Who ever puts communism as centralisation, sees it as what the soviets did and not what it is actually about
The Soviets really did a number on the perception of communism all around the world. Thinly veiled state capitalism ain’t it.
That’s more what the Chinese are doing these days. Russia was pure centralized planning and control under an autocracy. The theory being that the central authority would be abolished once communism was achieved. Because everyone knows autocrats easily give up their absolute control of a country.
aye
It’s a bit more complicated, and others are saying literal nonsense.
Communists views the necessity of a period of “dictatorship of the proletariat”, where the workers take state power and become the dominant class, using it to advance their class interests such as discriminating against bourgeois and erasing the existing class relations, reorganizing production, actively working with and supporting communist movements abroad (without which the revolution is bound to fail as seen in USSR), etc. Centralization is a practical necessity for advancing class interests mentioned above, suppressing counter-revolutions (bourgeois don’t just disappear), organizing defense against foreign capital who will attempt to commit imperialism and so on.
Now notice how it is a period where proletariat as a class wield state power and it is explicitly not communism which is a classless, stateless society. One is necessary to achieve the other, but both of these stages share very little in common given their place in history.
All that being said it’s not like the ultimate goal, which is communism, would have absolutely no centralization. There would still be efficient, large-scale factories efficiently creating goods to satisfy needs for a large amount of people in contrast to anarchist vision of decentralized medieval villages that only participate in small-scale or petty production.
Except the “dictatorship of the proletariat” very quickly became just plain dictatorship, if we’re looking at the USSR and modern China and DPRK. I guess they weren’t centralised enough.
You need a state for communism, no?
Any historical examples as for what communism actually is?
Communism does not require a state, or even a transitionary state as the Marxist-Leninist’s claim.
Communism would just mean there would be no private property (which is distinct from personal property like your house), so no factories owned by shareholders or a CEO, they would all be collectively owned by the people who worked in them.
We would also all chip in to provide each other with basic necessities for free, like housing, food, transportation, etc, all as a form of mutual aid. That would result in people only needing to contribute (voluntarily) about 3 months of labor out of the year, with the rest being free time to do with as you please.
Catalonia during the Spanish civil war demonstrated very effectively that communism can be achieved immediately without an authoritarian or centralized state.
Communism would just mean there would be no private property (which is distinct from personal property like your house), so no factories owned by shareholders or a CEO, they would all be collectively owned by the people who worked in them.
That’s Socialism - a core philosophy shared by Anarchism and Communism. Communism includes this but is more than this
Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War
Was Anarchist, not Communist!
There was a lot of Communist activity suring the Spanish Civil War, but in the views of many contemporary and modern Anarchists, they collaborated with the Liberal State to put down the Anarchist Movement in Catalonia
"There was also concern among anarchists with the growing power of Marxist communists within the [Spanish] government. Anarchist Minister of Health Federica Montseny later explained: “At that time we only saw the reality of the situation created for us: the communists in the government and ourselves outside, the manifold possibilities, and all our achievements endangered”
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/geoff-bailey-anarchists-in-the-spanish-civil-war
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Catalonia
For a deeper read on this I’d recommend Chomsky’s ‘Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship’, particularly Part II which covers the Spanish Civil War
That’s Socialism - a core philosophy shared by Anarchism and Communism. Communism includes this but is more than this
Socialism isn’t quite as nailed down as a definition compared to Communism, and some people in the past used the two terms interchangeably, though nowadays they can be more distinct. A gift-economy socialism that abolishes capitalism essentially is communism, while others may use the term to advocate for an advanced welfare state that still uses some form of wage labor.
Was Anarchist, not Communist!
You appear to be conflating communism with Marxist-Leninism/Stalinism. The quote from Federica Montseny is using communist as shorthand for the Stalinists who undermined the revolution at the time.
Most forms of Anarchism, as well as Marxist-Leninism advocate for an end-goal of Stateless Communism, though they differ drastically on the means to achieve it.
