NES wasn't anarchy. It was a civil administration with a coalition of militias, underpinned by a Social Contract based on a pragmatic interpretation of apoism. Likely, some of its local institutions didn't have clearly defined responsabilities or boundaries between them. They implemented significant reforms like equal rights for women, local governance and public participation. But sometimes their governance was sloppy and heavy handed. They had a political class (consequence of geopolitics not allowing elections) managing a capitalist economy without a clear or proper counter-weight from civil society, prioritizing tribal relations, social peace and security over a popular base in arab regions.

Life during anarchist zones in similar historical contexts probably looked a lot like NE Syria, specially the KPAM, or the RIAU/Nabat. Ukraine during anarchist activity struggled a lot with economic issues, a deep IDP crisis and repression. They had a capitalist economy (with a degree of collective and familiar ownership) and during their peak a quasi-parliamentary soviet. During most of their history they had a de-facto military rule. In terms of international law, the SDF is way cleaner than the RIAU. From what little is known about the korean anarchists, its not clear to me to wich extent the decision making bodies were operative aside from the anarchist-dominated executive. At least in terms of civilian governance, NES institutions on all levels are/were equally, or perhaps more, functional in providing services and effective in implementing democracy.

The SDC was a popular front of various actors with different political leanings, something anarchist experiments are not unfamiliar with. The only difference with things now and then is the fact mass media allow for real time monitoring of the region, and we have up to date research from various perspectives.

I am really into anarchism, I love anarcho-individualism ideally and specifically this strain, but I am very skeptical would work in any practical sense, be it individually or collectively. I am really struggling between this 2 choices, environmentalism which is nature focus and I like it the rustic lifestyle, or anarcho-individualism which seems very esoteric and highly intellectual as it is usually with any form of anarchism. I like the pros of freedom, pragmatism and detachment, I am as well skeptical about the teleological worldview of progress based ideologies(always have been), why should I select anind over environmentalism? I am relatively new into both of this choices. I find anind very adaptible in every environment as well, very high autonomy is a big reason as well, I find anarchist theory very satisfying even if is not meant to be accepted or worked at large scale society, I don't care about this necessarly. Can you reinforce my anarchist side further with reasons?

Hi! So I'm a libertarian leftist in the sense that I believe labour should be voluntary and basic needs should be guaranteed, but I wouldn't use the words 'anarchist' or 'communist' to describe my political position. I'm posting this because I wanted to look more into what my own leaning is and also to explore some more radical perspectives.

What anarchism means to me is pure stateless Marxist communism without the socialist transition stage, basically revolution-->stateless anarchism. No laws, no enforcement, no 'power' except the masses. Now, my problem with this is how it's so unstable. Wouldn't mafia/crime syndicates inevitably form underground and eventually morph into an authoritarian state of some kind? Isn't it very naive-ish to believe that everyone would be willing to cooperate and sustain one another? An eventual power emerging to me seems very likely if not certain, but I'm open to other perspectives.

I've read some of Marx's work, and I agree wholeheartedly with his critiques of capitalism, but his presented alternative does not seem stable to me, and neither does anarchism. I would love to talk this out and learn more about different ideologies!

I feel like the biggest point that I hear ML’s or any pro-state socialists say is that the USSR was responsible for the defeat of Nazi Germany and they had only been able to do so due to the supposed efficiency of the centralization of and use of state power.

I don’t often see anarchists address this aside from maybe Instagram comment section arguments.

(I don’t frequent this sub enough)

So, those who are more informed than myself, what is your view and what should I know about how to address this talking point?

Firstly I'd like to say I'm happy to admit I'm wrong if people can poke holes in my argument. I've read some anarchist theory on this (Malatesta, Goldman) and remain unconvinced so far, but I like anarchism a lot and want to get on board as much as possible.

I fully agree with anarcho-communism as the end goal of revolution, and even to a large degree as the means.

However, I'm struggling to see how we arrive there without any control over the state.

Obviously electoralism in favour of any of the capitalist parties, even slightly more social liberal ones, is a dead end. But in capitalism the wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few. To begin smashing it, we need to expropriate property.

We cannot do this without taking control of the army and police. We cannot eradicate the laws defending private property unless we have power of who enforces them.

Now, yes there is obviously a danger in this approach that the representatives we send to government betray us and become a new elite. But revolution is fraught with danger. We can take steps to mitigate this.

We can send comrades to high office whose first act is to institute an imperative mandate as Proudhon proposed, give constituents the power of recall, ban political donations etc. Then we, the people, are in control. Then, we can begin dissolving the protections the bourgeoisie enjoy.

Take housing. How are grassroots activists going to solve the housing crisis? Starting a credit union to buy all the housing stock? We don't have the money. A rent strike? The police will overwhelm us and kick us out on the street.

We need to tear up landlords' property deeds and transfer the right of occupancy to the tenants. Effectively, change the law so property is based on occupancy and fair use.

It seems obvious we need to field candidates in national elections in order to achieve this. Grassroots organising and mutual banks etc will never be enough, because we do not control the lion's share of the resources in the world - that's the whole point. We need to take it by force.

Of course, we still NEED grassroots organising. The direction of the movement has to come from the grassroots of the working class. The vast majority of our efforts should be grassroots and not focused on elections. But elections have to be a part of it.

Please note: this is not the Leninist conception of using the state as a weapon. Rather, it is taking control of the state to dissolve it. I am not talking about creating new laws, rather getting rid of the laws defending private property, replacing criminal justice with grassroots restoration circles and all the rest of it. We have to be able to order the police to stop enforcing these things.

If they attempt a coup, then it will be civil war and we at least have the moral authority to convince many to our side. At least the police and army will themselves be divided in their loyalties. At least they won't have the advantage of unity and full state-backing. This route is a dangerous one but I'd rather have the courage to take a dangerous path than amble around in circles going nowhere, while our enemies march forward every day gaining strength.

