No choice - anarchism!

For those who rely on popular conception for their definintions of anarchy, read some of the main proponants;

Kropotkin, a great Moscovite anarcho-communist -  http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/kropotkin/KropotkinCW.html

and Rousseau, a French philosopher and musician amongst other things -
 http://www.epistemelinks.com/Main/TextName.aspx?PhilCode=Rous
 http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/rous.htm

Then, after you have finished, do something.

If you want TRUE LIBERTY and not some SHITS trying to govern your every move then choose ANARCHISM - since the 18th Century the whole thing has been sussed for us! Read Kropotkin, Proudhon, Bakunin etc for thee evidence ... NEVER, REPEAT NEVER trust a trot ... just another set of bigots with their rifle sights trained on YOU!

A TAZ is a temporary autonomous zone.
a PAZ is a permanent autonomous zone.
PAZ = PEACE.
so... we will only have peace when autonomy (which begins with self)
is permanent.

A home is more important than a theatre.
a place of history is best left to memory.
Between 1989 and 2000 Europe saw a plethora of social and arts spaces
occupied and reclaimed from the cities of London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Barcelona etc.,
These cities now count very few of such spaces in occupation.
But the okupes and their values and genius live on.

¿Anarchy or Marxism?

I'd say anarchy.

@ the link you will find a letter which some would like you to send to the local government person in BCN to express your unhappiness that Les Naus is gone, and to remind everyone that anarchists don't forget anything, that's why generally we were snotty nosed kids, and did better than most at problem solving but weren't sporty @ all.
 http://sindominio.net/lesnaus/ajuda/regidor.php

As nice an idea as Anarchism is it offers no threat to capitalist power groupings, so much so that is never really discussed in the capitalist media, a sure sign that it is not a threat, anarchist are relegated to other 'undefinables' like 'terrorists' to instill disquite into a depolitised population but no more than that.

The fact that the Universities continue to feel the need to discuss and then dismiss Marx to me shows his remaining potentcy.

I see no alternative to Communism as an effective combattant to the ravages currently inflicted on the world, it is not a case of whether I like or dislike Anarchism, it is whether it will ever have the power to assert itself, I would say integrally it can't

best wishes!

The answer to this question relates to some topical issues as well as some issues emerging from historical events.

Firstly, in deciding whether Marxism or Anarchism (and we should perhaps add Ghandism which is also influential on the left today) is most relevant today you should ask yourselves the following questions:

1) Do you really think that the likes of Bush, Blair, Howard, Sharon, etc., and the wealthy corporate elites that they represent, would give up their wealth and allow it to be redistributed to the poor without an extremely violent war/civil war/bloodbath? Yes or no?

2) If you accept that they will not give up their wealth without a vicious civil war, it is clear that any serious attempt to redistribute wealth will be drowned in blood (Chile 1973 being the obvious example) UNLESS the working class is politically prepared, in advance, with an understanding that it needs to arm itself at the APPROPRIATE moment.

3) Ghandhi's peaceful non-violent direct action strategy may have gotten rid of British rule, but did it really liberate the Indian sub-continent from foreign corporate oppression? Do you know what the literacy rate in India ia today? Last time I looked, it was something like 60 percent of the 1000 million population were illiterate. nyone who visits India can see what a mess it is in with mmillions of people living in shanty town dwellings. How much did Ghandhi and non-violent direct action really achieve?

Anarchists have no answers to these questions. When they held a leading position in the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, they joined the capitalist Republican government in Barcelona alongside the Stalinists rather than prepare workers to disarm the Catalonian capitalists. That is THEIR real track record. Trotsky denounced his former sumpathisers in the POUM for doing the same.

Read Marxism first hand, don't rely on unsubstantiated, second-hand smears from anti-Marxists, anarchists and other muddleheads.

All the historic Marxist works are at the Marxist Internet Archive (MIA):

 http://www.marxists.org

There are also some Anarchist works in the reference section of this site.

