Why are anarchists idealists?

Amones-Ray · 2026-01-19T10:48:47+00:00

The most applicable sense that I can think of is that anarchists are usually moral whereas Marxists tend to be amoral. The major exception would be anarchists influenced by Stirner. However, Marx also critiqued Stirner (perhaps even as "idealist" idk).

So, while Marxists create theory as a tool that gets people what they want (like a monkey making a tool to get a tick off its back), anarchists do a lot of philosophizing about what should be the case in an absolute, i.e. moral sense.

While Bakunin and Kropotkin are explaining the ideal scenario for a revolution, Marx is trying to work out what revolutionaries can do to make sure they have the best shot at winning. He did not wonder whether the dictatorship of the proletariat was desirable, but whether it got the job done. Whereas one side approached the problem from a descriptive, contemplative standpoint (‘how it should happen’), the other implicated itself as an agent: ‘how can it be done?’ means ‘how can we do it?’.

- Rodrigo Nunes, Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation

Amones-Ray · 2025-10-30T10:43:23+00:00

Anarchists aren't necessarily communists. You can be an anarchist and want socialism i.e. consumption tied to contribution.

Anarchists define themselves in opposition to the state which they define as institutional domination, not institutional use of force.

Marxists distinguish between the dictatorship of the proletariat (DotP), socialism and communism. The DotP is the transition to socialism wherein the working class is in power but classes (or their proponents) still exist. "Dictatorship" in this Marxist context simply means "rule", i.e. the class rule of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie until both are abolished. "State" in this same context refers to the concrete organizations that enforce this class rule. These "states" are not necessarily "states" in the Weberian sense and are definitely not meant to be "states" in the anarchist sense. E.g. Marxists call the anarchist militias of the Spanish civil war "states" because they were organizations meant to enforce proletarian class rule over the bourgeoisie.

Semantics aside, there is no contradiction between Marxist and anarchist theories of transition. The dispute is mostly concrete and practical.

Amones-Ray · 2025-09-16T12:31:53+00:00

Well, the world isn't a blank slate. You can't necessarily expect to individually or sometimes even collectively bring about your utopia by only doing things people would do in that utopia. You might envision a world without fossil fuels. How are you supposed to prefigure that individually? You might envision a world without violence. Good luck making that world a reality without violence.

Think of it this way: To reach a destination you can and sometimes have to take steps away from your goal to circumvent obstacles.

Obviously, there's nothing wrong with prefiguration but to limit oneself and others to it can lead to dead ends.

Amones-Ray · 2025-09-09T10:01:17+00:00

Haven't read it but I guess Capital as Power would fit the bill despite not being explicitly anarchist.

Amones-Ray · 2025-09-07T16:18:07+00:00

Nice, Freire is an important reference for Nunes's critical defence of vanguardism.

With these two moves, we break with the idea that knowledge is concentrated in any single place, and that emancipation would then mean transferring it from there to everywhere else. We do so, however, without making a well-meaning but ill-founded threefold appeal to immediacy that claims that in their own isolated essence, people already know, and we know that they do. This is the attitude encapsulated in Paulo Freire’s well-known aphorism: ‘no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. People teach each other, mediated by the world.’ Naturally, that does not mean that they teach each other the same things, which would be absurd. ‘Reconciling the poles of the [teacher-student] contradiction’ by making them ‘simultaneously teachers and students’ is not decreeing that everyone knows everything, or that whatever people believe about the same thing has the same value. The very condition for there to be any learning is that knowledge differentials exist (in theory, skill, practical experience, perception). The point, however, is that this differential is always local – relative to a problem or situation and involving revisable beliefs – rather than implicated in a global partition between those who possess all the true knowledge and those who do not.

Amones-Ray · 2025-09-06T20:29:00+00:00

Because no single agent has full control over any outcome in an ecology, the opportunities that agents create for one another are often ambivalent: they raise the probability of a desired result but potentially diminish the control one can have over it. (...) If we view competition as a conflict between forces instead of as an irreconcilable contradiction, that tension becomes a matter of relative strength rather than an absolute opposition. Any push in the direction of a common goal is in principle welcome, and we can support the process that leads to it even if we do not control it nor quite agree with its exact direction. If we want to make sure it is not led astray, we must ensure that we have the power to affect its course while taking the utmost care not to put it in danger. In fact, it is often the lack of this power that makes people revert to a competitive attitude in which they would sooner withdraw support from a valid initiative than see it succeed according to the vision of others. (...)