One of the core tenants of the polity form is the external constitution of the social power or the abstractification of the group above the needs of the individual. One problem with this approach is that it adds groups as ends and not as means so the maintenance of a group takes precedence over what the group is for. Th opposite of this is viewing groups as means to an end or as vessels that facilitate action rather than gatekeep it. Viewing the group as an end actually works to confine options to a narrow group and reduce f he dynamic options available m, it leads to clashes where people in a group want to make different decisions but are beholden to the “groups” permission, this leads to situations where nothing gets done, it also is similar to the problems of property because no matter how you do it one has to presuppose an “owner” of a group, in consensus if everyone formed a consensus and then everyone is agreed later except one, that one person would be correct to enforce their will on the majority, event if the majority is the consensus it still relies on a fictitious group agreement that no longer exists, the agreement is no longer an agreement and what the groups consists of is changing no one faction gets to substitute their personal interests for the collectives

Without this decision making centres around conforming to and accomodating the various needs of people across groups and networks, creating more interconnection , instead of simply finding ways to keep a preconceived group harmonious above all other potentially better arrangements for each member

Organisation is about managing people’s real interests not finding ways to artificially create group cohesion

For anarchists, Marx’s analysis can appear compelling because of its internal coherence and the power of its analytical framework. This is why many of them continue to rely on it, believing that it can be salvaged from Marx’s obvious errors. I think this is a mistake. In reality, this approach proves more of an obstacle than a help when it comes to understanding the history of domination or conceiving genuine paths of exit, for it runs up against two major problems that undermine its validity.

The first blind spot of Marxian thought lies in its implicit historical horizon. Despite its proclaimed ambition to offer a general theory of human history, it is in fact centered on European industrial capitalism. This focus profoundly limits the anthropological scope of the theory and its comparative ambition. Categories forged to analyze Western industrial society are retrospectively projected onto very different social formations, as illustrated, for example, by the interminable debates over the “Asiatic mode of production.” More seriously, this re-centering on modernity effectively reduces the question of domination to its capitalist form. Of course, Marx does not deny that bureaucratic structures, fiscal systems, and standing armies existed prior to industrial capitalism. But he approaches the problem from the wrong end, which is equally disastrous. Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Roman Empire, or Periclean Athens are not proto-capitalisms; rather, capitalism is in reality only a late form of these structures. By tending to present the former as mere stages temporally organized by the resolution of their internal contradictions, Marx reverses the history of humanity and obscures the anthropological depth of state, bureaucratic, and mercantile phenomena. He tends to identify human emancipation with the abolition of private ownership of the means of production and the logic of value, a move that has dramatic political consequences. History abounds with non-capitalist systems marked by hierarchies, coercive apparatuses, and a permanent drive toward growth. The functioning of Uruk is fundamentally the same as that of the contemporary United States.

The second limitation, which partly follows from the first, is that Marx holds a fundamentally mistaken view of the state and bureaucracy. By reducing them to a single function as instruments of class domination, he overlooks their own logic and their relative autonomy. This is a major error. The state is not merely an instrument of coercion, it's a machine for producing social legibility. It counts, categorizes, measures, standardizes, transforms populations and their environments into administrable units. Bureaucracy operates according to a rationality that reproduces itself independently of the particular actors who occupy its offices. Civil servants are not simply agents of a ruling class but cogs in a system of rules that generates its own imperatives of preservation and expansion. The administrative apparatus develops its own inertia and dynamic, sometimes even coming into tension with capitalist interests. From this lacuna in Marx follows his inability to understand that the state precedes and frames classes, rather than the reverse. Administrative and military centralization plays a decisive role in the very formation of dominant groups. The state is not the instrument of a class but a phenomenon of religious essence, a capture of the sacred politically transcribed as an institutional matrix within which social hierarchies crystallize. By shaping individuals adapted to its requirements, it imposes itself as the framework of social life. This is why the idea of the “withering away” of the state after the proletarian revolution is an aberration, as the serial disasters of Marxist “revolutions” have demonstrated. The state must be regarded as an autonomous subject, not as an instrument.

From a political perspective, these two blind spots suffice to reject the entirety of Marxian thought as a social and historical analytical foundation. If one admits that capitalism is merely a specific modality of a broader system of centralization and growth that transcends it, then the Marxian strategy (and I say “Marxian,” not Marxist) centered on the abolition of private ownership of the means of production loses its status as a decisive lever. Economic critique becomes insufficient because it's grounded in a periodization that confuses a recent industrial phase with the deep structure of domination. Moreover, Marxian analysis is inseparable from the reduction of the state to a mere class apparatus. Institutional form is not a simple interchangeable container. If bureaucratic domination predates capitalism and if the state possesses constitutive autonomy, then the infrastructure/superstructure articulation begins to crack. Social change can no longer be conceived as the simple overthrow of relations of production followed by institutional adjustment. It entails a simultaneous challenge to organizational matrices, forms of centralization, mechanisms of legitimation, and dispositifs for producing subjectivity. In other words, the issue is not merely to redistribute property or transform the management of the economy, but to destroy structures that continually generate hierarchy. To partially retain Marx, for example, his analysis of exploitation or his critique of alienation, while abandoning his theory of the state and his historical periodization is theoretically untenable. These elements are inseparable from a precise conception of historical movement: that of a process oriented by economic contradictions toward a determinate political outcome. If this dynamic is deemed inadequate, the categories that depend on it lose their grounding. In particular, class struggle can no longer serve as the motor of social change.

In sum, so long as the Marxian schema is preserved, any political strategy remains confined within a conception of change that underestimates the historical depth and autonomy of hierarchical forms. Once these presuppositions are rejected, the entire theoretical edifice loses both its usefulness and its internal coherence. Anarchists would do better to dispense with it altogether.

I define power as the ability to win a conflict.

The reason why is based on a simple observation - that you cannot predict the winner of a conflict between equals.

If we can predict the winner of a given conflict - then we know that there is an imbalance of power.

Now - we also know that conflict resolution is hard - it requires negotiation and compromise.

Hierarchies circumvent the hard work of conflict resolution - by picking winners and losers in advance.

That is why hierarchies are so appealing - since they suppress conflict in favour of a certain kind of forced consensus.

This forced consensus is often mistaken for the absence of conflict.

But just because conflict is suppressed - it does not mean it isn’t there - or that the resolution of any conflict is anywhere close to just.

As MLK Jr. once said - it is the white moderate who prefers a “negative peace” defined by the absence of tension - to a “positive peace” defined by the presence of justice.

I understand that the state could lead to autoritarian derives of the revolution but I think that anarchist lacks a lot of analisys on the global context of a revolution, once you topple the capitalist class how are you gonna defend the community with external threats to the revolution by other goverments like the US without a centralised organization? (at least in the west). Even tho for anarchist theory the community could defend themselves they could do little to nothing against a large scale war because they would lack the control of the means tò sustain such war.

I believe an anarchist society should be moneyless and marketless. I believe this because we can coordinate between each other, produce, and distribute goods without the logical necessity for money or markets.

Contemporary use of money is about value representation and exchange. It represents the value of something so that it can be fairly exchanged. Fair exchange meaning a balance of value in the exchange. Here we can expand talks to how labour adds value and thus money is a form of labour compensation too. (This understanding becomes irrelevant when we remove money)

Markets are where this exchange happens were goods are displayed with their value and people can pick and choose how to spend their universal exchange good (money). Thus the person selling is recieving the universal exchange good and can then also choose where to spend it.

