The fundamental conflict in capitalist society is not between the working class and capital, but between the local community and the centralized, oppressive, state. I do not advocate uprisings which would throw up revolutionary assemblies, as in the French revolution. Instead, I propose that citizens peacefully and legally create mass assemblies at the level of villages, townships, and city neighborhoods. With the aim of making these assemblies official, we would run in local elections. There, we would seek to take over town councils and similar bodies. We would try to change city and township charters, in order to replace the existing city, town, village, and neighborhood governments with popular assemblies. As much as possible, we would try to take over local businesses and industries, to “municipalize” the economy. This would lay the basis for a libertarian (lower case “c”) communism.
As more localities were transformed into communal assemblies, they will associate with each other, beginning to form an overall confederation. (However, they shoult not try to take over state-wide or national governments by elections - e.g. more statist reformism.) These spreading communal entities would undermine the state and capitalism. At some point, the state and capitalist class would try to stop the process. There would be a clash, nonviolent or violent, depending on circumstances.
the only brainlets here are people still trying to cram the 21st century square peg through the circular hole of the 19th century.
Henry Wilson
gladly, if my communal assembly asks me to
William Williams
Please tell me this is fake.
Ian Lopez
rich beople are good and like boor beople xd fug the goverment
Daniel Edwards
>''anarcho''-communist checks out
Landon Morgan
I'm advocating for local, direct democracy, genius. You're just mad I don't identify with the manufactured, outdated "class" identity, but rather a citizenry equally engaged in local control.
Connor Richardson
Are you arguing that a worker and a capitalist don't have a conflict of interest
I'm arguing that all of these conflicts can be dealt with directly by the communities. You know. Anarchism. If the people don't want anyone owning businesses in their community, and that any business there has to be municipalized, they vote on it, and that's that. No need to rely on overthrowing an entire system with billions of people in a protracted global war. Just start taking over areas with the consent of the people there and the state becomes redundant and less receptive - and fades away.
Jonathan Mitchell
yeah because when people willing to have hundreds of thousands murdered by drone strikes so they can make oil money stop getting their way because the poor people locally voted that they have to stop they're just going to do it.
Anarchism is the slightly lefter version of liberalism
Benjamin Carter
Those drone strike operators come from those small towns all across the country. So the more these assemblies form, the fewer people that will be available/willing to join with the capital "S" State. In fact, if areas that include military bases are taken over, those weapons default to the revolutionaries. Plus, your "worker" revolution does nothing to combat this issue either. Your only solution is to firebomb fellow worker's cars.
Gavin King
This is pure stupidity. It reminds me of the stupid "social contract" theory that forms the basis of liberalism. No, social and economic systems are not just a contract that one can pull out of at any time dumbass.
Ryan Walker
yes I support firebombing all anarchists
Lincoln Nguyen
...
Elijah Nguyen
There is no "social" contract. There's democracy. The only alternative is a centralized state with decentralized power.
Jonathan Myers
You do not even remotely understand how government works. Capitalism is the base, not the superstructure.
Aiden Turner
Where? I don't see any democracy here. Do you really think you can vote the capitalists out of power? That is as stupid as saying that you can vote the King out of power. Come on, you must know this. Or are you that naive?
Carson Carter
...
Logan Anderson
Democracy doesn't exist, its always rule of some class.
Landon King
t.1775
Connor Ortiz
they didn't vote retard
Zachary Taylor
class doesn't exist. it's always rule by individuals.
Do you think drone strike operators genuinely give a shit about who they're bombing? They're told to, they're told it's okay, and they're put in jail if they try to disagre.
Do you think the people who are willing to go out and murder union leaders and those on strike by the thousands in cold blood in Columbia are going to suddenly grow a sense of regret and decency towards their fellow man? Do you think that the men willing to kidnap others and work them literally to death in slave mines in northern africa will suddenly give a shit?
How are you even going to handle that anyway? Those things aren't local. The absolute barbaric cruelties of capitalism and the capitalists that follow its whim operate globally, not locally, and nobody genuinely cares about what happens if it's far enough away from them, and furthermore, how do you even propose to make sure it does happen?
Blake Mitchell
They set forth their own governmental system via assembly and wrote a letter to the King asking him to abdicate his power.
Daniel Taylor
t. 1776
Jeremiah Sullivan
It's possible. Though the same thing happens with "worker" revolutions too.
