Anarchocommunism

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socialistworker.org

www.racialequitytools.org

www.sciencedaily.com

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

www.harvardmagazine.com

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Neofascism and the misinterpretation of Marx.

Fascism has differing definitions, including: “A system of government

marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist

economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression

of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and

racism” . A form of far-right authoritarian ultranationalism, fascist

movements oppose liberalism, democracy, communism, and anarchism. Donald

Trump and his financial supporters, for example, are right-wing

populists/white nationalists, which is inextricably linked with

colonialism, neoliberal capitalism, and of course fascism. The Bulgarian

communist, and General Secretary of the Communist International, Georgi

Dimitrov’s famous description of fascism (1935) is really apt here:

“Fascism is the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary,

most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital”.

Mussolini and his Fascist party, the National Socialist party of

Germany, Franco’s Spain, the clerical fascism of Romania under the Iron

Guard and Ion Antonescu, the various governments of Hungary in the

1930s, and Enver Hoxha's Albania are all examples of fascism. While

Fascism and near-fascist movements have evolved, they continue to

include leftist aesthetics, and sometimes sound oppositional to

capitalism. Red Fascism is a thing, and it usually deals in Stalin

apologia, especially of the sexist &/or racist kind. The conflation of

antisemitic nationalism and “Third Way” movements for Socialism goes

back to the revisionist George Sorel, who notably influenced Mussolini

and the Nazis with his support for “national class collaboration”. The

results of Stalin’s decision to “build Socialism in one country” are,

for many, at the very least, closely analogous.

Stalin essentially accused anyone who disagreed with his party line of

“social fascism”, to which Trotsky simply said: "Should fascism come to

power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank.

[...] And only a fighting unity with the Social Democratic workers can

bring victory”. Of course, Trotsky was under no delusions that siding

with the Social Democratic parties as a leading Vanguard party was

anything other than a temporary alliance, and this assumes that the

Vanguard party is the larger. If the ideology seeks to justify violent

suppression under a ‘good excuse’, then it's not really different from

violent suppression for a ‘bad excuse’. In both cases people suffer and

die for the ‘national interest’. It’s nationalistic social Darwinism

with a militant aspect, i.e. military keynesian nationalism. This is a

common worldview shared by many fascists, regardless of how they

identify. This is why populism is so dangerous, and why it facilitated a

resurgence of this new type of fascism, especially given capital

influence over the window of public discourse. Hamerquist saw the danger

of this new fascism that is more independent than the classical

“euro-fascism” of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, and is seemingly more opposed

to capitalism. The fact that this neo fascism disconcertingly comes with

mass support, especially through commodified social media, further

highlights its connection to populism, and most importantly the

problematic nature of populism itself. Populism, for me, is the ideology

that uses language friendly to the populous to pass policies unfriendly

to the populous. It's called Λαϊκισμός/Laikismos in Greek, and it's

extremely dangerous since it can be supposedly separated into right

populism and left populism. The difference being that the right ones are

fascists, and the left ones are “communist”, apparently, even though

many are reactionary and strangely supportive of, or seek to platform

for “engagement”, authoritarian ideas and opinions.

Poe's law also seems pretty relevant here. You can't possibly create a

parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it can't be

mistaken by some people as sincere. When some "leftists" make fun of

righties all day long, at some point they just end up reproducing their

ideas. Toxicity in online culture, (I'll refrain from using the word

incel because despite its negative connotations, many of us are some

form of involuntary or voluntary celibates), like the one present in

4chan, is the epitome of this paradigm. This culture, and its war, has

slipped into everything, including in leftist content. For Hamerquist,

fascism can be influenced by the bourgeoisie, but it's ultimately

independent of it. I would add that it and populism may sound opposed to

the bourgeoisie, and even call them establishment/elites/status quo, but

both ultimately support policies benefiting the same power structures,

wittingly or unwittingly. Hamerquist argued that fascism is a form of

populist right-wing attempt at revolution, which is true; see the

Capitol Hill insurrection, and how it was handled by the Imperialist

Capitalist US State. The purpose of fascist revolution is to turn back

the social clock (usually to a glorified mythic past), or break it

outright. Fed by the bourgeois, fertilized by the base due to its

oppression, and building on identitarian reactionary pervasiveness to

evolve into a catch-all political ideology of “us vs them”, with ‘them’

usually being foreigners, women, ‘satanic elites’, socialists, etc. This

paradoxical nature of this neo fascism/populism is why it gained so much

prominence, and why it perplexed me so much. In my opinion,

sexism/misogyny are the historical and material roots of fascism. Neo

fascism can basically be applied to everything, and every single

ideology can find some sort of solace in its delusion of ‘necessity’. It

just prepares the popular conscience for the inevitable aggressive war

against an enemy, as Hamerquist puts it, whoever the enemy may be. Its

similarity to Nazism is an added reason as to why these ideologies

strictly belong on the right or at best authoritarian center-right.

Differences between modern forms (neo fascism) and past forms are

largely technological, but the modern versions seem to have realized

that past fascism failed, and so they seek somewhat ironically

international movements of petite bourgeois and reactionary labor,

focusing on anti-government rhetoric while abusing the power of the

state and the inherently fascistic nature of capital accumulation even

under social democratic policies, which, as Rosa Luxemburg points out

are merely concessions from ownership whose ownership does not change.

Zak Cope in 2015 said: “Geographically speaking, on its own soil,

fascism is imperialist repression turned inward” . This is one of the

reasons why Black Nationalism isn't comparable to White Nationalism.

Similarly, one can support the oppressed peoples of North Korea without

necessarily embracing Juche, but to compare Juche to “White Nationalism”

is at the very least dishonest. A reactionary ideology of the oppressed

could never be equated to a reactionary ideology of the oppressors, even

when the oppressors are just people oppressed under capitalism

themselves; their ideology comes from the capitalist class and their

think tanks, and again even capitalists are alienated by capitalism.

Conspiratorial logic is rampant among these circles, and as we've seen,

it's not just associated with anti-leftism - Qanon is a good example of

this, see that they called for the hanging of Mike Pence, the extremely

conservative Vice President. Hell, even Tucker Carlson's speech sounds

leftist at times, and as one guest that never aired pointed out, Tucker

Carlson pretends to rail against the elite while he is a millionaire

funded by billionaires. Liberalism, conservatism, and fascism exist

toward the rightwing end of a political-economic continuum, and are all

rooted in sexism, colonialism, anti-blackness, white supremacy, and

capitalism. Modes of oppression and domination arise from collective and

individual differences, and attempts to maximize and maintain those

power differentials. Essentialism and privilege both result from and

reinforce such oppression. Sexism is the root of fascism, and capitalism

creates in parallel and exacerbates fascism. Big business is

manufacturing theory, populism is their product, and leftist language

has been appropriated. We further see this fascism dressed in red when

we observe debates between reductionists, revisionists, ‘authcoms’, etc.

The misinterpretation of Marx's work seems to be a key point in their

bullshit, and failing that, they rigidly adhere to “orthodoxy” of Marx’s

more authoritarian views. Marx made many contributions to theory, and

patriarchal oppression is a thing. The idea of the bourgeoisie and the

proletariat is correct, and Marx himself gives further explanation of

the terms, along with “many fine gradations”. Anarchist writers have

elaborated upon, contributed to, and expanded upon this. We must be

careful not to be reductive to merely economic class issues while

racism, sexism, transphobia and other forms of false consciousness and

oppression exist.

The ‘means of production’ are not so clear-cut, because they sometimes

include personal property as well as equipment used for self-employment,

and ownership over vast sums of financial capital certainly qualifies

one as capitalist whether one owns any factories or not. To further

clarify, if we deduce individual/private property to mean the house that

you live in, your toothbrush, and similar, then it is personal property.

This is consistent with usufructism and even perhaps non-ownership

theory. “Small businesses” can also be thought of as personal property

in terms of conditional analysis, because their owners operate under

neoliberal capitalism, and are therefore exploited. The race angle and

morality arguments mentioned in the Communist Manifesto are relevant,

but Marx wrote this in 1848, and society was different back then. As a

result, we can't judge him, and most past theorists in fact, according

to today's standards, but we can take a situated approach to

understanding without engaging in apologia. In addition to this, the

value of a commodity isn't necessarily linked with how much work someone

performs. Capitalists subtract the cost of labour from the price of the

commodity, and their profit margin (often also due to subsidies for “job

creation”) is usually so high that the cost of wages they pay is

minuscule. The price of the commodity is therefore also not necessarily

linked with the cost of the wage labour it requires. This doesn't apply

to small/medium business owners though, because exorbitant taxation and

the forced competition imposed by capitalism always keeps them in a

perpetual growth mindset, and a price-matching race with their

oligopolistic competitors. This need for perpetual growth is one major

reason why capitalism is unsustainable at the core, and results in a

“repeated mowing down of small enterprise”, to borrow a phrase from Rosa

Luxemburg. The cost of labour is very much an inhibiting factor for

many.

This is why anarchist critiques of exploitation are the most appropriate

here. People shouldn't be regarded as cogs in a machine, but a

theoretical framework of this form was useful for the time. As a result,

theoretical argumentation with terms like the ‘value of labour’ should

best be avoided, as such topics can act as a barrier to entry and

increase alienation. It can encourage the creation of naziesque/nazbol

sentiments, but reactionaries have been cloaking their ideology in

economic language seemingly forever, so refuting capitalist arguments is

vital. When you argue the value of someone's work, since leftists

already know that all labour is undervalued, you end up comparing the

value of people in general. Judging the value of the labour of people,

even when utilitarian, falls into ableist argumentation. You're in

essence accepting that people should in fact compete with each other.

When you engage in this argumentation as a worker, and especially if

you're currently unemployed, or your job is threatened, you fall victim

to emotions of jealousy, and this ‘negative solidarity’ headspace feeds

on resentment and acts as a vehicle for reactionary rhetoric. The logic

of it goes like this: since capitalism is inevitable and can't be

changed (a defeatist interpretation of the theory of capitalist

realism), you need to find an individualist reason for justifying its

unfairness, and social darwinism isn't far after that. You think that

maybe it's the particular manager's fault, or the particular colleague's

fault. Maybe it's because they're immigrants or a woman, maybe it's

because they're lazy. You're better than them after all, you really need

the job, competition in this jungle is normal, etc., etc. ...And when a

fascist comes along, all their criticisms start to make sense if you

accept their premises. So let's not talk about value, but instead talk

about exploitation, because this is the inherent nature of the system.

It exploits ALL of us, and it was built this way since its inception.

Moreover, the State incentivizes and thrives in this environment. It

makes us wonder why our neighbours receive benefits and not us. “Why is

our miniscule wealth consisting of a house, a business, and a car taxed

so exorbitantly while our neighbours are getting free stuff all the

time?”. Material analysis has given us the tools to combat this,

however. ‘Primitive’ accumulation leads to capital accumulation, and

such systems are in no one’s self-interests.

