Submitted by subrosa in Anarchism

Reconciling Anarchism and Marxism

To reconcile is to restore friendly relations and harmony. I’m not sure Anarchism and Marxism need to be reconciled, and I’m not sure what there really is to restore. There never really was much of a friendship or harmony.

But that’s not what people seem to ask for anyway. Reconciliation has become an odd synonym for unity, the idea being that anarchism and Marxism can be mixed together for a stronger movement, a bigger one. What moves people to such absurdities, I believe, is a desperate clinging to a logic of strength in numbers, a political instinct.

Before we can even begin to talk reconciliation and harmony, we would need to be very clear about how these two might relate to each other. What connections can we make, what contexts do they share? In which ways do they differ? In which ways do they conflict?

But more importantly, other than calming our instinct for mass, what exactly do we gain from bringing those two together? Perhaps the strengths of both Anarchism and Marxism remain in how they differ and conflict.

I’m not opposed to attempts of reconciling the two, but I’m much more interested in seeing them fight. I respect Marxism enough to wanna see anarchists fight our best against it.

Capitalism is a hierarchy.

Both capitalism and hierarchy certainly play important roles in conversation about any vaguely coherent anarchism, but equating the two is hardly more than an inelegant way of taking position. Taking position against one thing, by a presumably understood position against the other. This amounts to little more than a vote, an empty signal for or against something. A desperate cry.

Capitalism really isn’t a hierarchy.

It is in all likelihood, or in most contexts, more accurate to say that capitalism is a system of economic exploitation that we can identify in existing political economies. Hierarchy is a ranking of positions of authority, a relationship that elevates one above another. Capitalism’s exploitative mechanisms depend on norms and institutions that authorize some to govern others, creating social hierarchies.

These are sort of a minimum definitions that can be contested and debated; depending on context you may want to use rather different definitions. My point here is really to draw distinctions, and to push for more clarity in our positions against capitalism and hierarchy. Because playing this game of “identify the bad thing” has a narrowing, flattening effect on anarchist discourse.

Capitalism isn’t just hierarchical, and we don't seem to gain anything from reducing anarchism to a mere opposition to hierarchy. No ‘bad’ thing worth worrying about is simple or one-dimensional. Nor is any ‘good’ thing worth living.

How would a communist society function? How would an anarcho-primitivist society work?

Today we see hardly enough anarchists to be recognized as anything like a force within society. The few anarchists that do exist stubbornly cling to rather narrow ideas of what anarchy might look like. This points to a contradiction of sorts: We narrow our options despite already not having any.

In a sense, currently existing anarchists are — equally brave and ridiculous — “early adopters” of anarchy, embracing it without any guarantee that we will ever see more anarchists or more anarchy in this world. The Bilge-Rat's Gambit.

Whenever someone starts laying down a plan of how it would work, I can’t help but see it as an attempt of explaining anything other than anarchy. Anarchy could very well be a massive disaster. We are ill-prepared to even recognize and talk about the challenges we might face. The challenges we do talk about are those we can hope to have the luxury of facing them.

The question of how it would work perhaps needs to start there. With this big unknown, and with our embrace of anarchy despite it being so alien and rare in this world. Subordinating anarchy to specific visions, economic arrangements, or responses to various aspects of the status quo, is to reject anarchy in one way or another. I want to see anarchy, in the full force of the term. Anarchy in all its senses.

Our fights will continue, and should continue — but more than that, anarchists need to overcome the ways our ideas of "what it would look like" actively stand in the way of 'getting there.'


I think I wanna write part 2 some time soon, perhaps covering property, semantics, flags and anti-statism. For fun. Hoping to antagonize my fave antagonists. In the meantime, gimme yer unfiltered thoughts.

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ziq wrote

Capitalism really isn’t a hierarchy.

Not sure I agree about capitalism not being a hierarchy on its own. At its most basic level, it's simply the ownership of capital. If certain privileged people own capital, and a few select people own most of the capital, a hierarchy is immediately evident, created by the system of capitalism. Making capitalism an arrangement of haves, have-lesses and have-nots, where the power each group has is completely unbalanced - a rigid hierarchy.

Capitalism isn’t just hierarchical, and we don't seem to gain anything from reducing anarchism to a mere opposition to hierarchy. No ‘bad’ thing worth worrying about is simple or one-dimensional. Nor is any ‘good’ thing worth living.

This I agree with. Just stating you oppose something for being a hierarchy and not analyzing its further consequences is very limiting and self-sabotaging. Every fiber needs to be pulled on until the ball of string is fully untangled.

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subrosa OP wrote

I hear ya, there's a bit of a conflict that I struggle to draw out entirely/clearly.