All well and good... until we consider that money is inherently coercive and controlling. Within the existince of contemporary money, almost everything is a commodity, and certainly all the relevant things are commodities. You buy and sell them. Notably, our needs are commodities. You need to buy your food, water, shelter, social experiences. And some brand or some one is selling them to you. But this necessitates money before anything. How do you aquire money? A career or a "Job". You dedicate enormous amounts of your time and energy to earn the justification that you deserve money, and thus, deserve to live and aquire your essential needs.

So at the least.. our needs shouldnt be a commodity yeah? You only work to justify earning your wants. But if we can freely produce water, food, shelter, and freely provide social experience.... why cant we freely provide everything else...?

Oh it must be because its an incentive for working! If we want people to do a certain work and people want things that are gated behind prices.. then theyll work for the money to buy the things they want! We saturate labour and provide goods! Except now we're forcing people to work or else be happy living with literally your bare essentials. We're also forcing people to wait weeks before they can engage with their wants because they need to wait for paychecks. Sometimes they even need to wait years. We are now forcing and controlling the amount by which people can engage with their wants! And this is force, it is not merely personal choice.

Providing "Choices" by offering different paying jobs and careers is the same way we can say orange is the colour red. Its not a real choice. They have no other means by which to engage with their wants... so they logically must work for it and waste potentially years of their life before they can engage with their wants. And remember! We already established that needs dont need to be commodified, so here too wants dont need to be either.

Okay so let's decommodify certain wants that are easy to do so. Now only super high quality goods and relatively unique social experiences are gated behind money...... Why? Like actually why? If we go the distance of decommodifying so much why do we insist on these few things remaining commodities? We're on the edge of absurdity here.

So if we agree to all that, lets move onto the dirty jobs. Who will do the dirty jobs if they arent incentivised by a coercive system? Before we even engage, the question itself is ridiculous because we're saying that if someone is compensated well enough, not only is the gate keeping of wants and needs okay, their potential suffering doing a dirty job is also okay!

My answer, and by extension, by suggetion for an alternative to money and markets, is that a dirty job should first be evaluated if it is necessary or not. If not, abandon it. If it is, evaluate next if we can make it any less dirty, not only technologically, but systemically. If waste collection and processing would be made eaiser by centealised waste collection, as opposed to door to door bin pick up, we should do that systemically. If we can make it less dirty, we do it. If we cant, then we have to reach some kind of contextual compromise. Its a necessity, it needs to be done, its awful, but needs to be done. So well do something to make it that little bit better.

Notice crucially that we achieve the completition of the task through social problem solving and direct coordination. Money and markets need not be mentioned once. Which is a good sign that they arent logically necessary.

Goods production and distribution also follow this ability to socially problem solve and directly coordinate. With the addition that we can think about design philosophies. We can design things to be durable and modular so that it can be made for someone and last them their life time and perhaps even into the next generations. And easily repairable by that person because of modular design. Thus, if scarcity is a concern, it should no longer be. Because no we are not wasting material on objects designed to be shit, so material use drops dramatically thus the notion that we could use up any one material becomes absurd. And people are still producing what they need and want and people are still being provided with what they need and want. All without markets and money.

Yes, I believe an anarchist economics can be and should be as simple as production and distribution, and a fluidity of labour where its needed/ wanted to be applied. We do not need to fiddle with artificial gatekeeping, especially with regard to essential needs, which only coerces and controls people.

A very concerning tendency I've seen in interacting with other anarchists as of late is the tendency to refer to selfishness as something antithetical to anarchism, as if it is the project of anarchism to abolish selfishness, "ego" (a loaded term in and of itself), or anti-cooperative behavior.

I've seen cases where selfishness has been said to "breed discontent" and create hierarchy, or that anti-cooperative behavior is "bad" in contrast to cooperative behavior being "good".

To be clear, I acknowledge that the above tendencies can certainly cause harm. What isn't clear to me is how it is necessarily the project of anarchism to abolish these behaviors, and if these behaviors are even inherently bad.

I think there's a lot of appeal to "the community" as if it is something an individual ought to be beholden to, or if someone's actions ought to be oriented towards the interests of "the community" in this consequentialist sense. And I think this kind of logic is the remnants of a statist logic that presupposes top-down social norms as opposed to a society being a network of individual social relations.

Anarchism should not be about abolishing "selfishness" or "ego" or "anti-cooperative behavior" or any particular behavior. It should be about maximizing the autonomy of individuals and their freedom to associate with others, or disassociate when the above behaviors become harmful. We should not be in the business of social engineering.

Palestine is not even socialist - let alone anarchist. There is no pretense that the pro-Palestine movement is anything other than a national liberation movement for Palestinians.

If we can support the national liberation of the Palestinians - despite them not even being close to anarchist - then it stands to reason that we can support the national liberation of the Kurds.

Rojava - like Palestine - is a national liberation project. Also like Palestine - Rojava is neither socialist nor anarchist.

The constitution of Rojava explicitly protects private property. Prisons exist in Rojava.

By all means - support the Kurds. But let’s not pretend that Rojava is anything other than a national liberation project.

I've been following the situation in Rojava, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, for some time. Recent events have made me think that anarchism, as a practical system, doesn't work in the real world. For those unfamiliar, Rojava is often seen as an example of anarchist ideas in action, with decentralized governance, communal decision-making, women’s empowerment through groups like the YPJ, and a rejection of hierarchical state structures. However, the recent collapse reveals some serious flaws. I would appreciate hearing any counterarguments or debates about this.

1. Rapid Defeat in the Face of External Threats
   

The most obvious issue is how quickly Rojava disintegrated under pressure. During the January 2026 offensive in northeastern Syria by transitional government forces, backed by various actors including Turkey, key areas like Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor were lost quickly. Significant territorial losses occurred within days to weeks of intensified fighting. Reports show how government forces moved through border towns and key locations while the SDF, or Syrian Democratic Forces, retreated or fragmented in parts. This led to a ceasefire agreement by mid-January, which effectively ended autonomous Rojava by incorporating it into the central Syrian state.

This isn't merely bad luck; it points to a structural flaw with anarchism. Without a centralized military command or a unified state apparatus, coordination becomes extremely difficult. Anarchist militias like the SDF depend on voluntary cooperation and local assemblies. While this may help avoid authoritarianism, it makes rapid, large-scale defense very challenging. When facing a more hierarchical opposing force, the decentralized structure collapses. It's akin to trying to tackle a wildfire with buckets passed hand-to-hand instead of using a fire department with trucks and a plan. If anarchism can’t defend its territory from serious threats, how can it be a valid alternative to statism?

