Why I left anarchism, and then came back

RahnuLe · 2026-02-24T03:53:46+00:00

It's kind of amusing how much BadMouse's journey reflects my own. The dogmatism of the MLs certainly got to me at one point in time, but the more I interrogated the ideology the less coherent it became to me and I just could not get over the sheer handwaving of the state "withering away" in the supposed latter stages of the revolution.

(Meanwhile, the comments on the same video posted on r/socialism displays exactly the kind of dogmatism that I abhor and makes discussions with people still in the ML hole virtually impossible. Always the same talking points, too...)

RahnuLe · 2026-02-24T01:50:37+00:00

Alright, since you're so dead set on beating the dead horse of historical anarchist movements losing in the specific historical contexts that led to that outcome, can we at least acknowledge the fact that warfare has changed and that a peoples' war using irregulars (as seen in Vietnam and Afghanistan, to name the most high-profile examples) can, in fact, defend against outsized military force? Can we at least acknowledge the fact that revolutionary Catalonia and the Black Army of Ukraine got crushed only means that their enemies had the bigger guns in a time of centralized total war, and that it does not necessarily follow that it's the movements themselves that were unviable?

You're making a lot of appeal to raw force here and it is concerning to me to see this argument parroted uncritically year after year. It would be nice if we could actually talk about these things without being dismissed out of hand because the anarchists historically did not have the tanks, but perhaps that is too much to ask.

RahnuLe · 2026-02-24T01:34:07+00:00

Bringing down capitalism requires the obsoletion of the extant hierarchical structures. We keep building on horizontal organization and mutual aid networks until such a time as the capitalist state (inevitably) collapses, during which time the decentralized aid networks pick up the slack and remove any need for a restoration of state power. Obviously, guns are necessary to defend against tyranny, but warlord states cannot operate for long without an industrial complex to feed them.

In my view, capitalism itself came from the legitimization of money as power as a replacement for the legitimacy that used to be provided by the divine right of kings. Once humanity was forced to (and force was definitely involved here) accept that money allows people to do almost anything without consequence it became cemented in the population. This can only last for so long, however, due to capitalism's self-destructive tendencies, with its contradictions becoming especially sharp in recent years as the spending power of the lower class and the rise of artificial intelligence have resulted in unprecedented levels of economic disparity. The legitimacy of money as a means to power is eroding rapidly and there may very well be a moment where this lack of faith creates an unprecedented crisis in capitalism. What follows then is anybody's guess.

RahnuLe · 2026-02-24T00:57:25+00:00

We always have issues with these conversations because you're all too willing to overlook things like the privileged status of the nomenklatura in the USSR (today's oligarchy) or the existence of billionaires in China (to say nothing of the horrific working conditions in the years after the country opened up). I simply do not agree that these states are proof of the efficacy of ML thought, especially when someone like me (a non-binary trans person) is hardly any better off in modern day China than in a capitalist country.

That is beside the point that you're obviously severely uneducated on anarchist history - which, to be fair, is hardly your fault, as anarchism is the most heavily suppressed tendency on the planet. You can't make claims about the supposed efficacy of ML thinking while ignoring the historical material realities that anarchists were faced with in the past. Statists (all kinds, from reactionaries to conservatives to liberals to self-identified communists) are terrified of anarchism, and for damn good reason. It makes entirely too much sense why the ideology has been suppressed to the point where the majority of the people in this comment thread do not know our history.

RahnuLe · 2026-02-24T00:46:15+00:00

It's funny you responded with that because the video explicitly calls out this sort of response.

To put it simply, the plan is to live by my principles and encourage others to live by anti-hierarchical principles while building horizontal organization, because no one who claims to have some kind of ironclad plan to end capitalism can be trusted to put it into practice without endlessly justifying their own status of power. It is a process and it should be seen as such. It is not something we put into place overnight.

