User:RD/9k/anarchism (Q3300)
Main entry
anarchism
(top-level category) -> it took me toward the end of making this list to add anarchism or its color swatch. this is partly because I don't know much about any particular named Anarchism, and partly because I have my doubts a lot of concepts in anarchisms are actually unique to them rather than being borrowed from Liberalism or Existentialism. I am not against the sheer concept of anarchisms; particularly when they have specific civilizational shapes they form if they form successfully, they fit into meta-Marxist analysis as well as anything else does. there are just a few things I have problems with like the vagueness of anarchist philosophy and the failure to distinguish between utopian imagery and realistic models of constructing post-capitalist societies. "scientific" anarchisms with the specificity of a named Marxism are at least as legitimate to describe here as Trotskyism.
Significant works
World's first anarchist manifesto
(Anselme Bellegarrigue 1850) / (9k)
Anarchism and "conceptual tribes"
united nonviolence of special oppressions
-> the motif that a country is composed of "superior people" (social construct, bad) and a ton of endless categories of people who fail to function as perfectly as society's most elite people for some highly specific reason, that if you have any trouble getting into society there must be some highly specific reason you are specially oppressed which requires you to find other people who are specially oppressed exactly the same way and for all the highly specific groups to convince each other at length not to hurt each other and oppress each other. I am so tired of this, specifically because of that last thing. it's clear that over time our basic assumptions about capitalism and Liberal-republicanism have simply ceased to be true, and the way the whole thing operates is a bit different from the way people think. it seems less that people inherently want to accept each other because they're different and more like there are many separate subpopulations of people shoving each other around all trying to fit onto an island too small to fit all of them.united states of states of states
/ China full of Chinas full of Chinas / USSR of SSRs of SSRs / tribe of tribes of tribes -> the motif that a country is always just a voluntary link between demographics. that the United States is composed of Black women and White women spontaneously opting to be the same country, or Black women and White women opting to be women that then together with Black men opt to be the United States. etc.
this motif is neutral. I am not trying to say it's bad or impossible to use well, although I would say it confuses and baffles me how intuitive this concept always is to everyone else for reasons I do not understand. or more specifically, how intuitive it is precisely to everyone who is oppressed while being completely unintuitive to a single individual with the power of oppression and as far as I can tell mostly ineffective on them. the sheer ineffectiveness of it on everyone I have ever known personally makes it greatly unintuitive to me, yet to everyone else there's almost no other way to think, and this always leaves me confused.
I do have some days where I can almost understand it, specifically in cases like the USSR being made up of 14 republics, or a cluster of Iroquois tribes binding together into one big tribe. to me this motif makes lots of sense as a way to understand societies and history when you strain it through Communism or some very crimson-tinted general-sense historical materialism, but it doesn't make a lot of sense as anarchism, exactly the way everyone actually looks at it. so then I end up sitting around confused going, I'm supposed to understand the USSR as being effective specifically because it was made up of 14 nationalities that came together, but how is that even possible when it needed the Material System of Bolshevism to unite them? does this mean that when Trotsky attacked the Soviet Union he went against anarchism and the charcoal-tinted workers' state process? funny enough, that would actually make sense. but it's totally not the way anybody ever sees it in the United States. you don't see United States people going around saying "Trotsky brought down the USSR and that's why you have to vote Democrat, you don't want to become East Germany and let the Great Wall of Biden fall down only to let West Germany start hating and oppressing all people named Kevin". it'd certainly make internally-coherent sense in its own way, and yet nobody ever says it because everybody is committed to anarchism being the enemy of Communism but not the enemy of the United States government. doesn't that make anarchism literally "Western", full of prejudice in favor of "The West", and unable to do what "Settlers" claims? anarchism always completely twists my brain in knots because I always end up actually thinking about it and it never makes sense.small-scale internationalism
/ molecular internationalism; molecular scale internationalism (meta-Marxism) -> the motif of a country which has been sharded into a ridiculous number of "nationalities" that all function like tiny countries of 1,000 or fewer people, but where that huge number of tiny nationalities has actually started functioning together again.
Hierarchy
"Hierarchy" is class society
-> Anarchists use the concept of "hierarchy" as an attempt to model class society; "domination" is a slightly different way to refer to the same overall concept of Hierarchy or class society, but is almost the same thing ->
if you collect enough anarchist statements and texts together, you find this: anarchists are using "hierarchy" or "domination" as a definition of class society. they're fundamentally talking about class society, and they don't care about 'hierarchies' in other contexts. but they specifically think class society exists because people give orders to other people.
it's really frustrating because in a way, it's sort of referring to something that's true. in feudal orders, and in capitalism, you have these chunks of people that do a task (manor, factory, etc) and then there's this one person or tiny group that is conflated with the whole group and gets to take credit for what it does. Anarchists think that exists just because humanity socially constructed the concept of owning individuals giving people orders, and thereby constructed governments. they think that a person giving orders is the nucleus of a government, and people giving orders and creating governments is what divides societies into warring states periods, hostile kingdoms, pointless Liberal-republican party fights, and capitalism.
this becomes super clear when you read Bellegarrigue — his anarchism is rather crude and doesn't fully match a lot of modern social anarchisms, but the core ""class analysis"" framework used by many anarchists is clearly defined in there.- Social sanctioning is caused by hierarchies -> no. it's pretty
often caused by Communities. - Giving orders is having illegitimate authority / It is illegitimate authority to divide society into order givers and order takers -> god if this isn't one of the orangest things I've ever heard. not one of anarchism's highest moments in my mind.