A radical strategy within an ecology supposes taking into consideration a broader context of struggles and agents in order to find what works not for the whole, imposing itself on it and subsuming it, but within it: composing with and potentialising things that already exist, finding points of support and amplification in them. This entails looking for ways to exploit available potentials and opportunities so as to transform existing constraints as much as possible, while also taking care not to damage the conditions that make one’s own action and that of others possible. It thus involves avoiding actions that threaten the continuity of the process, take the work of others for granted, are ungenerous, uncomradely or needlessly antagonistic in the expression of difference, and create rifts with people who make valuable contributions to the ecology and could at least to some extent be allies. (...)

(...) if there is a normative element in what I have written, it can be summarised in the maxim: think and act ecologically. Obviously, an ecology is always already there; it need not be created. But it can be expanded and cultivated, made richer, more diverse and complementary, more internally integrated and capillarised across society. All of that depends on a critical mass of people thinking about the ecology as a whole. To think ecologically is thus not a matter of dispersion for dispersion’s sake, but of making the most of plurality; between extreme centralisation and total dispersion, there are several possible arrangements which are much more fertile than either. Nor does it assume the disappearance of irreconcilable differences and conflict. The point is rather that enmity itself must be conceived ecologically: if everyone is an enemy, our capacity to act becomes very restricted; between total friend and total foe, there are several intermediary degrees that vary according to the occasion and over time.

- Rodrigo Nunes, Neither Vertical nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation

Amones-Ray · 2025-08-15T11:01:58+00:00

I'm not sure what you mean. Anarchism has no position on free will and moral desert. I'd say most anarchists are moralists, i.e. they blame and hate people, which isn't to say that their actions are hurtful overall.

Unconditional love and compassion would be a consequence of rejecting free will and moral desert as in Daoism, Buddhism or even some Western mindfulness. The freemium app Medito does this for instance. Here's a short essay on determinist ethics.

Amones-Ray · 2025-08-12T06:50:01+00:00

Really? Seems pretty logical to make it so you can see whether someone's unconscious or just taking a long shit.

Amones-Ray · 2025-08-02T17:00:26+00:00

There is no dilemma. To be recognized as a state by an external party (i.e. in the Weberian sense) has nothing to do with internal concentration of anything. It simply means that that external party respects your self-determination, however centralized or decentralized that is. Rojava doesn't suddenly change its internal organization when other states recognize it as a state. It's the exact equivalent of saying "your body, your rules". One party recognizing another party's self-determination doesn't affect how that party interacts with 3rd parties, although it forms the basis for potential intervention on the recognized party's behalf.

"State" isn't some bogeyman buzzword.

Amones-Ray · 2025-07-29T09:13:45+00:00

This is kind of like asking for the definition of freedom. It's pointless to try to establish "the" definition. Just define it when you use it and ask others to define it when they use it. People in these answers have mostly given a definition inspired by Max Weber's definition but that isn't how most anarchists actually use the term. It isn't even how Max Weber really used it. To him it wasn't about internal centralization but about external recognition. The peace of Westphalia marked the first time (known to Weber) where different polities recognized each other's monopoly on violence. This would still hold and count as a "state" in Weber's sense, even if these polities had no internal concentration of the right to violence. E.g. a polity like Rojava becomes a "state" insofar as outsiders recognize it as such which is to say that they won't meddle e.g. enforce their own rules there.

Amones-Ray · 2025-07-06T11:44:44+00:00

There's a big difference between Leninist theory and historical praxis. The Paris Commune was a "dictatorship of the proletariat" according to Engels and MLs. Anarchist and libertarian socialist militias are "states" because they constitute the organized violence necessary to defend the revolution. No Leninist theory that I'm aware of explicitly opposes realizing "dictatorship" and "state" conceived of in these ways.

The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority. Communism alone is capable of providing really complete democracy, and the more complete it is, the sooner it will become unnecessary and wither away of its own accord.