The key idea which has been distorted by the enemies of Marxism is the concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat". Marx meant by this that the rich propertied classes would violently resist any attempts to redistribute their ill-gotten wealth. This has been proved time and time again--from the Paris Commune to Russia to Indonesia to Chile to Nicaragua. Marx argued that it would be necessary for the working class to arm itself in order to disarm the violent reaction of the wealthy elites. He came to this concluison after the experience of the Paris Commune where a workers uprisng was drowned in blood by a right-wing counter-revolution. By dictatorship of the proletariat, he meant the dictatorship of the majority of people in society--the working class and poor--over the tiny minority of rich parasites. He did not mean the dictatorship of a Stalinist bureaucracy over the working class that replaced the early (1917-24) Russian "dictatorship of the proletariat"--this is a key point which anti-Marxists and anarchists deliberatelya and disingenuously try to confuse.

Marx and Lenin saw the dictatorship of the proletariat as a TEMPORARY necessity to defeat the counter-revolution of the wealthy which would be replaced by a classless society after the capitalist counter-revolution was defeated. In opposing the concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", Anarchists fail to politically prepare workers for the savage and violent reaction that people like Bush will unleash on working people should it ever get to the point where they actually try and redistribute the resources of the wealthy elites. In effect they politically disarm workers in the face of an utterly ruthless enemy.

Read Marx's writing on the Paris Commune and Lenin's: "The State and Revolution"--written on the eve of the October 1917 revolution.

This text was written for Anarchists--READ the thing before you criticise Lenin!

 http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/index.htm

Trotsky predicted, in 1906, that the dictatorship of the proletariat would degenerate in a backward country like Russia UNLESS it quickly sparked a revolution abroad in the more industrially advanced countries like Germany and France. 20 years before it happened, Trotsky predicted that, if it failed to do so, a bureaucratic degeneration would take place. This was his famous theory of "permanent revolution". Read what he wrote about this in "Results and Prospects" (1906) and his subsequent review of this theory "Permanent Revolution" (1930):

 http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1931-tpv/index.htm

If you haven't read these key Marxist works, you don't really know what you are talking about.

READ THEM!

Never trust an idealist, Marxist, Stalinist, Free Marketeer, Neo Con, Anarchist, Islamist, Zionist they're all the same. They want you to live by their rules (even the anachists).

How about fighting for a real democracy where we can then argue the toss on a level playing field?

Its time to end this divide and conquer cycle that people have been lead into by ideology.

That is UNITE, DONT FIGHT!

This sort of debate summarizes the limitations of the movement in the UK.Still stuck in those old leftist debates that no longer hold anymore relevance.Many Im sure are aware that a new form of politics is emerging,one that rejects all prescriptions and blue-prints.Of course one can have 'aspirations'but that has more to do with desire than some monolithic manifesto.Both Marxism and Anarchism have useful conceptual tools and approaches which can still apply now as long as one stays away from 19th Century orthodoxies.FOR what is important is the context from which they are beind applied and that is the a "movement of movements" An alternative will flourish as the movement grows through stages and this cannot be worked out in advance as so many Cassandras gazing into a crystal ball. Such a movement will only be stifled and suffocated if it is narrowly categorized as if the world belonged inside a bottle.

be an anarchist in an imperialist country where it's easy to insult third world people who are fighting and dying to liberate themselves. No solidarity or class analysis needed. Just make them look stupid by criticizing them and telling them how a "proper" revolution should be like.

Like this comment (

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A lot of you really seem to have a bee in your bonnets about the "poshness" or otherwise of lefty commentators, don't you?

Are you sure you are anarchists? Your comments appear to be more akin to the rigid Marxist who believes that nobody who doesn't wear overalls and carry a spanner (ie. the urban 'proletariat') can be of any use in the (long-awaited) revolution that is to come.

Anarchist thought accepts anyone from ANY class who has seen through the lies of capitalism, hierachy and state oppression and chooses to work towards its abolition.

Just look at some of the great thinkers of anarchism and their backgrounds:

Willam Godwin (upper-middle, son of a Methodist preacher)
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (middle-class businessman)
Michael Bakunin (Russian aristocrat)
Peter Kropotkin (Russian prince)
Errico Malatesta (son of landowning squire - gave the land away to his tenants and retrained as an electrician)

And lest we forget, Marx was solidly bourgeois and Engels owned a factory.

