The Anarchist Prophets

[Agnapostate]

As a socialist, I've become accustomed to incessant repetition of mockeries that refer to the failures of Leninism and its derivative of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and derivative of Maoism in China. No matter how many times I attempt to explain that I'm an anarchist and a libertarian, and that the failures of Leninism in fact strengthen anarchist ideology, politically and economically misinformed rightists are seemingly incapable of distinguishing between the pseudo-socialist state capitalism adopted by Leninists and legitimate socialism, that which necessitates actual public ownership and management of the means of production, not mere declaration of such.

With significant factions within the socialist movement now advocating republican market socialism as the way forward after having witnessed the numerous deficiencies of central planning, we should be aware of the fact that it was anarchists who initially identified the problematic nature of authoritarian inclinations within socialist ideology. It was then the anarchists who were persecuted after the state capitalists gained power, and to add insult to injury, anarchists who are now told that all forms of socialism are impossible to implement because of the failures of an ideology that they attacked as anti-socialist even prior to its complete development, offering prescient and desperately needed criticisms of authoritarian "socialism" throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Elements of this commentary were indeed prophetic in nature, and it's necessary to examine them to determine the role of anarchism in the socialist movement, and whether anarchism is better equipped than Marxism and republican market socialism to lead that movement forward.

This analysis must start with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first person to declare himself an anarchist (in 1840), and a socialist theorist who ensured that the development of anarchism predated the development of Marxism, attacking what he regarded as the authoritarian nature of the socialism advocated by rival Louis Blanc:

[W]hat can there be in common between socialism, that universal protest, and the hotch-potch of old prejudices which make up M. Blanc’s republic? M. Blanc is never tired of appealing to authority, and socialism loudly declares itself anarchistic; M. Blanc places power above society, and socialism tends to subordinate it to society; M. Blanc makes social life descend from above, and socialism maintains that it springs up and grows from below; M. Blanc runs after politics, and socialism is in quest of science. No more hypocrisy, let me say to M. Blanc: you desire neither Catholicism nor monarchy nor nobility, but you must have a God, a religion, a dictatorship, a censorship, a hierarchy, distinctions, and ranks. For my part, I deny your God, your authority, your sovereignty, your judicial State, and all your representative mystifications.

Proudhon's work was published several decades before Marx and Engels were to achieve their ultimate fame, but Proudhon did know Marx and was aware of Marx's criticism of his work, terming it a "tissue of abuse, calumny, falsification and plagiarism," and Marx (or Marxism) "the tapeworm of socialism." Marx's greater libertarian foe, however, was to be the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who warned that "If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Czar himself" and "When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called "the People's Stick" decades before the Bolsheviks were to spark the Russian Revolution. Marx himself cannot be entirely blamed for the state capitalist legacy of the USSR, of course (and likely would have disavowed Leninism), but it's worth noting that anarchists predicted that authoritarian elements would be able to base themselves upon Marxist principles and tenets. Bakunin elaborated on this in his 1871 manuscript Statism and Anarchy:

Idealists of all kinds – metaphysicians, positivists, those who support the rule of science over life, doctrinaire revolutionists – all defend the idea of state and state power with equal eloquence, because they see in it, as a consequence of their own systems, the only salvation for society...This fiction of a pseudo-representative government serves to conceal the domination of the masses by a handful of privileged elite; an elite elected by hordes of people who are rounded up and do not know for whom or for what they vote. Upon this artificial and abstract expression of what they falsely imagine to be the will of the people and of which the real living people have not the least idea, they construct both the theory of statism as well as the theory of so-called revolutionary dictatorship.

The differences between revolutionary dictatorship and statism are superficial. Fundamentally they both represent the same principle of minority rule over the majority in the name of the alleged “stupidity” of the latter and the alleged “intelligence” of the former. Therefore they are both equally reactionary since both directly and inevitably must preserve and perpetuate the political and economic privileges of the ruling minority and the political and economic subjugation of the masses of the people.

