<Snipped quote by Buddha>
I think you can hardly call the revolution in Russia a fully realized communist undertaking. And I think it's a structure vs. superstructure issue. When you change the structure of a polity but not the superstructure, you'll find it's not very sustainable.
Eh, it could be called an attempt. It just relied too much on the idea of the vanguard party. Personally I think the problem with Marxism has always been the obsession with purity, and that obsession with purity both blinded the Soviets to what they were actually doing and led them to squash the communist parts of their society rather quickly because they weren't following the correct pattern. You know, "Hey Communes, I see you are doing okay and all, but it's not time for that yet! Didn't you read the book? You're on the wrong step!"
And the entire "Marxism is inevitable" thing blinded them to the reality that their government was becoming another corrupt power structure. No, Khrushchev didn't betray the revolution, he was inevitable the moment Lenin said "We need a strong state"
Not that I'm well versed, but the way I see it, the problem with anarchy is a lack of infrastructure. It's unsustainable on the large scale. You can have a town or a city be anarchist, but at the level of a state or country it starts to fall apart - at least in the modern day, with modern requirements such as internet, power grids, decently quick long-distance travel, and so on and so forth.
You need co-operation on a huge scale in order to maintain these things, and that's extremely difficult in an anarchist society. Indeed, that's sort of why we ended up forming democracies in the first place. So unless you're going to massively technologically downgrade your life, anarchy is somewhat untenable.
(As I said, I'm not well-versed in this, so if anyone wants to correct me please do <3)
Well like I said before, Anarchism is basically super-democracy. The difference between Anarchy and something like Athenian democracy is that Anarchists are really just democratizing everything instead of, as most traditional democracies do, democratizing policy and the right to chose a leader. In the traditional Anarchism that was popular in the 20th century, practiced in Spain during their Civil War and an important component of the old American far left, what we call "Anarcho-Syndicalism", amounted to the communes seizing the means of production and turning a democratic workplace into the building block of the society, so that instead of chaos, you end up with an organization that looked like this.
And this isn't just theory; it's been tried before, and Anarcho-Syndicalism had a pretty good run. During the Spanish Civil War, when the Fascists rose up against the Spanish Republican, the Republican government crumpled and became ineffective under the pressure, and it was the Anarchists that picked up the slack. And they did really damned well considering Stalin essentially stabbed them in the back trying to make Spain Stalinist, and that Hitler and Mussolini funded and armed the shit out of Franco while the western democracies left the Spanish Republic twisting in the wind. It did turn out that Anarchists struggle with military coordination though, which seems to be the Achilles heel of most Anarchist movements, and turned their battles into messy affairs. If I remember right they did okay in the beginning when the Fascists were using outdated rifles and had no modern weapons, and they continued to do alright against Mussolini, though that's not much of an accomplishment since most people tended to do alright against Mussolini.
But there is more to the movement too, because unbeknownst to most people we actually have another major Anarchist experiment going on right now. The Kurds in Northern Syria have adopted an Anarchist form of government. Not Anarchy-Syndicalism, but another that is more heavily influenced by democracy than communism. I don't know nearly enough about Democratic Confederalism, but from what I know they've built their system on the village and the locality rather than the work place, and that they are unique among the far left in that, instead of immediately seizing the means of production, they've placed property rights under control of the communes. This is to say that you can own private capital and be a capitalist so long as your community sees it as beneficial, but the moment the community decides private capital is against the interests of the community, they can simply vote to seize it and the capitalists have no recourse.
There system looks like this, incidentally.
So anyway, in short, Anarchists aren't about destroying the power structure and just sitting back to see what happens. There is a plan there. It's more or less based on the theory that authority sucks energy from a community rather than directing or adding it. An Anarchist would say the problem with voter turnout in modern Republics isn't apathy, but alienation, that people don't vote because they feel their vote is irrelevant, that they can't change their lives for the better against the authority structures of their society. Essentially, they idea is that we all want to participate to improve our own world and the world around us, but that we all more or less feel locked out of the process and so we just... don't participate. If you believe the reason that Democracies fair better against Leninists and Fascists is that those authoritarians kill civic engagement and make their people apathetic, wheres Democracies at least coax out some level of civic energy, then Anarchism may be something worth looking into.
I do also feel the need to say that, despite the fact they make fun of the Anarchist movements above for being impractical, the Anarcho-Capitalist movement has only had one serious experiment and it was a
total clusterfuck. So don't mind the An-Caps, they get the trophy for most incompetent political philosophy in western history.
Chapatrap,
Timemaster
