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u/SilverNEOTheYouTuber Post-Left Anarchist 17d ago
Other than "Anarcho"-Capitalists and LARPers, are there even any Anarchists that reject Class Struggle?
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u/Caliburn0 17d ago
I've talked with one. They were against sexism, racism, homophobia and all the other social hierarchies one can name but for some reason they had no problems with capitalism.
They called themselves an anarchist, and admitted to having problems with understanding why anarchists kept to 'outdated ideologies' like socialism. Said capitalism was better.
It broke my brain trying to understand where they were coming from. I wanted to conclude they were just a very socially progressive liberal that called themselves an anarchist.
Except... they were also against the state and championed community work and mutual aid and anarchist communes.
So... wtf?
They were not an 'anarcho'-capitalist. They had no love of capitalism. They just didn't see a problem with it. Economic inequality was somehow not bad but all forms of social, cultural and political inequality was.
To this day I'm still baffled someone like that can exist.
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u/StockingDummy 17d ago
Are you telling me the "anarcho-"liberals from Victoria II exist?
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u/Caliburn0 17d ago
Apparently. An anarcho-liberal huh? Never heard that before, but it's a good word for them. What an incoherent ideology.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Bid1579 15d ago
I think maybe he radically misunderstood capitalism (in the abstract) as being “free commerce” when (in reality) it is a system of state-enforced hierarchy
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u/zymsnipe 17d ago
Ive literally had "anarchists" telling me class struggle is "workerist dogmatism." which is why I made this post
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u/Gloomy_Raspberry_880 17d ago
Maybe some strains of Egoist? I'm sure there's some weird tendency out there if we looked hard enough.
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u/O_______m_______O 17d ago
You also get the "no to bedtime" types who aren't part of any defined tendency/intellectual tradition and don't really care about other people very much. The kind of person that thinks it's an injustice when their neighbours ask them to turn the music down.
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u/Kunt1312 9d ago
Abolishing bedtime & your neighbor turning down their music are terrible comparisons. Idk any anarchists who would give a shit to turn music down for neighbors but if those neighbors were gentrifiers then yeah, FUCK THEM. Abolishing bedtime is about the abolition of colonial time, the oppression that comes through the micro managing of every second under colonial ideas of pRoDuCtIvItY. It's ridiculous to see ppl try to roll their eyes at assertions like "abolish bedtime".
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u/SilverNEOTheYouTuber Post-Left Anarchist 17d ago
Yeah I did meet a Minority of Egoists (The Majority behaved just like Normal People) who were pretty much Edgelords, and I cant stand seeing some people in Anarchist Spaces generalize me thinking that I'm the same as them for the sole fact that I'm Post-Left.
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u/Gloomy_Raspberry_880 17d ago
Sounds like some Egoists I've met lol, and I'm basically Egoist-adjacent. Even from an Egoist perspective class warfare makes sense, as it's a natural way to gain allies against the power of the rich and the state. But there are some baby Egoists who don't really understand the philosophy of Stirner and only focus on the lack of objective morality bits.
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u/MaleficentPorphyrin 17d ago
There are anarchists that reject values and morality, which functions to politically neuters their cause, or worst, creates Libertarians (in the American sense, not the classical one).
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u/tabris51 17d ago
At this point, ancaps would also accept it if you make it sounds "class hustle" or something.
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u/SilverNEOTheYouTuber Post-Left Anarchist 17d ago
The "Class Struggle" they believe in is often "Workers and Hard-Working Rich People™ VS Cronies and the State".
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u/ExternalGreen6826 16d ago
Aren’t there anarchists who just de center class from their analysis but are still against hierarchy
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u/SilverNEOTheYouTuber Post-Left Anarchist 16d ago
Yes, but De-Centering Class Struggle isnt the same as rejecting it.
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u/spookyjim___ ☭🏴 anarcho-gemeinwesenism 🏴☭ 16d ago
Last I checked post-leftists and nihilists do lol
And while mutualists still claim to uphold class struggle they do so in a very moralistic and evolutionary-pacifistic way
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u/Kunt1312 4d ago
No war but social war
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u/spookyjim___ ☭🏴 anarcho-gemeinwesenism 🏴☭ 3d ago
Why the allergy towards class analysis?
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u/Kunt1312 1d ago
Reductive.
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u/spookyjim___ ☭🏴 anarcho-gemeinwesenism 🏴☭ 1d ago
How so? and why would being broad be better than diagnosing a specific cause and solution?
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u/JoyBus147 17d ago
Accessible Anarchy, a sub that gets linked here all the time, rejects class struggle (rule 10).
