I am trying to write a simple faq about anarchism. One of the question is “Why do anarchist want to abolish hierarchies?”. This question sounds so obvious to me I cannot write something convincing enough. …
My answer to the concept of “justifiable hierarchies”
It doesn’t matter how amazing these communities are if they’re unable to defend themselves from external threats effectively.
I strongly disagree. What matters is living by our ideals everyday and if that means death, so be it. By focusing on remote end-goals instead of today’s praxis, you are reproducing the worst there is in humanity. A conqueror’s mindset who wants to impose their worldview on everyone else in the name of socialism, is the worst enemy of actual socialism.
The Amish exist in the western world, but most people are choosing not to live that way.
The Amish only exist in the USA to my knowledge, and enjoy a certain exceptional privilege of cultural exception there from my understanding. I’ve never heard of Amish sovereign lands being threatened by huge corporations supported by the USA armed forces, as is often the case with indigenous nations. Also many people in the western world choose to live like that, but in countries like France suffer from strong political persecution.
Lords demanded tributes from villages on their lands, and those who failed to produce it would suffer severe consequences. People of course could run to live in the woods, but they can do that today exactly the same way.
Lords were not everywhere ; there were free communes as well. Running into the woods was an option, but barely is nowadays. People who try to live peacefully on the countryside, detached from capitalist society, are repressed by the State apparatus who comes and destroys their homes ; at least so is the situation in France, where DIY housing is considered unsuitable housing and destroyed by police forces on authority of the préfet ; yes, even on private properties in case you were wondering.
The armed branch in Marxist revolutions also consists of the people
Sure. Any group of people consists of the people. A bosses union also consists of the people. Does that make them representative of the entire population? Fact is the zapatista militias don’t trust themselves to become the enlightened vanguard guiding the people (healthy self-criticism), and they actively tell everyone to build their own community power, not trust some other authority. That’s what, in my understanding of the word, makes them anarchists.
You speak out of sheer ignorance here if you think that the people of USSR and China were not liberated by their revolutions.
I don’t speak out of personal experience because i was born and raised in France. However, i have met enough political refugees from Marxist-Leninist state capitalism to know there was no communism in Russia. If you don’t want to see the countless counter-revolutionary crimes of your own country, too bad for you, the rest of the world remembers. To me, placing a “communist” label on a bloody dictatorship where the workers/peasants have no power and no rights is the worst crime against communism, because it’s not only the exact opposite of communism (totalitarianism), it’s an insult to the very idea of communism.
you’re just making a false equivalence here.
What false equivalence? I genuinely don’t care if i’m interned/executed by capitalists for being an anarchist, or if i’m being interned/executed by marxist-leninists for being an anarchist. I will fight for freedom and equality until the end.
I strongly disagree. What matters is living by our ideals everyday and if that means death, so be it. By focusing on remote end-goals instead of today’s praxis, you are reproducing the worst there is in humanity. A conqueror’s mindset who wants to impose their worldview on everyone else in the name of socialism, is the worst enemy of actual socialism.
The Amish only exist in the USA to my knowledge, and enjoy a certain exceptional privilege of cultural exception there from my understanding. I’ve never heard of Amish sovereign lands being threatened by huge corporations supported by the USA armed forces, as is often the case with indigenous nations. Also many people in the western world choose to live like that, but in countries like France suffer from strong political persecution.
Lords were not everywhere ; there were free communes as well. Running into the woods was an option, but barely is nowadays. People who try to live peacefully on the countryside, detached from capitalist society, are repressed by the State apparatus who comes and destroys their homes ; at least so is the situation in France, where DIY housing is considered unsuitable housing and destroyed by police forces on authority of the préfet ; yes, even on private properties in case you were wondering.
Sure. Any group of people consists of the people. A bosses union also consists of the people. Does that make them representative of the entire population? Fact is the zapatista militias don’t trust themselves to become the enlightened vanguard guiding the people (healthy self-criticism), and they actively tell everyone to build their own community power, not trust some other authority. That’s what, in my understanding of the word, makes them anarchists.
I don’t speak out of personal experience because i was born and raised in France. However, i have met enough political refugees from Marxist-Leninist state capitalism to know there was no communism in Russia. If you don’t want to see the countless counter-revolutionary crimes of your own country, too bad for you, the rest of the world remembers. To me, placing a “communist” label on a bloody dictatorship where the workers/peasants have no power and no rights is the worst crime against communism, because it’s not only the exact opposite of communism (totalitarianism), it’s an insult to the very idea of communism.
What false equivalence? I genuinely don’t care if i’m interned/executed by capitalists for being an anarchist, or if i’m being interned/executed by marxist-leninists for being an anarchist. I will fight for freedom and equality until the end.
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