Now lets stop all this damaging inverted snobbery and focus on things that MATTER.

Thanks, comrades.
Disgusted by all the ignorance

Anarchism has never produced a blue print of a future society or even attempted to explain how a future society would function. Only Marxism attempts to exlpain how a future soicety would function as well as attempting to explain why the present society is wrong. Anarchism has also never been a mass movement because it cannot argue it ideas across to the masses in a coherent manner. In fact most anarchists are stumped when asked simple questions such as how an anarchist society would function. Marxists on the other hand can give detailed explanations of how a future Marxist society would funtion and operate.

Also most anarchists are not serious political thinkers but latter day hippies who want an alternative lifestyle and are more concerned with drugs, alcohol, partying and fun than politics. Look at the Mayday protests for example most of the people there were the scruffy, pot smoking younsters without a clue about political theory.

It is pretty clear from the Marxist responses above that
they have not bothered to read the full article. They simply
reproduced, without thought, the usual Marxist responses
about anarchism. Shame. If they had bothered to read the
article and followed up the footnotes they would see that
anarchism covers the issues they say we don't.

But this is what I expect from Marxists. They really are
ignorant people. And, yes, I have read Marxists. That is
why I'm an anarchist!

> Anarchism has never produced a blue print of a future society
> or even attempted to explain how a future society would function.

What ever happened to Marx's comments about "writing recipe books
for the future"? Sad, really, how silly Marxists can be. But, in
reality, anarchists have discussed the basic framework of how
an anarchist society would function. We have written more on that
than marx ever did. See, for example, section I of "An Anarchist
FAQ" for some discussion.

> Only Marxism attempts to exlpain how a future soicety would function
> as well as attempting to explain why the present society is wrong.

what utter rubbish! Really. Look at "An Anarchist FAQ" to see an
explaination of why present society is wrong and some ideas of what
could replace it. For, for that matter, *any* anarchist book!

> Anarchism has also never been a mass movement because it cannot
> argue it ideas across to the masses in a coherent manner.

And so the million plus strong CNT in Spain did not exist? Or
the 800,000 strong USI in Italy? Or those other mass anarchist
movements that existed. Really, don't try and rewrite history.

> In fact most anarchists are stumped when asked simple questions
> such as how an anarchist society would function. Marxists on the
> other hand can give detailed explanations of how a future Marxist
> society would funtion and operate.

Sad, really, how people can just lie without blinking an eye-lid.

for more details on anarchism visit "An Anarchist FAQ" at
 http://www.anarchistfaq.org

or, then again, do what our marxists have not done, namely read
the article posted above!

" Anarchism has never produced a blue print of a future society "
Thats because anarchy involves listening to and then catering for the needs of all people, as a result anarchists can't possibly give a blueprint of how society should be until we know how society wants society to be. Beats the marxist approach of telling them how it will be.
Oh, I was also the fastest at 100 metres at school!!

If anarchism is about direct democratic participation, then it is more a process less an ideology.

But what if the people of the world rose up against oppression . . . and chose consumer capitalism and a heirachical state infrastructure? Anarchists would presumably accept the wishes of the majority, so long as a majority could change the system at any point in the future?

It is also worth looking a little deeper than the prevailing socio-economic system to see root causes of problems. The present monetary system is a case in point. Many anarchists would simply abolish money, which may or may not solve some problems but certainly wouldn't help understand what features of the present monetary system make it so destructive.

97% of money in the UK is created against debt, backed by no 'real' asset. The more money, the more debt. America's national debt is around $6 trillion.

Debts have to be repaid with INTEREST which pits all members of society against each other, each trying to grab enough money to pay off their interest & debt.

This is because there is only as much money as is issued, for one person to payback a debt plus interest requires someone else to fail to. INTEREST creates 'winners' and 'losers'.



So we see that the present monetary system creates UNREAPAYABLE DEBT, POVERTY, COMPETITION BETWEEN PEOPLE and 'WINNERS' and 'LOSERS'.