Just to be extra clear about one point, I don't think capitalism can be maintained in non-hierarchical social arrangements. There's no way capitalism can exist without hierarchies being very evident.

What I'm trying to get at is, capitalism is a complex system in motion — political economies in for-profit competition within political economies. Property norms and institutions that make any conception of "capital" possible are fundamental, so are social collectives organized into firms (with hierarchical obey/command relations), so are 'supply and demand' regulated markets,... but none of these elements on their own make capitalism.

To put it another way, I don't think capitalism = authority either, nor is capitalism government. (The distinctions and separations there are far more agreeable anarchist 'common sense' for whatever reason.) It is in how these terms relate to each other that gives meaning to them; the equation alone doesn't get us very far in untangling this mess.

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Fool wrote

Capitalism

System requirements: Hierarchy


Anarchy

System specifications:

  • Hierarchy: None
  • Licence No.: None
  • Build No.: 0.04

Error: Capitalism cannot be installed on a system without Hierarchy, please install Rulers and restart system to continue.

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Tequila_Wolf wrote

Saying it's not a hierarchy doesn't appear to be the right way to go - saying it's not just a hierarchy might do it.

Seems you'd also benefit from including a tiny genealogy of capitalism to demonstrate what you were talking about in terms of the preconditions for capitalism.

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subrosa OP wrote

saying it's not just a hierarchy might do it.

Not just doesn't do it for me, gets right past my point.

There's all sorts of hierarchies within a capitalist system, but it doesn't make sense to say capitalism itself is a (an instance of) hierarchy. Capitalism isn't any authority in itself either, it doesn't command anyone. Our relationships to capitalists, owners, bosses must be different than our relationship to capitalism. There's plenty in capitalism that simply isn't a hierarchy.

you'd also benefit from including a tiny genealogy of capitalism to demonstrate what you were talking about in terms of the preconditions for capitalism.

I think I did, to the the extent it seemed useful. The point was to separate the system from its elements, its building blocks and relations. Wouldn't wanna insist on any history or any rigidy in how you might map out the conceptual relations within capitalism.

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Majrelende wrote (edited )

How would a communist society function? How would an anarcho-primitivist society work?

Today we see hardly enough anarchists to be recognized as anything like a force within society. The few anarchists that do exist stubbornly cling to rather narrow ideas of what anarchy might look like. This points to a contradiction of sorts: We narrow our options despite already not having any.

I agree. The ten thousand isms are all annoying oversimplifications... and I think we are generally going about everything the wrong way with them.

First, for the sake of translation into a question that is more alive, in a sense, I will rephrase: "What kind of a place do I want my (X-great-)grandchildren to inhabit, its culture and environment?" I think that takes the relatively divisive -isms out, which while they undoubtedly have meaning, are a little oversimplifying, and have entirely the wrong perspective. "Anarcho-communism" is often assumed to have industrial elements and to generally reject money and trade, while "Anarcho-primitivism" is supposedly more radical, because it rejects most elements of modernity and civilisation. For a while I thought of myself as both, because I never thought they were contradictory.

What I mean is that the -isms are all graded with how far they are from the Center, the place of great plummeting swirling evil. How is that the center of the world?

Shouldn't it be how the water that runs in the river and into the lake and rises as clouds and rains and flows through and grows our grains and vegetables is exactly the same water who flows as blood within us and everyone we know, or how everyone seems to be relatively kind in the forest, how root vegetables grow best where people harvest them? The way we know how to treat another if we want them to like us, and know that they will do the same back?

I am not sure really how common or not this is as a way into "anarchism", but I think that a major thing that lead me to be "anarchist" and everything else, and which has shaped my view was being raised around good people and having relatively good traditions of taking the gifts of the earth.

I have heard that morels can grow hyphally in nutritious soil, but will only begin to fruit when they enter from there into a harsher area. I think this is what happened to me: the horror of the gender binary, the intolerable ubiquity of capitalism when I knew deeply that Earth fed us abundantly, the realisation that even if the Great High Ones gave me a few more rights, it would go on and on, always a new one to oppress and then another to raise up in self-congratulatory applaud. I wasn't comfortable, and so after a few rainy days a mushroom popped out of the earth.

Whether you consider it so or not, the -isms seem like always finding something else to hate: authority first, then capitalism, trade, then civilization and technology and language and whatever odious object is next. And that is a horrible way to figure out how we want to live, really. (You could start a movement called Anti-Murderism, if you wanted, but what good that would do I haven't any idea.) Maybe we are so busy arguing over what to hate that we have forgotten to center our lives around what we love.

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