Humans are innately creative, and there are alternatives to the

dichotomy of “it’s either capitalism or stalin” that can lead to a

stateless, classless, moneyless society that works for everyone and

doesn’t mercilessly strip nature. Capitalism exploits everyone, and it

or its agent the State, throws crumbs to some people but not all. Don't

forget that by taxing Jeff Bezos, the US state can help with world

hunger, so it's not a point of a lack of resources, but of a lack of

will. They're simply capitalists, and capitalism is a scourge on this

earth. Just the financial crises they manufacture alone are destructive

to the economies of entire countries. Dario Rahim writes that the

bourgeoisie/capitalists pave the way for more extensive and more

destructive crises by diminishing the means whereby crises are

prevented. Therefore the fact that capitalism and the state intertwine

shouldn't be argued against. We should, as a result, find a pragmatic,

acceptable limit of wealth, even by inheritance, so that it can be

regarded as personal property, and at the same time to differentiate it

from private property by ‘means of production’ terms, and by the amount

of wealth while taking taxation into account. Individual landlords

aren't the problem; real estate agencies and property hoarders are, as

are the systems of literal and figurative economic rent and profit

extraction under which even individual landlords operate. Some

individual landlords can be an issue, but since they operate under

capitalism, I can understand their incentives, but not sympathize. If

they try to be nice, they cannot compete with others that are more

ruthless and who are rewarded. So, again, the problem with landlords is

systemic. Simultaneously, we can encourage worker's unions and general

strikes. For example, If you have to go to work and the metro isn't

working because of a strike, you should chill, and remember that

capitalism forced them to ruin your day - that's the only way they can

fight the exploitation you both experience. So,

discussing/building/providing alternative systems like really really

free markets, supporting inclusive labor and tenant unions, and

solidarity/sympathy strikes can all be helpful. Mutualist usufructism is

a system whereby access is determined by ‘occupancy and use’ rather than

‘ownership’, but if the underlying systems of capital accumulation and

false consciousness don’t change, ‘market anarchism’ can be identical to

‘anarcho capitalism’ in advocacy and reactionary identity. Market

abolitionism is the set of positions that market systems are inherently

harmful to humans and our environment, and therefore seeks to move

toward a moneyless society. Rebuttals that argue price signals are the

most reliable can’t seem to fathom supercomputers and various voting

systems as an alternative set of signals, along with other direct inputs

in an inclusive system that accounts for systemic and environmental

risks as much as possible beforehand.

“Solidarity, Comrades” isn't just a phrase. So, I would reconstruct

Marx's words by saying that Communists everywhere should support every

left revolutionary movement, and know that peaceful revolutions are

possible. The leading question in each shouldn't just be the property

question, it should be the exploitation/oppression question. Communists

labour everywhere for the union and for agreement of all democratic

parties in all countries. The aim is clear, though; the reformations

should be done for the interest of the working class and marginalized

people. People of all countries, unite! We have nothing to lose but our

chains. Marx, though deeply flawed, changed the world with his

materialist conception of history. Many rightoids, and even some

"communists" of sorts, have misinterpreted his words, and this should be

addressed. We have already briefly addressed the relationship between

Sorelianist interpretations of Marx and Fascism/Nazism, and shall now

address relationships among Leninist Bolshevism, Stalin, and Fascism.

Marxists-Leninists (though we may dispense with the hyphen) supporting

Stalin and the horrifying 5-year plans he enacted to rapidly

industrialize the Soviet Union are generally referred to as ‘tankies’,

though the meaning has morphed from its original usage. Marxism-Leninism

was the official state ideology of the Soviet Union, of the Eastern

Bloc, and of the political parties of the Communist International after

Bolshevization. The ideology of Stalinism (and Maoism, a derivative set

of positions by Mao Ze Dong) was developed by Joseph Stalin, and it's

based on Lenin's work in the late 1920s. This is why I'm going to

analyze and criticize Lenin's work here. Firstly, let us recognize

Lenin’s contributions to theory. I mostly agree with Lenin's

Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Capitalism has indeed

reached a stage where it exports finance capital, not just products -

even entire factories have been outsourced. It has even divided the

earth into the ‘third word’ and the ‘first world’.

Moreover, I agree with Lenin's arguments about monopolies, neo

colonialism, imperialism, the problematic nature and inevitable results

of ‘free markets’/‘free competition’, the wars capitalism wages for

profit, and the decaying phase capitalism will inevitably enter (or has

already). Now, when it comes to his book: The State and Revolution, he

gives his own interpretations of the words of Engels and Marx in the

first chapter. He basically justifies the use of force and violent

suppression, and in 1918 after an assassination attempt, he sent

telegrams authorizing terrorization of the Kulaks (slightly wealthy

peasants) by the Cheka, the precursor to the KGB and a secret police

force, which Trotsky also supported ; see also the White Terror and

ensuing Red Terror. The Red Terror targeted Socialist Revolutionaries

first, though forcefully mobilized deserters and their families were

targeted, as were foreigners, with justifications from Pravda and the

Cheka clearing the way for justification of Stalin’s atrocities. This is

why the ideas of ‘socialism in one country’, a two-stage revolution, and

the Maoist ‘new democracy’ shouldn't be dominating the conversation.

Some opinions and disagreements among leftists have caused countless

loss of life, and this is where we must stop. Simple as. Life is

precious, and there's no justification for taking it because of

sectarian chauvinism. When this is done by the ‘Proletarian State’, it

is fascism, no matter if the State wears a red hammer and sickle. In the

second and third chapters of his book, Lenin writes about the revolution

and the Paris Commune. It's true that the proletariat needs political

power and that the state can't wither away immediately, but I disagree

with the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, and therefore Vanguardism,

on the grounds that it's impossible that they won't eventually bring

about violence, oppression/ exploitation, and therefore fascism (for

example in the form of Stalin’s ethnic cleansings). Rosa Luxemburg

emphasized the metaphorical nature of ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’

to expand quality of life rather than curtail it, and that of a vanguard

party to be representative of the world revolution, not as a ruling

national body dominating the international stage. In addition to this,

the proletariat shouldn't be organized as the ruling class, because

there shouldn't be a ruling class at all.

A classless society is what communism is all about, and him making these

points further highlights his eventual fascistic evolution. Elections

shouldn't be held in the confines of one single party as this is

undemocratic, nor should one party govern firmly and wield state power

to ‘prevent counterrevolution’, as this is inherently fascistic. The

German Marxist Otto Rühle, in his work: The Struggle Against Fascism

Begins with the Struggle Against Bolshevism (1939, after the signing of

the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), also notes the

authoritarian-to-totalitarian nationalist character of Leninist

bolshevism and its close relation to fascism, arguing that fascism

copied the model of bolshevism, but missing the connection to Sorel in

analysis of the nationalist pipeline to fascism. I also have my

criticisms about Lenin’s interpretation of Marx's comments regarding the

parliamentary body. Marx used the term pejoratively, and when he spoke

about legislative and executive being the same, this was for time-saving

purposes, and to offer a solution away from corruption and oppression by

the courts, the police, etc. Now, when it comes to the wages under

socialism, they'll initially be determined according to the type of work

a worker can perform, but this will come to an end soon, and it requires

that all people receive a wage that's sufficient for living with ease in

society. It's kinda absurd to claim that the workers should have their

labour value appropriated by the state - leninism reminds of state

capitalism more and more at this point. If wages are determined by

skills and amount of work solely, with no other context, then you still

end up with under-classes, and this is also, as I've mentioned,

dangerously ableist. Not all people have the same capacity for labour,

and obviously not all labourers are equally ‘productive’.

If you apply this framework, then you haven't really ended the class

system, you just replaced it with something else. People are still

divided by class, it's just that now ‘better workers’, or party members,

are the higher class rather than capitalists. Additionally, Marx can

absolutely be reconciled with Federalism; anarchist writers have

provided us with these tools. Marx wasn't strictly a statist, and the

state can be federal in terms of Bookchin’s communalist (con)federalism.

Furthermore, ‘centralization’ can be a step towards the withering away

of the state. When automation and online ‘governance’ (as in

communication of mutual need and development with free access for all)

are fully-developed and used for the good of all according to ability

and need, anarchism, as in the lack of oppression from the state or any

other apparatus, can be actualized. Lenin, after discussing housing and

critiquing anarchists and social democrats, proceeds to speak about the

disarming of the proles, and offers his own interpretation of Engels’

views on democracy. I understand the idea that democracy has deviated

from its meaning, especially social/liberal democracies that don't

follow from their theory; see also Noam Chomsky's critique. Nonetheless,

disdain for democracy usually means opposition to letting the people

decide their own governance, and that's frankly an excuse for

dictatorship, authoritarianism, fascism, etc. So we once more see that

Lenin’s model, if not a ‘red fascist’ himself, certainly led to Stalin’s

Great Purge, and most "communists" that gained power around the globe

have repeated this on local scales. It's true that communism has never

been tried; a communist country has never actually existed, even if some

countries have implemented socialist policies, such as Vietnam, Cuba,

etc. This is an unavoidable and uncomfortable truth that highlights how

state capitalism made fascism look like leftism. In the fifth chapter,

Lenin once again misconstrues Marx’ and Engels’ writings about the

state, in a tone that can again be interpreted as giving leeway to

authoritarianism. He then fleshes out his democracy criticisms a bit

more. I agree with his points about how it's used to suppress people

under Capitalism, but I disagree with his use of this to justify an

oppression of oppressors through the vanguard.

Lenin continues by describing the stages of a communist society. He

correctly speaks about the fact that the means of production, as Marx

puts it, shouldn't be owned by individuals, and I also agree that full

social equality wouldn't be achieved in this first stage - I've already

talked about the differences in wages among different workers initially.

This point, though, is used by Stalinists to justify exploiting the

labour of the people of the Soviet Union and basically starving them to

death. He then states that everyone should receive from society as much

as they've given into. As I stated, I strongly disagree with this. How

can we accurately measure the extent someone has contributed to society?

Even if we could, some people can't contribute the same as others, and

might need assistance, and to tell you the truth, we shouldn't measure

these things at all. He then misrepresents the phrase "From each

according to his ability, to each according to his needs", by claiming

that this will happen when people's labor has become so productive that

they'll voluntarily work according to their ability. This seems

backward. Stopping workers’ oppression and alleviating people from the

toils of labour are fundamental characteristics of communism. Pushing

people to be productive and then implying they will voluntarily engage

in less work later is at the very least disingenuous. After

regurgitating previous points, we reach the final chapter of his book,

in which he aggressively discusses anarchist writers and basically calls

them opportunists. I agree with some points, but anarchists were

subjected to ruthless and systematic persecution under his orders, so

this puts the final chapter in perspective for me. He basically

justifies murdering them for ideological disagreements, which is

horrifying. His main issue seems to be the function of the State, and

claims that anarchists want to abolish the State overnight, that they

have a vague idea of what to put in its place, and that they don't know

how to use the people's revolutionary power. The tons of anarchist

literature, rich history of anarchist movements, and future chapters can

attest to how false his opinions are. The bureaucracy of a reformed

state is an issue, but injecting violence into this argument by once

again presenting the revolution as destruction is wrong.