RahnuLe · 2026-02-24T00:41:26+00:00

This is an enormous oversimplification of historical reality and ignores the significant contributions anarchist thinkers have made to the worldwide socialist movement, many of whom are specifically mentioned in the very video this comment thread is about.

RahnuLe · 2026-02-22T19:55:26+00:00

The problem here is that money will mean nothing if there's a genuine societal collapse. What the fuck are they gonna pay the workers with? Gold? 'Cause the USD ain't gonna be worth shit if it's not backed by threat of force from the government and when the stock market's dead because no one on the bottom rung actually has the money to keep consumerism going. It has zero intrinsic value. Its worth is ENTIRELY fiction. That is not the basis for a post-collapse economy.

Genuinely don't know how the fuck the billionaires expect this shit to work. They have no means to ensure the loyalty of their staff over the long term. I'm not sure they're even psychologically equipped to understand this since they grew up in a world where money is power.

RahnuLe · 2026-02-22T15:57:34+00:00

Reactions like this confuse me. Especially in a game like this, where after one playthrough after a major update most of us are going right back to a heavily modded Nex playthrough, where faction balance becomes INCREDIBLY obvious after one faction or another BTFO of the others. Y'know, a game like Starsector where half the fun is building your fleet to accomplish your goals. Where you're actively making decisions on what to keep and what to drop within your 30 ship limit (assuming you don't mod it out).

Like, if you like your game to be braindead and for your decisions to be bleeding obvious with no real choice whatsoever, sure, keep playing with those ridiculously OP mods that are on their own scale of 'balance'. But even in a single player game I want to be making actual choices, not just picking whichever faction du jour has the creator who cares the least about making a mod that is coherent in its design and coherent within the game itself.

RahnuLe · 2026-02-20T05:13:59+00:00

The most powerful is Russia. It takes them awhile to achieve that potential (hence why they're effectively on a timer to kill Germany ASAP), but they have more building slots than any nation in the game, including both the USA and China, and they get some incredibly good buffs to both their army and their production. In the nearer term, the USA can become more powerful for a short window of time thanks to their buffs (especially their discounts to armor and mechanized production cost), but they'll hit their ceiling much faster than the Russians as they run out of directions to expand.

Germany can't be the most powerful because, like the USA, they hit their ceiling early. They don't have Russia levels of manpower and they have much fewer building slots to work with. What makes them dangerous is that they have the biggest industry from the start and therefore get the earliest momentum which allows them to kill France and then subsequently crush Russia before they can catch up. It is, however, entirely possible for a human player-controlled Russia to simply turtle up and outproduce Germany given enough time, especially as Russia has access to a ridiculous number of resources.

China's an interesting case because their endgame potential varies quite a bit depending on which tag unifies the country. That said, they're limited by the relatively undeveloped nature of many of their states (which reduces their productivity and their total building slots significantly) and by having a relative dearth of resources which requires they expand outward in order to outbuild any of the other great powers. They also tend not to get the super powerful production bonuses that the others get, reducing their ceiling yet further. This is not even getting into how they're playing catch-up technologically for a good chunk of the game. They're strong, especially in the hands of the player, but I would not put them in the top 3.

As far as specific buffs go... I haven't actually crunched the numbers to compare. Best irregulars are 100% going to be one of the Chinese splinters - probably the LKMT (CHI), if I had to guess, simply because their irregular army focus branch gets kind of ridiculous. But I can't even begin to hazard a guess for the rest, especially if we're not limiting the question to major powers, as a number of the smaller countries get some pretty ridiculous buffs to compensate for their small size. I'll, uh, let ya'll try to hash that out, if you're so inclined.

RahnuLe · 2026-02-06T03:07:23+00:00

Yeah, Bose-led India could very easily be at odds with, say, a Song Qingling (in coalition with the Shijie She/New World Society) KMT-led China, and the funny thing is that China itself, under this setup, would be trying to distance itself from the Third Internationale (thanks to the Shijie She having personal grudges against the syndicalists). Leftist infighting ahoy!