Now it is clear why the dictatorial revolutionists, who aim to overthrow the existing powers and social structures in order to erect upon their ruins their own dictatorships, never were or will be the enemies of government, but, to the contrary, always will be the most ardent promoters of the government idea. They are the enemies only of contemporary governments, because they wish to replace them. They are the enemies of the present governmental structure, because it excludes the possibility of their dictatorship. At the same time they are the most devoted friends of governmental power. For if the revolution destroyed this power by actually freeing the masses, it would deprive this pseudo-revolutionary minority of any hope to harness the masses in order to make them the beneficiaries of their own government policy.

We have already expressed several times our deep aversion to the theory of Lassalle and Marx, which recommends to the workers, if not as a final ideal at least as the next immediate goal, the founding of a people’s state, which according to their interpretation will be nothing but “the proletariat elevated to the status of the governing class.”

He complemented this with a criticism of Marxist "Communism." (Note that this was the only variety of "communism" existing during his lifetime, and anarchist communism was not to develop until after his death.)

I hate Communism because it is the negation of liberty and because for me humanity is unthinkable without liberty. I am not a Communist, because Communism concentrates and swallows up in itself for the benefit of the State all the forces of society, because it inevitably leads to the concentration of property in the hands of the State.

This statement, again, was issued several decades prior to the Russian Revolution, illustrating a level of prophetic insight on the part of the anarchist theorists that perhaps indicates a similar knowledge of legitimate and positive socialist organization.

 

[Agnapostate]

Shortly after the Russian Revolution and establishment of the Soviet Union, the anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin made his many criticisms of the authoritarian nature of Soviet state capitalism known, writing this to Lenin in 1920:

Russia has already become a Soviet Republic only in name. The influx and taking over of the people by the 'party,' that is, predominantly the newcomers (the ideological communists are more in the urban centers), has already destroyed the influence and constructive energy of this promising institution - the soviets. At present, it is the party committees, not the soviets, who rule in Russia. And their organization suffers from the defects of bureaucratic organization. To move away from the current disorder, Russia must return to the creative genius of local forces which, as I see it, can be a factor in the creation of a new life.And the sooner that the necessity of this way is understood, the better. People will then be all the more likely to accept [new] social forms of life. If the present situation continues, the very word 'socialism' will turn into a curse. That is what happened to the conception of equality in France for forty years after the rule of the Jacobins.

This insight is utterly prescient and demonstrates substantial abilities of foresight. Kropotkin knew not only that the state capitalism of Lenin and the Bolsheviks was not "socialist"; he knew that it was in fact anti-socialist, and that its ruinous legacy would generate harsh damage to the socialist movement, creating a "guilt by association" of sorts for even those socialists (such as anarchists), who had quickly and vigilantly condemned the authoritarianism of state capitalism. Similarly opposed to this pseudo-socialism was Emma Goldman, deported from the U.S. to Russia for her political convictions and participation in radical activity, and initially optimistic about the Russian Revolution. This optimism turned to dismay after she witnessed the brutal suppression of the democratically motivated Kronstadt Rebellion in 1921 by the Red Army, and led to her 1923 publication of My Disillusionment in Russia, in which she railed against the nature of dictatorship in the USSR:

The STATE IDEA, the authoritarian principle, has been proven bankrupt by the experience of the Russian Revolution. If I were to sum up my whole argument in one sentence I should say: The inherent tendency of the State is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolize all social activities; the nature of revolution is, on the contrary, to grow, to broaden, and disseminate itself in ever-wider circles. In other words, the State is institutional and static; revolution is fluent, dynamic. These two tendencies are incompatible and mutually destructive. The State idea killed the Russian Revolution and it must have the same result in all other revolutions, unless the libertarian idea prevail.