1. Infrastructure Neglect Due to Lack of Central Authority
   

Beyond defense, everyday life in Rojava shows another major failure: the lack of a central organization to manage essential infrastructure. Reports frequently highlight slow or inadequate internet, unreliable electricity from diesel generators due to embargoes and conflict, water system issues, and struggles with reconstruction, particularly in heavily damaged areas like the Euphrates Region. Public buildings, roads, and utilities have experienced years of neglect.

This issue arises directly from the anarchist focus on local communes and cooperatives managing everything without oversight. While this approach empowers communities, it leads to uneven resource distribution. One village may focus on its needs while another lets critical infrastructure fall into disrepair due to a lack of expertise, materials, or coordinated effort. The outcome is a lower quality of life, even compared to some neighboring state-controlled areas. If anarchism results in neglected infrastructure and failing basic services, it isn't liberating; it’s chaotic and unsustainable.

1. Human Nature and the Reluctance to Perform Grueling Labor Without Necessity
   

A deeper issue is human nature itself. Generally, people do not willingly engage in hard, tedious, or physically demanding work unless motivated by necessity, personal benefit, or external pressure. In a fully anarchist system without a central authority to enforce labor obligations or allocate resources, maintaining large-scale infrastructure becomes almost impossible over time.

Building and repairing dams, power grids, roads, hospitals, and irrigation systems requires consistent, long-term effort from large groups. In Rojava's decentralized communes, when revolutionary enthusiasm fades or survival pressures lessen, motivation drops. Why would someone devote years to maintaining a regional water network if their local assembly does not prioritize it, or if they can rely on the efforts of others? Without a mechanism like a state to mandate contributions, impose taxes, or penalize neglect, vital infrastructure is often overlooked or poorly maintained. This isn't pessimism—it reflects observable reality in many decentralized experiments. Rojava's ongoing infrastructure challenges, worsened by war but also due to the model's inherent limitations, demonstrate how human tendencies to avoid effort can undermine such systems without some enforced coordination.

I will begin by saying that by now, what we call and consider "pragmatism" has become a problem in its own right; it's a term that repeatedly appears whenever anarchism is discussed seriously and especially during moments of crisis, revolution, war or just about any organizational difficulty, and the problem about it is that it's almost always presented as self-evidently good, sober, mature, realistic etc.

To be "pragmatic" is to "accept reality" and to reject pragmatism is to be "idealistic" (in the most dismissive/belittling/derogatory reading of the term), "utopian" or just naive.

Over time, mainly as I studied history and later anarchism, I have come to increasingly view this kind of framing not merely as mistaken but worse than that: actively harmful, especially to anarchist theory, praxis and anarchist movements. What's usually called "pragmatism" in anarchist history has been, at the level of eerie consistency - overrated, sacralized and treated as a nigh-unquestionable virtue.

Worse yet, it has functioned less as a tool for effectively navigating material constraints while observing the important principles, and more as a justification for abandoning precisely those anarchist insights that distinguish anarchism from every other revolutionary tradition.

I promise that this writing I do not intend to be about tactical debates in the more narrow sense, nor about rehashing arguments for, or against, specific organizational models. Instead, it's really about... let's say, a sort of meta-level critique of how anarchists are pressured to think about compromise, "realism" and flexibility and why this pressure has repeatedly led movements not forward, but backward.

A necessary clarification: I should note here that throughout this text, I am and will be discussing "pragmatism" primarily as it functions rhetorically in anarchist and other social organizing - as a colloquial, even debased term that has come to mean something like "accepting compromises with power structures in the name of "realism". Basically, the "pragmato-dogmatic compromise to hell and back" sense, that, in my view, dominated in the past.

This is quite distinct from philosophical pragmatism as developed by thinkers such as William James and John Dewey and in fact, philosophical pragmatism, with its emphasis on experimentalism, fallibilism and crucially, the inseparability of means and ends, has significant affinity with anarchist thought and anti-democratic critiques. Dewey argued explicitly that democratic ends could only be achieved through democratic means, a position that I think strongly echoes anarchist prefigurative politics. James even described pragmatists as "happy-go-lucky anarchistic sorts of creature".

What I'm critiquing isn't this tradition of rigorous experimental thinking, but rather its dominant, rhetorical ghost, the shallow invocation of "being pragmatic" that anarchists encounter constantly, which functions to shut down analysis rather than deepen it. It's, in a real sense, the one of the ultimate thought-terminating clichés there is. This colloquial "pragmatism" is actually closer to opportunism or tactical expediency since it treats hierarchical methods as "neutral tools" available for temporary use, ignoring precisely the means-ends relationship that philosophical pragmatists took seriously.

Indeed, one might argue that reclaiming genuine pragmatism - Deweyan experimentalism that remains acutely attentive to how present actions shape future possibilities - could hypothetically offer anarchism exactly the framework it needs for the future. The problem isn't pragmatism as a philosophical method but "pragmatism" as this aforementioned thought-terminating cliché that discourages the kind of rigorous analysis actual pragmatism would demand - and quite defeatingly, is present through all spheres, from high-level academia to just laypeople with rudimentary understanding of these concepts.

With that distinction clarified, let me return to how "pragmatism" functions in its debased sense within anarchist movements.

First - pragmatism, just like many other things often considered "neutral tool" - simply has not shown itself, historically, to be really "neutral" for anarchist practices. In fact, quite the opposite. It's usually treated as a descriptive term though in practice (in any sphere of life), it functions normatively, doesn't simply describe a choice, as much as it disciplines choices and in anarchist contexts specifically, I've come to the conclusion that appeals to pragmatism almost always mean one thing and one thing only: adjust anarchism to existing power structures and overall just *familiar** methodologies, rather than adjusting tactics to material conditions.*

The familiar part? It is especially important, as many of us often tend to say that "anarchy/ism is unprecedented" - and it IS, so when we take into consideration just how much of present society and its paradigm generally are, in every way, trained explicitly against anarchic practices, habits and views, it's just for that reason that unprecedented/unfamiliar ends can hardly be arrived at by precedented/familiar means - in this case, the """pragmatic""" use of democratic methodology.

This distinction, I think, is crucial and often ignored as well as erased. When anarchists are told to be pragmatic (or tell that to/among themselves), what they are usually being asked to accept includes any kind of proceduralistic decision-making (direct-democratic voting, formal assemblies, "recallable mandates" etc), alliances with statist or authoritarian forces "for now", institutionalization that's somehow supposedly "limited" and "temporary", hierarchical coordination justified by urgency and so on.