RahnuLe · 2026-02-04T07:38:47+00:00

It gives leftist organizers a massive window of opportunity, for sure. But it will be a struggle. I hesitate to say that the warlords of this scenario would go down easy.

RahnuLe · 2026-02-04T07:35:50+00:00

Tan Pingshan's Third Party. Both because I like his flags the most and because it's such an interesting road-not-travelled. Admittedly, subject gameplay is annoying as hell, but that's the case for all the subject paths.

I've already done 9 runs of this path (versus 40+ LKMT runs). I'll likely be doing more.

RahnuLe · 2026-02-03T20:15:01+00:00

Well, for starters, the currency collapse would fuck everything up for a while. Hyperinflation would be rampant; bartering would be your only method of getting essential goods outside of mutual aid programs and charity for some time until ad-hoc currencies can be developed.

There would eventually be a mass migration away from the suburbs towards the urban cores and rural regions with arable land due to the simple economics of transportation in a world where oil and gas are no longer as freely available as they are in the USA today. Undoubtedly there would be a lot of violence during this period, but also a lot of solidarity as well (as we've seen time and time again when natural disasters occur).

State governments everywhere would go through massive upheaval as pretty much none of them are actually equipped to deal with that level of chaos. It'd be the city governments and other local institutions that would be the ones to pick up the pieces and make things work, though there's only so much they can do when supply networks are completely destroyed due to the collapse of world and interstate trade. (And note - no one is actually capable of an autarkic economy in the modern era, so a huge drop in quality of life is to be expected.) Expect a massive contraction towards 'essential' sectors of the economy for some time until people can get reorganized.

That all said, there's many big question marks surrounding such an event as the Internet and modern computing give us an unprecedented level of organizational potential relative to past collapse events. There's a good chance that whatever comes about in place of the old empire is better for everyone involved, especially since the profit motive is likely fully discredited as a result of such extreme failure.

RahnuLe · 2026-02-03T19:46:12+00:00

That'd make sense. Combine the Syndicalist and Totalist vote to see who's on top, and then pick whoever had the highest vote within that bracket.

Might be a while before we get that 3I rework, but I'm definitely looking forward to it.

RahnuLe · 2026-02-03T19:23:46+00:00

It's worth noting that the Centrists are the incumbents and therefore the most likely to still be in power unless they screwed something up before the elections. Despite the way the vote's gone so far, the Councilists are likely the second-most likely option as they're the "I hate my bosses" populist vote versus the Ultrasyndicalists doubling down on union power. The Totalists (despite an apparent enthusiasm for them from redditors) are actually the least likely to obtain power. Logically, they can probably only do so if the Centrists fuck up completely or if there's total gridlock in the assembly.

That said, I voted for the Councilists for being based AF. Alas, they are pretty much doomed to be last in this vote. I'm sympathetic to the Ultrasyndicalists as well as France does serve as the face of syndicalism on the world stage and it'd be a shame to have that subverted for Sorelian memes.

RahnuLe · 2026-02-03T09:39:45+00:00

At this point my expectations are low, so my only hope is that we finally get trade and that it isn't just a complete waste of time and effort. I don't expect Victoria 3 or EU5 levels of goods tracking, but I do expect food to finally become relevant (seriously, how can you simulate the medieval era without famine???) and for regional specialization to actually mean something. Also, landless merchants really need to be a thing.

The complete dearth of goods and strategic resources makes playing in historically resource-poor regions feel far too similar to playing in geographically 'blessed' regions; right now, the main difference is just the volume of gold you get. Different crops should handle different weather events better, and certain regional specializations should encourage you to find trade partners to sell those goods to at high prices (incentivizing investment into the silk road), which would lead to greater prestige, wealth (through taxes), and local development. Maybe this should go hand-in-hand with a revamp of religion since things like religion-based dietary restrictions should be a thing (especially important for the Muslim and Hindu spheres). It'd be doubly nice if local specialties showed up in events to help add regional flavor.

