u/ArthropodJim

I was talking with a (principled) LeftCom friend earlier today who said that not ALL anarchists are moralists because that’s a generalized statement, but that a lot of them are. But it was a response to a Marxist who told me anarchists are moralists. I forgot their exact reasoning, but the LeftCom said something along the lines of “anarchists say hierarchies are morally or justifiably bad, and then they work backwards to create the society they want rid of it.” I also asked what separates/prevents communizors from identifying as anarchists and they said that communizors don’t really view hierarchies as a focal point.

Maybe it’s just me, but I also don’t understand what the project of communization is. They dislike the state and share almost all points with anarchists, but are they doing mutual aid or prisoner support and food not bombs and stuff?

But i guess back to my larger question, are anarchists moralists? doesn’t that assume that anarchists don’t base their claims and perspectives off current material conditions? Does that make anarchists materialists, and to what extent does Marxism have a “monopoly” on the application of materialism if its most popular form is historical materialism?

thanks

Edit: I think there’s a miscommunication going on. It was a Marxist who called anarchists moralists, not the leftcom. it was the leftcom who said not ALL anarchists are moralists

Morning!

Did a long drive yesterday that I’ve done multiple times in the past. But it took almost 3 more hours because I was avoiding fires and etc, so I had to drive through a very mountainous and desert-like area where I got stuck for almost an hour.

But it got me thinking, and this will be written in a stream of consciousness, how strong or weak are states in geographically “difficult” regions? First thing first, I recall some women out in South Asia saying that the feel very free when high up in the mountains away from governments and states. Similar people feel this way about Zomia around Southeast Asia and anthropologists like James C. Scott and James Stout have written about this.

I also think about the hot desert areas of the Sahara along with relatively empty “hot” deserts of California and West Asia and the “cold” deserts of Siberia or the Arctic poles.

How much jurisdiction do states or governments have in these sorts of areas? How can we measure how strong or weak a state is compared with the result of its centralization as seen in cities and rural areas compared with low populated areas away from cities and hubs? I also think about old president Theodore Roosevelt who was like “hurdur we need to save the environment and keep certain portions of the environment untouched by man!” but it seems to be more of a conversation of preventing the spread of capitalism to ALL parts of the country (which they knew to be exploitative) rather than protecting the environment. Because if they actually cared about keeping the environment untouched, why commercialize and “ruin” the beaches of Hawaii like in Waikiki and stuff like that? Who determines what’s worth saving?

The reason why I asked is I would imagine states are pretty weak in areas where there’s not a lot of people to have control over. One example I thought would be large flat areas like farms with only certain roads, no one for miles, distant police stations, maybe one or zero general stores in the county, etc. But then I figured that the farmers here are also being told what to do by the seeds they plant, and the whole seed copyright thing, which means there’s definitely some corporate oversight over their actions - which means the state is strong in this area? Or what about really tall and snowy mountains that would be hard for the state to do anything with, but then they open it up to tourism, to which the state makes hotels and resorts and snowboarding stuff, therefore “absorbing” it into the state since they now have more oversight over it? Let me know if i’m defining any of these incorrectly.

Cool thanks everyone be safe today

I see state socialism as the result of statist socialist revolutions like in the Soviet Union or China, or things that postcolonial African countries decided to experiment with. But if the state runs everything like businesses and industries, workers aren't really in charge of anything, and we have a one-party state with no real elections, how is that socialist?

Which brings me to my question, what is the anarchist analysis of "objectively good" policies that state socialist countries would implement? Like Tanzania implemented Ujamaa which pretty much failed because the villagization Nyerere thought of to run the state's production didn't work since the village groupings (people of which already weren't really in villages per say) were family-run and not absorbed into the new state apparatus. Overtime his administration centralized the state more and there was a lot of autocratic and coercive stuff going on.

But Tanzania's maternal mortality rate went down, literacy rates went up, and female life expectancies went up. Obviously these are objectively good things, and I don't think any anarchists or principled human beings would say they aren't. But for people who only measure success by that, what is the way to show that a centralized and coercive government didn't need to be the ones doing it? After all, dictators and nazi assholes can build railways and roads but that doesn't justify either of the two. But I want more of an anarchist analysis than just "it's not what's being done but HOW it's being done."

Speaking of Tanzania, was the forced villagization and coercive acts NEEDED to be done to increase literacy rates and reduce maternal mortality rates? Like if something is objectively good like the lowering of maternal mortality rate, it should be done ASAP if not be the BASE of whatever is to come. But on top of that, even if it was the state that created these policies, wouldn't it be the common people and workers (doctors, teachers, etc) who were the ones who actually *did* the work and not the state? Even if China's state socialist (state capitalist, technically) government lifted 900 million people out of poverty and they're above a dollar or two a day, isn't there still large %'s of people earning three dollars a day who are still in poverty? Doesn't that make the poverty line extremely arbitrary? Just because they have a bullet train doesn't mean the people are free. So what's the deal here? what's the way to show them that the good results DO matter but in a nuanced way that doesn't justify the state?