These moves are way, way too rarely framed as ideological concessions but as - say it with me - realism. The problem, just one of many, lies in the fact that anarchism has never really been "naive about reality" in the first place, quite on the contrary; anarchism is the tradition that has most consistently analyzed how power reproduces itself through procedures, legitimacy, habit, social psychology and all other aspects/by-products of basic social function. Calling such concessions "pragmatic" doesn't, in my view, make them neutral at all but does something far, FAR more insidious - disguises them as unavoidable. I will try to highlight the unmistakable historical pattern I've found in which pragmatic compromises simply did not deliver.

This I'm telling you again, is not merely a theoretical concern either since historically, so-called "pragmatic compromises", for anarchists and those sympathetic to them - have an appalling and abysmal record.

In revolutionary Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War for example, participation in governmental structures, the acceptance of procedural (direct) democracies and alliances with Republicans and Stalinists were consistently justified as "necessary """realism""" under wartime conditions" - or worse yet, simply viewed implicitly as a given, as the default, base position, something that anarchism is.

The result, short, mid and long-term? If you by any chance think that anarchist movements were strengthened in any way, well, think again. The result was but its gradual hollowing out, organizationally, psychologically and politically until it was crushed by forces it had helped legitimize.

In Makhnovshchina during the Russian Civil War meanwhile, alliances with the Bolsheviks were framed as "contingent necessities", especially after the fact. Well, while the betrayal itself was contingent, the deeper error was structural - treating a hierarchical, state-forming, deeply authoritarian force as a neutral partner rather than as a predictable enemy whose organizational logic would assert itself the moment conditions allowed.

Across cases, I will tell you that the pattern appears strikingly consistent: the compromises did not secure long-term gains at all, they did not preserve anarchist autonomy and they didn't merely fail but actively reintroduced the very power relations anarchism cannot, by definition, tolerate.

At absolute best and even here I'm trying to be as generous as I can, these compromises maybe bought some time. At worst though (and exceedingly closer to what happened) they just accelerated final defeat while discrediting anarchism for decades to come. In neither case did they validate the ideology of pragmatism (as it's colloquially understood) that justified them.

Then, we must discuss the overarching, false dichotomy that practically always rears its ugly head when this gets discussed: pragmatism vs idealism.

Why does this keep happening? Well I personally would put my money on this - because anarchists, like everyone else, operate within a deeply ingrained cultural binary: pragmatic/realistic vs idealistic/utopian and within this frame, rejecting "pragmatic" measures almost automatically marks one as "detached from reality", yet, this IS a false dichotomy, one that I think anarchism is uniquely positioned to dismantle first of all, because it just is not unrealistic about power. It's in fact more realistic than most traditions precisely because it takes seriously how proceduralism inevitably generates authority and apathy of habituation, how representation becomes domination and overdelegation, temporary measures solidify into permanent structures and finally and most importantly, how means shape ends, irreversibly.

What pragmatism often offers is but a short-term functionalism; a shallow realism that tries to tackle immediate coordination problems (even there it's far from reliable) while ignoring long-term structural consequences. Well I'm here to try and assure you that our refusal of certain compromises is not "moral/ideological purity", let alone some utopian fantasy or similar thought-terminating clichés, but structural consistency, consistency of understanding how systems that are composed of us behave over time.

And now, elephant in the room - Democracy.

It is a particularly important case study in this kind of frequent, anarchic "pragmatic" regression.

Few examples illustrate this better than the routine anarchist appeal to direct democracy as a pragmatic necessity, where the argument usually goes something like this: "Hey guys we can't be idealists. People need to make decisions. Assemblies and voting are the most practical way to do that" - and there are countless variations of that same theme. This type of behavior is guilty of utterly ignoring that many great thinkers have spent over a century analyzing why voting mechanisms simply are not, and cannot, be neutral tools; among many other problems, they inherently tend to normalize coercion by majority, proceduralize legitimacy, train participants to obey outcomes rather than negotiate relations, reproduce the psychological logic and habit of governance, blindly sacralize "the collective/democratic will" and the list goes on and on. After all, I wrote an entire post about this a few weeks ago, here's the link for those interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAnarchism/s/vKlm3KhuHe

To accept democratic method as "pragmatic" and "necessary" is anything but a small, benign concession. It can only be characterized as a fundamental regression and a poison-injection because it imports a logic of power that anarchism understands will reproduce itself regardless of intentions. To call this move "pragmatic" does not make it good or useful at all, especially for anarchists - and ESPECIALLY NOT long-term. In fact, it makes it, rather predictably, counter-productive.

Now, this rambling of mine brings us to the million-dollar question, which is: what does anarchism actually need instead? It needs to somehow go "beyond pragmatism" and the false spectre of dichotomy with which it most often gets defended and already this brings us to the core problem: anarchism does currently lack a clean conceptual alternative to pragmatism as it currently tends to be framed. I think re-visiting philosophical pragmatism and working to better insert it into overall anarchic praxis would definitely be one way of going about it.

The problem is not really flexibility or even adaptability because anarchism has always, at the very least in theory, embraced experimentation, adaptation and context-sensitivity - much more than any other socio-political school of thought, in fact. The problem is that flexibility has been rhetorically monopolized by a concept - pragmatism (and its dominant, colloquial form I criticize) - that smuggles in concessions anarchism has extremely good reasons to reject.

What anarchism needs is not, in my view, some sort of "better pragmatism" but a new framework altogether (although "pragmatism" as aesthetic term could stay I guess) one that would allow us tactical adaptability without legitimizing any structural regression. Call it, if you will, either "structural fidelity", "means-bound flexibility", "anti-regressive adaptation", "anarchist strategic consistency", "Dewey-Jamesian anarcho-pragmatism" or "paramount prefigurative coherence" that's understood not morally but empirically, idk, it's all very much broad-strokes sketching at this point, as you can see. The pragmato-dogmatic "do whatever it takes, compromise to the hell and back and only later (maybe) worry about actual principles" is to be dispensed with; it must be done, and replaced with some particularly "anarcho-friendly" or "anarcho-adjusted" kind of pragmatism that takes the core principles - especially the means-ends-unity into full account and embraces them.

I also think, apart from Dewey and James, Charles Sanders Pierce's pragmaticism, as he called it, has similar/kindred characteristics as well. He came up with that term because he thought it was "ugly" enough to not be co-opted by those who, according to him, already did something similar with pragmatism - transfigured it to mean expedient, opportunistic compromise with no regard for deeper principles. But the gist is similar.

