One of your Anarchist pets you say? How does this pet system work?

Even anarchists can desire a guiding hand. Even better when said hand gives headpats!

Well I had a bad experience, which made me research the history of the party I was in, and its predecessors, and the underlying ideology; and I found leninism and its branches (ML, trotskyism, maoism, etc) hold as a core tenet that there is a small group of people (the vanguard) who must have absolute uncontested authority over all others and must eliminate all contestation. Regardless of whether you believe that ideology by itself is justifiable, it has historically been used over and over as a rhetorical hammer to justify and fortify the power of power-hungry individuals (this is also true of other marxist branches, even beginning with Marx himself). I learnt “co-secretary” means supreme leader, “materialism” means trust me bro, “democratic centralism” means shut the fuck up, and “petty-bourgeois” means you are a bad person regardless of your actual deeds or social situation.

I also realized that the party sociology was deeply divided, with the upper ranks being political science graduates who were planning a career within the system while the lower ranks thought they were fighting against the system. Votes were a masquerade in which the upper ranks decided what the best outcome would be before discussing how it could be passed — there was absolutely no belief in any “collective wisdom”, only shepherds looking to guide their flock. None of this is part of leninist doctrine, but the social split and patriarchal outlook absolutely were characteristic of Lenin’s party — and is it a wonder that technocrats who look down on the common people would be attracted to an ideology that promotes there being a small cadre of very smart people who should yield absolute power over the rest of them?

All this sounds a bit naive of me; I sort of knew about this stuff before joining, but I didn’t really think it could happen to me, you know? I thought 1920s USSR had little in common with my life, and I just wanted to support some leftist organization that had at least some bite and radical character. I wouldn’t have though it necessary to read all these books and articles on the subject beforehand. Probably had I read them before, I wouldn’t really have grokked them anyway.

So yes I do believe at the very least leninism is fundamentally rotten. Revolutionary leninist parties turn into sects, electoral leninist parties turn into alternate career paths for the social-conscious lower managerial class. I also regard marxism as a mere historical artifact due to its keystone (materialist dialectics) being pseudoscience that can be used to claim or explain anything and glaring omissions in its social analysis. I do think “post-marxist” thought can be very interesting though; that is, thought that is in line with marxist lineage but deconstructing parts of the marxist orthodoxy.

And I wouldn’t write off a person based on the organization they find themselves in, since many people just want to help and find themselves in one organization or another based on luck. I’m sure many left-anarchists are assholes but I don’t think we’ll ever see a dictatorship that uses left-anarchism as its ideological underpinnings, for obvious reasons.

The point in anarchism is that nobody can be trusted to have coercive power over others, because there’s always that one dipshit who will seek that position of power for selfish ends, or then the position of power corrupts a person to become a dipshit.

Dipshit anarchists aren’t a problem in that sense because they never get into a hierarchical position of power because there are none.

Economies and societies are so complex that none of the models we imagine on the whiteboard are able to stay stable across centuries (or even decades).

We know, for instance, that capitalism has to be heavily regulated to prevent things like pollution, mistreatment of workers, shoddy goods and anticapitalist practices. We also know that over time, government regulators will get captured by business interests. The environment and workforce / customer base suffer, small businesses cannot compete and all the money ends up at the top with everyone else bankrupt.

So far we haven’t been able to implement any system that doesn’t degrade into authoritarianism, and eventually a one-party state with a dictator, or that doesn’t get overrun by another, more militant society intent on plundering their labor and resources.

The vast majority of capitalists believe in the possibility of an ever expanding market on a planet with finite resources.

actually that’s not true. spaceflight is explicitely researched because they understand that you can’t have an infinitely growing economy on a finite planet.

You can be an anarchist and poke fun at naive interpretations of anarchism. I don’t think you have to read “all anarchists are like these hypothetical human pets” into that joke.

Tankies think that the state should own the means of production. Sure, they’ll then claim that the workers own the state, but in reality it’s just owned by the political elite.

Anarchy is more about dissolving ownership. Why would it be right to keep people out of a factory by force just because you work there?

If you have reason to believe they will cause direct or indirect harm, sure, but ownership is no indication of that. In fact production may be causing more harm than good, in which case it would be right to stop the factory’s operations, with force against the workers if necessary.

equates it with anarcho primitivism

Hey, it specifies solarpunk. The fellas have at least solar panels in there. And they know how to use pharamaceuticals.

I’ll grant that gathering medication in the bushes is a little on the nose.

It’s paternalistic, all right, but that’s something different. I have a toddler, I should know.

I think there’s going to have to be a long drawn out transitional period both technologically and socially.

We’d probably need some sort of socialist state in between, and to replace corporations, and eventually other forms of private enterprise, with employee owned and ran co-ops.

You’re right to say something as complex a chip fabrication would go out the window if we tried to do this overnight, but I’d like to think localized manufacturing will get us at some point in the mid-to-distant future.

Industry and anarchism are not mutually exclusive. There obviously would be very little industry left in a post-industrial, post-collapse world so I don’t think that particular example is too relevant.

Anarchism takes no stances on the scale or level of industrialization of a society. Anarchist Spain had factories. The whole anarchist federation there stemmed from workers unions. Anarchism also does not mean a lack of organization or a lack of rules the way that “anarchy” is often portrayed by the status quo. It’s just that the organization happens horizontally and without coercion.

If some place is fucking up the environment, then you organize on the regional level (delegate councils or however the system is structured) to lessen cooperation with the problematic community until they stop doing that.

Edit: If some neigbours continue to be dicks, then you can just go to war. Inb4 “Checkmate anarchists, killing fascts in the spanish civil war sounds a bit coercive!”

I mean, pretty much you get a group of people together to buils/maintain/run the infrastructure because it needs done. As for the community upstream, have a nice chat and if that doesn’t work, do violence. The most important part is setting the conditions so that a self-sustaining state or similar such group capable of enacting large-scale coercion or hierarchy is difficult/impossible

Most of what I’m going to say here is stuff I learned/thought about a decade ago. I went to the Porcupine Freedom Festival (Porcfest) in college, the largest libertarian get together in the US (it took over a mid-size campsite for a week). What I learned was hardcore libertarians tend to be anarchists. A lot of what I heard from others was centered around individuals being engaged in their own governance.

In one case that was a blockchain voting system where a person essentially owned their voting registration instead of getting registered with the state. The more interesting one was a presentation that put forth that the best organized groups are in sizes of eight. Therefore the best government system would be a council system in which individuals sort themselves into groups of eight, then choose one of them to be part of a group of eight groups, and so on until a country has built up a national council that directly traces each member to every individual they represent.

Based on those I think what most anarchists take issue with in our current world (of the US) is that the government comes out every four years to say “hey, here are some people to vote for, take your pick.” It’s a lot more top down than it might look on the surface, and anarchists demand a bottom up approach.

If you want an interesting portrayal of hard libertarian/anarchist ideals, I recommend The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, which is about a libertarian revolution on the moon.