Goldman had no ability to know that the Soviet Union would eventually be dissolved many decades later and did not declare it anti-socialist only after its imminent destruction was apparent. She, as with other consistent anarchists, declared the Soviet Union and the authoritarian state capitalism that falsely masqueraded as socialism within it to be tyrannically monstrous and unjust even as it gained greater power:

Witness the tragic condition of Russia. The methods of State centralization have paralyzed individual initiative and effort; the tyranny of the dictatorship has cowed the people into slavish submission and all but extinguished the fires of liberty; organized terrorism has depraved and brutalized the masses and stifled every idealistic aspiration; institutionalized murder has cheapened human life, and all sense of the dignity of man and the value of life has been eliminated; coercion at every step has made effort bitter, labor a punishment, has turned the whole of existence into a scheme of mutual deceit, and has revived the lowest and most brutal instincts of man. A sorry heritage to begin a new life of freedom and brotherhood.

In the mid-to-late 1930's, the world saw the most expansive and important socialist revolution throughout history occur during the Spanish Civil War, as anarchists and libertarian workers organized and collectivized vast areas of land and numerous fixtures throughout Spain, establishing several thousand anarchist collectives among several million inhabitants of Spain, their hub being in the industrialized region of Catalonia and its capital of Barcelona, a city populated by 1.2 million residents. Unfortunately, the exigencies of the situation (a fascist military revolt against the republican government), led union leaders to organize an alliance with authoritarian "socialists" backed by the Soviet Union. These phony socialists considered the social revolution a counterproductive engagement, and moved to sabotage and destroy collectivization efforts through violent force, with Soviet "allies" deliberately depriving anarchist and libertarian Marxist military forces of necessary aid, critically undermining the war effort. The anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker offered this insighftul analysis into the reasons for this treachery:

For two decades the supporters of Bolshevism have been hammering it into the masses that dictatorship is a vital necessity for the defense of the so-called proletarian interests against the assaults of the counter-revolution and for paving the way for Socialism. They have not advanced the cause of Socialism by this propaganda, but have merely smoothed the way for Fascism in Italy, Germany, and Austria by causing millions of people to forget that dictatorship, the most extreme form of tyranny, can never lead to social liberation. In Russia, the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat has not led to Socialism, but to the domination of a new bureaucracy over the proletariat and the whole people…What the Russian autocrats and their supporters fear most is that the success of libertarian Socialism in Spain might prove to their blind followers that the much vaunted “necessity of a dictatorship” is nothing but one vast fraud which in Russia has led to the despotism of Stalin and is to serve today in Spain to help the counter-revolution to a victory over the revolution of the workers and peasants.

This anarchist criticism has continued to the present day, and saw a remarkable recent expression in Noam Chomsky's 1986 publication of his articleThe Soviet Union Versus Socialism:

The Leninist antagonism to the most essential features of socialism was evident from the very start. In revolutionary Russia, Soviets and factory committees developed as instruments of struggle and liberation, with many flaws, but with a rich potential. Lenin and Trotsky, upon assuming power, immediately devoted themselves to destroying the liberatory potential of these instruments, establishing the rule of the Party, in practice its Central Committee and its Maximal Leaders -- exactly as Trotsky had predicted years earlier, as Rosa Luxembourg and other left Marxists warned at the time, and as the anarchists had always understood. Not only the masses, but even the Party must be subject to "vigilant control from above," so Trotsky held as he made the transition from revolutionary intellectual to State priest. Before seizing State power, the Bolshevik leadership adopted much of the rhetoric of people who were engaged in the revolutionary struggle from below, but their true commitments were quite different. This was evident before and became crystal clear as they assumed State power in October 1917.

It is thus apparent that anarchists have been at the forefront of criticism of the authoritarian and dictatorial nature of the pseudo-socialism of the Leninist states, and criticized the authoritarian inclinations of Marxism and pre-Marxist socialism long prior to that. With every facet of this analysis in mind, is it reasonable to claim that anarchism and libertarianism (which could include minarchist varieties of socialism, such as forms of libertarian Marxism) represent the future of the socialist movement?