Lenin was responsible for bloodshed, and so was Stalin; some of Lenin’s

ideas still have relevance. Leninism, Stalinism, the Maoism of the CPC,

Hoxha's Albania, Juche, etc., are neither humane nor correct ways of

approaching leftist ideology imo. Since leftism is primarily about

alleviating suffering, we can adequately postulate that Leninism and its

products aren't “actual communism” (on this point Lenin would agree), or

in fact leftism. Nazbol, Tankie, Sorelianist, and in general most

authoritarian “socialism" should therefore be treated as fascistic, and

they subsequently should be included in the right, or at best as “auth

center-right”. The problem that leftist unity faces is with ideas, not

people, though, and people can change. That said, uncritically applying

leninist thought is misguided, and most importantly it's unbelievably

cruel. Leninism results in State Capitalism in practice. The term “State

Capitalism” usually signifies the economic system in which the state

performs the role of the employer, and subsequently exploits the working

class. We must make a crucial distinction here, though: there's a

difference between state capitalism and private capitalism that's

regulated by the state. This ideology is related to neoliberalism,

liberalism, and social democracy, whereas state capitalism is related to

communism... and I know this sounds paradoxical, but I'll elaborate.

State capitalism can be regarded as a social system that basically

combines capitalism with state ownership, so it is therefore similar to

some aspects of market socialism and is a product of vanguard

‘communism’. State capitalism happens when the government controls the

economy and operates like a big international corporation, like the

former Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, etc. Noam Chomsky

brilliantly associated the term with the United States, and contrasted

it with the term "State monopoly capitalism". This again highlights how

both ends of the rightwing spectrum are connected through an “anarcho

capitalist” line of argumentation, as I briefly mentioned in the

previous chapter. This term delineates a system where the state

intervenes to defend the interests of big businesses, see the huge bank

bailout that happened under the Obama administration - the social

programs are generally fewer than those offered in state capitalism and

both exclude the noncitizen.

This is where the debate about what's the proper amount of state

involvement in the economy comes down to, and this is also why the

kerfuffles with the MLs/tankies happen every week on Twitter. So to what

extent exactly should the state be allowed to have power over the

people, anarchists would ask. The goal of the working class is

liberation from exploitation, capitalist and patriarchal alike, and this

of course can't be reached by simply redirecting the existing

exploitation to another master. We can't just substitute the bourgeoisie

with the state like the Soviet Union did, but to instead make the

workers realize that they themselves should be the ‘masters over

production’ for the purposes of meeting the needs of all. Proletarian

states can be an intermediary stage until we establish

anarcho-communism. This, however, must happen for political reasons, not

because of economic crises as they arise, but because of underlying

inherent class struggle. The current uprisings are indicative of such

class struggle taking place, even if they're still on an introductory

level. They're also, according to marxist theory, suggestive of

late-stage capitalism. The class struggle is the most significant force

that decides the course of history, and this is why there's been so much

contention with these uprisings. Capital will always attempt to

recuperate any revolution and hold back the workers from revolutionary

aims – from the aforementioned class struggle. There're already warnings

against “extreme demands”, appeals to be timid, for-profit media smear

attempts, compromises with liberals/neoliberals, agents provocateurs,

etc. Remember that the outcome of this struggle solely depends on the

maturity of the working class as a whole, which includes black people,

women, trans people, disabled people, etc. We don't want a society where

the “best brains” will direct production and the people will once again

have their labour exploited under a new aristocracy. This is also why

state capitalism v state socialism makes no difference in practice if we

don’t build anti-capitalist, anti-statist systems of direct action and

mutual aid.

Socialism is done by a state of sorts, but this state shouldn't oppress

people under material circumstances - this is how anarchism can be

included into socialism/communism - as the “withering away” of the

proletarian state. Further to that, the distinction between Socialists

and Communists shouldn't matter, but we should prefer the term

communist, since socialism has stretched so much in meaning that it can

mean state capitalism/social democracy at times. Similarly, Marx didn’t

speak much of socialism, preferring to focus not on the intermediary

forms, but on the goal of a classless , stateless, moneyless society,

and what might lie beyond. We have to be extremely careful. Capital

utilizes the unique political conditions that exist in every country and

have been developed through history and traditions. Let's take the UK,

for instance, where a parliamentary system is in conjunction with a high

measure of supposed personal "liberty" and autonomy, and it's also a

major place where monopolist capitalism grew and developed. While there

indeed may be parliamentary roads to revolution, a literal House of

Lords certainly isn’t it. Similarly, in the United States, Republican

Senators seem free to kill legislation they or their donors do not like.

This is why each case must be judged separately - each country has its

own kind of government, after all. One thing is for sure though, the

arguments for a new international labor movement cannot possibly find

their basis in state capitalism or fascist dictatorship. State

capitalism is ostensibly left because it's based on Marx, but as Chomsky

points out, Leninism is a rightist deviation/statist interpretation of

Marx that Antonie Pannekoek correctly identifies as inexorably leading

to if not starting as State Capitalism. From an intersectional

perspective, state capitalism and vanguardism have oppressed racial,

gender, and sexual minorities. Genocides against Jewish, Roma,

Indigenous and LGBTQI+ people are common among authoritarians.

Xenophobia and some sort of Supremacy and Nationalism (the very

chauvinism Lenin decried) are always present in fascist ideologies,

because in my view the ideology of the USSR belongs on the right, and

specifically near red fascism/state capitalism because of the

nationalist elements. Again, the justifications offered by Lenin

directly paved the way for the atrocities of Stalin as well.

Let us be clear that the Nazis and Italian Fascists were vile. “Ethnic

cleansing” is always fascistic. It is for these reasons among others

that Stalin is accused of being a fascist. Just look at the ethnic

cleansing of 1912 to 1953 in the Eurasian borderlands, named the Great

Terror, not to mention the Holodomor genocide. Collectivization brought

the justification of forced migration under the excuse of ‘helping the

communist cause’, and the Stalinist propaganda of the time that claimed

immigrants were coming in order to ‘disrupt things’. This further

illustrates the creation of an enemy as a manichean construction - a

strategy that most rightoids engage in. The Great Terror was done by a

Nation-State that simply took on the mask of an international

nationalist, and the toll was the thousands of indigenous peoples that

have been ravaged.

So for me, this is the most accurate representation of the right wing

spectrum of political ideology:

[]

Sources:

www.wordnik.com

en.wikipedia.org

itsgoingdown.org

Indigenous communism to anarchist praxis.

When it comes to the left, one thing is for sure: revolution plays a

huge part in our discussions, and by revolution, I mean the violent

overthrow of bourgeois governments and their replacement by a “strong

proletarian state”. The State's going to wither away, supposedly, but

violence doesn't seem to go anywhere. As previously discussed, Fascism

always co-opts popular ideas; national syndicalism was fascist, and

"national socialism" was literally nazism. Economic violence is

committed by the state, after all, and wage slavery and de facto slavery

still exist. All people should ‘own the means of production’, but

because workers were one of the more oppressed and plentiful of people,

they came to mean ‘all people’. Some anarcho-syndicalists seem to forget

this. The purpose of direct action is to help people, and the purpose of

“dual power” in an anarchist sense is to build community systems that

replace state functions. The perfect state would be a non-state. It'd be

an amorphous, moral, non-violent entity that's automated and is ideally

without bureaucracy. A neutral, but just, structure that doesn't oppress

people. It will evolve democratically according to needs, through the

participatory voting of all . But for now, we live under capitalism, and

we know it speculates racism, sexism, ableism, etc., so this is why

leftism is and must be inherently intersectional and

international/post-national. This is why “anarchists without adjectives”

are problematic. “National anarchism” and “anarcho”-capitalism are why

adjectives matter for anarchism. Unfortunately, there has been no

systemic justice, so there is no peace. Rosa Luxemburg said that those

who do not move don't notice their chains. I would add that freedom can

be the feeling after the removal of those chains. Indigenous peoples

have known this for a while, and the oppression they continue to face

must end today - action must be taken. The plight of indigenous

communities has been well-documented, and it's something that we should

not gloss over. The worst of it is that its effects still remain largely

unaddressed.

Canadian and Australian governments forcefully gathered Indigenous

children and sent them into foster homes where they were forced to

abandon all traces of their Indigenous cultures. There was purposeful

underfunding of residential schools, and this genocide and economic

violence pushed natives to staggering percentages of alcoholism. Many

indigenous peoples were moved from their ancestral lands in an attempt

to be assimilated into urban populations. Their lands have been robbed,

and the US government had the audacity to try and buy out individuals

who had been sexually assaulted in residential schools and who sought

any accountability in court. There's a definite connection between the

economic system of neoliberalism and the oppression native peoples

faced. The Declaration of Indigenous Rights still hasn't become a

reality in the US, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, after all. On the

contrary, Indigenous children in residential schools were starved for

research purposes, and the Canadian government tried to destroy these

records. Recently, the bodies of 215 indigenous children were found

buried under a school for indigenous people in Canada. Also, let's not

forget the pipeline issues the northern tribes are facing. Indigenous

peoples are not a monolith. There are many tribes across the globe, and

each has its own history, language, and culture. I'm using the broad

term indigenous peoples for simplicity's sake. In Tibet, for example,

German and English anthropologists who were measuring native people's

skulls later became nazis and were educated by "prestigious"

universities. The bodies and lands of indigenous people have been stolen

and used for scientific research by Western colonial society. European

Colonialism cultivated the notion that white people were "civilized" and

indigenous tribes were "uncivilized" or "savage". Inherently fascistic

methods of categorization are heteropatriarchal, with men being logical

vs women being emotional, with humans vs animals, with able-bodied

people vs disabled people, and generally with every imposed societal

distinction, often in this form of inherently oppressive false

dichotomy. Feminism, more specifically intersectional feminism, has

researched these distinctions/hierarchies, and has provided us with

tools to combat and dismantle them.

I should note here that calling indigenous women woc is not something

many of them identify with, because it lumps them all into a category in

relation to the white man. The word feminism has gotten a bad rep from

the media, and for men it's difficult to admit there's widespread

oppression of women and to understand how men are also harmed by being

locked into modes of oppression and domination. It's understandable to

some extent - patriarchal oppression is deeply entrenched into society -

sexism as a system of oppression is devaluing women. Some Indigenous

societies have been highly feminist. In the US Turtle Island for

example, there was political, economic, and social equality between the

genders. Matriarchal governance was commonplace until the Indian Act -

these types of legislation are the reason why only men can be chiefs

now, btw. capitalist wage labour and religious male-centered creation

mythologies are also reasons as to why. There's a big amount of feminist

literature from Queer and Masculine Indigenous studies as well.

