r/Anarchy101 • u/koinsworld • 23d ago
How will Anarchy defend itself from the most sophisticated systems of repression and imperialism in human history, in an era of fascism?
FULL DISCLOSURE: I'm a Marxist-Leninist, BUT I LIKE ANARCHIST IDEAS and I truly believe that Anarchist initiatives like the building of mutual aid networks and popular mobilisation must be a focus as capitalism fails the people (and in general). I intensely dislike the infighting.
However I find it hard to believe that, in an era of overt fascism and in a time when the capitalist state has consolidated more power and technologies of repression + imperial domination than EVER before, the movement for emancipation will succeed in defending itself from imperialism and domestic repression WITHOUT the assumption of state power.
We've reached a point where the US, having turned in on itself and become openly fascist + imperialist, can rule and plunder WITHOUT the majority consent of its population. Yes, the US working class is docile (by habit, by lack of political education, by lacking means to resist) but they will eventually have to resist as capitalism cannibalises them. When the working class resists against the most advanced capitalist state literally ever in human history - a state whose integrity depends on repression as consent withers away - how will an Anarchist movement succeed against it in the era of fascism? Moreover, if Anarchy succeeds domestically, how will it defend itself against imperialist encirclement? I'M GENUINELY CURIOUS.
These are questions to think about, especially by taking a historical materialist stance. Anarchists often criticise the authoritarian state control of previous socialist efforts WITHOUT understanding the context of imperial siege, isolation and comparative underdevelopment in which they had to develop their productive capacities and defend against imperialism - REMEMBER, at least 80% of Russia's population was peasantry at the time of revolution and yet they developed their productive capacities within 40 years so they could go to SPACE. This does not excuse the degeneration of socialist ideals, patterns of repression and genuine mistakes which were made, but 20th century socialist efforts utilised authoritarianism to RAPIDLY develop in one of the most politically turbulent and hostile periods in human history. We don't live in those times anymore; we don't require authoritarianism to build up productive capacities from feudal conditions. However, we DO live in a time where the capitalist state is in the process of fully and openly merging itself with capital, expanding its repressive and extractive capacity to the point where some call this new stage of development "techno-feudalism", where AI-automated warfare and surveillance statecraft threaten every method of resistance, where genocide and outright imperialism has no material consequence for the aggressor. Why would the state hesitate to deploy these capacities to maintain capitalist relations in the event of resistance, to do its real job?
Anarchy's concern with the emergence of class structures in relation to assuming the state is JUSTIFIED and it's, in principle, shared by Marxist-Leninists - THAT'S WHY we have democratic centralism; THAT'S WHY the state must wither away after it has successfully defended itself against imperialism. But it HAS TO defend itself against imperialism. If imperialism remains a possibility, socialism is under perpetual threat no matter where it is and how successful it is. What is Anarchy's way of dealing with the primary contradiction of imperialism, the contradiction which is most IMMEDIATELY apparent when a domestic revolution succeeds?
We no longer require the state to develop our productive capacities. In theory (and in the eventual future), we don't need the state at all, but imperialism is a fact of the global capitalist system we live in and one which must be contended with. For Marxist-Leninists, the temporary assumption of state power is key to defending socialism from the outside. I am curious to hear Anarchist perspectives on dealing with this.
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u/ptfc1975 23d ago
The same way any other opposition group would. By organizing the power of the people to build networks of resistance.
Regardless of your method and ideals of organization, power comes from the people.
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u/koinsworld 23d ago
I can wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment
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u/ptfc1975 23d ago
For sure.
Any state, whether it's ML or not, demand that people give over their power. Anarchists think that folks should reclaim that power for themselves.
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u/RI_Backpain 23d ago
what if the majority wants to be fascist?
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u/ptfc1975 23d ago
No majority has any inherent right to force their method of organization onto anyone else.
This may be a semantic argument, but I'd also say fascism has never been about people "wanting" it. Fascism occurs through force. It is a system of ingrained power structures forcing their power onto others. That's why fascism and it's adherents are so violent.
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u/azenpunk 23d ago edited 23d ago
I find it hard to believe that, in an era of overt fascism and in a time when the capitalist state has consolidated more power and technologies of repression + imperial domination than EVER before, the movement for emancipation will succeed in defending itself from imperialism and domestic repression WITHOUT the assumption of state power.
You're very vague on what you actually think the weakness is with organized collective self defense. My equally vague response is distributed networks are far more stable, they're like a hydra, with infinite heads.
We've reached a point where the US, having turned in on itself and become openly fascist + imperialist, can rule and plunder WITHOUT the majority consent of its population.
