [Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti]
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@DemonDante1000 First understand that Anarchists are all about organization. Without association, a truly human life is impossible. Liberty cannot exist without society and organisation. As George Barrett pointed out:
“To get the full meaning out of life we must cooperate, and to cooperate we must make agreements with our fellow-men. But to suppose that such agreements mean a limitation of freedom is surely an absurdity; on the contrary, they are the exercise of our freedom.
“If we are going to invent a dogma that to make agreements is to damage freedom, then at once freedom becomes tyrannical, for it forbids men to take the most ordinary everyday pleasures. For example, I cannot go for a walk with my friend because it is against the principle of Liberty that I should agree to be at a certain place at a certain time to meet him. I cannot in the least extend my own power beyond myself, because to do so I must cooperate with someone else, and cooperation implies an agreement, and that is against Liberty. It will be seen at once that this argument is absurd. I do not limit my liberty, but simply exercise it, when I agree with my friend to go for a walk.
“If, on the other hand, I decide from my superior knowledge that it is good for my friend to take exercise, and therefore I attempt to compel him to go for a walk, then I begin to limit freedom. This is the difference between free agreement and government.”
As far as organisation goes, anarchists think that “far from creating authority, [it] is the only cure for it and the only means whereby each of us will get used to taking an active and conscious part in collective work, and cease being passive instruments in the hands of leaders.” Thus anarchists are well aware of the need to organise in a structured and open manner. While anarchists “aren’t opposed to structure” and simply “want to abolish hierarchical structure” they are “almost always stereotyped as wanting no structure at all.” This is not the case, for “organisations that would build in accountability, diffusion of power among the maximum number of persons, task rotation, skill sharing, and the spread of information and resources” are based on “good social anarchist principles of organisation!” [“Socialism, Anarchism and Feminism”, Quiet Rumours: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader]
The fact that anarchists are in favour of organisation may seem strange at first, but it is understandable. “For those with experience only of authoritarian organisation,” argue two British anarchists, “it appears that organisation can only be totalitarian or democratic, and that those who disbelieve in government must by that token disbelieve in organisation at all. That is not so.” In other words, because we live in a society in which virtually all forms of organisation are authoritarian, this makes them appear to be the only kind possible. What is usually not recognised is that this mode of organisation is historically conditioned, arising within a specific kind of society — one whose motive principles are domination and exploitation. According to archaeologists and anthropologists, this kind of society has only existed for about 5,000 years, having appeared with the first primitive states based on conquest and slavery, in which the labour of slaves created a surplus which supported a ruling class.
Prior to that time, for hundreds of thousands of years, human and proto-human societies were what Murray Bookchin calls “organic,” that is, based on cooperative forms of economic activity involving mutual aid, free access to productive resources, and a sharing of the products of communal labour according to need. Although such societies probably had status rankings based on age, there were no hierarchies in the sense of institutionalised dominance-subordination relations enforced by coercive sanctions and resulting in class stratification involving the economic exploitation of one class by another (see Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom).
It must be emphasised, however, that anarchists do not advocate going “back to the Stone Age.” We merely note that since the hierarchical- authoritarian mode of organisation is a relatively recent development in the course of human social evolution, there is no reason to suppose that it is somehow “fated” to be permanent. We do not think that human beings are genetically “programmed” for authoritarian, competitive, and aggressive behavior, as there is no credible evidence to support this claim. On the contrary, such behaviour is socially conditioned, or learned, and as such, can be unlearned. We are not fatalists or genetic determinists, but believe in free will, which means that people can change the way they do things, including the way they organise society.
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@ToxicAudri There is no doubt that society needs to be better organised, because presently most of its wealth — which is produced by the majority — and power gets distributed to a small, elite minority at the top of the social pyramid, causing deprivation and suffering for the rest, particularly for those at the bottom. Yet because this elite controls the means of coercion through its control of the state, it is able to suppress the majority and ignore its suffering — a phenomenon that occurs on a smaller scale within all hierarchies. Little wonder, then, that people within authoritarian and centralised structures come to hate them as a denial of their freedom. As Alexander Berkman puts it:
“Any one who tells you that Anarchists don’t believe in organisation is talking nonsense. Organisation is everything, and everything is organisation. The whole of life is organisation, conscious or unconscious . . . But there is organisation and organisation. Capitalist society is so badly organised that its various members suffer: just as when you have a pain in some part of you, your whole body aches and you are ill . . . , not a single member of the organisation or union may with impunity be discriminated against, suppressed or ignored. To do so would be the same as to ignore an aching tooth: you would be sick all over.”