These are overwhelmingly the criticisms made of 'Capitalism', when in fact they are not caused by the capitalist system per se. For instance introducing 'demurrage' (effectively negative interest, a disincentive to hoard money) instead of interest would instantly turn short-termist, 'slave-to-money' corporations into long-termist, 'slave-to-society' ones.

I am not attempting to be an apologist for capitalism historically, which has being probably the most socially and ecologically destructive socio-economic system devised, or to dismiss all marxist concepts or anarchist ones. However it is important to truly understand a problem in order to solve it. Vague and jingoistic definition of 'capitalism' as the problem will only lead to vague and jingoistic solutions (even in direct democratic anarchism, if people deliberatly simplify issues they will fail to tackle them), which seems to be what this thread is about.

Peace and Hope

I'm not convinced all the 'Marxists' and 'anarchists' posting here are for real.. and if they are then they're silly!

What could be more pointless than shouting at each other on the internet? Get involved in some actual campaigning in the real world and see how it pans out. The proof of any philosophy is when you try to put it into practice.

It is a serious mistake to judge Marxism, Leninism and

Trotskyism by the actions and positions of their self-styled,

so-called, "followers" today. The problem with typically

British offshoots of Trotskyism--in fact they are actually

centrists of Trotskyist origin--like the SWP and Workers Liberty

is not that they are "Trotskyists", but that they are not

Trotskyist enough. In fact their politics are an eclectic hybrid

of old fashioned British left liberalism and "Trotskyism"

gutted of its content.


Take the issue of internal democracy. This is what one SWP

leader wrote in 1977 about the internal life of the Trotskyist

international Left Opposiiton in the 1930s:


Extract from: "Trotskyism Reassessed" (1997) by Duncan Hallas

 http://www.marxists.org/archive/hallas/works/1977/07/reassess.

htm


The numbered references can see at the above link.


"Trotsky encouraged the various sections of the [Trotskyist

International Left] opposition to interest themselves in each

others’ activities, he wrote interminable circulars and

epistles explaining, say, to the Belgians why the French fell

out, to the Greeks why the German comrades were in

disagreement, to the Poles what were the points at issue

between different sets of the Belgian or of the American

opposition, and so on and so forth. He did all this in the

belief that he was educating and training a new levy of

communists, new “cadres of revolution.” [9]


Some of this was doubtless unavoidable, a necessary consequence

of the propagandist stance which, in turn, was politically

correct at the time. Some, but by no means all. Trotsky’s

method legitimised and encouraged the pretensions of people

who, though they could not gain so much as a toe-hold in their

own working-class movement, felt able to pronounce on the

details of policy and tactics all over the world. It fostered

the very “conceit and grand airs” that was such an obstacle to

serious work. It helped to give the Trotskyist groups an

exotic, hothouse atmosphere remote from the world of working-

class militants and thus perpetuated the petty-bourgeois nature

of the groups. To all this, Trotsky contributed, in spite of

quite opposite intentions. The basic fallacy was that cadres

can be trained outside the class struggle. And the baleful

influence of this tradition was to persist; a poison in the

bloodstream of the movement long after propagandism had been

officially abandoned as a struggle orientation.


One particular aspect of the evil, factionalism, took a strong

hold in the early period and was never subsequently entirely

eliminated. Some factional struggles are an inevitable overhead

cost in the growth of any serious revolutionary organisation.

Permanent, persistent factionalism, however, is not an overhead

cost, but a disease.


As Cannon wrote later: “There is no greater abomination in the

workers’ political movement than a permanent faction. There is

nothing that can demoralise the internal life of a party more

efficiently than a permanent faction.” [10]

A light-minded toleration of factionalism certainly cannot be

attributed to Trotsky. His approach to the development of

cadres nonetheless encouraged it precisely because it enabled

petty-bourgeois cliques to justify their existence on “

theoretical” grounds."


