Anarchism - Petty Utopianism
- Thread starter Yugoslav
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Yugoslav
Jugoslaven
Actually, PTK did a job understanding what I was trying to say. Lenin wanted to smash the capitalist state and then in its place, found the workers' state.
PTK
Paul Kegan
That is not what you wrote. You wrote of seizing control of the existing state, not smashing it.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
the intellectual rigour of a professor who CBA to read a fucking pamphlet length piece
petee
no gods, no malarkey
a point that was brought home to me by the left communists i used to hang around with.
time to read State And Revolution again ...
Hi — I'm late to the party. This is a good point from the original post at the top of the thread. Not in the sense of "I agree with this" but in the sense that it makes an excellent starting point for a conversation about anarchy and those of us who embrace it as an ideal.
For the sake of comparison, one could make the same points about holding a moral perspective that values kindness, forgiveness, and charitable sharing of resources — that it's incredibly idealistic, utopian, and unrealistic.
In both cases, you could counterargue (and I do) that any and all progress in that direction is a good thing, and that failure to establish such a state of affairs as an absolute doesn't make incremental progress in that direction a useless and wasted effort.
Anarchy, if it is to work, has to be cooperative. It does work in small informal groups such as three friends on a small fishing boat. They can discuss where they want to go next and how long they want to stay out on the water without someone being the Captain and having authority over the other two. Does it extrapolate effortlessly to 300 residents of a cooperative building, or 300 million residents of a hypothetical anarchic nation? Very obviously not, but that doesn't mean the latter is impossible, merely that a totally informal structure isn't going to do the job.
I don't think anarchy can be established by overthrowing conventional structure by force. Warfare and violence by its very nature is a coercive form of implementing decisions, and I'm reminded of the sign in a photograph of a peace rally from the 1960s that read "Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity".
I'm not as pollyanna about anarchy as dismissive folks tend to assume. I've been a participant in idealistic organizations that officially "did everything by consensus", and I've been in 11 hour meetings that eventually ground to a halt with exhausted frustrated people thinking we'd attained consensus on a few crucial decisions, only to find out at our next meeting that we did not have consensus on whether or not we had had consensus! There are entire months' worth of meetings that I still want an emotional refund on.
But yeah I have some structural notions that I think are worth playing with and testing out, and I'm up for comparing notes with anyone else who is of a similar perspective.
Yugoslav
Jugoslaven
Do I need again to repeat what Lenin said in Chapter 5 of the State and Revolution?
"Only in communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists have disappeared, when there are no classes (i.e., when there is no distinction between the members of society as regards their relation to the social means of production), only then "the state... ceases to exist", and "it becomes possible to speak of freedom"."
The state cannot be abolished unless capitalism is abolished.
"Only in communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists have disappeared, when there are no classes (i.e., when there is no distinction between the members of society as regards their relation to the social means of production), only then "the state... ceases to exist", and "it becomes possible to speak of freedom"."
The state cannot be abolished unless capitalism is abolished.
Yugoslav
Jugoslaven
Did Lenin say about smashing the state? Yes.
But how and when will the state be smashed? Only when capitalism is gone.
PTK
Paul Kegan
“the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state
machinery and wield it for its own purpose"
No, Lenin does not argue for the seizing of the capitalist state.
The new state would arise from armed bodies and committees that arose in a revolutionary situation in opposition to the machinery of the bourgeois state. There would be period of "dual power" in which the existing state and the nucleus or embryo of the new state were in contention. Anyone who claims to be a Leninist ought to know this.
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