Two-spirited people exist, and Indigenous men were stripped of their

spirituality and were given in return a violent dominance over their

companions. I’d like to stress here that another threat the future

generations of indigenous peoples face is the high numbers of hiv/aids

cases among their young women. This highlights the lingering

socioeconomic and health impacts of capitalist ‘treatment’ and

stigmatization. In South America, feminist anti-capitalist advocacy has

a rich history that continues today. In 1996 in Colombia, a female

Zapatista revolution Commander shocked the white male assembly of the

house of parliament, being both an indigenous person and a woman. She

spoke with an indigenous syntax in Spanish, reminiscent of a

pre-Colombian poetry style, using the word ‘heart’, not in the context

of feelings, but of reason, history, and truth. Another indigenous

Zapatista revolutionary named Maria de Jesus Patricio spoke about how

systems of oppression, including hegemonic legality, hurt everything

(see also Mujeres Libres).

Sylvia Marcos is an academic who has participated in Indigenous and

Zapatista womens’ struggles for justice, and writes about gender and

womens’ issues in Ancient and Contemporary Mexico. She mentions the

declaration of the Summit of the Indigenous women of the Americas, a

summit of approximately 420 women from Latin American countries who

built their careers within the power structure. These women made a clear

distinction between spirituality and institutional religion like

Catholicism. The term of indigenous spirituality can be better

understood in the academic context of cosmology, rather than

Christianity. These women were solving the atheists vs theists debate

before the skeptics ever saw their first Sam Harris video. The

perceptual disposition of Meso-American indigenous peoples is to do away

with the binary gender concepts, and to instead argue for a

complimentary fluidity. They've always rejected these dichotomies, and

asked for their customs to be respected. Their culture is not in a

stasis; it's evolving, and there's a selective process of change. We

again see that the “ignorant, backwards, and superstitious” stereotypes

are not the indigenous peoples, but are in fact the colonial powers and

christianity. Indigenous women actively redefine feminism to be

separated from binary thinking, from essentialism - they even spoke

about the flexible agender duality of the divine. They believe that

through difference we can establish balance - men are vital partners we

should include in feminism. When it comes to decolonization as it

relates to indigenous sovereignty, it's a touchy subject because it

involves the return of land. The way I see it, the return of land can

start small while locals resettle. Eventually the State will provide

land to all for free, and the state can be a part of a community of

states, like a communalist federation. Land must be returned, but the

point is to have less countries, not more. So any contentions about

decolonization only indicates racism, and bashing protests is a common

occurrence, especially among bespoke punditry. Protests are mainly a

leftist thing, and many have taken place regarding decolonization. In

the East Bay area, for example, protests have happened against

government plans to pave over parts of the shellmound. The Sogorea Te’

land trust is actively stewarding three plots in different parts of the

East Bay in order to provide a place where remains, such as shellmounds

— which have been kept in museums — can be returned.

This land trust has also created a Himmetka, a culturally based

emergency response hub, because of the fires, power outages, visible

climate change, the pandemic, and the fallout of social inequality. It

includes a ceremonial space, food and medicine gardens, water

reclamation, filtration and storage, first-aid supplies, tools, and a

seed-saving library. It's basically a collective that offers actual

mutual aid to people, which should be the first and foremost function of

the State. According to the political theory of mutualism, the purpose

of the capitalist State is to subjugate, tax, imprison, and control

people. The state can take and it can give, effectively creating

(maintaining) privileged and underprivileged classes. Now, in my

opinion, if the State gives land and other remuneration to indigenous

people, and to all people in fact, then it can transform into a

structure that actually promotes liberty in all transactions. When the

concept of property arose, the problems for the people intensified. A

person or a group of persons took the product of another person's

labour, and this has been going on continuously in many forms, from

explicit violence to the more nefarious neoliberal ways of today. The

element of force was and is ever-present. From the desire to maximize

and maintain the “natural advantage” of productive land, to armies

conquering people and taking them as slaves, this format of "governing"

was the foundation of what we now call the State. Furthermore, the

French revolution didn't achieve its goals. The Kings and Lords may have

been removed, but the people still weren't free from tyranny. The modern

state just became a little more responsible and responsive to the

populace, or at least perpetuates the illusion of this while really

being beholden to ‘national’ capital interests. The oppressor changed

but the oppression became more extended, now capitalist big businesses

exploit the workers; the majority is manipulated through hegemonic

propaganda that manufactures consent and false consciousness, and

atomized negative solidarity is a reality.

Small businesses, if they can overcome barriers to entry, can't survive

because of costs and taxes; the consumer is paying exorbitant prices,

and the state is subsidizing profits of large capital. The State's tool,

the police, enforces property laws that have nothing to do with

occupancy, tariffs sustain monopolies, and laws like copyright

infringement impede the so-called competitive "free market". The top 1%

owns 40% of the wealth in the US - this wealth isn't the product of

labour and innovation, but of privilege such as inheritance, royalties,

rents, capital gains, etc; ie the theft of labor and innovation. So

income inequality is rampant because the State has created and sustains

privilege since its inception. At the same time though, a state of sorts

is vital and should exist, but it has to be completely re-invented. Its

power should be distributed, not completely removed, but to where this

power would apply is the key point. Power without physical coercion, but

with minimal financial / social coercion to ensure equality of

opportunity. The state shouldn't perpetuate economic inequality, but

should instead subsidize people's income. It shouldn't have a

militarized police, but a body of officers similar to social workers

serving a protective function - an anarchist police service is not an

oxymoron. The state, as the name suggests, is static: it doesn't evolve

according to social life, it rests on tradition, and it upholds the

status quo. Any progress that has been made throughout history was done

by opposing it, not idolizing it. That's been the case from free speech

and shorter work hours, to civil rights and the increased standards of

living in modern times. Opposing the state/the system/the status quo is

what revolutionary action is all about. Of course, bourgeois states

operate at the behest of capital interest, but blaming the state

exclusively for all the failings of capitalism is a favorite tactic of

capitalists. The little freedom people enjoy, we historically won

through questioning authority, privilege, and superstition.

Unfortunately, the fight for freedom, liberty, or however you want to

put it, is incomplete, and we must take the next step. Anarchism means

without rulers, not without rules. Mutualism views history mostly as the

struggle between unjust authority and freedom. It proposes that

voluntary organizations of people can provide us with the necessary

tools to take that next step. Voluntary organizations can include the

examples highlighted above regarding the indigenous land trusts, and it

can someday lead to independent communes connected on a federal level,

i.e. an anarchist communism.

These examples of indigenous communist structures echo the opinions of

most anarchist writers as well - anarchist praxis is communal

organizing. According to Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin, all human progress

was created by the work of all people, and attempting to take any aspect

of human invention and claim it was the work of one person is

ridiculous. Receiving credit for something you did is empowering and

vital, but it has also been commodified. Offering the fruits of your

labor freely is how society should be organized, and there are many

incentives that are not financial. Remuneration/compensation can take

many forms, and this is another function the state can acquire. This is

a view I espouse, and I think it perfectly encapsulates what

anarcho-communism should be about. All people should enjoy the benefits

of human progress; every factory, thought, and invention are common

property, so everything should be shared. This obviously isn’t

advocating for lack of privacy and acknowledgement, but for lack of

servitude and exploitation. Anarchism is the absence of oppression. He

noted that the revolution should first and foremost focus on the needs

of the people, before schooling them in their duties, and that we should

initially fulfill people's needs, like food, clothing, and shelter, and

then discuss with them how to help them meet those needs regularly. This

mutual aid of anarchist communism, this human generosity, is all around

us, he argued. Free libraries, free schools and meals for children,

open-to-all parks and gardens are arrangements founded on the principle:

"Take what you need." He wrote that the expropriation of wealth is

basically the opposite of privatization, it's using property for public

use or benefit. He proposed volunteers to gather or document all the

food, clothes, shelter, and goods and to give them freely to those who

ask. If something is rare, it should be allocated on the basis of need.

This can admittedly become complicated and nuanced swiftly, but since

most wealth comes from exploitation, the evil of the present system is

therefore not that the "surplus-value" of the production goes to the

capitalist, the evil lies in the possibility of a surplus-value existing

in the first place.

He believed that If we built a society with ample time for leisure,

where work shifts last for 4 hours, where everyone's needs are met and

where work is more enjoyable, people would then of course put in the

necessary amount of effort needed to maintain such a society. Unjust

hierarchies and ridiculous remuneration are the reasons for many

selfish, lazy, reluctant, and resistant behavior we see in our society

today. He argued that anarchy is a vision of an "ideal society", but

it's not a "utopia" because it is based on the study of tendencies

already emerging in the evolution of society, rather than being based

solely on what the writer finds desirable from a theoretical point of

view. The revolution would not spontaneously come out of nowhere, but

out of a prior evolutionary phase, during which workers would be

transformed through their direct struggles against capitalism.

Anarchists should focus on participating in labor unions in order to

spread anarchist values, goals, and strategy; see also the praxis of

anarcho-syndicalism. He advocated that workers from all trades should be

united under the single purpose of waging war on capitalist

exploitation, and this must be prosecuted tirelessly, day by day, by the

strike, by agitation, by every revolutionary means. I would add here

that participatory democracy is also a great tool in spreading anarchist

values - elections are also included in unions. Elections in general are

sometimes unfair, undemocratic, or downright contested in some

countries, but we should keep voting nonetheless. We should also try to

make them more transparent, fair, and actually representative of the

population. It's a small price to pay for a nonviolent revolution… I

also agree with his views on the eventual abolition of money, or tokens

of exchange, for goods and services, and with his criticism on Bakunin's

collectivist economic model, which is just a wage system by a different

name. There is a link between work performed and the costs of

production, though. Studies have shown that power imbalances can have a

negative effect on health. Capitalism is inherently hierarchical; that

means that power imbalances are ingrained in the system since its

inception. The institution of wage labour is based on the power

employers exert over employees, and bourgeois states form the protection

of private ownership of productive resources. So we again see that the

function of the State in Anarchist literature is what makes or breaks

it. If the state is oppressive, we smash it; if it protects us, then we

play the Soviet anthem. Tankie humor aside, if a state-like entity

exerts a justified authority (of sorts) over the populous, then freedom,

liberty, voluntary accord, etc. are possible.

By ‘justified authority’, I mean an authority that acts in accordance

with the collective well-being, meaning the well-being of the community,

without physical coercion and with the minimal possible amount of social

/ financial coercion. This authority isn't used to maximize or protect

production or wealth, but rather it aims to listen to people's

grievances, address them, and keep us happy. It's used to protect and

improve people's lives, and specifically their material conditions.