- Being an authority is good, having authority is bad -> when I read this I automatically assumed the anarchist would call the opposite of the two things bad. being an authority is bad because class territory owners and bigots clinging to positions and generalized dictators etc, having authority is okay because anarchism has to enforce its structure and Ideals somehow. and I was like, oh, wow, maybe anarchism actually makes sense and I'm being too harsh on it. and then, like it always does, it pulled a left turn and ceased making sense, and I was genuinely baffled. though unsurprised, because what came next was very familiar to the kinds of nonsense I'd already heard.
- dividing society into order givers and order takers / The ideas of the ruling class become the ruling ideas of the age (Marx) -> this is a legitimate description of society in the end, but anarchists always seem to get the causality behind it wildly wrong.
- There is a difference between expertise and irrational authority, and anarchists are able to make this distinction and honor legitimate authority -> there really isn't though, as far as anarchist movements are concerned. Stalin had "socially acknowledged expertise". but anarchists didn't like him. and the whole reason capitalism is a problem is that many or all of the people who "irrationally" dominate people first get into positions of power because they do have legitimate expertise in something that other people don't have; capitalism comes to exist because expertise becomes a matter of quantity rather than quality and the "expertiest" people within the few areas that capitalism actually values come to define what facts everyone is allowed to acknowledge as real and to "own" everyone else. in practice anarchists don't actually like experts being in charge if they violate other conditions that are much more important to anarchists than this distinction without a difference.
Freedom from governments
- Capitalism ends through many rounds of "Absolutely Not" / Capitalism ends through many rounds of "NO" / United States capitalism ends when we realize every protest is about "" / proposition No (hypothetical transition to anarchism) -> derived anarchist proposition. the claim that in the United States, specific-sense historical materialism revolves solely around protests that say "no" to something, while movements about actually creating anything in particular won't form any enduring connections. protests about gender identity or abortion or specific forms of racism or even pollution aren't actually protests for anything, they're solely protests against somebody prohibiting or destroying something. there are an alarming number of examples for this. A) "Black Lives Matter": no police shootings. B) during COVID, there were more people than there should have been banding together across charcoal and rust factions to simply side with "no requirements". C) blanket resistance against "AI" without thinking about the origins of the problem in disorganization, conflation of products with individual Subjects, and the nonsense that is copyright disputes. "no AI". D) widespread negative sentiment against "social media", "phones", and The Big Guy that "greedily" devised them. these idle critiques are all "no" statements to merely take the thing away. E) "No Kings": it's in the phrase. arguments it could be true: this is the only kind-of convincing claim I've heard for how rival demographics could directly join together because of their identities despite the pressures of Liberalism. it's consistent with the notion that nations begin as population-societies which must begin with links and outer boundaries, by suggesting the boundary directly forms the population. argument it could be false: this could lead to horizontal conflict of two or more factions mutually protesting each other, as already happens on things like abortion clinics. argument 2 for false: this feels like it clashes really badly with the history of Afrikaners I briefly outlined in another entry. feels like an Afrikaner model could be as useful for challenging some of these claims as the Trotsky model
Bellegarrigist / Proudhonist anticommunism
- Mainstream Marxism-Leninism is a revisionist degeneration of anarchism / Marxist states coopted anarchist movements
- Communism has failed 95% of the time out of 196 times [1]
- stay with the program (Marxism) / Marxists not updating theories through evidence or reason because 'anarchists aren't correct enough to judge them' () / dogmatism () / (9k) -> one of the only anarchist criticisms of Marxism that is actually fair. ...
Practical definitions of anarchism
Anarchism swaps states for ethics
/ Anarchism replaces states with ethics / Anarchism is partly defined as a society where ethical codes replace The State -> this is what I think the categorical imperative teaches us about blue anarchisms and maybe all anarchisms.- Anarchism is partly defined by the claim that progress can only be described through the sheer assertion of human moralities as a fundamental layer of material reality -> this seems common to both charcoal anarchism and blue anarchism, as well as to some forms of Western Marxism. and as far as I know, it's absent from Stalin's Marxism.
as it ought to be!