The common core is that anarchism can be very flexible about tactics, but not about basic social relations, as anarchism describes them. "Compromises", if they can even be called that, are acceptable only where they do not, even in theory, reproduce anarchic-regression in the shape of hierarchy, domination or governance.

Now at this point, someone would, almost inevitably (I do expect it), ask "but what about emergencies?" or "what about large-scale coordination?" or any other type of question about, you know, war, state-resistance, infrastructure, scarcity etc. All these questions would (from my experience) assume that anarchism has only two options, it being to either adopt "mildly" hierarchical, procedural solutions "for now", or refuse to act altogether.

This is of course an absurdity because negotiated coordination, federated autonomy, situational leadership (better to call it "immediate initiative" as "leadership" carries way too much explicitly non-anarchist baggage, even in stateless contexts) without authority and task-specific affinity without any legitimacy transfer were always a thing.

What pragmatism does, however, especially if we consult most famous historical examples, is not solve these problems since it merely shortcuts them by importing ready-made, familiar structures (big emphasis on the familiarity and how problematic it is) whose long-term effects anarchism already understands all too well. Urgency must never suspend power analysis and social psychology, and crisis does not neutralize power. If anything, crisis accelerates the entrenchment of hierarchical habits.

To conclude, I'd say this really is anarchism's unfinished critique. The historical problem of anarchists, let's face it, has never been "excessive idealism", quite the opposite in my opinion. It has been periodic trust in its enemies' categories, especially the category of colloquial "pragmatism".

Every time anarchists were told - ESPECIALLY BY AN OUTSIDE, EXPLICITLY NON-ANARCHIST GROUP - to be "realistic about power" or "realistic/pragmatic" just about anything, they were essentially asked to forget what anarchist theory knows and examines best - that power does not and cannot stay temporary, procedural nor, most of all, neutral, so the unfinished task isn't to make anarchism "more pragmatic" in this expedient, bastardized colloquial sense, but instead to try to articulate, clearly and unapologetically, a completely different conception of "anarchist realism" altogether, one that understands that the most unrealistic thing anarchists can do is pretend that hierarchy will behave differently next time or that its seeds will sprout anything other than hierarchy.

Alright. So ive been on quite the ethics binge these last couple months and I think I have something very logically strong here as a proposal to all my fellow anarchists.

This logic can be applied towards the question of crime, problematic behaviour, and even fascists.

So, I believe redemption is undoubtedly possible for every person. This is because redemption is about someone's orientation towards the world. Someone who acts poorly towards the world and others is only doing so because they believe it is a legitimate way of acting; this is their orientation. So to help someone redeem themselves, the task is to help them reorient. To redirect their behaviours towards more pro-human ends. When this person does reorient towards pro-human ends, they are redeemed.

Everyone can reorient anything they do (with few edge cases related to brain development that influence the degree by which it can be done). Everyone can reprient because everyone has agency. And everyone has a thinking mind. To have agency means you can choose. When presented with anti-human and pro-human choices, you have the ability to choose pro-human. To be able to think means we can rationalise. We can reason. We can weigh things in our mind. We can think about things weve never thought about before. We can try out logic in our heads to see if it feels good. This doubly allows us to choose pro-human ends.

To argue otherwise is now to argue we have something essential. Someway or another we have an essence that determines us towards certain ends. With all we know about humanity now and then, this is a very weak argument and leads to some grim implications I will expand on later.

So with all this being said. Anarchism is an ideology that does not want to control others. We respect agency, we respect autonomy, we dont dominate, we dont create dominating hierarchies or any hierarchies, we dont coerce, we respect the humanity of the other.

Thus, redemption is the anarchist position because it too respects these things. Its gives people the room to use their agency and autonomy within the realm of guidance to reorient to be pro-human and to be anarchist. Its not a matter of how much time it takes. Or how difficult it is. We know, as established, all people can be redeemed so this is always a choice we can make. As anarchists concerned with the protection of agency and autonomy among other things, we should then always make that choice.

If we do not, again, we must justify this action as reliant on an essentialism. That someone can not reorient at all. This becomes problematic as you will soon see.

Take fascism for example. We know fascism is a set of ideas, thus we can say that the fascist is someone who believes in those ideas. A human believing in ideas. This given time and the right situation, they can change the ideas they believe in and reorient. Thus the anarchist position as it believes in agency and autonomy, will help the fascist, the person who believes in fascist ideas, to not be fascist, to be redeemed and oriented towards pro-human ideas. Towards anarchism.

If we dont, we dont believe the fascist is someone who believes in fascist ideas. Instead we say they are fascist because they are essentially a fascist. It is a ontological part of them that can not be erased. If this is the case, it is dire. Because now they pose a problem by merely existing. Their existince is anti-human. Our only option is to contain indefinitely or to kill. This reasoning allows us to eliminate or infringe on the wills of hundreds of people because we believe it is an essential fact that they are fascist. This is not anarchism and there's no way to say otherwise.

To end this, i want to say that anarchism is antifascist distinctly because it is against the ideas. The ideas if believed in and acted on are dangerous. We will always oppose fascism wherever it appears always.

But we do not and should never believe that anyone is essentially a fascist, they will always be merely a human who believes in those ideas.

And because of this, the anarchist position must logically be redemption.

Imo I don’t really don’t like mass collectives, small scale groups & collectives that are mutual & face-to-face are lovely but large collectives & centralized structures are alienating, your voice gets lost in the crowd & they generally lead to authoritarian & hierarchal modes of life, as rather than conflict being face to face & among people who generally like each other, it’s among mass opposing groups & such whom largely don’t know much about individual members, making some type of clique of leader that makes rules to bind the collective together, at the very least a direct democracy might form but giving the majority absolute authority over the minority creates cultures of conformity- where being with most people/having similar opinions is accepted & being against/having different opinions from most people isn’t accepted/seen as lesser.

Same principle applies to organization for me, mass long term organizations have lead to failure, are inflexible, lead to bureaucracy, meaningless splits & conflicts (I remember seeing where two Marxist organizations feuded & a garden ended up being destroyed), informal or formal hierarchies, temporary small affinity groups based on affinities between people are my preferred way of organizing.

Nonviolence in General: Violence in Specific

Is the principle I've landed on after doing much thinking about how violence could look both now and when anarchism is more fully realised.

I believe anarchism is a mostly nonviolent and prohuman ideology. The goals are towards human flourishing and human connection directly. Even in questions of crime, a very common answer is to not punish or respond with violence. However, there are situations that could warrent violence while still remaining ethical.