 

[NEUROSPORT]

so Agna if i understand you correctly the only regime you approve of is that brief period in Spain - right ?

what would you say to Anarcho-Capitalism with a fixed wealth distribution curve ?

for example let's decide from the start that:

top 1% = 5% of wealth
next 9% = 20% of wealth
next 20% = 25% of wealth
next 50% = 40% of wealth
bottom 20% = 10% of wealth

and dynamically adjust taxes to make sure that no matter the degree of consolidation of businesses ( in other words even if wal-mart puts every other store out of business ) the poor get their cut.

you can use negative taxes such as negative 1,000% tax so a person who makes $1 / hour would get an extra $10 / hour tax return.

i think that would be superior to collectivism.

 

[DrunkenAsparagus]

Except that it removes almost all incentive to be more productive

 

[Agnapostate]

so Agna if i understand you correctly the only regime you approve of is that brief period in Spain - right ?

I don't entirely approve of that regime, and there are facets of other political structures that I'd say that I approve of, such as the Makhnovists' Free Territory of Ukraine.

what would you say to Anarcho-Capitalism

That it's illegitimate pseudo-anarchism.

Except that it removes almost all incentive to be more productive

All forms of capitalism do, "anarcho"-capitalism not least among them. But this thread is not intended for general discussion of anarchism and libertarianism anyway, but merely for discussion of whether those political ideologies should be at the forefront of the socialist movement rather than Marxism or republican market socialism.

 

[NEUROSPORT]

That it's illegitimate pseudo-anarchism.

does the end justify the means ?

yes capitalism reduces an average person to wage slave - but with a bit of wealth redistribution by means of graduated tax this wage slave could enjoy a much higher standard of living than a free person deserted somewehre on an island.

do you still dispute the fact that capitalism is the most efficient system ? you know yesterday i accidentally opened the communist manifesto ( i was reading it as a bed time story for somebody ) and the first couple pages is all about how Capitalism is TOO EFFICIENT and nothing can compete with it.

apparently the view of Marx, as well as Hitler and Lenin was that Capitialism is the most efficient system but Socialism is efficient ENOUGH. and that other benefits of Socialism outweigh its lower efficiency.

do you have any Criticism of Capitalism aside from its ability to provide for the good of the weak and uncompetitive?

do you dislike Capitalism simply because it is not Anarchism ?

i guess there is no real way under Capitalism to provide for the welfare of the weak without having a strong state. is that the problem you see with it ?

considering that Capitalism is the only system that ever was successful on a large scale and over a significnat period of time - do you not feel it must get at least SOMETHING right ?

 

[Wessexman]

Except that it removes almost all incentive to be more productive

What does? Care to explain this?

From my knowledge of social anarchism I don't think a lack of incentive would be a problem.

There are problems with anarchist philosophy certainly, particularly with the rise of the New Left which attacks all kinds of settled authority and culture --- the sooner anarchists remove themselves from the idiocies of post-modernism the better, but the biggest flaw I can see is it is not necessary to go the whole way in my opinion. You could get most of the benefits by simply pursuing a program for quite radical political, social and economic decentralism without having to tie it to the more controversial idea of completely removing the state.

Apart from this my criticisms are simply about things that though they were always a little present in anarchism, even the really insightful figures like Proudhon, Kropotkin and Landeaur have been greatly magnified since the 60s. Namely an opposition to local traditions and customary, historical identities this alienates a lot of the right who would be more sympathetic to you otherwise and helps to harm the identities and loyalties that help to make up individuals and provide them with a base for resistance to tyranny.