Help me understand, thanks. Anarchy and Equality!

I am 100% an anarchist, and a proud anarchist of color. Anti-hierarchy, anti-state, anti-capitalist, none of my commitments to these values are being questioned. My problem, as someone who makes zines on anarchist theory and used to make videos on anarchism on TikTok before being fed up with MLs, is that nearly all other leftist ideologies talk about liberation. Whether it is people talking about Marxism, Marxist-Leninism, Maoism, POC variations of Marxism, etc.

I fundamentally do not understand how these ideologies can remotely think or envision any, and I mean ANY, of liberation while intentionally upholding the state and not wanting it gone immediately. People then ask me how would the state be immediately gone? My response is always "the state won't be gone tomorrow, but we HAVE to create alternative structures OUTSIDE of the state to be dependent on." I understand that approach is slightly more "defensive" than "offensive" since we're not immediately disrupting the state other than excluding our presence in it. But either way, the brain's base is "I do not want a state" and the result is "I will build dual power" or "I will attack the state," both types of anarchists are invited to my cookout.

My problem lies with every single statist ideology. Do these people completely reject the existence of state violence and state domination? It makes incredible and inherent sense that anarchism, an ideology completely rid of the state, situates itself as a libertarian ideology since it treats individual liberty and personal sovereignty as the highest values. Few days ago I posted this

>Marxist-Leninism is only successful if you view success as something being able to grab power. Change your measuring stick to measure actual freedom, actual liberation, sovereignty, and autonomy, and it’s an incredibly failed ideology.

>“if the objectives of those who used the DC [democratic centralist] methods were simply to seize power, then their record during the 20th century was impressive. It has proved itself as brutally efficient and capable of outdoing anything the bourgeois forces are capable of.” - Russell “Maroon” Shoatz, “The Dragon and the Hydra.”

and someone retweeted it saying:

>lemme just tally up my Freedom Points

To which i quickly responded:

>Just say you don’t care about actual freedom, no need to talk all smug about it. this is how i know people who don’t care about that actually aren’t liberationists nor are they interested in genuine liberation for people. they just want some abstract ass revolution with zero actual progress to humanity.

Lately I've been getting more and more frustrated with leftists north of the X-axis in the authoritarian realm. I don't understand how they can have such detailed and complex analyses on damn near everything, and then turn around say they want to seize the state. From my perspective, anyone who wants to seize the state is not anti-state because they need it intact for it to be under their control. State-centered visions of liberation are completely meaningless to me, useless, and completely counter-revolutionary to me no matter how you spin it. How did going after the state become seen as something revolutionary if the state is a bourgeois creation strictly to oppress the many by decisions made by a few?

In my understanding, state socialism advocates for state ownership of the means of production. Industries and natural resources are state-owned, and like all types of anti-state socialists at the time thought it was the most effective form of socialism (which is a weird blanket statement to make on behalf of all socialists, but anyways). Economic systems of ML states were not socialist due to the continued use of commodity production and wages as remuneration. Even if Marxist-Leninists are anti-state because *eventually* they want it to wither away, why do they advocate for state socialism? How have they single-handedly convinced people that liberation will come and the state will disappear after a revolution that puts them in charge? It's completely unfathomable and illogical.

As someone studying Black and African anarchisms, I can say with my chest that there were severe problems with countries in the African post-colonial period that embraced state socialism, this is both my opinion and the opinion of African sociologists. It was attempted by 21 countries within the continent and I think less than 10 times in Europe. I do not understand why Marxist-Leninists or any other authoritarian leftist ideology do not look to the failures of state socialism and say that it was not a socialism problem but a state problem like African anarchists have diagnosed.

In Tanzania, Nyerere wanted to mix traditional precolonial communal values with the then-current ideas of socioeconomic development. His view of socialism did not focus directly on class struggle but rather on the family unit. From 1968-1975 he led Tanzania through a period called villagization which was the consolidation of rural Tanzania into village-style agricultural communities where resources would be collectively shared. His logic makes sense to me, even the part where he said village production would remove the culture of capitalist value and power. But nearly all of the state of Tanzania's agricultural production was done by independent owned farms that were not absorbed into the new state. In the article "Deconstructing Ujamaa: The Legacy of Julius Nyerere in the Quest for Social and Economic Development in Africa," they say that the cultural and lifestyle changes they were expected to embrace by forced collectivization didn't make sense. Even though 96% of children went to school (50% of which were girls), female life expectancy went up, and maternal mortality rates went down, overtime "the state assumed a degree of control over village management and production that some historians have labeled coercive and autocratic, claiming this contradicted the democratic values Ujamaa espoused." What is the trade-off here? How do we as libertarian socialists/anarchists view the strong state oversight of villages against clearly good rates and %'s that were in the green?