Malatesta argued that anarchy is a society based on free and voluntary

accord. A society in which no one can force their wishes on another, in

which everyone can do as they please, and together all will voluntarily

contribute to the well-being of the community. He also made clear that

anarchy doesn't mean that we recognize and wish to respect the "freedom"

to exploit, to oppress, to command, to murder, or to steal. This is

oppression and most certainly not freedom, he noted. He believed that

the full achievement of anarchy requires that all people will not only

not want to be commanded, but will not want to command as well. This is

the prerequisite for the existence of the justified authority I

mentioned. This will be the case only if the police use force in order

to prevent the loss of life, and the force exerted doesn't take a life

or cause harm (see also harm reduction/community models). Malatesta also

wrote that such a significant transformation of individuals, and the

social structures they constitute, would take an extended amount of time

to achieve. Given this, he thought that the society immediately after

the revolution will not be anarchy yet; that the development towards

full anarchy will be a product of peaceful evolution until it embraces

all humankind and all life's manifestations. Electoral politics can

transform society in revolutionary ways imo, but if and only if the

elected persons act in support of working-class/marginalized peoples’

interests. Malatesta again put it best: "Why go through the intermediary

of elected persons who, once elected, do as they see fit, instead of

directly demanding and claiming those improvements from the masters?"

The masters "freed" the slaves without giving them the means of life, he

argued, and as a result, humans were obliged to have recourse to the

land owners and work for them on their terms. Thus, step by step,

through wars, revolutions, and oppressions, we have arrived at the

current state of society, in which some have inherited land and all

social wealth, and most are exploited and oppressed. From all this stems

the misery in which most people live today, and which in turn creates

all evils such as crime, depression, etc., he noted.

He believed that the clergy was created by a series of fables about the

will of God and about the afterlife, and that it seeks to persuade the

oppressed to accept oppression meekly, and, just as the government does,

to serve the interests of the ruling class and to serve its own as well.

The patriotic spirit, wars, and armed "peace" also stem from this system

that turned love into hatred and rivalry. Subsequently, we can again

infer the function of the government/state, and thus, if they don't

serve the interests of the ruling class, but they instead serve the

people, we can continue to grant their authority up to a point. Which

isn't the case right now - today the state uses violence to oppress

people. Malatesta argued that there aren't clear-cut divisions between

individuals or between classes, which is somewhat true. The working

class includes the middle class and the unemployed, and the bourgeoisie

includes the capitalists/means-of-production-holders and the other rich.

The distinction between these two classes is big, but the distinction

among the subsections of each individual class is minuscule. The

oppression they face is similar, or the interests they serve are. When

it comes to violence, things get a little more complicated. He held that

the main plank of anarchism is the removal of violence from human

relations, and that violence is the essence of every authoritarian

system. This thesis finds me in agreement, but he didn't oppose violence

completely. He argued that those who benefit from existing privileges,

and who today dominate and control all social life, will oppose the

creation of a free society with brute force, propaganda, and economic

force. The ruling classes have police forces, a judiciary, and armies

created for the purpose of protecting their privileges, after all. They

persecute, imprison, and massacre, and no oppressed class has ever

managed to emancipate itself without recourse to violence, he

elaborated. No oppressed class has ever been truly liberated, and

because of this, the masses must rise up and engage in violent action

which isn't the result of their free choice, but it's imposed upon them

by necessity in the defense of unrecognized human rights which are

thwarted by brute force, he wrote.

I disagree with the violent action aspect of the revolution, the only

moral use of violence I can imagine is the defense of your life or

someone else's life. This is why the legitimacy of use of deadly force

defensively includes the need and therefore right of a slave to be

emancipated, the right to a life-saving medication, the right to protect

your life or your loved one's life, and the right of a person to defend

themselves from being murdered by the police. This also includes the

need to protect an unknown person or persons from immediate harm. In

Joyful Militancy, Bergman and Montgomery expand upon related concepts as

a “...fierce commitment to emergent forms of life in the cracks of

Empire…”. A million peaceful revolutions are violently suppressed every

day. As an example, when BLM protestors are being attacked by the

police, setting the police station on fire is understandable, since the

protestors didn't willingly take a life, the police did. Similar

instances of revolutionary violence, like property destruction can also

be considered understandable in my book. Malatesta's next quote sums up

this point beautifully: "Revolutionary violence must not therefore be

ethically evaluated in the abstract, but instead be judged relative to

the violence perpetuated by those institutions which revolutionaries

seek to abolish.". When all other forms of protest go ignored or

punished, only property destruction remains. I'd like to make abundantly

clear here that if these arguments are used to justify the murder of an

officer, then I'm not on board - context is vital in these situations.

In addition, Malatesta operated in a different and even more brutal

time. Humanity was suffering much more intensively, wars were rampant on

the European continent, armed gangs were killing people on the streets,

"revolutions" in other countries had massacred people, etc. This state

of things has lasted from time immemorial, and without a revolution it

would last indefinitely, he noted. Every day that it delays means an

enormous mass of suffering inflicted on mankind, he argued. Notice that

Warhawking, contrary to the stated aims of “removing despots”, merely

reinforces ultranationalist and other extremely reactionary sentiments,

increasing support for groups like ISIS since such ideologies are sold

as necessary to fight against all the horrible things the US has done.

That doesn't change my overall point, though. We should not employ

violence, except in defense of ourselves and others against direct life

threats. Human life is of the highest value, and war is abhorrent. This

isn't just pacifism, it's also a nuanced take on the use of deadly

force. Malatesta argued that morality should be grounded in the actual

conditions that we're acting in. The means we employ should be those

that circumstances make possible or necessary, but at the same time,

place the value of life on the highest pedestal. This is also why

leftists should be against the death penalty. This quote of his, I

believe, can encapsulate an overall non violent revolutionary attitude:

"A liberating revolution cannot be born of massacre and terror, because

these are the midwives of tyranny." In addition to this,’capital

punishment’, ironically named, is ineffective at the stated goals of

deterrence, and even one false death sentence makes us all then

complicit in an unjustifiable homicide, if not murder. This is a good

point, I think, to present some new terms, and to offer a critique on

Max Stirner. He introduced a term he called Eigenheit ('Ownness' or

autonomy), and claimed that ownness is not in any sense an idea like

freedom, morality, humanity, etc., that it is only a description of the

owner. I would like to supplement this term with something I like to

call ‘Freiheit’; it means liberty and political freedom in German, and

for me it can be best understood as personal/individual freedom/liberty,

and political/civic responsibility. This term should be analyzed in

relation to another term I will introduce called Gemeinsam

Individualität, or Collective Individuality, which means a mutual,

united individuality that acts in accordance to the collective

well-being and individual freedoms. Max Stirner called for a Union of

Egoists to replace the State, and formulated a criticism of it, but he

did not principally oppose it. He wrote: "I annihilate it (the state)

and form in its place the Union Of Egoists". It seems that he didn't

want to literally destroy the state as an institution, but as an idea, a

principle, and to eventually transform it. This is something that again

shows that many anarchists are, in fact, welcoming of a state that isn't

a state, but a non-state.

This state operates in harmony with freiheit and gemeinsam

individualität. He furthermore claimed that the ‘true man’ does not lie

in the future, but in the present, which is kind of a self-centered and

destructive way of thinking. If you don't care about your future, then

you don't really have any; you just live in a never-ending present. He

wrote that a person is a moral egoist when they ought to act in their

own self interest, and a rational egoist when they act in order to

maximize their self-interest. These sound a lot like the "pull yourself

up by your bootstraps" argument, and all "rugged" individualist points

tbh, and Egoists can be found refuting Randroids in the wild

occasionally. As we have already discussed through various lenses,

ensuring genuine equality of opportunity for all is in the interests of

all. I would like to add here as an example that it's not irrational to

act altruistically, especially when you're looking after someone and you

don't get a ‘thank you’ in return, or when you care about the collective

well-being of a community at your own peril. Not being appreciated /

acknowledged is mentally exhausting and emotionally debilitating, and to

acknowledge this is not to be self-absorbed or egotistical, but real and

honest. Most people will, for example, give some money at some point to

an unhoused person because they're good people, without expecting

anything in return, and this attitude is found all around us; see also

biological mutualism. It is not illogical; it's very much logical and

emotional. “I feel, therefore I am” is something I say, and I believe

that it perfectly applies here. Feelings such as kindness are very much

a logical/rational response of our primate brains, and mutual interest

is, by definition, self interest. This is why both ethical and rational

egoism should be expanded upon with a concept I will name synlogism;

which means an ethically rational, emotive, self-concern/interest about

the communal/collective welfare. The ‘self’ encompasses consciousness

and unconsciousness; the id, the ego, the super-ego, and the shadow as

well. The notion of the self refers to a person's experience as a

single, unitary, autonomous being that is separate from others,

experienced with continuity through time and space. The experience of

the self includes one's physicality as well as one's inner character and

emotional life. The idea of a soul for me is fully-formulated, and it

highly relates to the idea of the self. So when the self is amoral, then

it's a moral nihilist, a fatalist, which is related to false

consciousness and capitalist realism.

To deny our interconnectedness is to deny ourselves. Stirner claims that

the egoist, before whom the humane shudder, is a geist (ghost/phantasm)

as much as the devil is: he exists only as a boogie and phantasm in

their brain, but for the egoist everything is a geist. The geist

therefore is any abstract concept/social construct that people act as

though it really existed; this is clearly related to marxian reification

and also to the spectacle. But most geists exist, and they're very much

material constraints - laws and mental health issues for example

actively hurt people as we speak. When it comes to the revolution,

Stirner clearly states that his object is not an overthrow of the

established order but his elevation above it; his purpose and deed are

not political or social but (as directed toward himself and his

‘ownness’ alone) an egoistic purpose indeed. Replacing the ruling class

with ourselves isn't a noble goal, and using violence to achieve this,

or achieve anything for that matter, can never be altruistic or serve

the individual or the community. Protecting and preserving all life is

the utmost good. Remember here that it's almost impossible to completely

agree with every opinion a theorist has, and that questioning or

restructuring arguments is healthy, and in fact necessary for our

evolution and the revolution. Violence is the essence of every

authoritarian system, and fascism thrives on it. Fascism is inherently

sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, etc. The alt-right

pipeline produces ‘anarcho-’capitalists, and Socdems are turned into

fascists. In other instances, through the media/cultural pipelines,

anarchists become socdems, and the same happens with communists that

turn into fascists. This is why we must categorically state that

marxism, and all anti-capitalist leftism, is inherently intersectional.

[]

Sources:

www.racialequitytools.org

usa.anarchistlibraries.net

)

youtu.be

youtu.be

usa.anarchistlibraries.net

academic.oup.com

Intersectional Green Marxism.

Anarchism, Socialism, Marxism/Communism, and in fact all leftism,

involve really really free markets, and by that, I mean free shops where

people are ‘buying’ stuff for free. They're also really really

intersectional, and this is why we need to actually define what

intersectionality is. Intersectionality is a framework for

conceptualizing a person, group of people, or social problem as affected

by a number of discriminations and disadvantages, but also privileges.

It takes into account people's overlapping identities and experiences in

order to understand the complexity of oppression they face, or

oppression from which they benefit. It highly relates to queer theory.