Unlike Trotsky, it seems that for James Cannon, Hallas and the

SWP the internal life of working class organisations must of necessity

be less democratic than even bourgeois democracy--even the

British Parliament allows permanent oppositional factions to

exist. They are even institutionalised and formally recognised

--a title is given to the leader of the largest oppositional

group: "Leader of the Opposition".

Are Trotskyists really less democratic than bourgeois

democrats?


It can be seen from the above extract that Trotsky had a very

different and much more democratic approach to internal

democracy than the phony, workerist Cannon and the British SWP.

Cannon had obviously not outgrown the Stalinist methods that he

experienced in the US Communist Party in the 1920s.

While it is obvious that no one on the left should worship

disunity for its own sake, it is clear that the OPTION of

establishing a short term, long term, or a permanent

oppositional faction is an essential democratic safeguard. No

political leadership has the right to deny this safeguard.

This right is comparable to the right to secession for

oppressed nationalities which the Bolsheviks defended from 1917

to 1924 and which Stalin later trampled under foot. If Lenin

and Trotsky were correct to defend the right to self-

determination and secession for oppressed nationalities within

the proto-Soviet Union, why oppose the right for oppositional

groups within the revolutionary party to establish permanent

factions, if they so desire? The same methodology applies to

both situations. And, incidentally, it should also apply to

social groups (women's caucuses, lesbian and gay caucuses etc.).

In all cases, while no one should encourage factionalism (or

Indeed the balkanisation of workers states) for its own sake, it has

to be an option, a safeguard. In fact, history shows that

disunity and splits are most likely to occur when factions are

disallowed or restricted. The SWP is responsible for more

splits than any other organisation on the British left. This is

a direct result of the primitive Cannonist restrictions on factions that

has infected it, and most other Trotskyist groups, n the post-war

period.


The key point here is that this was NOT the approach of

Trotsky--as Hallas makes clear in passing in the above extract.

I think both Communists and Anarchists both wish to arrive at the same place - a classless society. I.e no 'state', which Lenin terms quite correctly as the inevitable result of irreconcilable class antagonisms. The difference being that anarchists are deluded into thinking that once you've had your revolution the state will quickly wither away. This is a false hood. As capitalism replaced feudalism and Bourgeois democracy replaced aristocratic rule, the jump from capitalism and rule by the middle classes to a completely classless society is nonsensical. We have to make the transition to a socialist state before we can have a classless and therefore stateless Communist/anarchist society.

Dictatorship of the proletariat, this is what is necessary. Anarchists deal with absolutism, they are unable to deal with relative change, which is the reality of life - and no, it's not pretty. Capitalism, privilege, the desire to move up a class and gather unnecessary riches is seductive. Who is going to repress the likes of Blair or Bush or Murdoch? Are the millions of Sun and Daily Mail readers brainwashed for decades suddenly going to change their outlook? Of course not. They would organise, manipulate, create class antagonisms, destroy the revolution. Put a revolution in the hands of anarchists and it would be over in a couple of days! Back to capitalism and barbarity!

Coehesion is necessary. Look at Cuba. Your mindless middle class anarchist in the West or limp Social democratic Trot criticise from their comfy armchairs, but they have shown the way forward. Despite having a blockade on their country by the most powerful country in the world, despite having no large amounts of natural resources, despite having countless terrorist attacks organised against it which have cost more than 3000 lives they have eradicated illiteracy, they have one of the best health care systems in the world, they have one of the best education systems in the world, they have more doctors working in Africa than the whole of the UNHCR, they are an inspiration to all those in the world fighting against the savagery of capitalism and imperialism from Latin America to Nepal.
Left to anarchists and it would be like it's nearest neighbours, Taihiti or Jamaica. Awash in poverty, drug abuse, exploitation and misery. It's not a question of socialism or anarchism. It's a necessity of socialism or anarchism. Then we can have no state.

'But, but Castro's a dictator' the middle class anarchists moan. Give me a break.

Castro *is* a dictator, but its important to recognise that he is far more benevolent than many others. I may be an anarchist, but I also recognise that Cuba is not a terrible place to live - far from it! I'd prefer to live in Cuba than the US - a place I quite frankly don't want to ever set foot in.