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subrosa wrote

Reply to comment by Esperaux in by !deleted32344

It's not a question of anarchism needing to be communist it's a question of what anarchism itself means.

Ok. Why do you think it means communism?

What forms of noncommunist anarchy exists besides either market anarchism or anarchist capitalism? The former preserving the coercive forces of capitalism but collectivizing the system and the second being a contradictory concept.

I highly doubt the usefulness of the 'market or communism' thing you do, I would be similarly critical if it were the other way around. ("Anarchism without markets ends up always coercive communism blah blah", I can imagine some C4SS reader tweeting that). Either approach would seem a little stuck in the 'ontology' of existing economics and politics, the interlocking sciences and practices of household-managing and government that gave us the most commonly accepted meanings of 'markets' and 'communism'. As if anarchism is merely another political program, a plan for how to run the community or whatever 'house' you plan to communize.

Obviously unwilling to 'kill my heroes', or just not great with language, here's me pulling two quotes that express important bits of what I'm trying to get at:

I believe that anarcho-hyphenations tend to favor the non-anarchist side of the hyphen and should be avoided. [...] This burden of hyphenation wasn't necessarily the way it had to happen. Hyphenated positions can just be a way to state a preference, to work through the extremes of a position, or to compensate for the fact that so many partisans of positions have gone quiet in our modern era, replaced by mealy mouthed voyeurs who swipe left and right on the infinite choices life presents them.

Aragorn!

[...] if I am anywhere near correct that it is various forms of something like escheat that connects the various kinds of exploitation that we currently experience, then I am probably not too far wrong in thinking that the entire abandonment of the polity-form is the key to shifting from archic to anarchic forms of social organization.

That, it seems to me, is the one fundamentally anarchistic task we face and, if we manage to accomplish it, many of the challenges to follow are really just technical questions, to be answered experimentally as we try to best match our available resources with our needs and desires. At that point, we can settle back into a kind of economic analysis that we’ve learned to approach with a mix of skill and pleasure. But, at that point, I expect that the market-form itself will have diminished considerably in its specific importance, losing much of the ideological significance that it clearly now bears.

Shawn Wilbur

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