Original title (which I find a bit too click-baity):
Socialism: Let’s Not Resuscitate the Worst Mistake of the 20th Century
Every single state created after a revolution by a socialist or communist Party has resulted in a continuation of capitalism.
This is absolutely correct.
And every single stateless society created after a revolution has been crushed by state violence.
So what options are there?
Work within a capitalist state to mitigate its worst excesses (the European democratic socialist model)?
Work towards a socialist state that practices state capitalism as a transition stage to full communism, and hope your socialist state won’t become a self-perpetuating dictatorship clinging to state power for its own sake?
Build a stateless society within a “friendly” state and hope that state’s leaders will treat it kindly?
Large nation states as a form of organizing a society are a fairly recent phenomenon.
A “stateless” society doesn’t usually mean that there is a singular wide-spread power vacuum that is ripe for state takeover. Rather it means that there is a patchwork of varying levels of organisation grade with maybe some city states more akin to modern day social democracies or widely other forms of organisation. The vital distinction being that it is much easier to vote with your feet and that they are united in their wish to not be dominated by a nation state. So called democratic confederalism is one of the better known variants of this idea, and this has also been the dominant form of society during most of human history.
One of the mistakes repeated over and over is the belief that the mechanisms af the state can be leveraged to dismantle the state. Movements do have success at building dual power and gaining concessions from the state.
As we do this, its important to keep the history in mind. We don’t need a theory, we just need to remember what hasn’t worked and use that going forward.
The anarchist strategy has always been to guide resilient communities that could resist the state and live independently from it. These networks of mutual aid can then form a mass base in case of revolution.
And every single stateless society created after a revolution has been crushed by state violence.
Since achieving a stateless society is my goal, I dont see why that strategy is a failure.
And while I dont claim them to be anarchist, Rojava and the Zapatistas are still resisting state violence.
And every single stateless society created after a revolution has been crushed by state violence.
The Zapatistas and Syrian Democratic Confederalism are still around, for now.
the European democratic socialist model
It’s actually Social Democracy, which is still part of Capitalist ideology, with all the negatives of capitalism but with more welfare.
Democratic socialism is a different thing. Yes, the names are confusing, leftists suck at naming things.
An idea that crossed my mind was a gradual circumvention of big businesses. A group of people working together to provide the services currently only offered by big corporations. Some silly examples would be someone setting up an email server that others can use, someone growing food in their garden that can feed others, someone making a trip once in a while to a source of water and filling it up for the people in the group (if tap water is not good). And once you have a group of people that cover most of their basic need with cooperation, it will in any case be easier to move towards replacing multinational megacorporations with something more humane than it is now. So not violently receding from the state, but gradually creating a community where mutual aid becomes normalized and we don’t automatically turn to big companies for everything we need. That would set up at least some sort of independence.
The solarpunk approach?: Work towards and hope for post-scarcity (in steatlh until achieved/inevitable) to make first capitalism, then communism, then statism and perhaps even anarchism irrelevant. I do think having a tangible end state helps in convincing, and this way you can go look, here’s star trek, wouldn’t you, given the choice? Post-scarcity is a (somewhat, catastrophe notwithstanding) fairly inevitable result of the march of technology. Cyberpunk dystopia, 1984 or hippy space communism, you choose…
I guess three is basically what the Buddha prescribed for uprooting greed.
And those values of letting go of property and living in harmony have survived 2500 years. I believe it has a fair shot of outliving capitalism.
I mean maybe there is a way for a stateless society to beat state violence. Or maybe there is a way to make people replace the inherent authority/trust that they put in the current system and instead start believing in another system making that old system lose its power (parallel society).
The European democratic socialist model really has made people’s lives immeasurably better (and still does). It’s far from perfect but I think that’s because it’s happening in the real world, where there will always be messy compromise. For me, I choose the mess that helps people!
The thing is, and I say this living a very comfortable life in Germany: this model makes life good for (many, not all) people HERE, but it still depends on people being exploited elsewhere. Call it imperialism, dependency theory or world system theory, they all say similar things. World-wide social democracy is impossible.
This is a common sentiment, but I don’t agree. I have family in Brazil, and I know that the democratic socialists there have done a lot to improve life for the Brazilian people, too, in very different material circumstances (i.e., in a largely agrarian ‘developing’ economy). The structures and principles of democratic socialism can be applied successfully outside the developed world.
European welfare is subsidized by interest payments made by poor countries to rich countries. European social democracy works because they steal money from the developing world. Social welfare in developing countries are notably less robust precisely because of the underdevelopment.
I’ve already addressed this critique. Democratic socialism works in the developing world, too. Everything there works less well because the countries are poorer, but democratic socialism still works best.
Yeah sure, whatever. Meanwhile I’ve watched social democrats in the Philippines turn to fascism while others become the left wing of the Liberal Party.
