this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2024
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What is your practical plan?
I literally just said it: Anarchist prefiguration
How do you plan to scale that? Prefiguration sounds great for small already tight knit communities, however there are very few of those in the USA that aren't complete chuds.
Do you have a plan for the drone swarms the people in power will send to wipe out your community? Living well isn't a plan while you're also surrounded by the enemy. Especially when the guy living next door isn't gonna even listen to what you have to say because theyre so brainwashed by the powers that be.
Prefigurayion doesn't mean "tight knit communities". That tactic can be a refuge for some, but ultimately doesn't work. Prefiguration means showing the people how mutual aid and solidarity can help everyone.
The US army won't drone strike a community meal, or disaster relief events. And growing within communities, not as a separate bubble should be protection enough from bullets ever being shot.
Why not? They do it in other counties.
Because the people conducting these drone strikes would be more closely connected to the community in the US.
These heinous acts were only possible by othering the "foreigners".
You might want to look up what happened at Kent State, when American soldiers fired on unarmed student protestors. The media spread all sorts of lies about the victims, like that they were a bunch of outside agitators putting LSD in the water supply, and things like that. A week after the shooting, a poll was conducted in which 60% of Americans blamed the students, while only 10% blamed the National Guard. Of course, the media's narrative didn't hold up in the long term, and they issued "corrections" about their "mistakes," once the moment had safely passed.
Othering is not something that's reserved for foreigners, and there are plenty of people without consciences who the state is more than happy to recruit to do whatever dirty work needs to be done.
A protest is easy to put down, and even then the propaganda machine had to go in overdrive. If a lot of your society is practicing prefiguration (and not just protests), violence like that becomes counter-productive.
Sure. But a lot of our society isn't practicing prefiguration (at least, as far as I can gather what you mean by that).
Whether violence is effective or counterproductive can't just be assumed ideologically, it has to be assessed based on the situation. The bulk of human history has involved violent state repression, that the perpetrators have frequently gotten away with (and made bank off of).
If we are in a position where, because of the lack of prefiguration, the state is able to use violence with impunity and then simply lie or blame the victims, then it follows that the state can use violence to prevent prefiguration from occurring, to the extent that it sees it as a threat to its power. It's a bit of a Catch-22.
That's not to say it's a bad idea to try. It's just a reminder that being right doesn't stop bullets.
Sure, but the bulk of human history was not ideologically anarchist. I.e. the people were not self-consciously trying to avoid hierarchies. If they didn't have any, it was just the way things evolved, but they weren't conscious about rejecting them actively.
In the 20th century, the Marxist-Leninist experiments sucked out all the oxygen from the room by turning all socialist momentum towards those failed projects which just became capitalist again. The world is not the same anymore and a lot of lessons have been learnt and as the empire hegemony weakens and collapses through its own contradictions, there will be space for prefiguration to be practiced and grow. You can't just take the last 100 of the US at the height of its power and posit that this is how the world will always play out.
Anyway, the best part of prefiguration is that it allows people to do it based on their appetite for risk. What we're doing right now is a form prefiguration. Supporting piracy, supporting distributed social media, rejecting VC-based capitalism and so on. Not everything can be solved by violence and we can and should flow around it.
The bulk of people today are not anarchist either. You don't have to be an anarchist to recognize it as bad when the state enacts violence against you. And for the record, there were various historical movements such as the Diggers in the 1600s, who wanted to create small, egalitarian communities with communal land ownership and public health insurance.
I disagree with this on every count, but the most relevant is this idea that Marxism-Leninism "sucked the oxygen out of the room." This seems to be coming from a position of philosophical idealism as opposed to philosophical materialism. Why was Marxism-Leninism able to suck the oxygen out of the room? Is it just because people happened to believe one thing over another thing? Or were there material reasons why people turned to Marxism-Leninism?
I'm not? I'm both looking at thousands of years of world history, and also not saying that the world will always play out that way.
Of course not. The idea that violence can solve everything is just as ideological and baseless as the idea that violence never works.
Yes, but those driving for anarchism and prefiguration are.
Utopian socialists trying to create small communes during feudalism were doomed to fail and entirely irrelevant to our situation.
Sure, ML was a great transition plan for agrarian/feudalist societies to pivot towards capitalism, and as such it provided comparatively a lot of the same benefits liberalism did.
As to why it sucked the oxygen out of the room, it's because US and USSR propaganda happened to align for a brief moment in time to paint state capitalism as "socialism" for different reasons, until it inevitably collapsed upon itself. Therefore those interested in socialist alternatives thought ML-styles communism can work during that time and tried to do the same instead of anarchism.
Thousands of years of history under monarchy are also irrelevant in this situation.
