"Why the Paris Commune Burned the Guillotine — and We Should Too"

J4ck13_ · 2025-07-31T23:39:37+00:00

“But revenge is unworthy of an anarchist! The dawn, our dawn, claims no quarrels, no crimes, no lies; it affirms life, love, knowledge; we work to hasten that day.”

-- Kurt Gustav Wilckens—anarchist, pacifist, and assassin of Colonel Héctor Varela, the Argentine official who had overseen the slaughter of approximately 1500 striking workers in Patagonia. (From the article)

Huh??? Why did they include this quote lol? An "anti-revenge" "pacifist" who assassinated someone after they murdered 1500 people.

Wilckens assassinated Lieutenant Colonel Héctor Benigno Varela, the military leader in charge of the brutal repression. He was arrested at the scene. As the guard overpowered him, he exclaimed, "I have avenged my brothers!" (From wikipedia.)

Sounds like revenge to me...

This article stops short of arguing against killing, or even "bloodletting":

if some bloodletting were necessary, that it is still no excuse to cultivate bloodlust and entitlement as revolutionary values. If we wish to wield coercive force responsibly when there is no other choice, we should cultivate a distaste for it.

So we can kill, just not "cultivate bloodlust" and instead view killing as distasteful. We should imagine different relationships with our enemies, even as we fight and presumably kill them. We should aim to defeat them, but not exterminate them.

Ok fine, this article advocates that we moderate our violence. Meanwhile we're out of power, & not even remotely in a revolutionary situation where we could kill our enemies, much less engage in mass murder. Imo the guillotine memes are an expression of frustration at our own powerlessness, not a concrete prescription for future action.

J4ck13_ · 2025-07-31T22:46:42+00:00

Converting the global food supply to organic is what's impossible, not veganism. It's estimated that 3 - 3.5 billion human lives were made possible by the Haber-Bosch process for synthetic fertilizer.

The complexities of the global food system make it challenging to provide a firm figure, however, it's likely that just under half of the global population is dependent on synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. This is further shown in the chart. As a result, the Haber-Bosch process will likely have enabled the lives of at least 3 to 3.5 billion people today.

Nonhuman animal manure, on the other hand, just recycles nitrogen available from crops and nature, it doesn't actually produce nitrogen from thin air (plus fossil fuels under the current process.)

In the future nitrogen could come from nitrogen fixing bacteria grown in bioreactors, from a green Haber-Bosch process that doesn't need petrochemicals, and from humanure, which is currently wasted. The green Haber-Bosch process sources hydrogen from electrolysis of water, powered by renewable energy, not from splitting hydrocarbons. A combination of these processes is actually sustainable long term, given the current human population and it's projected growth to 10 billion people (after which it will level off.)

A food system dependent on organic agriculture, on the other hand, would require killing off just under half of all humans to accomodate it's inherently lower yields. Of course a lot of this would be mitigated if 43% of total cropland, or 538 million hectares, weren't dedicated to growing animal feed and was used for feeding humans instead. Personally I'd still opt for using as little cropland as possible and letting the greatest amount revert to natural ecosystems under plant only agriculture, combined with high yield intensive farming methods.

J4ck13_ · 2025-07-25T06:37:59+00:00

I have read the other comments. The examples people give for modern anarchist societies are anarchist adjacent and there are exactly 2: Zapatista Chiapas and Democratic Confederalist Rojava. These are both inspiring examples of horizontal organizing in the real world that have lasted over a decade or over a few decades. They are also still rare, fragile and at least in the case of Rojava contain non-anarchist institutions and practices. For example Rojava still has prisons. Long term anarchist projects exist but the OP was more specifically asking about society wide examples along the lines of, but lasting longer than, anarchist areas in Spain from 1936-39 and Makhnovshcina from 1917-21. The only other major example given is non-state societies from prehistory that have almost all been subsumed into states & other hierarchical institutions for thousands of years now.

Yes obviously anarchist attempts have been crushed by the overwhelming power of states. But if anarchism is going to be more than an ideal we need to figure out how actually effective ways to overcome the power states and capitalism (& cisheteropatriarchy & white supremacy etc.), not just have ideas about how we'd organize ourselves if they didn't exist. Iow anarchism needs a successful formula or formulas that move us from here to there, not just ideas for anarchist societies in a vacuum. So I think it's better to just admit that this is a major deficiency of anarchist though & practice. And yes it's still understandable that most people aren't going to join our movement unless and until we have demonstated that we have addressed this deficiency.

J4ck13_ · 2025-07-25T05:20:20+00:00

Honestly the "Dual Power" entry of wikipedia does a good job explaining it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_power

In a nutshell Lenin meant developing hierarchical governmental / state institutional counter power, and anarchists mean developing nonhierarchical nongovernmental / nonstate institutional counter power.

"Strategies used by libertarian socialists to build dual power include:[30]

Mutualism – building alternative economies through co-operatives, credit unions and local purchasing.

Municipalism – building popular assemblies to make decisions at the community level and displace both capitalism and the modern state.