Anarchists believe that the state can be immediately abolished and a totally egalitarian non-hierarchical communism can be directly implemented upon a successful revolution, without the need for a transitional ‘vanguard’ state.
Marxist-Leninists believe that the state must be first controlled by an enlightened elite for some undetermined amount of time until the conditions are right to finally allow the state to ‘wither away’, which in practice never happens, and instead turns into a permanent authoritarian dictatorship every time.
While there are different types of Anarchism, such as individualist anarchism, the main form of of collectivist Anarchism is Anarcho-Communism (interchangeable with Libertarian-Communism), which as your first source from Geoff Bailey mentions, was the main thread of Anarchism in Catalonia.
In November 1910, representatives from anarchosyndicalist unions across Spain met in >Barcelona to found the CNT, a national union. As Vernon Richards describes:
“By its constitution the CNT was independent of all the political parties in Spain, and abstained from taking part in parliamentary and other elections. Its objectives were to bring together the exploited masses in the struggle for day-to-day improvements of working and economic conditions and for the revolutionary destruction of capitalism and the state. Its ends were Libertarian Communism, a social system based on the free commune federated at local, regional and national levels. Complete autonomy was the basis of this federation, the only ties with the whole being the agreements of a general nature adopted by Ordinary or Extraordinary National Congresses.”
The Spanish anarchists were largely educated on Anarcho-communist concepts as elaborated on by Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin, with their pamphlets being translated to Spanish and spread widely in Spain for many years before the revolution.
The method they chose of achieving that stateless Anarcho-Communism was through Anarcho-syndicalism, which was the concept of achieving revolutionary power and the ultimate destruction of the state through the use of militant unions, but their end-goal was the establishment of a stateless communism.
Without getting into an endless debate about various terms and subterms, you can surely appreciate that describing self-defined ‘anarchist’ achievements as ‘communist’, while they faced counter-revolutionary action from ML-Communists, in a thread about the differences between Anarchism and Communism, is at best muddying the waters
Anarchism was once called ‘Libertarian Socialism’ but I ain’t gonna go into a thread about American Libertarianism and call the CNT an example of Libertarianism in action
You appear to be conflating communism with Marxist-Leninism/Stalinism. The quote from Federica Montseny is using communist as shorthand for the Stalinists who undermined the revolution at the time
I’m merely using the terms as commonly used by contemporary sources. I understand that not all Communism is Marxist-Leninist; I also find it unhelpful to try and categorise every leftist movement based on Socialism as a form of Communism based off a hypothetical final ideal of worker-controled Statelessness
you can surely appreciate that describing self-defined ‘anarchist’ achievements as ‘communist’, while they faced counter-revolutionary action from ML-Communists, in a thread about the differences between Anarchism and Communism, is at best muddying the waters
I disagree, I think it’s useful to detangle the term communism from the authoritarian dictatorships that called themselves communist (if anything, I think the compass in the OP is itself muddying the waters), in the same way that it is useful to detangle the term socialism from the Nazis which called their party socialist despite not being that at all (though that connotation is far less strong in the public consciousness compared to Communism and ML/Maoism)
However, Yliaster specifically asked if communism requires a state, as they likely had that common conception of communism being linked to authoritarian states. I do not think it would be helpful to further entrench that conception by saying “Yes, communism does require a state. Anarchism is a different thing.” When that is not true.
I understand the usefulness of referring to stateless communism as socialism to avoid the connotation with ML’s, especially among certain company who may shut down at the word communism (I sometimes even refer to Anarchism as Libertarian Socialism, depending on the crowd I’m talking to), but in the case of my response to Yliaster, it would not have made sense or brought any extra clarity to use those other terms, though I will admit I should’ve clarified that Anarcho-communism is a thing (but the video I linked to in my first comment clearly explains it was the Anarchists that achieved a socialist society in Spain, and explains how the stalinists betrayed them)
That was an interesting documentary. Thanks for linking it.