In Ghana, Nkrumah adopted a strategy of increasing state-controlled services while putting restrictions on privately owned ones. 60% of bank deposits were at state-run banks, 17% of sea cargo was handled by state-run firms, 27% of industrial production was ran by the state, and the state controlled 35% of total imports. Completely centralized planning, economic mismanagement, and an authoritarian regime is what described Ghana at this point. There was a suppression of political opposition, no free and fair elections, and Ghana became a one-party state. Yet today he is heralded as a Pan-African hero and anticolonial Socialist revolutionary. How do we consistently, CONSISTENTLY, use a measuring stick that that almost NEVER measures actual freedom of the people or sovereignty of the Ghanaian or Tanzania villages? Why is the pure and raw ingenuity of the African peoples (NOT leaders) almost never depended on?

Even in the case of Tanzania. Why did the state pass something the villages were clearly not ready for? Now they are in the drivers' seat of the state's entire production? I don't remotely see that as a problem of socialism because obviously there would be some variant of this European ideology that would value that non-state version of decentralized organizing. So once again I see it 100% as a state problem. Even if the %'s of literacy rates went up and the %'s of mortality went down, HOW did it go down? Could those rates have not changed had there been no state? Obviously those decisions about healthcare and education still need to be made, but shit how were they made BEFORE the state and BEFORE colonization? Sometimes people wag in my face that state socialism (or i guess, state capitalism technically) lifted 900M people out of poverty in China. First off, what is described as poverty? As of 2022, 21% of Chinese people are living in poverty under $5.50. So what if you make $6, is that not poverty anymore? That's still pretty shit. Even in India, 34% lives under a dollar a day? That's ridiculous to me, the arbitrary line of poverty makes no sense because people who earn $2 a day in India or $6 a day in China are still living IN POVERTY if not extreme poverty. Why is China seen as a successful socialist state by MLs and Maoists? People both in capitalist and state socialist societies are suffering. I don't care if they got a bullet train, they're not free! Even dictators and capitalists can build roads, that doesn't justify dictatorships or capitalists.

I know this has turned into a weird rant talking about state socialism and stuff, but my point hopefully is weaved throughout and I just don't understand it. Since authority and the state is clearly a problem in their own right along with being a core part of capitalism, why are these other ideologies such as Marxist-Leninism absolutely winning the propaganda war against anarchism? I'm done ranting, someone help me understand this.

I've heard from people that they're embracing other politics, and that their libertarian socialist caucus is emptying out very quickly

morning rats

anarchist grad student here researching the

1. failure of state socialism in newly independent African countries

(by sharing the thoughts of African and Black anarchists and their critiques of authoritarian socialism)

1. top-down, hierarchical model of groups claiming to be working towards Black liberation

(Black anarchists who were former MLs themselves now critiquing the hierarchical and sexist natures of BPP, RAM, etc)

i am claiming that both groups (Black organizations in America + newly elected African leaders embracing socialism/the states they made) reproduced political dependency through centralized authority, decision-making by the elite, and greatly limited the capacity of communities to organize social and economic life outside state structures. they also both recognized that top-down models are structurally vulnerable because they’re very easily to be taken down (CIA and FBI infiltration, surveillance, incarceration, assassination) and the whole movement would die because they organized around top-down leaders.

i’m asking more specifically at how some of the changes these socialist states did aren’t inherently bad (Tanzania had 90% of children in primary school, and vastly reduced mortality rate of women), but that state forcing what can basically be described as single-family farms into villages (villagization) was detrimental because the farms themselves were never really absorbed into the state. they now had the sole production of the state on their backs but since they were never absorbed, the notion of African socialism under Ujamaa didn’t really work.

so i want to learn more about state socialism (and state capitalism since they are synonymous), but also i am in an african studies program so i don’t know if dense quantities economic analyses would likely be helpful. I want to understand the big picture and see how state socialism helped and or hurt the African peoples ranging from villagers and farmers and working class. i would also like some basic canonical texts understanding state socialism.

i’m very knowledgable about the large renaissance of 50s/60s African literature that existed when they were writing heavily about “buzzword” topics, books like “Pan Africanism or Communism?” or “African socialism: a radical reader!” type of stuff. I haven’t done through those yet, but it seems to be more socialist fused with traditionalist/communalist values than a critique of what would later be made which are the socialist states. i’m calling them failures because they involved the state and not because it was socialism. But also making the point that the ruler we use to measure differences can be very vague. It will yield positive results, for example, if we measured the improvement of that women’s mortality rate. But it would be poorer results if we’re measuring on how independent and empowered villagers were after statehood.

thanks, PM me please if anyone has questions

if not, what happened to them? I’ve heard of a lot of historic ones in Seattle and etc, i’m just curious why they don’t have anymore or why they shut down. If they didn’t, i can’t find any information of why or when.