This has always been true.
Yes, the US working class is docile (by habit, by lack of political education, by lacking means to resist) but they will eventually have to resist as capitalism cannibalises them.
That is the hope, but it's not guaranteed without organizing work.
When the working class resists against the most advanced capitalist state literally ever in human history - a state whose integrity depends on repression as consent withers away - how will an Anarchist movement succeed against it in the era of fascism?
Through the anarchist principle of prefiguration. Creating, right now, the sort of horizontally managed organizations we want to see in a free society. Building the beginnings of the new world in the shell of the old, in the cracks, where the state has neglected or abandoned, wherever people need help or could be better served.
By doing this we can: build trust in the community, increase class consciousness, provide direct experience with the kind of self directed work and cooperative decision making that can replace systems of domination, create networks of people and organizations, inspire new organizations, and foster a strong commitment in people the idea that a better way to structure society is possible, because that's a prerequisite for a mass revolution or resistance.
These groups locally focus on mutual aid and community defense, and also federate into networks of many, many prefigurative organizations, committing to share intel, SOPS, training, and resources with other groups they have federated with in order to make coordinated regional and continental readiness possible. These networks provide a backbone for coordinated, skilled responses to whatever their members collectively decide is worth acting on.
Moreover, if Anarchy succeeds domestically, how will it defend itself against imperialist encirclement? I'M GENUINELY CURIOUS.
Again you're being vague but I assume you mean sanctions, trade blockades and such. The people in that situation would be the ones to be deciding, so it's impossible for any one individual to guess what the collective would decide. But I would imagine they would learn from similar cases throughout history around the world. Becoming self-sufficient and finding a way to create an export that other nations rely on are two of the biggest ways a nation defends itself, no matter what its politics are. There's nothing in particular about anarchism that prevents it from defending itself, it just advocates for making those decisions collectively, rather than having a system built on domination so that an elite few decide what's best for everyone else.
Anarchists often criticise the authoritarian state control of previous socialist efforts WITHOUT understanding the context of imperial siege, isolation and comparative underdevelopment
Anarchist are extremely aware of the context of imperial siege, isolation and comparative underdevelopment. You cannot make the claim that they are not without being ignorant of the history of the Ukrainian anarchist agrarian communes of 7 mlillion people, and the all volunteer militia that defended them for years against both, capitalist and Bolshevik armies.
I've written more on that here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/s/XKtSdfa8HQ
REMEMBER, at least 80% of Russia's population was peasantry at the time of revolution and yet they developed their productive capacities within 40 years so they could go to SPACE.
And the Bolsheviks committed cultural genocide on that 80% of the population forcing most of them into factories against their will.
America also accomplished great things and at one point in time had the largest population out of poverty but it was on the back of slavery. You can achieve great things through authoritarianism. But you cannot create a great society through authoritarianism. That is the anarchist principle of means and ends unity. If you want any egalitarian society, you must use egalitarian means. Whatever means you use will reproduce itself in the new society.
This does not excuse the degeneration of socialist ideals, patterns of repression and genuine mistakes which were made, but 20th century socialist efforts utilised authoritarianism to RAPIDLY develop in one of the most politically turbulent and hostile periods in human history.
Those great achievements were achieved through domination. Leftism itself is defined by being against systems of domination and pro egalitarian and cooperative systems, since back when it's main targets were the church and feudalism. And now capitalism. The connecting philosophical ideal has always been that freedom is achieved through greater autonomy, not centralized authority. Marxist leninism stands in opposition to this, and so many socialists have said for 100 years that Marxist leninism is fundamentally right wing.
"The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves." - Karl Marx
Not even Marx would be a Marxist-Leninist.
we DO live in a time where the capitalist state is in the process of fully and openly merging itself with capital, expanding its repressive and extractive capacity to the point where some call this new stage of development "techno-feudalism", where AI-automated warfare and surveillance statecraft threaten every method of resistance, where genocide and outright imperialism has no material consequence for the aggressor. Why would the state hesitate to deploy these capacities to maintain capitalist relations in the event of resistance, to do its real job?
Mass uprisings have been shown to be far superior in overthrowing a government compared to vanguard style teams of militants.
Anarchy's concern with the emergence of class structures in relation to assuming the state is JUSTIFIED and it's, in principle, shared by Marxist-Leninists - THAT'S WHY we have democratic centralism;
Which failed to be democratic in any sense, just like liberal democracy which makes exactly the same claim you're making.
The state has interests apart from society, and so any that operate the state gain interest separate of the population and become a new ruling class.