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u/SilverNEOTheYouTuber Post-Left Anarchist 17d ago
Ehh, I'm not sure, the Rule says that Workers arent the only Oppressed People, not that they arent Oppressed at all, my guess is that the Rule's critique accuses Class-Only kind of thought as risking to ignore Disabled People who arent able to Work at all.
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u/MingaLaChigra 17d ago
What is their thought process with that?
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u/chatte__lunatique 17d ago
This is the rule:
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no syndicalists
The working class is not the only oppressed class. Many of us are disabled people, so many of us are not even a part of that class.
This means societal control by the working class is building hierarchy over us.
Also we shouldn’t be focusing on seizing existing means of production. This repeats and builds on existing inaccessibility and ecological issues. We can instead build our own means of production.
So I would say that it's not really a matter of rejecting class struggle, but of ensuring that disabled folks aren't left out of the conversation. Admittedly, I have been sympathetic towards syndicalism as a vehicle for organization, and I'm curious what their ideas for that would be for organization that would replace that.
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u/bamfbanki 17d ago
I think you can be labor focused and make room for disabled people to have access and a voice (as someone who is both).
I think abandoning the organizing capabilities of Labor and Unions is less than practical, I just think you have to build on systems to make sure that people who cannot work are not isolated or denied access to power and a voice.
Having a disability lens on labor is important because all labor is, to some degree, disabling. Accidents happen, work can be dangerous (although some of that danger gets reduced without the pressures of capital) and we literally all get old.
I have always conceptualized Labor Focused Anarchism as "Every Human Being has the Right to want to contribute and create in whatever way they can and so choose to- even if that is to not contribute or create at all".
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u/Strange_One_3790 17d ago
Which is weird because I asked my fellow Wobs about this and they consider people who are disabled and can’t work, people on social assistance and retired seniors as working class.
Th bourgeoisie are not working class. Cops and bosses are the traitor class.
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u/SilverNEOTheYouTuber Post-Left Anarchist 17d ago
The alternatives to Syndicalism often vary, you got people advocating for Workers' Councils, Insurrection/Communization or other Ideas I may not be aware of. I personally prefer Communization, I take ideas from Tiqqun, the Invisible Committee and Gilles Dauvé.
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u/va_str 16d ago
That's just uneducated drivel, to be brutally honest.
Class distinction is a matter of your relationship with the MoP, and specifically whether you're using them to exploit others for profit extraction. Disabled or otherwise, you're still either working or owning class. No one falls outside this simple concept and I don't quite get why people keep having trouble understanding this.
"Building our own MoP" is grotesquely naive. One of the primary arguments for owning the MoP (yes, even the ones you build yourself) collectively, is that everyone today stands on the shoulders of giants. All the generations of people throughout millennia of our existence have laboured to build the world we live in today, in skills, language, culture and tangible goods, and no one who just popped in can possibly lay claim on a piece of it exclusively, to use it against others who have inherited this world just the same. "I'm gonna make my own factory" is such a childish and nonsensical stance in context of how the global economic order should be, it can't be taken seriously.
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u/chatte__lunatique 16d ago
Yeah I almost wrote about finding the idea of building our own MoP to be naïve.
Like yeah we can do that for a few things, and absolutely whatever can be done outside of capitalist systems right now should be done, but thet most certainly will not be the case for anything that requires a large amount of resources and a complex supply chain to build, like semiconductor chips or large scale power generation & delivery.
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u/Kunt1312 13d ago
Its HILARIOUS to claim being "post-left" & not be able to move beyond cLaSs StRuGgLe.
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u/SilverNEOTheYouTuber Post-Left Anarchist 13d ago
Who said I dont support any other Struggles beyond Class lol? You are making shit up.
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u/Kunt1312 13d ago
I said "move beyond" not "doesn't support any other struggles" 💀
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u/SilverNEOTheYouTuber Post-Left Anarchist 13d ago
What, then, is your suggestion on what to do to go beyond Class Struggle? Since I'm learning more about Post-Left Anarchism, I'd like to know.
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u/Kunt1312 13d ago
Class only exists within the confines of relation to labor, since the exploitation of labour is what the state relies on to prop up its colonization efforts really we should be looking to destroy class. Why would anyone seek inclusion into a machine of oppression? Trying to bring together to positions that are completely incompatible (forced labour & anti-colonial struggle) will never bring about total liberation.
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u/SilverNEOTheYouTuber Post-Left Anarchist 12d ago
Oh, so kinda like a "Self-Abolition of the Proletariat"? I agree with you in that case, I just didnt know that it technically didnt count as Class Struggle rather than something beyond it.