I have never liked this concept. it sounds great if the only thing you ever talk about in the entire world is Palestine. but it doesn't sound great as soon as you actually have to accommodate multiple countries and all the different political factions in those countries, which all have their own strictly conflicting moralities that then all have to be acknowledged as fundamentally important and fundamentally okay. whether you call it "ethics" or try to make it objective doesn't matter, because somebody can do objective ethics in China and somebody can do objective ethics in the United States and their conclusions could strictly conflict such that there's absolutely no intuitive way to be "considerately and sensitively inclusive" of both ethics theorists or both countable cultures at once — there's no answer! it's not only the case that "is models can't directly generate ought models". whenever you even have to comprehend another person or group of people at all you always have to start at an "is" model, unavoidably, always creating that gap of being at an "is" model and unable to create an "ought" model no matter how hard you try to start at "ought" models. people outright use the word "phenomenology" to promote studying people descriptively, and then they don't realize that that in itself is already destroying the ability to have any ought models. one of the only ways out is to realize that ought models don't truly exist and only is models have ever existed. a whole lot of ought models are actually just wrong is models.
perhaps there is always just a tiny wedge way off in the corner of that first decision that arbitrarily selects what is models are the ones worth using and acting on. I don't think that's a big deal, as long as we can get the corner wedge as small as possible. a human being is a limited instrument when it comes to the problem of movement building, so we work within its limits. we don't have the choice to be ends instead of means at the moment the larger populational scale exists. a population doesn't have a brain. it doesn't have empathy. it can't even make decisions as much as mindlessly physically behave, radially outward, under relativistic determinism. Liberal-republicanism has shown that everyone becomes a means of a major Liberal-republican party as a material object and isn't an end any more. the big problem is that everyone continues to believe that populations can treat individuals as ends and not means, when population-objects aren't capable of that. this leads to a system where the very worst people are automatically and necessarily treated as having valid codes of morality and being ends in themselves, and everyone else is just told to tolerate everything about them and operate together with them like a happy family like nothing happened. that's blue anarchism: making everybody who is a consciousness with a code of morality all Rhizome together even if they're Hitler, and asking Hitler to explain his code of morality so it can be Considerately and Sensitively Respected. that works on Stalin. that works on Trotsky. that works especially well on Mao. that doesn't work on Hitler, and it doesn't work on Trump. - Anarchism means abolishing domination / Anarchism is partly defined by the concept of abolishing domination -> so, there are some people who already believe critical theory is a form of anarchism. noted.
- Anarchism is partly defined by the machiavellian use of existing systems to effect ethics
Orange anarchism withdraws
/ Orange anarchism is partly defined by pulling chunks of people out of some greater structure or population when they are dissatisfied with their relationship with that population -> this definition explains the strangely large set of commonalities between Trotskyists and right-Liberals while some of their values are drastically different. whether they know it or not they both fundamentally base their ideologies on the concept of splitting society. of course, I think you could say the same thing about uniquely brown "anarcho-Tory" movements — they want to detach out of a greater society they're dissatisfied with due to being nationalists and practicing local-scale nationalism.- Brown anarchism is partly defined by pulling chunks of people out of some greater structure or population when they are dissatisfied with their relationship with that population
Anarchism defines itself as Evil
/ (9k) -> this definition of anarchism applies to fields like non-normative queer theory.Anarchism actually seeks molecularization
/ Anarchism secretly aims for a molecularized model of all social interactions / Despite all the Idealist nonsense coming out of a lot of anarchist writers, the ultimate goal of anarchism is to become aware of all the small-scale interactions that occur between individuals or small groups of people and over time through some kind of gradual transition process put societies in control of all of those interactions through proportional levels of force or intervention / (9k) ->
this is one of the most good-faith interpretations I can pull out of anarchism, out of all the
they say. anarchists really want to believe that history doesn't exist, that all historical periods are arbitrary, and that nothing in particular makes historical periods transition into other historical periods. ok.... but what if that wasn't a terrible theory and it did make sense? one of the possible outcomes if you take anarchism seriously is that anarchists have described a process of how individuals assemble from very fine-grained scales into larger historical periods, and how each collection of individual behaviors creates a historical period of a different "color". with one minimum change to anarchism, the recognition that different historical periods containing different repeated behaviors-of-individuals summing up to a particular color can actually transition into periods of other particular colors only from certain colors, you end up with a theory that actually isn't so bad. you've basically replaced the concept of sublation with a more "timeless" theory that looks more like applied chemistry and recording or memorizing particular kinds of reactions that bridge particular kinds of molecules. but, again, that genuinely might be enough to carry an individual nation-wide movement in a particular country if somebody could only figure out the right transition from what to what. I genuinely believe you could teach anarchists meta-Marxism if they were smart enough and they weren't so stubborn. like there is only so much of a difference between what Stalin said right before he died and the CPSU per-se was defeated, and what anarchists want to do. Stalin wanted to create a systematic study of how the small-scale elements of society transitioned into other small-scale elements; anarchists want to be in control of society's small-scale interactions. that's like, almost the same thing. if we could all just pry anarchists away from the concepts of Idealism and utterly mystifying the word "community" to create a strictly Materialist anarchism we'd be set
Objections to anarchism
Miscellaneous
- horizontal revolutionary methods [2]
assertion something is an anarchism
-> seems a little random, but is oddly useful for defining silly fan theories like "Snufkin is an anarchist".Snufkin is an anarchist
-> apparently anarchists do not seriously believe this is true. [3]
Ideology codes
- (none)