And also there is an opposition to "all authority" despite the fact that as the sociologist Robert Nisbet said society is little more than a tissue of almost numberless authorities. To quote Nisbet:

Canadian Conservative Forum - Requested Essay

"The conservative philosophy of liberty proceeds from the conservative philosophy of authority. It is the existence of authority in the social order that staves off encroachments of power from the political sphere. Conservatism, from Burke on, has perceived society as a plurality of authorities. There is the authority of parent over the small child, of the priest over the communicant, the teacher over the pupil, the master over the apprentice, and so on. Society as we actually observe it, is a network or tissue of such authorities; they are really numberless when we think of the kinds of authority which lie within even the smallest of human groups and relationships. Such authority may be loose, gentle, protective, and designed to produce individuality, but it is authority nevertheless. For the conservative, individual freedom lies in the interstices of social and moral authority. Only because of the restraining and guiding efforts of such authority does it become possible for human beings to sustain so liberal a political government as that which the Founding Fathers designed in this country and which flourished in England from the late seventeenth century on. Remove the social bonds, as the more zealous and uncompromising of libertarian individualists have proposed ever since William Godwin, and you emerge with, not a free but a chaotic people, not with creative but impotent individuals. Human nature, Balzac correctly wrote, cannot endure a moral vacuum."

Sure let's try and make as many of them as benign and decentralised as possible and where appropriate democratic and participatory but we should not attack all authority so that we create a society of individual atoms, impotent and helpless. This will bring as much instability to an anarchist society as a statist one.

 

[Wessexman]

does the end justify the means ?

yes capitalism reduces an average person to wage slave - but with a bit of wealth redistribution by means of graduated tax this wage slave could enjoy a much higher standard of living than a free person deserted somewehre on an island.

do you still dispute the fact that capitalism is the most efficient system ? you know yesterday i accidentally opened the communist manifesto ( i was reading it as a bed time story for somebody ) and the first couple pages is all about how Capitalism is TOO EFFICIENT and nothing can compete with it.

apparently the view of Marx, as well as Hitler and Lenin was that Capitialism is the most efficient system but Socialism is efficient ENOUGH. and that other benefits of Socialism outweigh its lower efficiency.

do you have any Criticism of Capitalism aside from its ability to provide for the good of the weak and uncompetitive?

do you dislike Capitalism simply because it is not Anarchism ?

i guess there is no real way under Capitalism to provide for the welfare of the weak without having a strong state. is that the problem you see with it ?

considering that Capitalism is the only system that ever was successful on a large scale and over a significnat period of time - do you not feel it must get at least SOMETHING right ?

I think you're going to have to define "capitalism" here. The capitalism of the American style libertarian is as untried as the communism of the anarchist.

 

[NEUROSPORT]

I think you're going to have to define "capitalism" here. The capitalism of the American style libertarian is as untried as the communism of the anarchist.

point is all nations that are most developed today owe it to their capitalist element even though they are not purely capitalist.

 

[Wessexman]

point is all nations that are most developed today owe it to their capitalist element even though they are not purely capitalist.

What is this element? Why do they owe it to this? And what do you mean by development?

As far as I can see "capitalism" has always been replete with state intervention and this has had a massive impact on the development of "capitalist" nations even if a lot of this development has left a lot to be desired in the form of broader social and cultural development as opposed to mere additions to the amount of necessities required and consumerist goods produced.

 

[NEUROSPORT]

mere additions to the amount of necessities required

:rofl

true ...

and yet i would rather think of an iPhone as necessity than of shelter as a luxury

 

[Wessexman]

:rofl

true ...

and yet i would rather think of an iPhone as necessity than of shelter as a luxury

And when you find a system that makes shelters a luxury please inform me, I will attack it with you. Otherwise you don't really have an argument nor did you really respond to my points.

 

[NEUROSPORT]

And when you find a system that makes shelters a luxury please inform me.

some systems make food a luxury.

Dirt poor Haitians eat cookies made of mud | Worldfocus

 

[Wessexman]

some systems make food a luxury.

Dirt poor Haitians eat cookies made of mud | Worldfocus

Well I don't see many people championing that one here but if they were I'd attack it.