No prob! :)
Literally defined as a stateless, classless, moneyless society
The bavarian socialist republic as it formed. There are also ukranian groups during the russian civil war that were actually communist
Makhno was a based anarchist crossdresser and I will not hear otherwise
If i may, please also read into Kurt Eisner. Its sad how germany (especially the bavarian state) tries to make him and the bavarian socialist state and how it got sabotaged by the SPD forgotten, shunning the people that rose up against the sieg of munich by the freikorps as just brutal blood thirsty maniacs. Taking Eisners “Free state of bavaria” as if it was a democratic slogan from post ww2. But no him, the jewish philosipher, who was imprisoned, and in my opinion was the only one in the 19th century trying to bring forth a true socalist society as invisioned by markx, made this saying!
Really read into him. He is so facinating!
Will check him out, thank you for the recommendation!
Depends on scope. Centered on the community, absolutely. Centralized on the nation, that’s Leninism/Maoism/Dengism. Whatever you want to call it. But not communism.
Once centralization even approaches a national scale the scope is far too broad and hierarchy entrenched.
I’d argue that any form of unregulated capitalism will also lead to centralization of power.
How can we live in the very middle? The intersection of all? Because none of the extremes are good.
The very middle is slowly but surely leading us to certain death
Every extreme is leading us to a quickly assured destruction
We literally advocated against ecocide before climate change was discovered -_- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_anarchism#Roots
Isn’t this just a standard political compass with different wording? Left = Equality, Right = Hierarchy, Authoritarian = Centralization, Libertarian = Decentralization
I think way too many people don’t know the actual definitions of Left and Right, so this version makes it more clear.
I love how anarchists themselves don’t know what centralization is, despite all this talk about decentralization
In no way is capitalism decentralized except maybe in the early production and it’s “anarchy of markets” but even then we’re way past that point as capital tends to centralize. State power, and the bourgeois dictatorship, is centralized pretty much everywhere in the world (local power being mostly irrelevant)
The most recent historic period where decentralization existed would probably be pre-absolutist feudalism, where regions would generally be split between local nobility or prefects instead of one centralized body.
Yup. Though, less “tends to”, more inevitable, mechanistically, intrinsic to money as power, taking more money to extract more money, the rich get richer, and accelerates under consolidations towards monarchy via plutarchy via oligarchy via kleptarchy via corporatism via capitalism via “free market”, ending with maximal centralisation. But yup.
Oh, and another point, … I have logs (history) of irc chans of decentralised organisation of development of decentralised technologies… so that’s more recent than the feudal times… while we’re on contrivances. ;) Heh. Feudal, decentral. That’s a fun angle to look at it from.
Technically, communism is pretty much anarchism, since it happens once the state is abolished. What you meant is socialism
Socialism is between Communism and Capitalism. It has never been on an edge.
I interpret it more like a plane rather than a square, so I didn’t really think about the edges. But yeah, fair point
- Why have you done this?
- Why have you done this like this?
I didnt make it, I found it in the contradictionary and tought I would share it here.
Well that’s bullshit
Care to explain why?
I like this compass much better than the old one. The terming is so much more precise.
The equality to hierarchy axis makes sense to me because I’d see this as a perspective of language. Do we view others as equals, or do we view them in terms of how honorable they are? Ideologies like anarchism and leninism sais that all people are mostly equals. Ideologies like nazism and capitalism sais that some people has more valuable jobs, or has more valuable blood and therefore deserves more.
The centralization to decentralization axis is about societal structures. This is great! However I think how we term different structures needs to be discussed more deeply. I think we view decentralization too well, because technically we only need to divide the center for it to be characterized as decentralized. Distribution would perhaps be a better terming, but that would describe the extreme opposite of centralization. Terms like unsliced, sliced, chopped and powdered could make us see structures in a more nuanced manner. Here I’d say capitalism is sliced, whereas anarchism is chopped or powdered. Nazism and leninism are unsliced.
I’d say hierarchy is present in centralisation too, and inequality as a goal would be the real idea on the top side, but i see your point. Great compass otherwise!