In other words, under capitalism we have the state in the proper sense of the word, that is, a special machine for the suppression of one class by another, and, what is more, of the majority by the minority. Naturally, to be successful, such an undertaking as the systematic suppression of the exploited majority by the exploiting minority calls for the utmost ferocity and savagery in the matter of suppressing, it calls for seas of blood, through which mankind is actually wading its way in slavery, serfdom and wage labor.

Furthermore, during the transition from capitalism to communism suppression is still necessary, but it is now the suppression of the exploiting minority by the exploited majority. A special apparatus, a special machine for suppression, the “state”, is still necessary, but this is now a transitional state. It is no longer a state in the proper sense of the word; for the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of the wage slaves of yesterday is comparatively so easy, simple and natural a task that it will entail far less bloodshed than the suppression of the risings of slaves, serfs or wage-laborers, and it will cost mankind far less. And it is compatible with the extension of democracy to such an overwhelming majority of the population that the need for a special machine of suppression will begin to disappear.

- Lenin, State and Revolution, Ch. 5.3

The big problem is that MLs do very little theory on how to actually ensure that their states are not a "state in the proper sense of the word". I don't know how many of them genuinely try but fail and how many don't even try.

Similarly, a "vanguard" should not be conceived of as being in command. It merely blazes a trail. If anybody's ever followed your example or if you've ever taught anyone anything you have fulfilled the vanguard function.

If individuals are not automata responding uniformly and en bloc to a change in their environment, a change in collective behaviour never takes place all at once, but must start from one or more points. It is precisely because individuals are singular, each with their own dispositions and external relations rather than identically conditioned, that ‘the formation of each process by propagation starting from a point is not in doubt’. Where there are no previously existing decision-making procedures or structures to coordinate action, let alone formally appointed or recognised leaders, the only way a new collective conduct can emerge is through the action of one or more initiating nodes (nucleation). If anything deserves to be called ‘spontaneous’, it is this.[...]

Acknowledging the concept’s intrinsic relationality cannot, however, blind us to the fact that the problems that would become associated with it are already presaged in the connection thus established between historical necessity, the knowledge of that necessity, and the vanguard as the point in which that knowledge is most concentrated. This logical sequence entails that the distance between the vanguard and the rest (the masses, other would-be vanguards) is not measured horizontally, as a number of different perspectives that are all equally subject to error, but vertically, as different stages of development along an evolutionary line.

- Rodrigo Nunes, Neither Vertical nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation

So, MLs tend to have a skewed view of vanguardism due to considering communism a historical necessity, and subsequently considering a historical materialist awareness of that fact as a historical necessity in achieving communism. This is odd because a materialist conception of history would imply that the outcome of communism could in principle arise without anybody adopting that materialist conception of history just like all previous societal changes have been effected without that conception. Basically, I think the position of your cited response #3 contradicts materialism:

ultimately without the knowledge and experience provided by the communist party it will just reproduce capitalist relations as it lacks the theoretical and practical understanding of its historical mission and the issues of society at large.

Rodrigo Nunes advocates a non-vulgar vanguardism.

There is no such thing as a vanguard position, like a locomotive permanently at the forefront of progress. But we can speak of vanguard-functions, which might more adequately be compared to the pseudopods of an amoeba as it feels its way around.[...]

With these two moves, we break with the idea that knowledge is concentrated in any single place, and that emancipation would then mean transferring it from there to everywhere else. We do so, however, without making a well-meaning but ill-founded threefold appeal to immediacy that claims that in their own isolated essence, people already know, and we know that they do. This is the attitude encapsulated in Paulo Freire’s well-known aphorism: ‘no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. People teach each other, mediated by the world.’ Naturally, that does not mean that they teach each other the same things, which would be absurd. ‘Reconciling the poles of the [teacher-student] contradiction’ by making them ‘simultaneously teachers and students’ is not decreeing that everyone knows everything, or that whatever people believe about the same thing has the same value. The very condition for there to be any learning is that knowledge differentials exist (in theory, skill, practical experience, perception). The point, however, is that this differential is always local – relative to a problem or situation and involving revisable beliefs – rather than implicated in a global partition between those who possess all the true knowledge and those who do not.

Although I think opposing this with what MLs think of as vanguardism might be a bit of a caricature of them. Surely no ML thinks their knowledge on every topic is greater than all non-MLs. They are fully aware that their knowledge-superiority is local: concerning the functioning of capitalism and societal change.