My system is distributism or Catholic social teaching, which is both anti-socialist and anti-capitalist, so only it and perhaps things similar to it have much relevance to my position.

 

[Ethereal]

Agna,

I'm mostly on your side. Perhaps, if you swallowed your pride, you would realize it.

 

[Wessexman]

Personally I've always found Agna quite reasonable and polite.

 

[Agnapostate]

I should also reiterate the point I made in the economic calculation thread about the socialist calculation debate; one of the earliest objections to the inevitable failures of central planning that the self-described socialist USSR had embarked upon on the basis of its failure to incorporate dispersed knowledge and a condemnation of the party dictatorship that state "socialism" involved is found in Peter Kropotkin's 1919 postscript to Words of a Rebel, which was published the year before the publication of Mises's 1920 Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth. As Kropotkin wrote:

[P]roduction and exchange represent an undertaking so complicated that the plans of the state socialists, which lead inevitably to a party dictatorship, would prove to be absolutely ineffective as soon as they were applied to life. No government would be able to organize production if the workers themselves through their unions did not do it in each branch of industry; for in all production there arise daily thousands of difficulties which no government can solve or foresee. It is certainly impossible to foresee everything. Only the efforts of thousands of intelligences working on the problems can cooperate in the development of a new social system and find the best solutions for the thousands of local needs.

The entire libertarian approach went virtually ignored by the Austrian school (Mises did devote an irrelevant cutting remark to Proudhon in his essay without actual argument), which placed focus on central planning mechanisms and procedures on account of the emergence of them in the economic structure of a country which was to later become a superpower of the world. While Hayek commented on the market socialist models that were proposed during his lifetime in his and Lionel Robbins's debates with Oskar Lange, Henry Dickinson, and Abba Lerner, he dismissed decentrally planned socialism without argument, stating that "[t]he earlier systems of more decentralized socialism like guild-socialism or syndicalism need not concern us here since it seems now to be fairly generally admitted that they provide no mechanism whatever for a rational direction of economic activity." There was no elaboration on who "generally admitted" this, though the existence of widespread central planning and nonexistence of widespread decentral planning at the time was probably the chief basis for the Austrians' primary focus on the former.

 

[rathi]

The Spanish Civil is an illustration of why socialist anarchism is not an optimal choice of social organization. How can your communal anarchists defend themselves from the fascists or other totalitarian groups? Centralized state organization is extremely powerful, and in matters of military is the key to victory. Even liberal democracies switched to corporatist economies with national conscription in order to fight wars. Fighting wars is one of the main reasons that the nation-state was developed, and remains a crucial part today.

 

[Panache]

That it's illegitimate pseudo-anarchism.

And socialism isn't?

The only true anarchism is consistent opposition to any system of government. If rules are created, the anarchist opposes those rules and whatever body created them, regardless of whether the rules protect workers' access to the means of production or protect the ruling class's control over the means of production.

Ironically, only reason a government can impose its rules on anyone is because there isn't any rule saying they can't. From anarchy, hierarchy is established, and to anarchy it shall return.

Libertarians are generally willing to suffer a government to the extent that it protects its constituents against force and fraud.

 

[Agnapostate]

The Spanish Civil is an illustration of why socialist anarchism is not an optimal choice of social organization.

No, it isn't. Anarchist organizational principles weren't responsible for the inability to maintain a defensive military; indeed, some of the anarchist militias were forces to be reckoned with throughout much of the military campaign. As put by Spanish Civil War author Hugh Thomas:

In Aragon, the revolutionary armies of Barcelona, Durruti and his Anarchist column in the lead, and Major Perez Farras in command, were still bursting westwards bringing fire and death to the villages and towns on the way to Saragossa and Huesca. In some of these, such as Caspe, the [fascist] rising had at first been triumphant. But the fervor of the masses from Barcelona immediately brought revolution, varying according to the political complexion of the column, to the places they entered, whether or not they had to fight for them.