Queer theory is a field of critical theory, and the term emerged in the

early 1990's. It follows the work of Michel Foucault, and is heavily

influenced by Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Adrienne Rich, and

Diana Fuss. Michael Warner defines queerness as the resistance to

regimes of the normal. Queer Nation/San Francisco activist Karl Knapper

states that: "Queerness is about acknowledging and celebrating

difference, embracing what sets you apart. A straight person can't be

gay, but a straight person can be queer." It's mostly derived from

post-structuralist theory, specifically deconstruction, and it expands

gay/lesbian studies' focus on natural and constructed behavior. It

encompasses any kind of sexual activity or identity, and claims that

people shouldn't be divided into normal and abnormal/deviant,

categories - abnormal in this context means the relationships between

people of the same gender. Queer theory claims that gender, sex, and

sexuality are socially constructed, and debunks common misconceptions

associated with them. Sexuality and gender are not binary, instead, they

both exist on a spectrum.

Individual sexuality is fluid, fragmented, and dynamic. It's a

collectivity of sexualities that may vary at different points during a

person's life. Queer theory's goal is to deconstruct all existing social

norms, and investigate why and how they came into being. These norms are

rigid, and don't sufficiently explain differences in conditions,

attitudes, and behaviors of a person's experiences. Moreover, Queer is

an umbrella term for those not only deemed sexually deviant, but also

those who feel marginalized as a result of social practices. There are

multiple facets of oppression and privilege; race, class, and gender are

all interconnected. This theory of interconnectivity is called the

matrix of domination or oppression. Patricia Hill Collins is credited

with introducing it, and Kimberle Crenshaw expanded it. As I've

mentioned, according to queer theory, romantic, sexual, and gender

identities are neither static nor dichotomous. As a result, it argues

that labels are obsolete. Identities can't be fully categorized or

labeled, because they consist of so many different components, so

categorization by one characteristic is simply inadequate and

incomplete. It's important to note here that queer theory mostly

attempts to maintain a critique more than define a specific identity.

Queer used to be a slang word for gay people and was used for homophobic

abuse, but the word has been recently reclaimed, and it's now being used

as an umbrella term for several marginalized existences. In addition,

queer theory seeks to dismantle the idea of heteronormativity, and since

black feminist thought was the basis of it, it not only recognizes, but

also breaks down, identities in relation to factors like race, class,

religion, etc. It focuses on problems in classifying individuals as

either male or female, even on a strictly biological basis, and

challenges the ongoing consolidation of cisnormative, heterosexual, and

able-bodied hegemony. Furthermore, it deals with the material effects of

AIDS, and critiques modern-day neoliberal queer politics. It argues that

lack of recognition of other forms of oppression can result in many

queer people not being supported or acknowledged by politics. As an

example, the majority of "queers" are people of color, women, &/or

working class, and sometimes LGBTQ+ anti-hate legislation still

marginalizes and represses other minorities; see Israel's oppression of

Palestinians. The subjects of queer theory are diverse and not only

include women, but also gays, lesbians, bisexuals, bisexual lesbians,

trans persons, nonbinary persons, and in general all those considered

‘deviants’. One overlap of queer theory and feminist theory is through

the recognition of Judith Butler.

In her essay "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution", Judith Butler

proposes that gender is performative, and distinguishes between sex as

biological facticity, and gender as the cultural interpretation or

signification of that facticity. Butler argues that gender is best

perceived as performative, and it has a social audience. The

performances of ‘woman’ and ‘man’ (and everyone outside this binary) are

compelled and enforced by historical social practices. According to

Butler's theory, gender is essentially a performative repetition of acts

associated with male or female. She later argues that being born with

certain genitals doesn't determine behavior. Instead, people learn to

behave in particular ways to fit into society. Due to the fact that

gender is an act, a performance, and is socially constructed, Butler

argues that the performance of gender itself creates gender.

Additionally, she compares the performativity of gender to the

performance of theater, and also criticizes Freud. The title of her 1990

book: Gender Trouble alludes to the 1974 John Waters film "Female

Trouble". In it, Butler claims that radical feminists shouldn't try to

define "woman", and she proposes the breaking of the supposed links

between sex and gender. She also criticizes Catharine MacKinnon's

arguments against pornography for its unquestioning acceptance of the

state's power to censor. She wrote: "The effort to identify the enemy as

singular in form is a reverse-discourse that uncritically mimics the

strategy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms."

Queer theory and Intersectionality fit perfectly with Anarcha-feminism,

which is an ideology that combines anarchism with feminism, and

generally advocates that patriarchy and gender roles are unjust

hierarchies that should be replaced by decentralized free associations.

It supports the view that the struggle against patriarchy is both an

essential part of the Marxist class conflict and the anarchist struggle

against the state and capitalism. In essence, this philosophy sees

anarchist struggle as a necessary component of feminist struggle, and

vice-versa. Historically, its roots can be traced to Mikhail Bakunin,

who opposed patriarchy and the way the law and other institutions

subjected women to the absolute domination of men. The movement's

founder though was Emma Goldman, and later feminists like Voltairine de

Cleyre, Lucy Parsons, the Spanish group Mujeres Libres, and the

Stirnerist Nietzschean feminist Federica Montseny expanded it. In China,

He Zhen argued that without women's liberation, society could not be

liberated. In 1975, Peggy Kornegger posited that anarchism stands for

three things. The first is the belief in the abolition of authority,

hierarchy, and government. The second is the belief in both

individuality and collectivity at the same time (see synlogism/freiheit

in the previous chapter). And the third is the belief in both

spontaneity and organization - essentially revolution and evolution,

i.e. continued reform.

She basically argues that abolishing hierarchy and domination is the

connection between feminism and anarchism. She further states that

feminism connects anarchism to the future. L. Susan Brown argues that

anarchism is inherently feminist, and it even goes beyond feminism in

its fundamental opposition to all forms of unjust power, hierarchy, and

domination. Anarchism contains and transcends feminism in its critique

of power. Moreover, at the Combahee River Collective, black feminists

examined their double oppression of being black and of being women. From

this theory we have the idea that oppression rarely stands alone; these

power structures reinforce, strengthen, and support each other

systemically, as dual power systems like direct action and mutual aid

do, but with the exclusionary aims of capital accumulation. This is why

intersectionality is vital, it's a means to abolish these power

structures, and it's also a great indicator as to who our allies truly

are. It's true that it’s often misunderstood as simply an ideology that

seeks to invert the social hierarchy in order to achieve equality. This

misses the crucial aspect of intersectional theory, which seeks first

and foremost to abolish hierarchies and inequalities; not to merely turn

them on their head. Furthermore, this is often used by critics to write

Intersectionality off as divisive, when in reality they are writing off

a misunderstanding of what it is; a diverse tool. Intersectionality also

includes the assertion that systems cannot be properly critiqued by

those benefiting from them, which is correct. In addition, we can't deny

that patriarchal gender roles intersect with capitalist classes. Men

usually worked outside of the home and experience class oppression.

Women were seen as incubators and sex objects, and experience

patriarchal oppression, while simultaneously experiencing workplace

oppression. Women are disproportionately poorer than men, with women of

colour being poorer still, and men are also oppressed by patriarchy, see

the ‘warrior’ role. So since capitalism is undoubtedly a form of

oppression, then it's only logical that anarcha-feminism would staunchly

oppose it.

This is why this movement necessarily challenges all possible forms of

oppression, such as the state, caste, class, gender, transphobia,

homophobia, the institution of marriage, etc. It's an all-encompassing,

anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, anti-oppressive philosophy, with

the ultimate goal of creating an equal ground between all genders and

moving beyond all classes. This is also primarily what anarcho-communism

is. Anarchist communism is the practical opposition to all forms of

hierarchy and domination. It's a form of anarchism that advocates the

abolition of the state and capitalism, in favour of horizontal networks

of decentralized, voluntary (& explicitly anti-racist, anti-sexist, etc)

communal associations based on shared need. It's the way in which

everyone is free, and if we now finally take into account that Marxism

is historically an intersectional ideology, then we can adequately state

that anarcho-communism is very similar, as is communism, since it's

defined as a stateless, classless, moneyless society. Anarchists like

Emma Goldman played a pivotal role in this realization of mine. Emma

Goldman was a late 19th / early 20th century anarchist political

activist and writer. She played a pivotal role in the development of

anarchist political philosophy and Anarcha-feminism. Goldman was

imprisoned several times, including for illegally distributing

information about birth control. In Anarchism and Other Essays, she

argued that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore

wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary. I disagree with Emma on the

inevitability of abolishing the government, though. The Government/State

can be functionally obviated if what we obviate is the violence and

oppression it inflicts, especially if the decision-making process is

representatively democratic (not as in ‘representative democracy’, but

as in actual representation in a directly democratic system), and the

bureaucratic function is automated.

If the populous/populace (not merely citizenry) constituted a federal

‘government’ structure based on dual power, mutual aid, addressing

people's material needs, etc., without unjust hierarchies and

authoritarianism, then this structure could be called anarchist. The

definition of the word hierarchy indicates that it is inherently unjust,

but when we speak about justified hierarchies, we mean organization

structures. Any/all hierarchy should constantly justify itself, as an

example, a manager of sorts should be directly recallable by the

workers. The same logic can be applied to taxation. “How can you make

people pay taxes if you do not coerce them?”, is the immediate and

obvious question. I can say that you'll not need to coerce them but

educate them, and that they'll eventually pay the taxes themselves of

their own free will, since it is literally in their ‘rational

self-interests’. This is an example of a hierarchical power exchange.

It’s a nice dream and it would be possible if we lived in an

anarchocommunist world, but, alas, this isn't the case yet. So, the

answer, I'm afraid, is that you will have to coerce people in some form;

the issue is the form of coercion. The main evil today is an economic

one, and the solution of that evil rests on the individual, the

collective, the internal, as well as the external phases, Emma wrote.

There is no conflict between the individual and the social instincts,

she continued, any more than there is between the heart and the lungs.

The individual is the heart of society, conserving the essence of social

life, and society is the ‘lungs’ which are distributing the elements to

keep everything working in this metaphor. Anarchism is the great

liberator of people from the phantoms that have held them captive; it is

the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social

harmony. She believed that religion is the dominion of the human mind;

property is the dominion of human needs; government is the dominion of

human conduct. A good course of action would therefore be that the

police, and all forms of authority, didn't employ physical or economic

violence, and the government actually taxed the billionaires and

millionaires by threatening them with expropriation. The form of

coercion should primarily be an economic/financial one directed towards

the higher incomes, and the authority of the police should be constantly

justified, and will be subject to live revisions constantly. Those who

possess great power also have great responsibility, and they should be

subject to checks and balances, but also only use that power in service

of people, not property. Goldman argued that the most absurd apology for

authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. State is itself

the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law and

killing in the form of war and capital punishment. Most people are out

of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to

live. As a result, crime is inevitable, and all the laws and statutes

can only increase, but never do away with crime, she noted.