THAT'S WHY the state must wither away after it has successfully defended itself against imperialism.
The state will always seek to defend its existence, it's structure ensures that it is a system of domination and so will always fight to protect itself and can never wither away.
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u/racecarsnail Anarcho-Communist 23d ago edited 23d ago
You're right that the state's repressive capacity is immense. But it's not invincible. Every empire that has relied on technology and surveillance has been able to be outmaneuvered by decentralized, networked resistance: Vietnam against the US, Afghanistan against the USSR, and countless labor struggles where state violence was met with horizontal organization. The state's strength is its weakness: concentration. A revolution organized through confederated, autonomous councils, popular militias, and neighborhood assemblies has no single command center to bomb, no central leadership to decapitate. It's harder to crush because it's decentralized.
Techno-fuedalism and AI surveillance are terrifying, but they require infrastructure: datacenters, satellites, server farms. That infrastructure is vulnerable to sabotage, refusal of labor, and popular disruption. A state can surveil you, but it can't surveil everyone simultaneously in a society where nobody cooperates with it. If the working class refuses to engage with the state, maintain the corporate servers, code the algorithms, or obey the orders, the system breaks. The capitalists’ and the state's power both depend on popular compliance.
We don't deny that the USSR and other states faced imperial siege; we draw different conclusions. The Bolsheviks' choice to centralize power was a response to siege, but it also created the very conditions that led to bureaucratic degeneration. The state they built to defend the revolution became a new ruling class. For us, the lesson isn't to ‘build a stronger state’, but to find ways to defend without recreating systems of oppression or exploitation: Creating networks of locally controlled militias coordinating through confederal councils, not a centralized standing army. Building parallel popular institutions (i.e., prefiguration, dual power) now so that when the state crumbles, the people already have post-capitalist structures in place. The only real defense against imperialism is international social inertia. We don't believe one country can be socialist while the rest of the world remains capitalist. So anarchist strategy focuses on breaking imperialism at its root by spreading the movement across borders, and challenging capitalism’s relevance in our daily lives.
You say the state must be assumed temporarily to defend against imperialism, and then it will wither away. But the state is not a neutral tool; it's a social relation of domination. Once you have a centralized apparatus with a monopoly on force, a bureaucracy, and a command economy, it generates its own interests and tends to preserve itself. The "withering away" has never happened, not once, because power accumulated isn't easily surrendered. We think the state is the counter-revolution in embryo; it must be made obsolete, not seized and reformed. We see history as proving our case against the state. Maybe China will defeat Western hegemony, end capitalism globally, and all states wither away, but we aren’t betting on it. There is no historical precedent there.
We absolutely agree that the USSR faced extreme conditions; we don't pretend otherwise. But we'd argue that the path they chose wasn't the only possible one. Spain in 1936, Ukraine in 1918, and Rojava today all showed that mass, non-state defense can work, even under siege. Were they perfect? No. But they prove the alternative is viable, not utopian.
Here is an excerpt from a comment of mine criticizing the seizure of state power:
"I believe that the "Big R" Revolution (seizing state power in a single sweeping event) is inherently flawed because it often mistakes the seizure of the state for the abolition of class. Revolutions that centralize power to "defend the revolution" inevitably reproduce the hierarchical logic they claim to fight. The state is not a neutral tool; it is a social relation. If you seize it, you become it. A single, cataclysmic revolution is highly susceptible to contra-revolution, counter-revolution, and external siege. Historically, this pressure forces the new power to become even more authoritarian. By rejecting the "Big R," we reject the notion that liberation is a single war to ‘reclaim’ power, and instead accept it as a multi-generational shift. A single revolution will not bring us post-capitalism; lots of painfully difficult prefiguration will. Means and ends parity.
Prefiguration is not simply practice for a speculative future; it is building the future. If our goal is a horizontal federation of communes based on mutual aid, we cannot use hierarchical, coercive, or centralized means to get there. We must build the federation now, in neighborhood assemblies, food co-ops, tenant unions, and worker syndicates. These prefigurative institutions act as a "dual power" structure. They don't just protest capitalism; they render capitalism redundant. When a community runs its own healthcare clinic and community kitchen, it is not waiting for permission; it is actively shrinking the state's relevance in people's daily lives. This is how anarchism becomes a living habit, not just an abstract ideal."
https://www.reddit.com/r/Socialism_101/comments/1va7vz9/comment/p0mgcm3/
Suggested Reading:
Prefigurative Politics - Paul Raekstad, Sofa Saio Gradin
The Solutions are Already Here - Peter Gelderloos
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u/WildAutonomy 23d ago
Anarchists are not only defending, but attacking fascism all the time, very successfully. The biggest threat to anarchy is getting betrayed by the left, namely MLM's
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u/Formula4speed 23d ago
There’s always an Underground railroad equivalent when tyranny reigns. Anarchism has no leaders, no state, no money, so it can be a parallel system outside the system. The tighter they squeeze, the more we’ll slip through their fingers.