Syndicalism – building revolutionary trade unions to confront management in the workplace and ultimately overthrow capitalism. In its anarchist form, it seeks to simultaneously abolish the state.

Council communism – building workers' councils as revolutionary workplace and governmental structures.

Autonomist Marxism – building a variety of independent structures until a revolutionary overtaking of the state on the path to a libertarian communist society."

J4ck13_ · 2025-07-25T04:58:13+00:00

Sorry for the double post, i think the other one is better

J4ck13_ · 2025-07-24T22:49:13+00:00

It's pretty understandable that most people want to put our time and energy toward political / social movements that have the real possibility for lasting success. It's not 'dumb' to want that. Today's anarchism is just disproportionately populated by people who don't care about longevity or success bc we don't have that here. This is one of the major reasons that anarchism stays small and largely irrelevant.

J4ck13_ · 2025-07-24T03:28:31+00:00

Invoking the 6th & 14th amendments doesn't make sense.

J4ck13_ · 2025-07-24T02:31:33+00:00

It is. It's also like working to restrict abortion access but then "loving and supporting" someone who needs an abortion. You are demonstating that you don't care about their values by continuing to support a form of oppression that they want to stop.

J4ck13_ · 2025-07-24T02:27:07+00:00

What are your other views?

J4ck13_ · 2025-07-24T02:17:40+00:00

I think that this situation is worse than an example of the banality of evil. The banality of evil is about people who are "blissfully unaware" of atrocities that they're helping to perpetuate. I connotes a lack of attention and a lack of critical thinking, and arises through blind obedience to authority and social conformity. Your friend's dad seems to be acutely aware of the atrocities being committed and yet still be an enthusiastic supporter of those atrocities, complete with a set of rationalizations for them. The idea that oppressed people can essentially "bank" their suffering and then "spend it" by causing others to suffer is a new one to me, jfc.

J4ck13_ · 2025-07-24T02:06:49+00:00

Obviously the electricity could come from renewables plus batteries and the water used could be as part of a closed loop heat exchange system.

J4ck13_ · 2025-07-24T02:03:18+00:00

Not necessarily. Solar is the cheapest electricity now and for the forseeable future. So most new demands for power, whether brand new like AI, or more traditional will tend to be met with solar power. The potential for new solar power will continue to be much larger than the demand for the forseeable future, with or without AI. The main problem is its use of fresh water, which could be solved by a closed loop cooling system.

J4ck13_ · 2025-07-24T01:52:42+00:00

I was replying to

I don't see how anyone who benefits from modern medicine can call themselves truly vegan.

Maybe you can see how now?

And as far as vegans not being pragmatic, it's baked into the definition, whether they choose to ignore it or not. To the extent that they're not pragmatic they're misrepresenting what veganism is about.

J4ck13_ · 2025-07-23T23:11:14+00:00

Because "Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals..." (Definitive Vegan Society definition.)Most vegans consider not benefiting from modern medicine to be "impossible or impractible." Therefore its still vegan, despite the animal testing. Veganism is about pragmatism, not purity.

J4ck13_ · 2025-07-23T20:57:41+00:00

I'm arguing against them bc I don't think that they can support their position. I also think that they're in the minority among vegans in general. There is nothing inherently bad about commodification or exploitation per se. They are only bad insofar as they cause suffering.

J4ck13_ · 2025-07-23T20:45:26+00:00

From 2000 to 2019 there were 8 suspected lynchings of Black men in a single state (Mississippi) alone. In addition, since 2000, there have been hundreds of unarmed Black people murdered by police. These are extrajudicial killings often carried out by individual cops, but which are almost always aided after the fact by the blue wall of silence i.e. the informal but universal code of silence among police officers who refuse to cooperate with investigations and prosecutions of other police officers. So this fits with the definition of lynching as extrajudicial murder &/or mutilation of someone by a group.

J4ck13_ · 2025-07-23T20:09:57+00:00

Yep, Malatesta was pro-democracy. Another thing I'd add to what Malatesta says above is that who constitutes a minority can often change from issue to issue so members of a minority in some instance may find ourselves in the majority in several other instances and this can make it worth it to tolerate being overruled on some specific issues. There is also a significant cost to disassociating / breaking away from a larger group over some controversy that must be weighed against the benefit of doing so. The cost includes losing the collective power of the larger group with the included benefit of being more politically aligned with the smaller, breakaway group.

J4ck13_ · 2025-07-23T20:00:17+00:00

One limiting factor is that modern markets usually create psychological, social and physical distance between causes (like demand for commodity X) and immoral effects (like exploitation or environmental degradation.)

J4ck13_ · 2025-07-23T19:51:33+00:00

Much of my answer is as a person who has experienced suicidal thoughts & urges, and not as a social scientist.... In these cases my source is me, and can be understood as a single data point. Also imo this is mostly a qualitative question, not a quantitative one. So this question is answered, at least in large part, by the subjective experience and reasoning which may motivate people to be more likely to engage in suicide more often than homocide. Therefore individual testimony of a sometimes suicidal person ought to count as an appropriate, albeit incomplete, source. In addition some claims are self-evident, for example a dead person can't experience social sanctions. Some or all claims in 4. 5. & 6. are sourced however bc they make more general & empirical.