Yet this is precisely what happens in capitalist society, with the result that it is, indeed, “sick all over.”
For these reasons, anarchists reject authoritarian forms of organisation and instead support associations based on free agreement. Free agreement is important because, in Berkman’s words, “only when each is a free and independent unit, cooperating with others from his own choice because of mutual interests, can the world work successfully and become powerful.” Anarchists stress that free agreement has to be complemented by direct democracy (or, as it is usually called by anarchists to avoid confusion with democracy government, self-management) within the association itself otherwise “freedom” become little more than picking masters.
Anarchist organisation is based on a massive decentralisation of power back into the hands of the people, i.e. those who are directly affected by the decisions being made. To quote Proudhon:
“Unless democracy is a fraud and the sovereignty of the People a joke, it must be admitted that each citizen in the sphere of his [or her] industry, each municipal, district or provincial council within its own territory . . . should act directly and by itself in administering the interests which it includes, and should exercise full sovereignty in relation to them.” [The General Idea of the Revolution]
It also implies a need for federalism to coordinate joint interests. For anarchism, federalism is the natural complement to self-management. With the abolition of the State, society “can, and must, organise itself in a different fashion, but not from top to bottom . . . The future social organisation must be made solely from the bottom upwards, by the free association or federation of workers, firstly in their unions, then in the communes, regions, nations and finally in a great federation, international and universal. Then alone will be realised the true and life giving order of freedom and the common good, that order which, far from denying, on the contrary affirms and brings into harmony the interests of individuals and of society.” [Mikhail Bakunin] Because a “truly popular organisation begins . . . from below” and so “federalism becomes a political institution of Socialism, the free and spontaneous organisation of popular life.” Thus libertarian socialism
“is federalistic in character.” [Bakunin]
Therefore, anarchist organisation is based on direct association(or self- management) and federalism (or confederation). These are the expression and environment of liberty. Direct (or participatory) democracy is essential because liberty and equality imply the need for forums within which people can discuss and debate as equals and which allow for the free exercise of what Murray Bookchin calls “the creative role of dissent.” Federalism is necessary to ensure that common interests are discussed and joint activity organised in a way which reflects the wishes of all those affected by them. To ensure that decisions flow from the bottom up rather than being imposed from the top down by a few rulers.
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@DemonDante1000 to reiterate socialism means society reigns free from external influences and authority. Anarchism is the most radical expression of that. The State is all that apparatus and institutions used to take away the decision making power away from society, away from people. Society creates economic wealth, produces, industrializes, and make the world function, not government. People don’t need a law to not do violence, laws don’t prohibit violence. People don’t kill, rape, and murder in droves just because there’s words on a paper saying don’t do it. People form mutual associations, and cooperate to form society. All the things that government “does” can be done by the people themselves. Make roads, schools, collect garbage etc… In fact people and workers do those things, we don’t need government to direct them, just our own mutual association for defense, insurance, and federations. We scale upwards based on our needs, Anarchist federalism replacing the state and supplanting the government. Remove government and you have society, and the organization of people out of necessity for cooperation and association. To learn about the most prominent anarchic social revolutions going on now please research Rojava (aka AANES) in North Eastern Syria; and the EZLN and neo-Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico.
“We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.”
Mikhail Bakunin
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@ToxicAudri to reiterate socialism means society reigns free from external influences and authority. Anarchism is the most radical expression of that. The State is all that apparatus and institutions used to take away the decision making power away from society, away from people. Society creates economic wealth, produces, industrializes, and make the world function, not government. People don’t need a law to not do violence, laws don’t prohibit violence. People don’t kill, rape, and murder in droves just because there’s words on a paper saying don’t do it. People form mutual associations, and cooperate to form society. All the things that government “does” can be done by the people themselves. Make roads, schools, collect garbage etc… In fact people and workers do those things, we don’t need government to direct them, just our own mutual association for defense, insurance, and federations. We scale upwards based on our needs, Anarchist federalism replacing the state and supplanting the government. Remove government and you have society, and the organization of people out of necessity for cooperation and association. To learn about the most prominent anarchic social revolutions going on now please research Rojava (aka AANES) in North Eastern Syria; and the EZLN and neo-Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico.
“We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.”
Mikhail Bakunin
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