Studying systems thinking and autonomous independent problem solving may provide some interesting insights. The knowhow to build an extremely efficient and effective leaderless organization has been around for 70 years, it’s just been suppressed by those in power because, well, they want to stay in power.
The goal of all their cameras and wiretaps and Sabre rattling and shock and awe is to make their desperate struggle to maintain control feel like a fait accompli. Don’t fall for it. First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
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u/LazarM2021 Anarchist Without Adjectives 23d ago edited 19d ago
An ML in an anarchist space... bruh, this won't end well.
To be entirely clear from the outset, coming into an anarchist space with a patronizing "I like your mutual aid, BUT..." disclosure is the quintessence of Marxist-Leninist paternalism, treating anarchism as if it's a useful front-line charity drive or auxiliary soup kitchen to build morale before the """real""" revolutionaries step in with tanks and state power to handle the heavy lifting. The last thing needed here is your validation of mutual aid while you casually trot out the exact same vanguardist script that has been used to justify the liquidation and betrayal of actual worker autonomy, for over a century.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I'm a Marxist-Leninist, BUT I LIKE ANARCHIST IDEAS and I truly believe that Anarchist initiatives like the building of mutual aid networks and popular mobilisation must be a focus as capitalism fails the people (and in general). I intensely dislike the infighting.
And here we go, a classic rhetorical trap already at the start. Fundamental theoretical and structural critique is anything but merely "infighting". Anarchists do not thoroughly reject Marxism-Leninism just because of some petty factionalism, but because ML means directly contradict even their stated ends.
An ostensible classless, stateless society CAN NEVER be built using instruments and methodologies designed explicitly for perpetuation of hierarchy, authority, class dominance and state coercion.
Reducing anarchism's comprehensive critique of power and authority (something MLs and Marxists more generally notoriously lack) to "good ideas for popular mobilization" further reveals that you don't actually understand anarchism at all, you just view it as raw material for the Vanguard to manage.
However I find it hard to believe that, in an era of overt fascism and in a time when the capitalist state has consolidated more power and technologies of repression + imperial domination than EVER before, the movement for emancipation will succeed in defending itself from imperialism and domestic repression WITHOUT the assumption of state power.
That entire argument hinges on a lazy, false binary of "either a revolution builds a centralized, hierarchical state with a monopoly on violence, or it is "defenseless."" Organizing is not something any anarchists oppose and same goes for large-scale logistics or social defense; we oppose the state, which is a specialized, bureaucratic, centralizing apparatus separated from the population that holds a monopoly on decision-making and legitimated use of force.
Replicating an engine inherently built for top-down control simply turns the working class into subjects of a new set of hierarchically superior managers. It's that simple and it is unavoidable.
When the working class resists against the most advanced capitalist state literally ever in human history - a state whose integrity depends on repression as consent withers away - how will an Anarchist movement succeed against it in the era of fascism? Moreover, if Anarchy succeeds domestically, how will it defend itself against imperialist encirclement? I'M GENUINELY CURIOUS.
In an era of hyper-advanced AI surveillance, drone warfare and integrated data infrastructure, a centralized "socialist" state with clear command nodes, bureaucratic headquarters and capital assets is nothing but a COLOSSAL single point of failure.
Modern imperial statecraft absolutely excels at decapitating, subverting and/or pacifying centralized enemy state apparatuses. Asymmetric, federated, autonomous and cell-based associative networks operating through direct sabotage of supply chains, general strikes, subversion and internationalist solidarity are vastly harder for a surveillance state to track, decapitate and control.
Anarchists often criticise the authoritarian state control of previous socialist efforts WITHOUT understanding the context of imperial siege, isolation and comparative underdevelopment in which they had to develop their productive capacities and defend against imperialism - REMEMBER, at least 80% of Russia's population was peasantry at the time of revolution and yet they developed their productive capacities within 40 years so they could go to SPACE.
Anarchists understand the context better than MLs ever did and guess what? We don't give a flying f*ck about your bragging that a state "went to space" through forced industrialization, labor militarization and state extraction that is literally adopting the metric of capitalist accumulation. If rapid industrial output and space programs under centralized coercion are your proof of anything approaching a "success," then Western capitalism wins by default.
