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edmund_the_destroyer wrote

I'm not nearly as knowledgeable about this kind of thing as I'd like, but I'd say Marx and especially Lenin had a focus on the 'dictatorship of the proletariat', an authoritarian intermediate step before true communism. History definitely has demonstrated that step doesn't work out so well - everything goes off the rails and it becomes a despotic authoritarian state.

I have more respect and interest for the ideas of non-authoritarian socialists, though there is still the problem - as you wrote - of having to deal with attacks of all kinds by capitalist groups.

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sudo wrote

A lot of people get hung up on the term "dictatorship of the proletariat", and it's understandable why. When Marx says "dictatorship", he's not referring to a literal dictatorship, the way we think of one today. "Dictatorship" is one of those words whose meaning has changed over time. Back in Marx's day, "dictatorship" simply meant "rule". So, if you replace "dictatorship of the proletariat" with "rule of the proletariat", and "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" with "rule of the bourgeoisie", his meaning becomes more clear. The "dictatorship" of the proletariat is just a country where the proletariat (the working class) holds political power. The phrase is just a victim of evolving language.

Now, as far as anarchism, it would be nice if a lot of these decentralized models of government worked, because that would reduce the risk of jackasses going on a power trip. Unfortunately, though, these models tend to fall apart when scaled up from the government of a small community to the government of an entire country. This makes sense, since one of the principles of dialectics is the transformation of quantity into quality. Quantitative changes lead to qualitative changes - or, when put in layman's terms, changes in the number of something tend to lead to changes in the nature of that thing.

Take the government of a small town, for example. Every Sunday afternoon, the town holds a town meeting, where all the politically conscious citizens gather in the town hall, and discuss issues. This is done by a system of direct democracy - each issue will be brought to the floor, discussed for a while, and eventually voted on by everyone who cares about it. Now, as the years go by, the small town starts to grow. People start having lots of kids, and trade is booming, which attracts more people to move into the town. Eventually, the small town grows to the size of a small city. At this point, the system of direct democracy doesn't work as well as it used to. There are far more people attending the town meetings than before, so not everyone's issues can be addressed. Furthermore, not everyone has a chance to speak at the meetings, so some concerns that would have changed a lot of people's minds go unheard. Perhaps the town hall isn't physically large enough to hold everyone who wants to attend. So, in response to these problems, the town decides to switch to a system of representative democracy. It's not a perfect system, but it's more effective than direct democracy in these circumstances. As you can see, a change in the number of a thing (the number of citizens in the town) led to a change in the nature of a thing (the form of government of the town). This is true for a lot of things, including a lot of the proposed anarchist forms of government. What works for a small community simply won't work for an entire country. So, while socialist governments are faced with problems of corruption, anarchist ones would never exist long enough to reach that point.

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edmund_the_destroyer wrote

Interesting. Are you hinting that some kind of anarchist solution might work, just not many? Or am I misunderstanding you?

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sudo wrote

I think certain anarchist models would work well for small communities, like a commune of 50 people or less. But when large numbers of people are involved, those same decentralized models would be so horribly inefficient that they'd be practically nonfunctional. Centralization is necessary for large systems to function.

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edmund_the_destroyer wrote

Okay. That's more or less my impression too. I misunderstood your prior post to hint that you thought anarchy would scale where other systems would not. My error.

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