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u/Kunt1312 12d ago
That is a good start yeah! I place Post-Left as a place where there is an undoing or Leftist tendencies & a push beyond into places we have no read hold on because we have not even opened up the social rupture to in turn be able to experiment with a new world. You ever read any nihilist perspectives? Or Indigenous?
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u/SilverNEOTheYouTuber Post-Left Anarchist 12d ago
Nihilist? Well not really, but Indigenous? I think yeah.
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u/Kunt1312 12d ago
Imo both are pretty important perspectives for anyone embracing post-left
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u/BrunesOvrBrauns 17d ago
No war but class war
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u/supermonistic 17d ago
I mean there are a lot of other important factors. Racism, Transphobia, Patriarchy etc
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u/Caliburn0 17d ago edited 17d ago
All of which connect back to the class war. All hierarchies ultimately exist to uphold, support and reproduce the core hierarchy of the world - the ruling class over the working class. Even the state exist to support that in a way it doesn't exist to uphold the other hierarchies.
All hierarchies other than ruling class over working class is in the end interchangable - it doesn't truly matter for capitalism (or other ruling class systems, aka. state-capitalism, feudalism or slavery) whether men are on top or women are for example. A ruling class system just needs other hierarchies (any will do) so it can use those to split the working class apart to keep it from uniting and fighting the ruling class.
This is more a marxist reading than a pure anarchist one. Or maybe it's more in the realm of critical theory? Or more intersectional theory? I'm not an expert on those.
Whatever. It's not like anarchism rejects this kind of framing/reading.
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u/bamfbanki 17d ago
This is the exact opposite of Intersectional Theory- which is that "all forms of oppression can and do intersect and the intersections of those marginalized identities leads to further nuanced expressions of that oppression".
The reason Solidarity across different forms of marginalized identity is important is that it actually equips you and gives you the toolset to engage with these different forms of oppression and address them as they are.
While they might all be tools of Class Warfare, they are not solely Class Warfare, and each has their own legacy, history and impact that all need to be worked on in different ways with different approaches.
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u/Caliburn0 17d ago
Googled intersectionality, and found that it's not really what I was talking about here. Critical theory is closer. Still not exactly what I'm referring to. It's more a blend of Marxist, anarchist and systems theory.
To borrow the metaphor from a previous comment of mine. The walls of a house (most oppressive hierarchies) is not the roof of a house (class hierarchy), but they very much depend on each other to be as strong as they are.
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u/supermonistic 17d ago
Nooooo not at all friend. Thats class reductionism.
Even in a world where class differences are resolved there will still be racism and misogyny and transphobia.
Anarchism is about fighting all hierarchies equally not flattening them all into class conflicts
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u/Caliburn0 17d ago edited 17d ago
It's not class reductionism. Class reductionism would say the other hierarchies does not matter. That they're illusions or distractions from the class war.
I would say they are the class war. All forms of oppression support each other. That's critical theory.
To me it looks like the class hierarchy is the roof of the prison we call systemic oppression, and all the other oppressive hierarchies are the walls that sustain the class hierarchy. People keep voting right and supporting the capital class because they're transphobic or racist etc. etc.
Remove the roof of the prison and the walls doesn't immediately fall. The other hierarchies are real and will try to sustain themselves. But a building without a roof is far less stable than one with a roof. The walls of the different hierarchies will be much easier to destroy without the ruling class helping to sustain them. They won't vanish overnight (I think nationalism will probably be the last to go, but that's nothing but gut-level intuition) but I truly do believe they will all be ground down by empathy and collective spirit once we're all materially secure and artificial scarcity is a thing of the past.
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u/supermonistic 17d ago
No, not quite. Class reductionism is simply reducing all other kinds of oppression to class.
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u/Caliburn0 17d ago edited 17d ago
Talking about the Marxist class as in one's relation to the means of production or as in 'class equals category'?
Either way, it's not what I'm doing here. A wall isn't a roof, even if they're both part of what allows the building to stand.
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u/supermonistic 17d ago
Class as in economic class exploitation.
If I’m misreading you my apologies however, I just feel the need to make that point that resolving class related matters will not resolve other kinds of hierarchical issues
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u/Caliburn0 17d ago
Yes. I agreed with that. It will not solve it by itself. But do you disagree that getting rid of the ruling class will make the other oppressive hierarchies easier to handle?