William Price
Yes, no one has economic interests due to the property they may or may not own. BASED AND REDPILLED MY FELLOW BOOKCHINITES!
Wyatt Bailey
and then fought a revolutionary war…
Cameron Rivera
The British invaded the colonists for asking the king to relinquish control, the colonists didn't declare war. Plus, I already acknowledged this
Adrian Rodriguez
If class itself is abolished, democracy is achieved. That is the point of communism.
Parker Martinez
Why did you put "workers" in quotation marks? Do you think workers don't exist or something?
Carter Price
These are still revolutionary assemblies and class exists retard.
If this is the guy I'm thinking of he's been shitting the board up for the past few days with toxic levels of utopian "just vote the bourgeoisie out xd marxism is violent and bad" bullshit, notably in the LTV and wages thread as well as that one anti-Murican thread. Best to just ignore and move on.
Ethan Ortiz
I'm sorry, commisar. I forgot we are all the exact same people with the exact same ideas and needs no matter our material condition.
Benjamin Bailey
...
Brandon Adams
Believe it or not people do not listen to votes that tell them their life is over.
Anthony Morales
It has become an arbitrary and non-tractible measure in post-industrial society. Perhaps for materialist economic analysis it is ok, but as an identity to form a revolutionary movement - it's a complete meme.
Christian Jackson
sad
Nathaniel Johnson
explain
despairful.
Jose Gutierrez
I can't believe this is unironic.
James Cox
...
Angel Martin
Is this a "Marx was only talking about factory workers" argument? Because he clearly wasn't. He states several times that intellectual labor is still labor. A worker is anyone who is a wage laborer, a capitalist is someone who owns capital. It's not that hard.
Wyatt Thompson
The role of money in your local, direct elections will be decied by the people of that assembly. What do you people not understand? If a group of people do not want political ads, etc., they vote on it and ban them. If rich people are causing an issue in your small community, you take community action to prevent them from doing it in the future. They have more money but you have all the labor and numbers.
How the fuck do you expect this to happen without violence? We do not endorse revolution out of bloodthirst, we endorse it because it is inevitable. Violence is never desirable, but always justified, and sometimes necessary, even in a mostly nonviolent movement. There is not some law of the universe preventing the ruling class or its state apparatus from using direct force against the proletariat. If necessary, it is more than willing to play defensively–this is the purpose of fascism.
No, I mean the fact that automation will be replacing millions of people and the fact that a huge proportion of "labor" today is non-productive. Doing middle-management paper-shuffling jobs. It's bullshit jobs designed to prop up bullshit jobs. There are millions of people who are poor and disenfranchized, with no or little job opportunities. Conversely, there are football players who make tens of millions of dollars a year, and these people are in the same exploited "workers" class. You just cannot build up an identity around "work" when the nature and manifestation of labor is headed for a radically different world than even the 20th century.
Camden Richardson
I didn't say I don't expect violence. Read the last part of my post.
Aiden Baker
Capitalism isn't local, and if you seriously think you are going to get rich people to agree to give over their property without any sort of fight because you voted on it then you're fucking delusional. They can afford to put up a much better fight than you can. Economic power and political power are magically separate they are the same thing wether you "allow" it or not.
Isaac Martinez
...
Blake Smith
I HAVE SAID THIS REPATEDLY: NO ONE EXPECTS THIS, THIS IS NOT A VALID CRITIQUE.
Christopher Thompson
and the king sent in the soldiers to shoot them in their stupid traitor cunt faces sadly they failed in that duty.
Xavier Robinson
Do you plan to fight private armies with a disorganized decentralized network of local councils?
Kevin Carter
You act as if unemployment is not the fault of capital. You also act as if unemployment did not exist in Marx's time. It may be a different world, but capital and wage labor still exist.
Sure OK, try fighting a global force with disconnected local communities and see how in pans out. Engels already demolished this line of thinking a century ago, and yet brainlets who don't read still spout this nonsense.
Caleb Ramirez
The process of class decomposition must be understood in all its dimensions. The word "process" must be emphasized here: the traditional classes do not disappear, nor for that matter does the class struggle. Only a social revolution could remove the prevailing class structure and the conflicts it engenders. The point is the traditional class struggle ceases to have revolutionary implications; it reveals itself as the physiology of the prevailing society, not as the labor pains of birth. In fact the traditional class struggle stabilizes capitalist society by "correcting" its abuses (in wages, hours, inflation, employment, etc.).