You misunderstand. Not every problem of the state can be solved with violence. Which is to mean, state violence can't crush prefiguration
I don't understand why that would matter in the slightest.
Why are they irrelevant? Didn't you assert that the reason violent state repression worked in the past was because people weren't opposed to hierarchy? The existence of people opposed to hierarchy trying to build community in what seems to me to be similar to your ideas, doesn't somehow become irrelevant just because you say it is.
This is a remarkably reasonable assessment.
But American and Western leftists were pretty much always very critical of the USSR, and constantly distancing themselves from it. George Orwell, for example, asserted that opposition to the USSR was the litmus test for socialists to be intellectually honest. British socialists coined the term "tankie" ages ago. Marxists were kicked out of unions, like the AFL-CIO. It seems strange to me to assert that these anti-ML socialists would think that socialism would have to be defined by what the US and USSR say it is.
Again, things don't just become irrelevant just because you say they are.
Is there any historical data that I am allowed to look at? Like, at all? If I can't use the past 100 years and I can't use the past 1000 years, can I use the past 10 years?
That depends on the specific conditions. It can't always crush prefiguration. It can't never crush prefiguration.
You don't understand why the people pushing and training others to practice prefiguration being consciously anti-hierarchical would have an impact?
No, the reason is that monarchy != capitalism and there's different norms on how state repression works. And also small isolated communes in capitalism are also doomed, which is why it's not what we suggest we do.
Sure, some were. But I am not certain the majority were, given how even now on lemmy, there's a ton Stalin stans. Growing up in Greece, the vast majority of socialists were of the ML variety until the failure of ML regimes became too much to ignore.
Different situations are not relevant just because you say the are.
Yeah, I don't understand that at all. I feel like you lost the plot here.
We're talking about the possibility of violent state repression, right? If everyone in your movement, but just the people in it, got so pissed off they decided to take up arms against the government, would that be enough to overthrow it? Or would you also need the support of people not in your movement? You know, the ones who aren't anarchists and don't follow your ideology. If you present a problem for the state's control, then the reason they don't just round you up and shoot you is because of the possibility of a backlash from the broader public. But if that broader public is manipulable or unreliable, then you don't really have a guarantee of safety - which is all I'm really saying here.
So then, do you agree that a community of people promoting community and opposition to hierarchy can be violently suppressed, under certain circumstances? It isn't, like, an inherent trait of the universe, and you have to look at the specific conditions to evaluate it?
Lemmy was created by Marxists, so it's hardly surprising there's a lot of Marxists here. But there has been a broader surge in popularity for that ideology. The reasons for that have little to do with any sort of significant, long running movement and more to do with modern politics and circumstances.
This shows me you don't understand prefiguration. Prefiguration is about improving people's lives in the here and now by practicing anarchism in the here and now. The people are "in the movement" by practicing prefigurative direct action. And that action, along with the knowledge people instructing on how to do prefiguration, radicalizes these people to oppose hierarchies because they see how their lives materially improve away from them.
If/When a state directly takes arms against prefigurative movements, those people can either flow away into other direct action if they can't fight it, or if there's enough of them, fight back against state oppression.
You still don't get it. The "community of people promoting community and opposition to hierarchy can be violently suppressed" is distributed widely among the whole population and impossible to stamp out like a small isolated community.
MLs theory prominence always waxes and wanes in the low percentile digits. A little bit like Randian intellectual masturbation does as well. However it never materially changes things for people in capitalist societies so it never catches hold.
The most prominent example that comes to my mind of Western Marxist-Leninists were the Black Panthers. They made the exact same assessment and employed the exact same strategy that you're advocating for. Namely, they recognized that the way to win people over was to provide direct, material improvements to people's lives. So they looked at what the community needed, and they saw that poor black kids were going hungry, which was bad enough on its own, but also made them struggle in school, which perpetuated the cycle of poverty.
So they started a program where they handed out free breakfast to hungry kids. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, declared this program to be an existential threat to the government and authorized using any means necessary to put a stop to it. The night before they were set to open, the cops broke in and pissed on their food. They went door to door, spreading rumors that the food was poisoned. The news warned everyone that they were luring people in to teach them to hate white people.
Even so, it succeeded. Eventually, the liberals in government figured out that the easiest way to stop the Panthers from handing out free breakfasts was to just do it themselves. And so now, thanks to the Panthers, there's a national program to provide free breakfasts to poor kids.
I understand the concept of prefiguration (even if the specific term is unfamiliar to me), just like the Panthers did, and just like the FBI did. It's not a particularly new idea, it has been tried before, and it has both succeeded and failed. The only part that we disagree about regarding it is that I view it as a strategy, useful in some circumstances but not others, while you seem to regard it as inherently true and universally effective, despite a lack of evidence to back that up.