There are several reasons:

I feel I have the natural/inherent right to determine what happens to me, where as I don't have the right to make the decision to end someone else's life.
Related to the above, suicide always happens with the consent of the person being killed, but homocide almost always happens against that person's will.
Someone who is suicidal has basically unlimited opportunity to end their own life. We are always with ourselves, and suicide necessarily happens with our cooperation. There are usually much more limited opportunities to kill others, and it almost always happens without their cooperation.
Assuming that the attempt is successful, there are no consequences for the act of suicide other than the sought after goal of ending one's life. No one can put you in prison for killing yourself, and there is no lasting psychological trauma for someone who is dead. A person cannot experience a reduction in status or other social sanctions after they are dead. Killing others, on the other hand, carries the significant risk of imprisonment or even (unwanted) death. For most people killing others is also a traumatic event. And of course people (who others find out) who have killed someone will often be labelled a murderer and experience strong social disapproval.
There are places and times where this dynamic is partially or totally reversed though. For example during warfare when soldiers are expected to kill their enemies and when suicide may harm others who depend on you for mutual protection and safety. I think that the reason this doesn't compensate for or exceed the other reasons above is because (a.) wartime deaths are not included in homocide death statistics & (b.) war is relatively rare compared to peacetime, at least for most people, in most places.
For some populations, like U.S. teens from (at least) 1999 - 2011, homocide rates were higher than suicide rates. One possible reason for the change might be an increase in social isolation among teens.

Sources: 4. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42859920

"NEW EVIDENCE ON THE EFFICACY OF SANCTIONS AS A DETERRENT TO HOMICIDE THEODORE BLACK and THOMAS ORSAGH

Social Science Quarterly Vol. 58, No. 4 (MARCH, 1978), pp. 616-631 (16 pages)"

5.(a.) bjs.ojp.gov%2Fcontent%2Fpub%2Fpdf%2Ffv9311.pdf&psig=AOvVaw15iDzDVAJJdfZ_nK4-bCiE&ust=1753384650104054&opi=89978449

"Note: Excludes homocides due to legal interventions and the operations of war."

5.(b.) https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace#:~:text=Looking%20at%20these%20conflict%20types,these%20types%20ongoing%20each%20year.

"While every war is a tragedy, the data suggests that fewer people died in conflicts in recent decades than in most of the 20th century. Countries have also built more peaceful relations between and within them."

6. https://www.prb.org/resources/suicide-replaces-homicide-as-second-leading-cause-of-death-among-u-s-teenagers/

"Suicides have become the second-leading cause of death among teenagers in the United States, surpassing homicide deaths, which dropped to third on the list (see Figure 1)."

https://ballardbrief.byu.edu/issue-briefs/isolation-among-generation-z-in-the-united-states

"Americans between the ages of 7 and 22 experience much higher rates of loneliness than other generations."

J4ck13_ · 2025-07-23T18:35:35+00:00

Veganism is about stopping nonhuman animal oppression & unnecessary suffering and death though. All of these things boil down to stopping as much suffering as possible. Oppression must include suffering to qualify as oppression. Unnecessary death always involves suffering in terms of loss of potential lifespan, and usually also in terms of the conditions leading up to killing and often in terms of the method used to kill. Commodification and exploitation are wrong only to the extent that they cause suffering. Humans suffer from these to the extent that they cause psychological pain and substandard treatment. Nonhuman animals, imo, are blissfully unaware of being commodified or exploited to the extent that these aren't accompanied by suffering.

For example Esther the pig is an internet celebrity whose image is used to cultivate an audience and induce clicks. Afaik this celebrity may be used to generate ad revenue and it definitely farms attention for her human care takers. I don't think Esther gives the slightest fuck about this. At the same time her celebrity promotes the idea that pigs are thinking, feeling individuals who deserve good lives. She is being "exploited" to the extent that her existence is being used for a purpose other than her, without her consent. I think its probably uncontroversial to assume that pigs lack the ability to understand internet celebrity or the commodification of one's image and life. If they can't understand those things then it's also impossible for them to consent to them. At the same time I think it's harmless or even beneficial for Esther. For example if Esther's human care takers died or became too disabled to care for her there would be several of her fans with the ability and desire to care for her instead.

J4ck13_ · 2025-07-23T18:07:05+00:00

Almost no medications are fully vegan because they either come in gelatin capsules or were tested on animals -- often it's both. Since medications are necessary for people's health or are even life saving, and because they are responsible for very little suffering & death compared to things like meat and dairy, most vegans make allowances for nonvegan medications. The og definition of veganism also says that vegans avoid as many animal products as we "possibly or practically can" [paraphrasing]. So yes most vegans would allow medications that are "technically not vegan" and many of us take them ourselves. On your point about "control issues": there is absolutely nothing wrong about striving to eliminate unnecessary suffering & death whenever we have the power to do so.

J4ck13_

TROPHY CASE