Your 2nd paragraph is exactly where my mind already went while reading your 1st paragraph! When I try to think about what a stateless and hierarchyless society would look like and how it would work, the easiest thing for me to do is just look back to before states formed. I’m much stronger on history than communist theory, so that is interesting. I find it a bit far fetched…
I’m especially skeptical when at least the significant approaches attempted historically have been “let’s go basically the opposite way of what we want the end result to be, as a first step, and then once we’ve achieved the strong, powerful, and centrally planned state necessary to undo capitalism, we can just remove it all easy peasy and then things will just be stateless and work out” … seems… yeah… 🤔 lol
That is the main divergence between anarchists and communists. There is a good quote that captures the problem quite well (translated from German):
You say that the state is a tool that can be wrested from the capitalists, but if, just suppose, you want to be a small-time artist, what good does it do you to wrest the anvil from the blacksmith? You can’t juggle with anvils. The only thing you can do with an anvil is be a blacksmith. Remember: it’s not just the worker who sharpens the tool, the tool also sharpens the worker. The state may be a tool, but it’s not a Swiss Army knife, not a Leatherman, not a universal tool. And anyone who knows the stories—I deliberately use the plural here—will, given the problems of revolutionary states with the state, be unable to resist the suspicion that by attempting to take over power, one has already engaged so deeply with the logic of hierarchy that, if successful, one will almost inevitably imitate it rather than deconstruct it.
One idea of George Orwell about socialist revolutions he expressed when discussing animal farm:
I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job
As soon as the revolutionaries have gotten rid of the capitalists they are a obstacle in the way of control by the workers as they have their own ideas on shaping a socialist society that they will try to push on the people.
The Zapatista’s aren’t exactly communist, but they have an interesting system of federation, rotating “leadership” (I think people are randomly selected for most leadership roles), collective decision-making/consensus building, community justice, etc. I think a lot of communes have systems to avoid hierarchy as well. From what I’ve seen, they have their own, different problems, but many have been around for long time, so they “work,” in a sense.
Small communes definitely make sense to me in what they look like and how they work, but it is hard for me to understand how they could scale to nation/global proportions. Unless the idea is that everyone is part of their own small, separate communes… I also don’t see this as feasible because globalism exists and is real, yet doesn’t fit into that model (ironically globalism is most often propagandized as some kind of communist plot when the reality is that it is the epitome of colonialism/imperialism/capitalism, at least the way I see it… maybe that’s only because globalism has been implemented by capitalist empires).
I think the Achilles heel of small communes is healthcare. Everything is fine and good, until someone needs serious hospital care, which is effectively infeasible to provide at small scale from small communities. I think that’s only possible with large institutions but that’s debatable.
The Zapatista territory is pretty large and has a population of somewhere around 300k. It’s a network of autonomous municipalities, so it kind of like a bunch of communes. They have their own schools, doctors, and hospitals; but they are quite poor (they’re mostly indigenous farmers).
Your 2nd paragraph is exactly where my mind already went while reading your 1st paragraph! When I try to think about what a stateless and hierarchyless society would look like and how it would work, the easiest thing for me to do is just look back to before states formed. I’m much stronger on history than communist theory, so that is interesting. I find it a bit far fetched…
I’m especially skeptical when at least the significant approaches attempted historically have been “let’s go basically the opposite way of what we want the end result to be, as a first step, and then once we’ve achieved the strong, powerful, and centrally planned state necessary to undo capitalism, we can just remove it all easy peasy and then things will just be stateless and work out” … seems… yeah… 🤔 lol
That is the main divergence between anarchists and communists. There is a good quote that captures the problem quite well (translated from German):
One idea of George Orwell about socialist revolutions he expressed when discussing animal farm:
As soon as the revolutionaries have gotten rid of the capitalists they are a obstacle in the way of control by the workers as they have their own ideas on shaping a socialist society that they will try to push on the people.
The Zapatista’s aren’t exactly communist, but they have an interesting system of federation, rotating “leadership” (I think people are randomly selected for most leadership roles), collective decision-making/consensus building, community justice, etc. I think a lot of communes have systems to avoid hierarchy as well. From what I’ve seen, they have their own, different problems, but many have been around for long time, so they “work,” in a sense.
Small communes definitely make sense to me in what they look like and how they work, but it is hard for me to understand how they could scale to nation/global proportions. Unless the idea is that everyone is part of their own small, separate communes… I also don’t see this as feasible because globalism exists and is real, yet doesn’t fit into that model (ironically globalism is most often propagandized as some kind of communist plot when the reality is that it is the epitome of colonialism/imperialism/capitalism, at least the way I see it… maybe that’s only because globalism has been implemented by capitalist empires).
I think the Achilles heel of small communes is healthcare. Everything is fine and good, until someone needs serious hospital care, which is effectively infeasible to provide at small scale from small communities. I think that’s only possible with large institutions but that’s debatable.
The Zapatista territory is pretty large and has a population of somewhere around 300k. It’s a network of autonomous municipalities, so it kind of like a bunch of communes. They have their own schools, doctors, and hospitals; but they are quite poor (they’re mostly indigenous farmers).