He added that, "Durruti's column was the most formiddable of these forces, having advanced within striking distance of Saragossa." It was then that they were deterred by superior military technology in the way of air strikes, not superior coordination based on better organizational principles. And even aside from the fact that the anarchist collectives were violently sabotaged and the militias were undersupplied, there was also the matter of the eventual involuntary incorporation of those militias into the regular army that was mentioned by Cattell and is more explicitly described by Spanish Civil War historian Burnett Bolloten, certainly no friend of the anarchists:

[T]he Libertarian movement, far from being able to use its participation in the government to increase its say in the military field or even to curb the progress of the Communists, was obliged in the end to circumscribe its efforts to maintaining control of its own militia units and securing arms from the War Ministry. This was no easy task, for the latter had decided that weapons would be withheld from those militia forces which were unwilling to transform themselves into regular units with the prescribed cadres...in the long run, [the Libertarian military units] were forced to yield to the concept of militarization.

So a superior means of determining whether libertarian military organization constitutes an internal deficiency would be to judge a libertarian military body in direct combat with a proportionally sized and equipped orthodox military body, not a deliberately undersupplied libertarian military body subject to sabotage by their "allies" while facing disproportionate military force to begin with. Superior insights can be derived from the legacy of Nestor Makhno. His anarchist military body, the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine (or the Black Army, as opposed to the Bolshevik Red Army and the czarist White Army), defended the Free Territory of Ukraine, a society characterized by libertarian collectivization relatively free from Leninist methods. They enjoyed victories against the czarist military commander Anton Denikin and his White Army, as well as substantial defections from the Red Army in Ukraine to their own forces, though they were still undersupplied.

 

[rathi]

War isn't fair Agna. The decentralized nature of anarchists will make them unorganized, under-quipped and outnumbered by default. The single worst flaw is the lack of organization. Even if every commune and workers council purchased a single fighter jet, unless they could organize them into a squadron with all the requisite support personal and an airbase, they would be useless. Maintaining logistical compatibility is impossible. You have no military doctrine to speak us. You can't train your soldiers to operate in greater numbers that your local level. You don't have any experienced high ranking officers, and no system to figure out who is in charge. Strategic plans are ad-hoc and best, and you can't trust rely on anyone outside your immediate command. Conscription is impossible as is wartime production. Do you want me to go on?

 

[Agnapostate]

Not unless you can provide actual empirical evidence of your assertions. Since I've referred to the historical reality of libertarian organizational principles stimulating populist sentiments among the Ukrainian peasantry and contributing at least partially to their defeat of the tsarists, perhaps you should present a counter-example.

 

[rathi]

Not unless you can provide actual empirical evidence of your assertions. Since I've referred to the historical reality of libertarian organizational principles stimulating populist sentiments among the Ukrainian peasantry and contributing at least partially to their defeat of the tsarists, perhaps you should present a counter-example.

No actual examples of libertarian socialists in combat have existed for 70 years. Empirical evidence simply does not exist, not for either side.

 

[rathi]

Let us delve into thought experiments lacking anything better. Let us suppose that the French decide libertarian socialism is the way to go, and dissolve the state. However, their Spanish neighbors want to recreate the Holy Roman empire and invade.

The Spanish invade with a measly 5 division corps, say around 80 thousand soldiers total. How can our French anarchists create a force of equal strength with their decentralized system? Consider both peacetime preparations and wartime strategy.

 

[Agnapostate]

The inevitable deficiencies of excessively centralized organization are related to the dispersed knowlede problems identified by Hayek as deficiencies of the centrally planned economy, actually. That, along with the ideological fervency of the libertarian movement, accounted for anarchist militias' successes over opponents prior to incorporation into tradititional military bodies in battlefields already exposed to the widespread usage of firearms, not some medieval context. Simply ignoring this historical reality in order to assert the superiority of abstract theory doesn't advance your point.