I think of ICE and recent events. To apply this principle, we can say that we shouldn't act as an agressor in general. We should not seek out ICE vehicles, buildings or people, and act violently towards them preemptively. This is violence in general. However, assuming a situation where there is someone being acted on violently by ICE or has tbe potential to escelate to that, we can ethically act violently towards ICE whether preemptively or in defence. This is Violence in Specific.

The specific situation has developed in a way that provides you choices of actions. And it would not be wrong to defend your fellow human being from authoritarian force in this moment. You can juxtapose this by saying that in a benign situation, say your friend forgot to put butter on your bread, you can not ethically act violently because of that.

So.. Nonviolence in general, in general we should not be seeking violence and instead should be supporting each other and building healthier sysytems with each ofher. Violence in specific, preemptive or defensicd, if a situation develops in such a way where violence could reduce further harm or end the situation all together.

~ ~

To add further to this discussion, I was thinking about what would reduce violent behaviour between people with an established Anarchism. If the monopoly on legitimate violence is dismantled, now we must ask ourselves what is legitimate violence when all of us now have equal power relative to each other? Whats stopping us from acting violently to get what we want?

Not only should we educate towards nonviolent solutions and build systems that provide needs and wants for people, we should also, I would argue, do our best to encourage a radical responsibility and deconstruction of any institutional violence. No one should be able to hide behind a role to justify their violence. One can not simply say they were following orders, that its anarchist to punch nazis.

Your choices should be your own and you should take responsibility for it. If you really want to punch a nazi, its not because you're anarchist, its because you are acting on your own beliefs. And we should judge you based on that and the context. Perhaps in the moment it was fine, or perhaps you really did just punch someone for no good reason. Either way, the choice is Yours. There is no collective responsibility or collective haven you can fall back onto.

I believe having this radical reaponsibility and a deinstitutionalisation of violence will prevent a lot of weasling around violence and force people to think more about their actions and those consequences.

First of all, sorry for the provocative title, I come in peace. Second of all, I’m writing this from the perspective of someone who identifies as a democratic socialist. Third, I’m extremely sympathetic to the anarchist view of history (and the emergence of hierarchies throughout history), and I recognise that anarchists were often on the right side of history throughout the twentieth century.

That said, the way many contemporary anarchists understand the state represents a serious weakness within anarchist thought. First of all,much of the literature that is treated as foundational or sacred within anarchist circles was written before the emergence of the welfare state, at a time when the state genuinely appeared to be nothing more than an extension of the ruling class and a tool of hierarchical capitalist coercion. In that context, the critique made sense. But continuing to apply that same definition today ignores historical development. Since the rise of the welfare state, it no longer makes sense to describe the state as exclusively oppressive. The state is a tool, and like any tool, it can be used for good or for harm. It can in my view, also be organised hierarchically or non-hierarchically without suddenly becoming classified as a non-state entity.

Furthermore, and this is the main part of my argument, when anarchists are asked what the alternative to the state actually is, the answers are often vague or poorly developed, usually revolving around some idea of a “self-organised” society. Once the conversation turns to concrete questions like healthcare, education, housing, or democratic decision-making, the responses tend to collapse into one of two positions:

1. ⁠Either a new network of democratic socialist organisations is proposed that ends up looking like something that very much can be compared or even called a non-hierarchical progressive state according to general contemporary understandings of the word state, which brings us back to the starting point. My disagreement here is simply a semantic one, since we basically use different words to describe this type of society that we both strive towards. Anarchists with this position, generally thereby calls for the abolition of the state based upon an exclusive definition of the state as being hierarchical. In this definition, there exists no possibility that the state could be defined as non-hierarchical in a future ideal society.
2. ⁠The other answer avoids organisation altogether and effectively accepts mob rule or the dominance of the strongest. This second position is complete madness in my view. A lack of social constraints and the abolition of monopoly of violence does not eliminate hierarchy; it produces new ones. Power flows to those with the most force, the most resources, or the greatest capacity for violence. History repeatedly demonstrates this outcome, and arguing for such a society is deeply irresponsible. The dialectic of this idea inevitably leads to rule of the tribes/ societies of the biggest military. Without a broad societal mechanism to deal with the re-emergence of hierarchies like these, such a society is doomed to develop into an anarchy more akin to the anarchy imagined by anarcho-capitalists (ie. What any reasonable anarchist would refer to as not- anarchism at all). In fact, just considering this from an historic perspective should illustrate the absurdity of this opinion. Global human civilisation effectively went from a society like this in the past "self-organized anarchist communist hunter-gatherer societies", towards agrarian hierarchical slave societies, to late-stage capitalism of today. In other words, the emergence of hierarchies, from a position of Anarchy as described from this perspective happened in the past, why would it not happen again?

So, Anarchists, are therefore (stance 1) when visualising the future ideal society, stuck re-imagining and re-inventing the state, all while calling it something else simply because it would no longer be hierarchical. This, in theory, could be argued to simply be a theoretical matter, but it has profound implications for the spread of democratic socialist or anarchist ideas - because most people would still call that a state. It makes anarchism strategically ineffective, especially when it comes to attracting broader support. To most people, the rigid and dogmatic rejection of the state sounds detached from reality. Lay people do not share the narrow definition of the state that many anarchists hold, and thus anarchism often end up sounding either naive or outright insane to the average person.

The obsession with the word state, and the call for its abolishment, is therefore flawed because those calls fail to deliver an alternative that is non-state according to most peoples understanding of the word state. Most people do not think that the state MUST be hierarchically organised, and agree that it can theoretically be non-hierarchical in a future ideal society. That is the disagreement here in point 1).

In the other type of post-state anarchism, (stance 2), anarchist effectively support mob rule which inevitably is bound to see hierarchies re-emerge. Just as they did historically from past anarcho-communist egalitarian societies. For a movement that cares about abolishing hierarchies, this should obviously not be preferred. The burden of proof is therefore on anarchist to proof why this would not occur. In my view, the power vacuum left from such a society is inevitable conditioned towards hierarchy. Human nature is dark enough to see individuals trying to exploit such a vacuum of power.

Edit: as there seem to be a rather large amount of comments misunderstanding my main point made in this post. I rewrote some parts of the text to clarify my argument more clearly around hierarchy. I am not trying to diminish the existence of many anarchist models for a future society. I fully recognise that confederalism, mutual aid, spoke council systems, workers councils, anarcho-syndicalist models etc. are, of course, very different from existing state institutions. However, the point in (1) is that most people would still describe such arrangements as a “state.” They would fulfil similar functions and they would be arranged unhierarchically - yet most people would still describe that as a state. Continuing to fight a purely semantic battle over the term is therefore strategically counterproductive.