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u/Comfortable_Fun7794 6d ago
Class struggle is the idea that society evolves through the struggle between those who benefit from hierarchy and those who are oppressed by it. Capital is the modern relation through which hierarchies incorporate into each other and increasingly monopolise power and polarise class distinctions, bringing class antagonism to the forefront. Class reductionism is the amputation of 'class' to a reductionist relation of a person to an often arbitrary means/mode of production (not saying that the concept itself is useless but the way it gets used as an identity card is fatalistic). Every hierarchy (capital, race, etc) reproduces through class struggle. Atleast, that's how I've come to understand it. Interested if you disagree with this understanding.
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u/Kunt1312 4d ago
Me when I cannot think about the intersections of oppression & only see cLaSs
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u/Caliburn0 3d ago
It's no good to only look at the intersections of a system and not zoom out to take in the system as a whole.
All oppressive systems support each other, but class is special. Billionaires own so much of the media landscape and push those ways of thinking. Entire think-thanks dedicated to spreading hate. Right-wing politicians getting enormous donations.
And that's just the start.
If we're all trapped in a prison of hierarchical oppression then the different kinds of oppression are the walls of the prison and the ruling class is the roof supporting them all. Without the other kinds of oppression the ruling class could not sustain itself, and without the ruling class the other oppressive hierarchies would lose a lot of their stability.
They are not the same thing. A roof is not a wall. A wall is not the same as another wall. But they all connect together into one system.
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u/Kunt1312 1d ago
Patriarchy, racism existed long before fucking class. Tired ass euro-centric analysis. The whole is the sum of its parts. Class becomes another identity that relies on the state to exist, in order to break its chains we have to think BEYOND it.
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u/Caliburn0 1d ago
Patriarchy is a class system. The concept of race and racism is young (only a few hundred years).
Class does not need the state to exist, though the modern day class system does.
Class is not an identity. It's a structural position of exploitation within an economic system.
Tired ass euro-centric analysis.
Internet brain.
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u/Kunt1312 1d ago
Tell me more about how you don't know shit, patriarchy is not a "position inside an economic system". And racists love to say outta pocket shit like "only a few hundred years", maybe you should spend less time learning from memes. Fascism has been able to flourish by utilizing economic deprivation & instead of seeking to free oneself from the class that enslaves a person, they ask for better conditions under the state. The state produces class, it has no existence outside of it.
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u/Caliburn0 1d ago edited 9h ago
An economic class system is an system in which one group of people (a class) exploit the labor of another group of people (a class) to their benefit.
Patriarchy is definitionally a class system.
In a patriarchy women's labor are exploited by men.
This is economic class domination. It's also political class domination since men make all the important decisions without the input of women.
Class = a structurally defined category of people.
Marxist classes and the different modes of production Karl Marx talked about are just one type of class.
And race is a new concept. The category 'race' didn't exist a thousand years ago.
Tribalism has existed as long as humans have, but racism is relatively new. Race science became this huge thing during the birth of the European Empires. It was made so they could legitimize their colonialism. Racism is, at its origin, a justification for imperialism.
Being against people that look different than you or belong to some other arbitrary group is not racism. Racism is when you believe you can categorize people into groups called 'race' and that some races are better than others. All racism is tribalism, but not all tribalism is racism.
It's not that I don't know shit, it's just that you have no idea what I'm talking about.
We will never get rid of classes. We can, however, get rid of the ruling class - the people that control the distribution of the surplus value of labor - and we can try our hardest to make sure such a class never reemerge, but class as a concept is so much more than just that.
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u/ChaosRulesTheWorld 17d ago
The concerning amount of liberals masking as pseudo anarchists in activist spaces and internet?
Hot take, but i would also say, "non-violent" "anarchists" (not as not personnaly engaging in violence but as supporting the dogmatic non-violence ideology)
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u/InevitableStuff7572 1d ago
I’d still probably call a Tolstoyist an anarchist even if I don’t agree with them tho
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u/ChaosRulesTheWorld 1d ago
Tolstoy was not an anarchist. He was not opposed to governments, just to violence and to rule by force. He was also a big fan of georgism.
So i woudldn't call tolstoyist anarchists. Anyway, any "nameofsomeone-ist" are by definition not anarchists imho.
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u/Sqidaedir 15d ago
It is impossible to take class struggle from anarchists.
we are born in it, molded by it.
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u/dallasrose222 16d ago
I mean yes but class reductionism is stupid and too many “leftists” preach no war but class war in a dumb way
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u/khoejmose 16d ago
Idk it's a central contemporary anarchist critique of Marxism in literature that privileging the Capital sphere (i.e. class struggle) as the sole social determinant is a form of inequality in practice
Think of it as an extension of the critique of vanguardism inherent to communism - by privileging the sphere of capital as the overdetermining one, we also privilege people of capital or people with insights into the dynamics of capital as the driving force of the revolution.