Title!

I’m a teacher just trying to get back into cruising around, maybe now I’ll try to do a tailwhip. It’s convenient taking it on the train to where my class usually is. However maybe on the side I’ll just take it cruise around, i remember having a good hop when i was a kid, maybe i can do a couple stairs too.

But my bars were really short, like 24 or something. Super comfortable now with 28 or 28.3 or something. I just don’t really wanna spend $100 on a larger deck that’s 5.5 x 23 or something. Maybe in the future if it’s absolutely needed. I haven’t spent the most time riding what I currently have. Maybe if some decks like in the $40-50s show up on marketplace i can get it.

But i wanna keep the forks and the wheels and all that stuff. If I get a new deck can i put everything i have on it? i think my friend even put a shim or something in it when the new bars when on. But anyways, what’s up with the deck stuff? Can I stick with what I have now or am I gonna blow my back out like I would have with shorter bars?

Or something like that. Honestly was just clicking through the incoming notifications. Is there an updated LibreWolf I should download? Using a 2022 M2 macbook air. It said something like the current version won't be supported in the future or something.

so there’s two Toreros technically? so at Viva El Gonzo they did Faena?? that’s crazy

grad student here. i would leave class a few minutes early at night to catch the 8:45 train home to san bernardino (i get home at 11PM). now that they’ve cancelled that train, so it skips directly from 7:45 to 9:45 (i’d get home at midnight), does anyone have any solutions? Anyone else doing this commute who will be affected? just frustrated, i know they’re not reading that metrolink survey.

ran into an administrator who worked at my prior institution and they said they’re actually trying to recruit more students from the IE. Hope they’re just talking about undergrad, because these night classes are difficult if students have to wait an hour before leaving. and if that train gets canceled, i don’t know how i’d get home. i can drive, but that’s 240ish miles weekly.

morning

i’m traveling from california and i’m in houston for a single day. just a couple hours. i wanted to know if there’s any bookstores inside the freeway loop where i could get books on anarchism. could be old, could be new, preferably used books, just any. i know prairieland stuff is going on so i just wanted to be vigilant. even if they’re just used book stores that would have large theory sections for politics or sociology, send them my way thanks.

i know houston anarchist bookfair was just a month or two ago so i’m hoping some of those folks would know. thanks, i’m close to the medical hospital area

Here is what I think.

The Marxist definition of socialism is defined by it's usage in a transitory sense. In other words, I see it as the first landmark step a society will be in upon the passage of capitalist society. Mode of production will change, wage labor relationships will be reevaluated, etc etc.

The anarchist definition of socialism is the libertarian socialism on steroids, but maybe talks more of a society with hierarchical structures that emphasizes individual liberty + solidarity.

to my brain, i think they both talk about opposing capitalism, class exploitation, they both want collective ownership of production.

I am thinking about how various leaders of African nation states were infatuated with socialism giving way to African Socialist variants. But I want to know if that inherently makes them Marxists or if socialism on it's own can be a thing equally routed to anarchism. I know people say anarchism is just the non-state variant of socialism, but then I want to understand where the Marxist definition relates to that because I figured the Marxist definition would still want the state even if it's temporarily

Okay so I was on my home planet and saw an NPC ship on fire that needed to be repaired. I did it and remembered i can sell stuff, so i sold it and it gave me I think $3M. It was enough to consistently buy almost all ships that came into the station and now I have $30M.

the ship I started with was a C-class but right now a B-class came in looking like a Star Wars X-wing. and guess WHAT, a yellow tennis ball looking ship came in and it was an S-class! I bought it immediately and all of its stats were like +100.0 better than everything my original ship was.

So i’m keeping the B-class because it’s better than my C-class (which i just sold) and keeping the S-class. I made sure to take out all the cargo and upgrades and put it on a freighter or something, and i’ll put it on my next ship.

The inventory sizes are pretty good on both, i think they’re both better than what I had. I don’t understand why the open inventory slots are spread out though and not all cubic. But these are good. Now I want to have a good ship with high stats and high inventory space. But I think to purchase more slots for the B-class, it’s like 3M each but 11M for the S-class.

Are there easier ways to upgrade the slots on my ship other than paying those millions? and also do you all have multiple ships with high upgrades? Or should i get rid of my cool looking B-class and move all the upgrades to the yellow tennis ball S-class that’s all thank you reddit go traveler s kzzzt