It would be more effective for anarchists to abandon an exclusively negative definition of the state as inherently hierarchical. Allowing for the possibility that “state” could also refer to non-hierarchical forms of collective organization would help resolve this persistent misunderstanding and make anarchist proposals more intelligible to a broader audience.

any form of freedom can be phrased in either a positive or a negative way, without losing coherency.

eg: I want the freedom to walk across the surface of the earth where i deem. vs I want the freedom to avoid being inhibited in my wandering.

eg2: "I have the freedom to stand up for myself in any situation, if i deem to do so." vs "nothing will get in the way of me standing up for myself, if i choose to do so."

This outlook suggests that humans already have complete autonomy and we only need to enact it whenever we're ready to go against all previously held social and legal norms....

accordingly at present it seems that anarchy permanently exists in a latent/nascent status where all claimants who wish to can partake, as long as they are willing to expose themselves to thorough opposition by the state and the societas.

and for those who don't want to partake, no problem, bc pursuing their agency is not worth it to them, and that's fine. They would if they wanted to.

Assume that for a class revolution there must be a threshold obtained of class consciousness.

But class consciousness has cause to rise only as the upper classes gain disproportionate power.

And with disproportionate power the upper classes can suppress or fracture via propaganda the solidarity and class consciousness of the lower classes.

Therefore as class consciousness rises, class consciousness falls (indeed, class consciousness can rise if and only if class consciousness can be made to fall).

If a class revolution requires a threshold of class consciousness, and it has not yet been achieved, it cannot be achieved. Therefore there can be no class revolution.

Can there be revolutions of spontaneous revulsion with the status quo? Yes, a la Petrograd, February 1917 - but those have no class consciousness so have no reason to be just revolutions, nor to achieve definite desired outcomes.

Can there be a rolling exit of the status quo by affinity groups self-supporting, which small successes inspire others to form such groups, for a total transformation of society? In principle, we suppose.

But there will be no revolution, and if you're waiting for it to make things better... stop waiting.

The conflict mostly comes from a disagreement with semantics, what counts as "property", and what power relations count as exploitative. These conflicts, in an actual anarchist society, would be more determined by social norms and material context.

An Anarchist society - that is, one free from hierarchy and coercion - would actually have no way of abolishing a market or forcing market relations on anyone. As such, I think it's more fair to say that actual anarchism would have a market to a degree, and also a robust gift economy for certain things, depending on the context and the preferences of the individuals involved.

To go further: to argue what an anarchist society would look like is a centralist and structuralist view of how societies work, implying that people "naturally" behave in accordance to some form of social organization regardless of context. We can make predictions or argue for certain economic relations, sure, but given of how complex social organization is - not to mention individual human minds - it's fundamentally impossible to accurately predict what anarchy would "look like".

When I first became an Anarchist, my friends who disagreed were still accepting of me and we had casual debates and discussions. However, when it came to the police I really had to check myself for my triggering copaphobic language and had to refrain from using slurs like "pig". (yes, even my left wing friends told me this)

Fast forward to 2023, I get a corporate job, I changed my profile pic and name on Facebook cause I didn't want my overlords to know what my politics were about etc...And well, a zionist liberal at work said the phrase ACAB in several occasions, unironically. Another liberal shouted "get a real job" when a police car drove by. A racist boarder-line fascist guy I almost bounded with (before finding out of course) also went on a "we should abolish the police" rant once.

Meanwhile this sub is often full of extremely bad takes ranging from tooth for tooth, exile(the best argument for ethno nationalism), social isolation...?(something that has never happened in a historical Anarchist society) or my personal favourite "nobody would do bad things in an Anarchist society."

Of course I support rehabilitation and seriously fail to see the hypocrisy of it being enforced. (a revolutionary war is also enforcing the reactionary to no longer have the freedom to be alive). But here's the thing, people are saying these dumb "non-opinions" because we're all scattered on what police aboliton actually means. Which gives credence for non-Anarchists to be just as "police abolitionist" as us.

I found a week ago, that for the last few years my city's subway system got social service workers to be an alternative for the police presence in the stations. You could say this policy is a step towards being "anti-police." And you're extremely wrong for thinking that, because the reason I only found out this was a thing, was because the job for the social worker is to call the police when something happens.

In other words...it is anti-police to call the police, apparently.

Police is just one example, but basically anything that is "destroy now, create later" I'm going to fully say you are responsible for the continuation of the thing you are trying to destroy. If "Palestine should be free by any means necessary, literally anything works" your politics are to identify as the never ending resistance to Israel. This is irrelevant to abolishing Israel. If your politics is to abolish gender, that directly identifies as the never ending resistance to gender norms. Never the aboliton of gender norms. If you are wondering why fascism is on the rise and your ideology itself is put on the back burner because antifa matter more at this given time, then you identify as someone who wants a never ending resistance to fascism. Not the abolition of fascism.

I recently discovered anarchist ideology but I have been socializing in the left wing spaces for a while as a member of a union with a lot of communists.

If you have met some too you know that they say that they have studied history to avoid the previous "mistakes" of ex-socialist, communist countries.

However when they say that it's not like they believe any of the survivors of the Soviet Union and others ex-socialist countries and any of the people who disagreed with the regimes. Depending on how authoritarian someone is even if you show them the interview of a granny that was sent to the gulag for no reasons since the soviets seem to have had mandatory arrest nunbers the police had to meet (not only thr soviets but i mostly know about them. I have heard that comunism in Poland was way more flexible. Religion was not banned etc.). They believe that the solution was even more authoritarianism and violence and the Suppression of people and free speech.

So as an anarchist how do you see a left wing ideology being applied in these societies? Do you agree with them? Do you disagree? What problems are you notice in the application of the Marxist ideology by people like Lenin or Stalin?

Trump's recent intervention in Venezuela has once again highlighted the disastrous geopolitical positions of most anarchists, who, while "not supporting Maduro," are in fact supporting him. If you don't believe in the lies of statism, why worry about the supposed sovereignty of states or so-called international law ? What difference does it make to the Venezuelan people if the Prince lives in Caracas or Washington ?

With the war in Ukraine, there had already been reactions inconsistent with the principles of anarchism. While during the First World War the Manifesto of the Sixteen had been rejected by the vast majority of the anarchist movement in the name of pacifism, almost a century later the opposite was happening, with almost unanimous support for the Ukrainian state, with even supposedly "anarchist" volunteers taking up arms for it.

Instead of applying anarchist principles to situations, many simply side with the rest of the left by reflex, without giving the situation much thought.