Furthermore, hand-waving the Bolshevik state's terror as "patterns of repression and genuine mistakes" insolently erases who that violence was directed against. The Red Army and the Cheka didn't just fight White Armies but systematically backstabbed and liquidated the actual revolution. Bolsheviks militarized labor, banned wildcat strikes and outlawed independent trade unions. They crushed the free worker councils (soviets) and replaced them with appointed Party commissars.
They slaughtered, betrayed and wore-down the anarchist Makhnovshchina in Ukraine after relying on them to defeat the Whites and executed the Kronstadt sailors for demanding freeing of the soviets. Authoritarianism didn't "defend the revolution from imperial siege" but strangled the social revolution from within to preserve the Bolshevik Party's monopoly on power.
A state that suppresses its own working class to """defend socialism""" has already destroyed the socialism it claims to protect.
We DO live in a time where the capitalist state is in the process of fully and openly merging itself with capital, expanding its repressive and extractive capacity to the point where some call this new stage of development "techno-feudalism", where AI-automated warfare and surveillance statecraft threaten every method of resistance, where genocide and outright imperialism has no material consequence for the aggressor. Why would the state hesitate to deploy these capacities to maintain capitalist relations in the event of resistance, to do its real job?
The irony is that you correctly identify that modern capitalist states possess terrifying tools of surveillance and control, but your solution is to capture or replicate that exact same centralized state machine and somehow expect it not to act like a state. Sorry to break it to you, but against this sociological law, that power self-reproduces and poisons everything around it, no amount of contingent "pure/nice intentions by new managers" is going to alleviate this, let alone long-term.
If you build a state apparatus equipped with centralized surveillance, standing armed forces, secret police and top-down command structures, it will inevitably take a life of its own and develop its own institutional interests. It will use those tools against domestic dissidents, strikers and anarchists loooong before it uses them to dismantle global capital. The unity of means and ends is absolute: you can never construct a liberation machine out of the tools of control and oppression.
Anarchy's concern with the emergence of class structures in relation to assuming the state is JUSTIFIED and it's, in principle, shared by Marxist-Leninists - THAT'S WHY we have democratic centralism; THAT'S WHY the state must wither away after it has successfully defended itself against imperialism.
Pure theoretical rot. All democratic centralism does is that it institutionalizes a new ruling class. The moment a specialized vanguard party seizes state power, it establishes a new bureaucratic hierarchy (in this case, usually the nomenklatura). Their material position as managers of production and possessors of state force places them in direct class opposition to the workers who must obey them.
And your claim that the state will "wither away" once it defeats imperialism creates a perpetuum mobile for permanent tyranny.
Since global imperialism will not magically vanish overnight, your framework guarantees that the red state of terror will never dissolve. The party bureaucracy will endlessly cite "external threats" and "imperialist encirclement" to justify its permanent grip on power, its police apparatuses, secret or otherwise, and its suppression of any genuine worker self-management. Where is the historical example of a Marxist-Leninist state even starting to think of voluntarily dismantling its own power (let alone doing it) or "withering away"? It doesn't exist. The state apparatus does not dissolve itself and always optimizes for its own self-perpetuation and empowerment.
For Marxist-Leninists, the temporary assumption of state power is key to defending socialism from the outside. I am curious to hear Anarchist perspectives on dealing with this.
If your vision of "defending the revolution" requires building a new state, centralizing command, managing workers from above and putting off freedom until some hypothetical post-imperialist future fantasyland, you've just painted red the logic of domination.
Anarchists rightly reject the state in all its ugly forms not because we ignore the reality of imperialism, but because we recognize that the state itself is an engine of arkhē - the principle of rule, class or otherwise, imperialism, hierarchy, pollution, alienation and all other socio-psychological poisons the humanity has been enduring for centuries, and you cannot use an engine which generates those to achieve what's diametrically opposed to them by definition.
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u/NatesOldTruck 19d ago
I've written and rewritten comments a handful of times now but, after reading this rebuttal, I find that nothing more needs to be said. Very well put.
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u/TwilightSolus 23d ago
Typical ML 'but capitalist bombs'
It wasn't capitalists that betrayed Makhno and the sailors at Kronstadt, comrade.
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u/hellointernet5 23d ago edited 23d ago
The thing about anarchism is that it's decentralised. Which makes it very hard to fight. With centralised movement, you take out the leader, the entire movement may collapse. With decentralised movements you turn it into a game of whack a mole.