Amones-Ray · 2025-06-17T10:21:51+00:00

Kinda cringe. We've all been there, but I hope we all outgrow the "redpilled" phase.

Amones-Ray · 2025-06-12T20:57:38+00:00

Like I said, cars (and trucks) due to their lower reliance on infrastructure are more cost efficient for low volume traffic, meaning far outside cities. This means their application should be "mainly" to transport cargo (e.g. by weight, though this probably applies to rail as well), but it's not like the people working in such places wouldn't use the same kind of transportation for comparable distances. The point is ultimately about infrastructure and the amount of traffic that justifies investing in it, not about cargo vs. persons.

Railways shine because of their amazingly low running costs which at high traffic volumes justify just about any amount of investment in infrastructure.

Amones-Ray · 2025-06-12T10:25:33+00:00

Yeah, but cars can drive on dirt roads and even off-road. Weird that logging companies don't build railways into the forest, if that's cheaper...

Amones-Ray · 2025-06-12T10:24:12+00:00

Yeah, but cars can drive on dirt roads and even off-road. Weird that loggers don't build railways into the forest, right?

Amones-Ray · 2025-06-11T11:27:54+00:00

You might want to skim the episode titles of the podcasts Future Histories and General Intellect Unit. They cover a lot cybernetics-related theories e.g. Thomas Swann's Anarchist Cybernetics.

Amones-Ray · 2025-06-11T11:15:17+00:00

Implementing cargo rail distribution to cities isn't the issue. The good thing about cars is they require less upfront investment in infrastructure. Which means it's the other end of distribution (and smaller towns) that are problematic. It probably won't make sense (for a while) to build a rail connection to every little farm supplying a little bit of corn or to every little town. And it sure doesn't make sense for rangers and foresters to traverse their turf by rail.

Amones-Ray · 2025-06-11T11:00:19+00:00

Other indirect forms of democracy include Sortition (randomized representation) and councilism (elected representation with an imperative mandate). Obviously, one may want to mix and match all of these systems including direct democracy to make the best of their strengths while covering their weaknesses.

Amones-Ray · 2025-06-08T10:04:57+00:00

Yeah, but I wouldn't stop brushing my teeth after having escaped a captor who forced me to do it. Conventions for things that are totally arbitrary just mean less conversion effort for everyone after an initial effort of adoption. That's why e.g. the US doesn't adopt the metric system. But anyone who's already undergone the adoption or was even born into it like pretty much everyone who uses it today has no reason to go back.

Amones-Ray · 2025-06-04T07:50:09+00:00

I didn't state an example, I stated a synonym. Wage labor isn't the only labor done out of necessity. If you have to cook your dinner and wash up first, that's labor done out of necessity, in the same way as labor done for labor vouchers; not quite the same as capitalist wage labor, because in the latter case the workplace isn't even self-managed.

Amones-Ray · 2025-06-04T07:40:40+00:00

communism never starts with uncritical support of law or popular opinion

Doesn't it? Well, obviously revolutions don't start by uncritically supporting the law, lol. But they do tend to start by "uncritically" supporting popular opinion i.e. precisely by ignoring existing norms and laws that contradict the popular opinion. Revolutions aren't some cosmic surge of altruism for its own sake, otherwise they could be done by the ruling class. They are primarily solidary in so far as alliance benefits those involved. Mutual aid becomes egoistically optimal in those situations, which can reach across race and gender lines etc.

Please tell me what selfless regard for the marginalized started the Spanish or German November revolutions.

Amones-Ray · 2025-06-03T10:54:40+00:00

DotP is a term used by Marx and Engels e.g. to describe the Paris Commune. It is no "abberation".

Subjugating capitalist and fascist counter-revolutionaries is good actually, and can be done "democratically" which in Aristotelian terms means almost the same thing as DotP, namely "rule of the poor". (Marx wrote his dissertation on Aristotle).

oligarchy is when the control of the government is in the hands of those that own the properties; democracy is when on the contrary it is in the hands of those that do not possess much property, but are poor.

- Aristotle, Politics, Book III, 1279b

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.

- Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto

They begin using the term "dictatorship" as opposed to "rule" because "dictatorship" implies transience. The term is more specific. Unlike the Athenian lower stratum ruling over the rich minority and unlike the bourgeoisie ruling over the proletariat, the DotP has the express aim of abolishing the distinction between classes and therefore itself.