This is a strong refutation of the argument that social democracy always works and that all social democrats are good people.
Social democracy is a dead end. Where the left in power won serious gains like in Venezuela, Bolovia, or Brazil, they did so not under the banner of social democracy. And even in these countries, the left in power eventually developed a class consciousness diametrically opposed to the socialism of the streets and eventually betrayed their mass bases. In Bolivia and Brazil, where reaction was particularly harsh, the harshness of the reaction made people forget the failings of state socialism and tried again. I will continue to watch these dynamics play again and again and again for as long as I live. This is the folly of state socialism, whether social democratic or otherwise.
Also, please respect that this space is anarchist. There are other communities on this site that aren’t.
The Brazilian social democratic reforms were sufficiently well-embedded that, even when the people made the mistake of electing an authoritarian right government, that government wasn’t able to remove them. The organised working class in Brazil was than powerful enough to remove the authoritarians even in the face of voter suppression. The system in fact worked as intended (unsually for Brazil!) and the Brazilian people are benefiting once again.
By contrast, the record of anarchists is… what? A handful of temporary governments during civil wars, which anarchists can’t even agree were actually anarchist?
I didn’t think anarchists were oppose to having discussions. I don’t think you’re representative of anarchists in that regard.
One could argue that the social democratic strategy stood in the way of all the different approches to peoples power. in many situations social democrats actively sabotaged or withdrew support for strikes, revolutions, riots and struggles. Imo what we have in many places in europe is not because of them but despite their constant effort to undermine any actual system change.
Your first two sentences come under the ‘messy compromise’ that I acknowledged from the start. The last is just obviously untrue.
i view the democratic socialist model as harm mitigation. It doesn’t remove the harmful structures of the state or capital, but it does reduce the harm somewhat. As such, those policies are concesions that anarchists should fight for, but the system itself is not a goal and anarchists should continue to work in opposition to it
The European democratic socialist model really has made people’s lives immeasurably better
And better only for the Europeans, while the Third World is worse off. Social democracy doesn’t erase poverty, it moves it somewhere else, it works only as long as there is a poorer country on the other side of the world that you can exploit for cheap labour.
Not true. I’ve addressed this critique twice already in this thread, but democratic socialism has been successfully applied in the developing world, too, precisely in those poorer countries you cite, without undermining the success of the European social democracies.
A side point, but I thought this was a good observation:
The capitalists still own the media, and mass media no matter who owns it create spectators, and spectators are very easy to frighten. Historically, the only exception to the effectiveness of this form of social mind control is for people to be out in the streets, setting banks on fire and building a different future instead of sitting at home paying attention to the media.
It’s telling that when that does happen, the media cranks up the fearmongering to 11.
My personal pet idea about how to neutralize the state (and by neutralize, I mean “make neutral”, not “disappear immediately”) is to try returning from elections to sortition. Perhaps locally at first, then regionally, then a bicameral parliament with an elected and sortitioned half, until after many iterations, only sortition remains (singular leaders like presidents and prime ministers would obviously need to go). Upon success, there would still be a state, but not a state steered by borderline psychos, but a random sample of the (hopefully educated) population.
A long time ago, in a certain city-state where the term “democracy” originates from, it was considered oligarchic to elect representatives. Instead they were chosen by lottery, and only military leaders were elected. Modern politicians of course, would shudder at the thought of their kind being drawn by lot, and modern military leaders might not like being elected either. We have somehow stumbled to the point where we choose civil administrators using a method ancient democrats considered suitable for choosing warlords. And indeed, we get wannabe warlords using this method, and sometimes real ones.
Switching democracy over to sortition is, of course, a pathway short of revolution - it requires campaigning and constitutional change in almost any state, and one can expect long-term resistance - but the end result doesn’t slip away immediately after one electoral cycle, after power has corrupted those who sought to correct it. Sortition tends to eliminate political parties (read: at most times, most parties will oppose sortition). It tends to hinder corruption and make lobbying cumbersome.
In sortition, you can’t advertise your way to power with generous donations, the composition of a representative body can’t be altered by owning the media, a lottery is fairly hard to manipulate with bribes, and a lottery can be cheaply repeated with nobody losing anything they worked for, since they didnt climb to power (doing that requires certain psycholoogical traits which aren’t healthy), but power came to them by chance.
Another pathway is of course building up autonomy in low-level societal structures, so that those could take over functions gradually.
So I admit: I’m a reformist anarchist who doesn’t shy away from asking people to vote (because it’s easy, just don’t expect much to happen) and thinks it might be possibe to wind down some states using their own mechanism, while others must wait till failure. I don’t expect it to happen fast.
Full agree on sortition. However, you don’t want to end up with a republic, but it’s sortition. I think another key aspect is having some direct democracy, such as yes/no votes on the adoption of laws produced by the selected bodies.
However sortition does not remove the effect of media.
Great post!