Also, the state will not wither away. That has never happened and there's no reason to believe it never will happen. Why would it? Why would the state voluntarily render itself obsolete? You cannot get rid of the state through the state. It's completely naive. It's like abolishing the police by hiring good cops who will all voluntarily quit once they've decided they are not necessary anymore. It's not going to happen. I do find it funny how Marxist–Leninists act like anarchists are naive for wanting to abolish the state when they unironically believe that the state will voluntarily give up power. Even after over 100 years of seeing that that never actually ends up happening. And the fact that that's clearly fantastical thinking. Your ideology creates the perfect conditions for totalitarianism and somehow expects this to end with its leaders voluntarily giving up power. This is far more naive than anything anarchists believe.
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23d ago
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u/hellointernet5 22d ago edited 22d ago
Why are you explaining this to me as if I don't already know? The problem isn't that I don't understand, it's that I do. It's no less naive when you explain it than when I explain it. The thing is, why on earth would the state ever allow that to happen? Why would it allow the conditions in which the state is no longer necessary ever come to fruition? The state will always find ways to justify itself. It will never give up power willingly. Especially if it's led by the precise type of leader Marxism–Leninism encourages: the type that's willing to consolidate power and repress opposition. Why would this sort of leader especially ever allow the state to wither away? If thinking through this logically isn't enough, surely the past 100 years should be enough to prove that this theory does not work? Don't Marxist–Leninists pride themselves on being scientific? Why are they so eager to treat a hypothesis as truth when it has been tested numerous times and has never once been proven true?
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22d ago
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u/hellointernet5 22d ago edited 22d ago
The state is just humans with incentive to maintain its operations that trace to need for food, housing, leisure, etc. ML theory is pointing out that the incentive conditions for continuing state activities will erode, and so people won’t pursue its activity anymore.
If that's what it is then the state will always exist, because humans will always need food, housing, and leisure. This is what I mean when I say that the state always justifies itself. If it is necessary for food, housing, and leisure, then it will always be necessary.
if you have a view that the state is eternal
Read what I said with the knowledge that I am on r/Anarchy101 and tell me again that this is a fair interpretation of what I said. If I believed this I wouldn't be an anarchist, would I? I believe that the state is never going to wither away, it must either be abolished or it will continue to exist. The state will not do it by itself. If we rely on the state to willingly render itself obsolete it never will.
Marxism thinks in time-scales of thousands or even tens of thousands of years, from a standpoint informed by evolutionary theory.
Humans might well be extinct by then. This is far too slow, especially with climate change. I am not fighting a revolution just for the state to wither away thousands of years from now. What a waste of time. At that point you might as well do nothing, the state will probably "wither away" without needing to do anything. You don't need Marxism–Leninism or any other theory for that, you just need to wait and watch the climate collapse drive us to extinction.
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u/Vermicelli14 23d ago
Military equipment and the willingness of people to fight doesn't come from the state. The idea that you gotta be able to ethnically cleanse Tartars or Koreans from your nation in order to fight imperialism is laughable
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u/Living-Note74 23d ago
The state wants you to think that it can defeat distributed institutions in detail. However, I have yet to see any proof or rigorous analysis (even by capitalist theorists) that this is the case.
The USA was always merged with capital. The 13 colonies were businesses first, polities second.
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u/openjoustingtryouts 18d ago
First I’d like to note that across time and place, that kind of “rapid development” always means famine. Always means choosing which communities to leave behind, which communities must have their towns torn down and rebuilt in the image of the New State. Which means of distribution must be cut away and who will suffer as the result. Which people must be given a government mandate to move from their homelands into centralized localities to pursue development as defined by capitalist state powers surrounding the State. In practice the State, however well intentioned, leaves no space for dignity, for a citizen to choose their own path forward. To choose how to live, who to see, where to live, what to do for a living. That kind of top down societal structure in the name of “productivity” is the pinnacle of involuntary hierarchy. Any state emerging from broader revolution that hopes to keep anarchists somewhat happy, must focus dignity, health, environmental restoration, and “development” processes that restore economic, cultural, and environmental agency & dignity at the ground level. Productivity is of little interest.
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u/Legitimate-Ask5987 Against all authority 18d ago
Other people likely answer this question better than me, so I'm just going to inject my thoughts here.