You admit it yourself, that even the failed attempt at prefiguration actually worked ultimately! And yes sure, the BP movement ultimately failed because of how profoundly racist USA was and still is, but it still had an impact in failure. As such, we just need more of the same.
You completely missed the point. Why would I even bring up a successful example if my argument was that prefiguration never works? I'm not trying to be adversarial here. The point is that you're not the first person to think of doing this. It can work, yes, that I never disputed. But you need to look at history to see when it has succeeded or failed. I'm not arguing against the idea, I'm only arguing against treating the idea as sacrocant and infallible.
I actually believe it not always works in the long term, but it's the only thing that works. State reaction can of course shatter the occasional direct action movement or mutual aid group, but it cannot do so against everyone, especially if people are cognizant of the state danger. And the fact that these actions actually improve the lives of people, is what causes more people to join in doing them.
The history of previous movements crushed only to have their goals implemented anyway at the height of capitalist power is just more evidence of what we're saying it correct.
To actual falsify the idea that anarchist prefiguration doesn't work you need to show that it either doesn't improve the lives of the people practicing it outside of external factors (i.e. state reaction), or that when widespread it doesn't actually lead to anarchism.
But I'm not trying to prove it doesn't work. There are successful examples, like the one I mentioned.
If you go back to my original comment, it was in response to someone saying, "The US army won't drone strike a community meal," and "the heinous acts were only possible by othering the foreigners." If you agree that the state does sometimes successfully employ force to stop peaceful community building, then we are in agreement.
You also still seem to be caught up on this "gotcha" of like, "The example that you said used our methods and succeeded used our methods and succeeded! Ha!" Like, yes, that's what I said. You seem to think that I brought it up as some kind of cautionary tale.
yes and I directly responded to that argument with
Which is my point in that state violence can repress one small community or movement like the BPs but cannot easily do so on widespread prefiguration.
And I pointed out that a lot of society is not practicing prefiguration. Meaning that you can't currently treat it as a guarantee of safety while you attempt to reach the point where a lot of society is practicing it.
The point being that since prefiguration is the only thing that's been shown to work, this is what we do. The fact that everyone is not doing it is irrelevant.
It's completely relevant. The problem is that you're completely missing the point of the conversation, because you're too concerned with arguing a point nobody has disputed.
The point is that being right doesn't stop bullets. The point is that your safety is not guaranteed just because you're doing a good thing. At no point have I claimed that prefiguration doesn't work. I've been abundantly clear the whole time that it can. It's like you've invented a version of me in your head who you're arguing against instead of listening to what I actually say.
I don't understand where you saw me arguing that it can stop bullets. I honestly don't even know what your point is by now. That revolution is gonna be hard? No shit
I already spelled it out to you several times, but here you go again:
I don't see what's unclear about that. You might not have said that being right was a protection against force, but I didn't think that that was at all clear from what the other person was saying.
There wasn't really a need for any of this to be an argument. It was just a reminder that it's not always safe, and not to rely too much on ideology for protection. If you think that's valid, I mean, that's what I was saying from the start and I'm not sure what I could've said or done differently that would better communicate that.
Yes, my point is broadly speaking about, "Revolution is hard" - in a certain, specific way. Is it not valid to look at the history of people trying to build community power and identify various unexpected dangers they encountered? It's like, "Hey, be careful, there's a spike pit after this jump," "So what? You're telling me this level has things that can kill me? No shit." If we both agree there's a danger there, then I don't understand what I actually said that you take issue with.
I'm not taking an issue with anything. I just thought you were making a point more salient than "the capitalist state is dangerous and hostile to anarchist praxis" which every anarchist recognizes.
Do you really believe that?
Do you think any of the people who voluntarily joined the military are going to give a shit about anyone other than who is giving them orders? The military is already committing atrocities in plain view all over the world I'm sure will be fine following orders to drone strike a wedding in the USA if theyre told its a terrorist.
Regardless, my point is they won't need to because the drones that will be doing this will be moatly automated.
Yes, I do believe that, because it's still people in the military and if it', a big enough movement, they will have connections with those people.
Also, if the economy grinds to a halt, due to a general strike, they can bomb the workers all they want: it's not gonna restart the economy.
Or I simply refuse to be such a nihilist. Ifwe can't establish that, humanity is doomed. It's literally "socialism or barbarism".
I admiet I don't have all the answers, because I don't think you can have a perfect plan/vision of the future. I only know what I think is to be the best way to get us out of the massive mess we're in. If you're seriously interested a more thorough analysis, here's a video. And here's the script for the essay if you think youtube isn't for serious people.
Do you actually know any active military people right now?
We seem to be doing a fine job of "othering" each other right now.
It’s called “magic”