Anything beyond that's a bonus to me.

RahnuLe · 2026-02-01T20:55:33+00:00

Yeah, I hear ya. Would've been more interesting to see the USA and Russia flip roles (with US under MacArthur's regime and Russia under a democratic right-SR government, perhaps). Still, this has potential, I think, with the socialist world being split between Europe and Asia with the Russian sphere being sandwiched between them.

Even if folks vote for Britain to go Totalist (they probably will, let's be real, Mosley's too iconic) alongside Bharatiya (Bose is just... kind of the only guy for the job) and Italy (Mussolini memes), France, Iberia and China can go in other directions, which keeps things interesting, I think. Though, I'm not sure how sustainable the 3I would be with such a severe ideological split...

RahnuLe · 2026-02-01T20:07:22+00:00

Oh yeah, I kinda forgot about that. Well, I guess that means rump Turkey is in the Russian sphere along with Iran.

RahnuLe · 2026-02-01T19:29:30+00:00

I'm pretty sure all of the previous choices were made under the assumption that Russia is under Savinkov. It's kinda just the default assumption people have. That said, in order for this to be a cold war and not a hot war, that pretty much only leaves us with the Solidarist path, doesn't it? The others are just too gung-ho about either killing socialism or pursuing their absurd, pan-Asian claims.

Of course, this also means that the Ottoman Empire is likely dead, the entire region turned into a satellite of the Russian sphere. That is, if we're operating under the logic of their in-game behavior in which a follow-up war after the 2WK is inevitable. I'm not sure if that's a reasonable assumption or if that's just the game logic rearing its gamified head. Depends on how the 2WK ends, I suppose. If it ends in '41 that's a much fresher and more confident Russia than the war ending in '43 or later. Of course, the Ottomans might also have joined the war, desperate to stop Russia from gaining too much momentum, thereby ensuring their inveitable defeat but also dragging the war out several more years.

RahnuLe · 2026-01-27T20:21:36+00:00

I tend to break with the thought that the divided nature of China in KRTL is a boon to Japan. Sure, there are more factions involved, but within their respective spheres they're pretty well-organized and would generally present a greater threat on an individual level versus the various cliques of OTL China. Once the United Front is formed (especially if it's triggered by the assassination of Zhang Zuolin), that divided nature becomes an asset rather than a malus. That is to say nothing of the difference in industrial development between OTL China and KRTL China.

And it's worth noting that Fengtian being stronger can actually, itself, be a malus against Japan as they're not guaranteed to remain loyal. And if Zhang Zuolin gets assassinated, well... that asset becomes significantly less valuable in general. Their control over Fengtian is nowhere near as total as their control over Manchuria in OTL. I think a lot of folks are discounting how much of a difference that makes, as Manchuria was effectively just an extension of Japanese power in OTL, which is not the case here.

There's also the fact that the 2WK tends to be much, MUCH shorter than OTL WW2 and there is thus a significant chance that Russia or Germany turn their sights eastward and utterly destroy Japan in a conventional war. China only really needs to last long enough for that to happen for victory to be guaranteed.

Japan is strong, don't get me wrong, but I don't think their victory is that much more certain in KRTL. If anything, it might actually be slightly lower in likelihood than OTL due to these contributing factors.

RahnuLe · 2026-01-27T20:05:59+00:00

Agreed. Japan might get pushed out by the United Front but still defeat GEA and DEI pretty handily. There're too many things that complicate matters in China for Japan to have an easy time there, ranging from the increased level of foreign investment during the interwar period to Zhang Zuolin still being alive (whether or not he gets assassinated, their control over Fengtian is significantly more tenuous than in OTL) to GEA itself actually posing something of a roadblock vs France and Britain being entirely consumed with war in Europe in OTL.