To reinforce this class structure by babbling about the "role of the working class," to reinforce the traditional class struggle by imputing a "revolutionary" content to it, to infect the new revolutionary movement of our time with "workeritis" is reactionary to the core.
The only logical agent of revolutionary change will be the great majority of society, drawn from all the different traditional classes and fused into a common revolutionary force by the decomposition of the institutions, social forms, values and lifestyles of the prevailing class structure.
David Taylor
Well the western capitalist forces demolished his worker's revolution a century ago but here you are trying to make the same mistakes again
Christian Baker
As much as we ancoms love peace, we understand being a pacifist pussy is no way to go about achieving it. You can't have a peacful tranisition to socialism, the porkies will never allow it. "It matters not who votes, but who counts the votes." Us civilians aren't the ones doing the counting, they are.
Tell me this is b8
You have some shit praxis m8. Pacifism has never accomplished anything on its own.
Daniel Davis
Nothing I said implied pacifism. Nothing I said implies the reactionary forces will not try to prevent it. Nothing I said imiplied it's not going to be a peaceful transfer of power. It never is.
Henry Stewart
see
Parker Turner
*implied it will be a peaceful transer
Nathaniel Young
If you ever dare to try to take on a military base with violence you're already either going to be shot very quickly if you're on your own or you're already in the middle of a war and long past any level of democracy.
So why advocate for revolution at all? Certainly the US has a dangerous arsenal of weapons that even gigantic, multi-trillion dollar governments couldn't easily combat. Is it the anarcho-communist stance that we should just be blackpilled defeatists and burn people's cars to kill the time?
Nathaniel Turner
Anarchist mystification, hand-waving, and democracy fetishism at it's finest. What a trash political ideology.
Even when I was an anarchist I wasn't this stupid.
Vermont is lowkey the weirdest state in the US, it's full of redneck succdems.
Xavier Parker
Now you're an enlightened reactionary I see.
Xavier Watson
In that case, don't oppose violent revolution.
That's not what anarchism entails "solve everything with voting", you're propping up a strawman and you know it. Stop being so dishonest if you want to be taken seriously.
Ryder Flores
You got even worse.
Matthew Collins
Except thy wouldn't happen because local councils literally don't have the authority to do that shit and if they did the army would move in
David Sullivan
Haha yeah man, just democratically vote Wal-Mart out of existence
Logan Price
I don't support an offensive war, but a defensive war will likely be unaviodable. I believe the american colonists did it correctly. Set up an alternative in assembly, ask the power structure to relinqish power, and respond accordingly.
Lincoln Martinez
You can vote to ban it from your municipality and that will kill it in your community.
Robert Thompson
The problems of capitalism are far more complex than simply management. Remember it's a mode of production not a mode of management. The contradictions and problems associated with generalized commodity production and impersonal market imperatives disciplining society are much more pressing and can't be solved by socializing capitalism. The fact that you think switching out the boss for a worker's council is sufficient enough to overcome these issues is evidence of the poverty of anarchism.
Cooper Parker
I'm not adovating for doing X or Y. I'm advocating for local municipalities to decide for themselves. If they want bosses and private ownership, that's what they want. If they want total worker council management of produciton, that's what they want. There's nothing revolutionary about forcing a community to do something they democratically decided they don't want to do.
Leo Garcia
It's insane how everyone on this board was falling for Bookchin back in 2015/2016, even I fell for it before I read a fucking book. Did we get legitimately PSYOPed?
Josiah Carter
No. All the intelligent anarchists just left because this board was so full of reactionary ☭TANKIE☭ scum who claim to want to advance leftism in the 21st century, but in all actualilty just want to re-live the "glory days" of genocidal 20th century State Communism.
It is completely true that a lot of them are LARPing though. Burgerclaps wouldn't know the difference regardless.
Juan Brooks
Yes because criticizing MLs and calling them reactionary and genocidal are the same thing
Lucas Russell
Okay, frist worlder
Carter Wright
You are a perfect example of why people abandon this dumpster fire of a "leftist" board. It's this insidious, sycophantic obsession with the USSR and Stalin/Mao-style State Communism that keeps leftism stuck in the same failing cycles of thought for 100 years. Any critique of ML or the USSR, any mention of purging political opponnets, any suggestion that it wasn't as democratic as it should have been - and you're automatically labeled as a shill and dismissed. Intellectual dishonesty at its finest. Not that I expect USSR-bootlickers to value things like opposing opinions or debate.