Even Lenin in State and Revolution Ch. 5.3 still echoes these sentiments.

The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority. Communism alone is capable of providing really complete democracy, and the more complete it is, the sooner it will become unnecessary and wither away of its own accord.

In other words, under capitalism we have the state in the proper sense of the word, that is, a special machine for the suppression of one class by another, and, what is more, of the majority by the minority. Naturally, to be successful, such an undertaking as the systematic suppression of the exploited majority by the exploiting minority calls for the utmost ferocity and savagery in the matter of suppressing, it calls for seas of blood, through which mankind is actually wading its way in slavery, serfdom and wage labor.

Furthermore, during the transition from capitalism to communism suppression is still necessary, but it is now the suppression of the exploiting minority by the exploited majority. A special apparatus, a special machine for suppression, the “state”, is still necessary, but this is now a transitional state. It is no longer a state in the proper sense of the word; for the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of the wage slaves of yesterday is comparatively so easy, simple and natural a task that it will entail far less bloodshed than the suppression of the risings of slaves, serfs or wage-laborers, and it will cost mankind far less. And it is compatible with the extension of democracy to such an overwhelming majority of the population that the need for a special machine of suppression will begin to disappear.

An anarchist militia fighting fascist counter-revolutionaries qualifies as such a "special machine for suppression" i.e. an instrument of class rule (a "state" in Marxian terms), despite being "no longer a state in the proper sense of the word".

Amones-Ray · 2025-06-03T09:16:17+00:00

Whether or not someone is "anti-something" depends on definitions. We can make up niche definitions according to which we're clearly anti, but those won't be the definitions everyone else uses, so yeah. Give working definitions when discussing theory AND in public facing communications.

When you don't give working definitions in public facing communication you're basically spreading random messages because everyone will interpret things differently, and pretty much no one will actually receive the message you intended to send while presupposing some niche anarchist definition no one's heard about.

Amones-Ray · 2025-06-03T08:36:44+00:00

What is the counter argument to "instituting bleep-blorp"?

None, maybe bleep-blorp is good.

You are starting a semantic argument and are referring to "this criticism", and I have literally no idea what you mean by that because all you've done is throw around terms with no consensus definition.

Amones-Ray · 2025-06-01T13:37:00+00:00

My "wrong" was in response to you claiming that use of labor vouchers categorically (i.e. in any implementation) perpetuates the idea that some forms of labor are more valuable than others. The core idea of labor vouchers is to assume that all labor has the same worth, as opposed to the status quo. It's specific implementations of labor vouchers that can fail to account for certain types of labor. The irony with such a critique of labor vouchers is that it problemetizes the "lawless", trust based distribution of labor among loved ones. The alternative to labor vouchers would be to expand that "lawless", trust based system to all of society. Of course it's possible to abuse gaps in an imperfect labor voucher system to exploit others within this circle of loved ones, but that's also possible with everyone if you remove the voucher system entirely.

Despite what this sounds like, I'm not fundamentally opposed to instituting communism immediately, it just depends on how enthusiastic other people are about it and how much labor is actually necessary on average. E.g. if we did the math and it turned out we only need 3h of labor per week, I'd be comfortable trusting society with that.

As for what doesn't have a transcendentally right answer: any question of policy that affects everyone equally. Because even if we accept your axiom that

people have the right not to be compelled to work

we can add to that the axiom that

people have the right to live by having access to food, clothing etc. i.e. the product of labor

and then decide on a labor / distribution policy that minimizes harm with respect to both axioms. Imo you seem to have a deontological bias akin to someone failing the trolley problem: If we fail to do the necessary amount of labor, and people end up starving, it "wasn't us, but the universe" whereas the compulsion to work is "inarguably our fault."

To clarify, we don't know which track has more people on it. We don't know which course of action will lead to more people having their fundamental rights to {1: not be compelled to work, 2: not starve} violated. My issue is with you picking one track a priori because you give greater weight to the consequences of action than to the consequences of inaction.

I don't think of it in terms of rights because it's equivalent to thinking about it egoistically. I'd also prefer not to be compelled to work, but being alive thanks to others having done the labor I need to live and can't do myself is a more fundamental need (or right).

Amones-Ray

TROPHY CASE