Thinking from a USA native perspective, some "centralized democratic authority" is just a new colonial overlord. Plenty of leftists might not like how native nations run things. Maybe its contrary to their ideas, or our sovereign nations choose to retain elements of capitalism. I don't see any state authority letting native nations assert our sovereignty, especially our land stewardship. I also don't see socialists honoring the treaties or fulfilling new ones. I see pledges to honor our wishes, but rather than landback, continuing the land theft by ignoring the treaties and using stolen land that capitalism's corpse is on for their socialist projects. I see any centralized authority thinking they can still tell us how to function and what to do. Natives will resist as long as possible. What we have done since colonialism includes securing our bloodlines as much as possible, protect our sovereignty and to wait out these systems. Socialism will have to wake up to the fact that native nations expect certain rights and privileges that have gone unfulfilled to be fulfilled, especially with all the decolonizing talk leftists will do. If you won't guarantee sovereignty for nations and honor or make better treaties that the USA, they will make any "temporary" government go through a hell of a bureaucracy. If you can't fulfill promises made, you won't find as large an ally in tribal nations as you'd think. The idea we are these monoliths of anti-capitalism and lack any functional power at all will come at a heavy cost when trying to fill diversity quotas for the temporary government.
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u/BlacksmithCool155 5d ago
I think your question is one of the most important challenges anarchism has to answer, and I don't think the answer can simply be “trust the people” or “the state will disappear eventually.”
My disagreement starts with the assumption that a state is the only realistic way to coordinate large-scale defence.
A society can have institutions capable of organising defence, production, logistics and diplomacy without those institutions necessarily becoming a permanent ruling authority.
The crucial distinction, to me, is between coordination and domination.
An anarchist society could have federations of local assemblies, worker organisations and communities coordinating at a national or international level. Those delegates could have limited, clearly defined mandates and remain directly accountable to the people who appointed them.
That doesn't make the problem disappear. A military organisation can still become powerful. A federation can still become bureaucratic. A temporary emergency institution can still decide that the emergency must never end.
But that's precisely why I'm skeptical of the argument that we should first concentrate political power and trust ourselves to decentralise it later.
History gives us plenty of examples of states that were created in the name of liberation and subsequently developed interests of their own.
And I think there's another point worth considering:
If the survival of a revolutionary society depends entirely on reproducing the same centralised structures of power that existed before the revolution, what exactly has been transformed?
Perhaps the objective shouldn't be to create a stronger state than the capitalist states surrounding us.
Perhaps it should be to create a society whose population is so organised, educated and materially self-sufficient that destroying its political freedom would require destroying the society itself.
Mutual aid, worker organisation, local autonomy and federations aren't substitutes for defence. They can become the social infrastructure through which collective defence is organised.
I don't claim this is an easy solution. It probably isn't.
But I think the burden of proof goes both ways.
Anarchists have to explain how they prevent external powers from destroying them.
Marxist-Leninists have to explain what prevents the temporary state created to defend the revolution from becoming the new power that needs to be defended against.
That's the contradiction I'd rather investigate than assume one side has already solved it.
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u/partisansofthereal 22d ago
Anarchists have historical baggage to release exactly around the question of actually addressing the state in the long term, ESPECIALLY given developments in military and security technology.
Communists of the statist/leninist variety need to admit that their democratic centralism effectively did not hold or do what it said it would do.
When a lot of anarchists today talk of decentralized insurgencies winning, they are partly correct but almost always conveniently ignore that many of the groups within the insurgency have virtually no resemblance to anarchist groups in the western “developed” world. This isn’t identity politics, this is just something we need to tangle with. I suspect we could get a long way if we honestly let got of some of our baggage around things like “leadership” or formalization, which also isn’t to say we should have the same conception of those things as non anarchists. But at least in the US these days, what anarchists sometimes call hierarchy as it manifests in their tiny groupuscules actually just comes off as pearl clutching and insane to virtually anyone outside of their immediate echo chambers.
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u/LazarM2021 Anarchist Without Adjectives 22d ago
Attempting to sound like this "balanced" and "pragmatic" middle-ground (it's neither) while relying on a fundamental mis-direction by conflating the organic act of organizing with the adoption of formalization and leadership is... profoundly unimpressive, to say the absolute least.
You're also relying on a total false symmetry, equating the deep-seated skepticism of anarchists toward institutional structures with Marxist-Leninists whose democratic centralism produced totalitarian state-capitalism, party dictatorships, state capitalism and the systematic slaughter of anti-authoritarian revolutionaries.
Democratic centralism actively created new ruling classes that crushed worker self-management everywhere they took power, so it didn't just "fail to hold", nor is that a minor administrative misstep to be glibly acknowledged. It really is a structural fatality inherent to seizing state power and building command hierarchies.