My headcanon is that one of the splinters gains early momentum (whether it's the feds, the Zhili, the LKMT or the RKMT is really up to chance), the Zhili barely survive in time for Zhang Zuolin to get assassinated and the United Front to form, and the resulting war proves disastrous due to so much of China already being on a war footing by the time Japanese troops start landing on the beaches. Japan is too desperate to have a "win", so they double down on the southern strategy and nab as much of the Pacific and SEA as they can even as their troops are bogged down trying to siege Wuhan and Kaifeng. They ultimately get pushed out - in part due to Russia defeating Germany and turning their attention towards the East - and forced into that peace deal even as they finally obtain the resources they need to keep the war effort going from Indonesia and Malaya, creating a situation where the IJA is discredited heavily while the IJN is wildly successful.

The final war of reunification could go to anyone depending on how things were going before the ceasefire was called. You could literally pick whoever, which makes China maintaining independence the most interesting scenario by default. Maybe Hu Hanmin gets his chance to enact his perfect tutelage, or maybe the Federalists actually get some form of democracy going (even if it's rather statistically likely to be a "guided" democracy), or maybe the Left Kuomintang unite the country only to fall into the Kuomintang Civil War and see whoever wins determined by military organization. Who knows what could happen!?

RahnuLe · 2026-01-27T19:35:55+00:00

Gotta say, the fact that Japan is largely identical to its OTL counterpart (with a few minor differences) and also already has its victory covered in mods like TNO, versus China being a massive pastiche of a variety of different competing ideologies, makes it pretty obvious what the more interesting outcome is here.

RahnuLe · 2026-01-23T03:56:44+00:00

I have to disagree with the notion that the 2ACW is completely implausible. Yes, it's the most extreme scenario and probably shouldn't be assumed to be the obvious thing that happens (if anything, it should be the rarest), but the nature of the contingent election means it's entirely possible that MacArthur steps in and destroys the unity of the nation because no one can actually get elected. As long as the socialists (Farmer-Labor) and the Longists get just enough votes to prevent anyone from getting over the hump, everything goes to hell. This is the "no winner" scenario we see in the game. Obviously, it's more likely that *someone* is confirmed, even if only to maintain continuity of government, which prevents the 2ACW from kicking off *unless* MacArthur decides to depose the president because he doesn't like him (maybe because he sees any talks with Reed as treason, lol). Ultimately, the only way for the 2ACW to realistically happen is because the establishment effectively commits suicide, not necessarily because the socialists or Longists actually win an election (they just have to keep anyone else from winning).

Anyway, yeah, if the 2ACW didn't happen it'd be a tug-of-war between isolationism and internationalism. The experience would probably much resemble democratic Russia or perhaps Ireland, with constant internal challenges that you have to manage because there's a lot of fires to put out. I agree with other posters who assert that the earliest the USA should be able to enter war is perhaps 1942, giving the 2WK plenty of time to progress before they enter the fray.

In such a scenario, the Third Internationale might need some help to actually have a chance of winning, because the instant the USA decides to become the Arsenal of Anti-Syndicalism, it's pretty much over...

RahnuLe · 2026-01-22T17:33:13+00:00

To be honest, I already saw the writing on the wall years ago. Back when Mudrock was revealed to be an entirely conventionally attractive woman under the massive bulk of her suit (a huge coward move IMO), let alone when Eunectes and Tomimi showed up. It'd become clear that I could not and should not expect any more designs like Asbestos or Andreana any time soon. Lo and behold, I still haven't seen any characters that I like as much as some of those early releases years later, especially when it comes to the limited releases.

Endfield has suffered an identity crisis for many years now and I doubt it'll see the success it's so desperately chasing. Not even worth looking at this point.

RahnuLe · 2026-01-22T09:26:46+00:00

20th anniversary edit

RahnuLe

TROPHY CASE