She was a staunch anarcho-communist, and wrote that the General Strike

is the supreme expression of the economic consciousness of the workers,

and direct action has been proven effective. By direct action, she meant

fighting against the authority in the shop, against the authority of the

law, and against the invasive authority of our moral code. She made

clear that no real social change has ever come about without a

revolution, and revolution is just thought carried into action. Goldman

also noted that it is not at all surprising that every act of political

violence is attributed to Anarchists. It's a known fact that a great

number of acts, for which Anarchists had to suffer, either originated

with the capitalist press or were instigated, if not directly

perpetrated, by the police, she continued. This is something I've

experienced myself in Greece. Anarchists were constantly imprisoned,

tortured by the police, and their reputations were tarnished by the

media. Furthermore, because of the anarchist opposition to the state,

most of them didn't even bother to testify. Thankfully, they do testify

now, so the revolution will resume shortly, I think. Compared with the

wholesale violence of capital and government, political acts of violence

are but a drop in the ocean, Emma Goldman underlined, and advocated that

anarchism values human life above all things. This is an excellent

explanation as to why defensive violence by marginalized people is

justified, but taking a life isn't. The revolution won't be violent, but

it won't be strictly pacifist, either. As I've mentioned in previous

chapters, violence becomes unjustified when it moves away from

self-defense. The golden rule (do unto others as you would have them do

unto you) for me goes something like this: The use of deadly force can

be legitimate if it's done strictly for self-defense, or for defending

others against life threats. Revolutionary violence should be utilized

without willingly taking a life, and in the defense of ourselves or

others. All Anarchists agree with Tolstoy in this fundamental truth: if

the production of any commodity necessitates the sacrifice of human

life, society should do without that commodity, but it can not do

without that life.

In the next chapters, Goldman was critical of the way in which to go

about women's suffrage, and even though the language she used was kinda

problematic, the time and social situation in which she was writing

these obviates the need for further criticism along those lines. She

argued that a woman must first assert herself as a personality, and not

as a sex commodity, and she also defended sex workers, in 1910, mind

you! Secondly, she argued that a woman should refuse the right to anyone

over her body; by refusing to bear children, unless she wants them; by

refusing to be a servant to God, the State, society, the husband, the

family, etc. We will have to do away with the absurd notion of the

dualism of the sexes, or that man and woman represent two antagonistic

worlds, she wrote. In addition, Emma Goldman advocated that marriage is

primarily an economic arrangement, an insurance pact about protection.

She closed her text by writing: "Some day, some day, men and women will

rise; they will reach the mountain peak; they will meet big and strong

and free, ready to receive, to partake, and to bask in the golden rays

of love." These words inspired tons of anarchist, communist, and

feminist literature, and in the chapter “Prisons: A Social Crime and

Failure”, her arguments focus on the police and military structures. She

states emphatically that economic, political, moral, and physical

factors are the microbes of crime, but the methods of coping with it are

still all based on the primitive motive of revenge punishment towards

the offender. She argued that there is not a single penal institution or

reformatory in the United States where men are not tortured. Goldman

also wrote that the enormous profits from convict labor are a constant

incentive to the contractors, and they punish their victims cruelly when

their work does not come up to the excessive demands. These

revolutionary intersectional critiques by Goldman go out to patriotism

as well. She heavily criticized patriotism, and stated that those who

have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot consider

themselves better than the living beings inhabiting any other spot.

Patriotism requires allegiance to the flag, which means obedience and

readiness to kill father, mother, brother, sister. Every intelligent man

and woman knows, however, that we don't need a standing army, this is a

myth maintained to frighten and coerce us, she wrote.

Historically speaking, the police institution is deeply rooted in

colonialism and white supremacy - it's also inseparable from the

capitalist structure. When the police force was first established in the

US, virtually all officers were drawn from the military. As early as

1906, the police were already shooting labor strikers and escaping

accountability. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in

the 1700 and 1800s that caught, and returned, runaway slaves. Kamau

Walton states that policing is meant to be a tool to maintain the status

quo and keep people in line, and Pinkertons were another (privatized)

example of this. If you can't be kept in line you go into a cage, or you

die. The police are not actually broken because it's not about

crime-fighting, it's about containment and control. The vast majority of

police officers make one felony arrest a year, like robberies or serial

killers. If they make two, they’re cop of the month. Moreover, there

have been numerous sexual assaults that were allowed to happen in police

custody or prison, and some were even committed by officers themselves.

Various studies show that police sexual violence is widespread, and that

the incidents often begin with traffic stops. In addition, recently

released data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics suggest that rape

allegations have soared since the PREA(Prison Rape Elimination Act) was

developed in 2012. This is not to imply incident rates spiked

necessarily, but that reports of violence that will go unheard are often

not made; also when people feel more comfortable reporting crimes,

reporting crimes increases.

‘Abolish the police’ as a slogan is very much appropriate, as is ‘ACAB’.

It would be more relevant to state that reform is a part of abolition,

and that All Cops Are Bastards Because Capitalism, but writing on walls

needs to happen fast. Police reform/abolition is a vast process, and

requires the creation of policing alternatives, deconstruction of

preconceived notions of policing, engaging in practices which reduce

their power and legitimacy/’necessity’, such as defunding the police,

demilitarization, discontinuing ‘warrior training’ in favor of civil

service and crisis training, etc. There's a movement of people

supporting these ideas amidst BLM activists, and it's been growing since

the murder of George Floyd. Slogans like ACAB, F*ck the Police, and

Abolish the Police are being used as the unofficial mottos of this

movement. Marbre Stahly-Butts and Rachel Herzing argue that the reason

alternative systems to policing aren't widely accepted is because they

aren't given the time and space to evolve. Hiring more black police

officers helps, but, like, that's just a drop in the ocean, especially

if they’re enforcing the same racist policies. Reform options should

include the proposal of body cameras for the police, without building

wealth for the less-lethal weapons industry, and at the same time

providing material relief to those impacted by police violence.

Defunding the police can be considered as a step towards abolition, by

allocating these funds to community-oriented investments. We can create

safe spaces, put money in education and healthcare, provide access to

good food, affordable housing, etc. The funds we free up can be diverted

to other initiatives to reduce ‘crime’, and therefore the need for

policing, like programs dealing with mental health, disabilities,

homelessness, and drug addiction. Anarchists believe in cooperation

rather than competition, direct action rather than authority, and mutual

aid rather than policing. These are the basis of the anarchist system of

social peace. Additionally, anarchist literature often mentions

detective and forensic collectives that would serve several communities

at once, which is basically what a police force is, supposedly.

"Criminals" that must be isolated from the community to protect society

&/or themselves must be treated humanely, and during their incarceration

should receive the mental health care they require. Most crime is caused

by socioeconomic factors, and this is also why the underlying material

conditions of the public must be addressed first. This way, future

societies will experience crime in far lesser numbers than us; this is

just common sense.

Popular militias and neighborhood watches are dangerous and ineffective

tho. You can't possibly arm every random person illiterate in

de-escalation techniques, but you can revoke officers at will, given

that the courts are also revised. The ideal future police will carry no

guns and will be accountable to the public, not to mention that it won't

be really needed. Conflict resolution can be handled by community

service officers. Popular tribunals, tho, sound post-apocalyptic; courts

composed of jurors representative of the populous sound a lot better.

All these changes wouldn’t happen overnight, but protests around the

world show that enough people want to be free AND safe at the same time.

This brings us to another really difficult topic: prison abolition.

Prison as an institution first made its appearance in the United States

around the time of the American Revolution. It was based on the

replacement of capital and corporal punishment by incarceration. Michel

Foucault argues that incarceration did not become the principal form of

punishment just because of the humanitarian concerns of reformists, but

also because these disciplines were really convenient for the ruling

class. The technological powers that shaped this change can be found in

places such as schools, hospitals, and military barracks, he argued. The

aspect of instilling fear in the public to prevent revolutionary

sentiments exists today, especially in the United States, but the

disciplinary action taking place currently is different. The

state/prison system uses this fear to their advantage on the one hand,

and on the other they advocate for reformation at times, which is

actually good when sincere. Neoliberal social policies do help, but the

amount of slave labour in prisons really shows the fetishization of

punishment, the capitalist finger behind it, and the fact that the state

is tolerating and incentivising it.

The 13th amendment abolished slavery "except as punishment for crime",

after all, and If you factor in the massive over-policing and the "war

on drugs", then you can understand why the historian Adam Jay Hirsch

points out that there are many similarities between the penitentiary

system and chattel slavery. Both systems isolate people, confine them to

a fixed habitat, and frequently coerce them to perform physical labor,

often for longer hours and for less compensation. Of course it is not

coincidental that over-policing and tougher sentencing impact the

already-marginalized the most. Furthermore, gender oppression is also

rampant, and women who served in penal institutions between 1820 and

1870 were not subject to the prison reform experienced by male inmates.

Fast forward to today, and we've basically come to a point where longer

prison terms mean greater profits - the profit motive promotes the

expansion of imprisonment. Horrifically enough, the privatization model

is rapidly becoming the primary mode of organizing punishment in many

countries. Prisoners need unions too; how else will they fight for their

rights that are being curtailed by systemic violence. Abusers like

pedophiles should be reformed , but reformation starts with harm

reduction. Private prisons are direct sources of profit for the

companies that run them. We should conceive different ways of reforming

prisons more humanely, and support electoral attempts to facilitate

that, but we should eventually move towards abolishing them. The prison

industrial complex includes transnational corporations, media

conglomerates, guards' unions, and legislative and court agendas.

Demilitarization of schools, revitalization of all education, a health

system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice

system not based on retribution and vengeance are what we support.

Other preliminary steps towards abolition include legalizing soft drugs

and decriminalizing harder ones, legalizing sex work, and the

decriminalization of undocumented immigrants. It's a shameful reality

when women from South American countries, or countries from the Soviet

bloc, or East Asia, are imprisoned because they've entered a country to

escape sexual violence. I'd like to point out here, that violence

against women is a pervasive and complicated problem that cannot be

solved by imprisoning women who fight back against their abusers. We

have to also understand that the prison industrial complex is linked to

the agendas of politicians, the profit motive of corporations, and media

representations of crime. This is also one of the ways in which white

supremacy is being maintained. So any solution that doesn't include this

is simply misinformed. Mental illness among inmates is also a serious

issue, as well as substance abuse, sexual violence, overcrowding,

organized crime, etc. There's a highly racialized aspect to

incarceration. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, in

2013, black males accounted for 37% of the total male prison population,

despite making up 14% of the total U.S. population. The implications of

the aforementioned fact are horrific, and police brutality categorically

facilitates and encourages this. Reagan's "tough on crime" policies,

"three-strikes" provisions, etc., are great examples of this. I also

have to be really blunt here, law enforcement and the legal system

essentially continue slavery, lynching, and segregation. Consider the

mass arrests and detention of people of Middle Eastern, South Asian, or

Muslim heritage in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in 2001.