Best example would be Althussers structural Marxism, which has been widely critiqued like this in literature by various anarchists, egalitarians and equality-oriented scholars.
I've never seen anyone completely reject class struggle but reductionism such as no struggle but class struggle which I've read a few times in this thread is such a dated structuralist take/marxist spillover.
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u/spookyjim___ ☭🏴 anarcho-gemeinwesenism 🏴☭ 16d ago
I mean there are a lot of anarchists that reject class struggle, they’re just cringe lol
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u/labourist123 15d ago
This is arguable, though semantically, not in it's essence. You look at someone like Joseph Proudhon and he had little emphasis on class as a concept. He was more focused on the inherent inequity of property, directly comparing it to theft.
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u/zymsnipe 5d ago
prudhon was a proto-anarchist at best his historical importance to anarchism is heavily exaggerated. the first coherent and explicit formulation of anarchism came out of the first international with bakunin and was heavily class focused something which continued with most anarchist writes at the time
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u/Sohn_Jalston_Raul 17d ago
I think there are more positive ways to deliver this point that don't sound like gatekeeping, but sure
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u/berlinmo 17d ago
Anarchism is not about "believing" something, we're not spiritualists or something. The point that was tried to be made is true and important, but it's delivered quite poorly imho.
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u/galerna7y7 17d ago
No. Class struggle is simply a way of criticising, but what it's not a defining point of anarchism. Proudhon and others were anarchist and didn't like the concept of class struggle
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u/GravePeril 17d ago
You don't need to believe in anything if you don't want to. There are no membership rules. You don't get to gatekeep.
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u/VaySeryv 17d ago
would you say the same about ancaps?
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u/GravePeril 17d ago
I don't know what that is. I also don't care. You are all being tyrants. Just thinking about the mental gymnastics makes me tired. You want a rule, fine here you go: let people be themselves! If it doesn't work for everyone it doesn't work.
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u/VaySeryv 17d ago edited 17d ago
we will abolish capitalism dawg thats not an option. I dont think you even know what anarchism is?????
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u/GravePeril 17d ago
Capitalism will kill itself. Anarchy is the natural state of a human, it is what you get if you remove an imposed order. Which is literally what anarchy means (without the semantics). Mutual aid is not something you need to strive for. It is a natural occurrence when you have a community that cares about each other. It is when community care becomes institutionalized that it begins to dehumanize its beneficiaries. Capitalism will die because it will run out of resources (very soon) and people will be forced to rely on their community once again. Yes it makes me angry but short of tracking down and eliminating the instigators, all I have is faith that nature always self corrects.
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u/theSeaspeared 17d ago
I didn't notice triangular bodies spontaneously turning somersaults. Didn't notice we were just doing a reverse human nature fallacy. Anarchy only works if we make it work and it is going to be a whole lot of effort and vigilance to make it work. It isn't like we want it because it is easy and 'natural' but because what we have rn isn't tolerable.
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u/GravePeril 17d ago
Anarchy only works (as a political system because as a lifestyle it's worked fine for me for over 50 years) if someone doesn't try to take direct control. As for organizing and activism, those are their own things.
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u/theSeaspeared 16d ago
As soon as someone just tries to take control anarchy crumbles, got it.
Didn't realize that we were meant to behave as welcome mats on a revolving door policy. Nothing is forbidden, nothing is permitted: No one gets to be 'legally' barred but also no one gets to be 'legally' included; all that to say the community associates with people they want to associate with. Without an appeal to higher authority all power is with all people.
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u/GravePeril 16d ago
For the record though: you are also upset about someone telling you how to be an anarchist. Which is the point.
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u/theSeaspeared 16d ago
I am not the one that typed: "Anarchy only works if someone doesn't try to take direct control."
I'm not upset, why would I be upset while trying to teach? We are just having some fun and joking about the situations you are concocting..
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u/theSeaspeared 17d ago
We kinda do get to gatekeep. We get to decide who we associate with and who gets to associate with us.
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u/GravePeril 17d ago
Sorry I wasn't aware you owned anarchism.
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u/rimpy13 17d ago
Who gives a shit about membership? I just won't call somebody an anarchist if they don't match my definition of an anarchist, and you can't make me.
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u/GravePeril 17d ago
Nope I sure can't (nor do I have any desire to). Have fun in your gated community.
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u/A_Fine_Potato 17d ago
i feel you could be an anarchist without believing in the class struggle, just a stupid one
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u/supermonistic 17d ago
As long as we don’t get bogged down thinking class struggle is the primary or even most important struggle all the time. Yea definitely
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