The leftist movement that calls for the abolition of prisons and the

police, like the Antifa activists, are thus antiracist, anticapitalist,

antisexist, antihomophobic, antitransphobic, antiableist, antifatphobic,

etc. Leftists call for the abolition of the prisons, and at the same

time recognize the need for genuine solidarity with the millions of

incarcerated men, women, nonbinary adults, and children of all kinds.

The ultimate goal of intersectional marxists/anarchocommunists is to

abolish prisons and replace them with humane holistic health facilities

that also treat mental health issues. Hell, Bentham’s Panopticon was

designed to be run for profit, and we can see that while ostensible

reforms have been made to the US prison system, incarceration largely

serves to maintain heteropatriarchal white supremacy.

For-profit incarceration of overpoliced minority communities adds to the

inability of the ‘minority’ portion of the population to build

generational wealth. Reforming/Abolishing the police and prisons are

intersectional marxist goals, as is dealing with the effects of climate

change due to capitalism. Furthermore, green anarchism’s positions have

much overlap with anarcho-communism (ancom), and Murray Bookchin has

authored many books explaining his own ecological anarcho-communalism.

Murray Bookchin was a political philosopher, among many things, and he

developed the theory of social ecology within anarchist philosophy. He

also founded his own ideology, called ‘communalism’, which seeks to

reconcile communist and anarchist thought. After seeing the upcoming

ecological destruction, Bookchin argued that we don't have the time for

reforms; the only way of survival is through anarchist revolution. In

his book: Post-Scarcity Anarchism, he declared that we're no longer

faced with the choice of socialism or barbarism; we are confronted with

the more drastic alternatives of anarchism or annihilation. He argued

that the absolute negation of the state is anarchism; the absolute

negation of the city is community; the absolute negation of bureaucracy

is immediate if replaced by face-to-face relations; the absolute

negation of centralized economy is regional ecotechnology; the absolute

negation of the patriarchy is liberated sexuality; the absolute negation

of the marketplace is communism. If ‘the state’ is a communalist one and

the bureaucracy is replaced by automation, and if anti-hierarchical

social interrelations in which immediately-recallable temporary

‘representatives’ who have no power beyond faithfully relaying our needs

are ubiquitous, then I fully agree with him. He also criticized the

homogeneity and simplification of production under Capitalism, like

copypasted art, same designs in clothes, etc. The balance in nature is

achieved through variation, complexity, and diversity instead, he

continues. The liberation of the self involved a social process. In a

society that has shriveled the self into a commodity - into an object

manufactured for exchange - there can be no fulfilled self. He believed

there should be a harmonization between humans and nature, and that the

profit motive has pitted us against each other and against the natural

world.

The only real choice that we have is whether the earth can survive its

looting long enough for us to replace the current destructive social

system with a humanistic, ecologically-oriented society. Bookchin

resonates with green anarchists but he wasn't an anarcho-’primitivist’.

He said that he didn't want to surrender the gains of agriculture and

mechanization, but instead that the earth must be cultivated as a

garden, in a truly ecological sense. Furthermore, in an article found

later in the book, he states that we must explore three questions. These

are: What is the liberatory potential of modern technology, both

materially and spiritually? What tendencies, if any, are reshaping the

machine for use in an organic, human oriented society? How can the new

technology and resources be used in an ecological manner? Important

questions, indeed. He later gives some successful predictions about

future technological advancements like mechanical eyes and self-learning

bots. Bookchin argued that we should see our dependence on nature all

around us; it should be a living, visible part of our culture. He

exclaimed that when mass production became the predominant mode of

production, humans became an extension of the machine. Bookchin, in the

chapter “The Forms of Freedom”, is critical towards workers councils. He

argues that if structures exist that inhibit open relationships, either

by coercion or mediation, then freedom will not exist, whether there is

"worker management of production” or not. This is another excellent

point that anarcho-syndicalists and marketsocs as well should also take

into account. He makes clear that the factors which undermined the

assemblies of classical Athens and revolutionary Paris require very

little discussion; they were broken up by the development of class

antagonisms. In addition, he argues that we should build a movement

looking at the present instead of the past. We must transcend Marx's

dialectical analysis, just as Marx himself transcended Hegel, bourgeois

economics, and Blanqui. We shouldn't fetishize the worker's

‘workerness’. Young workers now smoke pot, fuck off on their jobs, drift

in and out of factories, grow long or longish hair, demand more leisure

rather than more pay, steal, harass authority, etc. Social resolutions

are not made by parties and groups, they occur as a result of

deep-seated historic forces, and contradictions that activate large

sections of the population, he argues. Misery doesn't produce

revolutions; just demoralization, and parties do more to hinder than to

help this revolution.

After I returned from France, I understood that anarchism and liberalism

have a big overlap, especially through the middle class. Bakunin argued

that liberty is a feature of interaction, not of isolation. The freedom

of an individual is contingent on the attitudes that shape society. The

anarchist struggle for power is political and fighting doesn't

necessarily mean winning or losing. It means doing the fighting without

knowing the result, it's trying to achieve smt better for ourselves and

for the future. It means discussing with eachother to find solutions, in

other words it means synthesizing. Voting is included in this, and

democracy is done through it. Murray Bookchin is an anarchist, and he

also discussed desire and need. He noted that we need to round out the

revolutionary credo with desire. So he's basically saying that people

won't join us if we just give them arduous stuff that they don't like

and we constantly make them feel like they fail. The right is always

portraying the left as the ‘fun police’, after all (in addition to other

lies). In his magnum opus: The Ecology of Freedom, Bookchin argued that

since nature also includes human beings, science must include humanity's

role in the natural world. Homo sapiens has slowly and painstakingly

developed from the natural world into a unique social world of its own,

he wrote. As both worlds interact with each other through highly complex

phases of evolution, it's important to speak of a social ecology and of

a natural ecology. He proceeded to note that Marx tried to root

humanity's identity and self-discovery in its productive interaction

with nature, and added that not only does humanity place its imprint on

the natural world and transform it, but also nature places its imprint

on the human world and transforms us as well. To quote him directly: "

It is not only we who "tame" nature, but also nature that "tames" us."

Natural history is also human history, and though unjustifiable

hierarchy does exist in present-day society, the maintenance of it

threatens the existence of society itself, and threatens the integrity

of organic nature, he elaborated. As a result, it can't remain a social

fact anymore. He stated that competing elites vie for the support of a

public, whose popular sovereignty is reduced to the pathetic right to

participate in choosing the tyrant who will rule it. In the next

chapters, he wrote that people have become instruments of production,

just like the tools and machines they create. This seems especially apt

to commodified social media.

As a Marxist, he furthermore analysed labour relations. Labour is both

the medium whereby humanity forges its own self-formation and the object

of social manipulation. Just as capitalism leads to production for the

sake of production, so too does it lead to consumption for the sake of

consumption, he noted. He argued that Marx's famous notion of the

"fetishization of commodities" finds its parallel in a "fetishization of

needs", and I would argue that Intersectional Green Marxism,

Anarchocommunism, and Green Anarchism are perfectly aligned to combat

this. So, if the object of capitalism or socialism is to increase needs,

the object of anarchism is to increase choice, he mentioned. After a

chapter about the evolution of ‘primitive’ societies into the

pre-industrial era and how it relates to women's patriarchal oppression,

Bookchin argued that people are caught in a nexus of human domination.

He underlined that Biblical power is the mana that all masters can use

against their slaves: ruler against ruled, man against woman, the elders

against the young. Neither Freud nor Marx alone have helped us fully

understand this process, he denoted. By making self-repression (Freud)

and self-discipline (Marx) the historic knout for achieving mastery over

nature, they've made domination an indispensable phase or moment in the

dialectic of civilization. I would add that the strict

self-centered/atomized analysis is deeply problematic in itself, since

people are primarily the result of the social conditions under which

they were nurtured. Bookchin stated that with the breakdown of the

organic community, privilege began to replace parity, and hierarchical

or class society began to replace egalitarian relationships. He then

wondered if we can really separate the State from Society on the

municipal, economic, national, and international levels. He wrote that

we must make a distinction between social coercion and social influence,

because, like ‘the market’, the State knows no limits. These points are

excellent, but further to these, there would be a form of coercion as

I've mentioned previously, especially regarding financial coercion

towards capitalists when it comes to taxation, though Bookchin would

likely include this in “social influence”.

Revolution is thus confronted with the task of smashing the State and

reconstructing its necessary administrative function along libertarian

lines, he notes. Bookchin then tackled the notion of "freedom" by

stating that freedom doesn't seem to exist in organic society - the word

is simply meaningless to many ‘preliterate’ peoples. Organic society

tends to operate unconsciously according to the equality of unequals, he

wrote. In a later chapter, he argued that patriarchy ceased to be mere

arbitrary authority, and became juridical authority that was answerable

to certain precepts of right and wrong. From a tyrant, the patriarch

became a judge and relied on guilt, not merely fear, to assert his

authority. Of course, we can see that the practical application of this

is to maintain the heteropatriarchal capitalist structure despite its

internal contradictions. Anarchism and revolutionary socialism profess

to be concerned with freedom, but fascism is concerned with neither

justice nor freedom, merely with the instrumentalities of naked

domination; its various ideologies are purely opportunistic.

Furthermore, he explained that people who claim capitalism is a

sophisticated substitute for medieval society make an arrogant

presumption, and insult highly complex civilizations, both past and

present. After a criticism of Marx's theory of value, Bookchin writes

that "freedom" is still conceived as freedom from labor, not freedom for

work. The Hellenic ideal of freedom was different, though - freedom

existed for activity, not from activity. He then made abundantly clear

that the environmentalist technocracy that's being promoted is, in

reality, just a hierarchy draped in green garments. It's even more

insidious because it's camouflaged in the color of ecology, he argued -

green capitalism is attempting to present itself as sustainable.

Bookchin also emphasized that direct democracy is ultimately the most

advanced form of direct action. As I see it, direct democracy that

doesn’t exclude the ‘noncitizen’ is the expression/manifestation of a

pacifist revolution. He then proposed a future society that should be

confederally integrated and communally-oriented, seeking to decentralize

itself logistically and economically, hence the anarcho-communalism,

which is imo entirely consistent with anarcho-communism. We can indeed

not choose a ‘civilization’ that lives in hatred of the world around it

and in grim hatred of itself, with gutted cities, wasted lands, and

poisoned air and water. Marxism and therefore the broader communist

ideology, on a global level, has been heavily influenced by the

Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh - his writings shaped Vietnam's current

government. The Kurdish Rojava are similarly following Bookchin’s theory

as well. Internationally speaking, pseudo communism has been applied to

entire nations, and it was basically Leninism which invariably became

state capitalism, so I think critiquing these theories is a prerequisite

for further discussion; hence the previous and following analysis.

Sources:

www.academia.edu

www.semanticscholar.org

www.google.com