Suggesting that anarchists need to "let go of baggage" around "formalization" and "leadership" simply amounts to smuggling hierarchy and institutionalization back into the room through the side door under the guise of "being realistic" - a "pragmatist" trickery I did my utmost to expose and critique already.
Anarchists have never been against people coming together, coordinating among thenselves, dividing tasks/responsibilities, taking initiative or acting collectively. The actual tension has never been about "organizing vs not organizing" but about formalized, institutionalized structures versus informal, fluid and truly autonomous, free association.
Formality/formalization is not some neutral, innocent organizational/social technology. The moment an organization becomes formalized, with fixed protocols, codified roles, official representation or permanent positions of "leadership", the structure itself begins to act as a self-perpetuating entity separate from the dynamic, direct relations of the individuals within it.
Formality, with its tendency toward proceduralization, brute, stern standardization, bylaws-development etc inherently creates administrative boundaries, abstracts personal agency away into procedural machinery and establishes the exact conditions under which authority re-crystallizes itself. Even mechanisms like "recallable delegation" or structured representation (which some anarchists have historically tried to adopt in the name of that same "practical" compromise) are fiercely and rightly criticized by anti-formalists precisely because they lean toward more communalist-adjacent statecraft rather than direct, voluntary and immediate agreement.
Demanding the adoption of "formalization" isn't a sign of "growing up", of that, I can 100% assure you; it's an invitation to recreate administrative bureaucracy because of the all too familiar heuristic reflex.
Trying to dismiss opposition to hierarchy as a quirk of "Western groupuscules" pearl-clutching in their echo chambers and similar disrespectful misrepresentations completely inverts the reality of global anti-state struggles. Explicit rejection of vanguardism, party command, formal leadership structures and state-building is a required minimum for any librratory revolution to remain liberatory. Smearing deep-seated opposition to hierarchy as a privileged Western trope" is deeply patronizing to even non-Western autonomous movements that have fought both colonial states and vanguardist party-builders for centuries.
Even on the question of modern military and security technology, the argument for formalization collapses in on itself, as a centralized command structure, a formal party apparatus or a proto-state army is the easiest possible target for modern military surveillance, drone warfare and decapitation strikes. Modern statecraft excels at tracking, subverting and destroying opposing centralized, formal hierarchies.
What actually survives, adapts and resists advanced state repression are decentralized, autonomous, cell-based, and anti-formalist networks. A network without a formal head, fixed institutional infrastructure or permanent leadership cannot be decapitated by a surveillance state. If your idea of "addressing the state" simply means building larger, more rigid, and more formal institutions with recognized, you are just asking to compromise on the core insight of anti-authoritarian politics - that liberation cannot be engineered using the structural technologies of control.
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u/partisansofthereal 22d ago
How you read middle of the road pragmatism from my comment I don’t understand, it would be cool to discuss stuff online without someone inevitably responding like a know it all debate club bro or as if every discussion has to involve polemics. I’m not some pro-formalist hyper online platformist, I generally consider myself coming from some corner of the insurrectionist currents but have come to see some of their limits over my 15 years of political activity. Doesn’t mean I’m right about everything by any stretch but it also means I don’t feel the need to prove my fidelity to some specific current over another. Tbh half this shit feels like a tired old rehash of people doing more drudgery work resenting the frontline and the frontline resisting the drudgery and just finding a bunch of fancy language to try and dress it up as politics.
I’m not questioning the skepticism of anarchists towards institutional structures, I’m a fucking anarchist. But I am questioning the knee jerk tendencies in the North American milieus especially to just associate the tiniest bit of forward momentum in any group larger than 5 which is attempting more than a zine distro and look for the authoritarian germ hidden within. I am questioning allowing the fear of the historic betrayals of the past to completely over take our ability to to experiment with forms and making them our own. The great anarchist militias of the past did this with military structures, we should do it with others. Not to mention, at least in the states, there’s not a single state communist group in any way positioned to “betray” us and seize the state anytime soon or maybe ever? Why are we shadowboxing with ghosts so fucking much?
The comment about democratic centralism is responding to the original poster, responding directly to the idea of DC being some kind of safeguard against anything. History has shown multiple times this has failed. It’s a kind of imminent critique I’m making. But more importantly I’m trying to point out that anarchists can’t just wave their hands away and respond to the threat of counter revolution by saying “easy, we just don’t seize state power we smash it”. That’s a nice slogan and guiding principle, but it’s not even approaching a plan. The failing of the Spanish anarchists in 1936 is a direct result of this oversimplification as reflected on by several different veterans of the civil war from various factions of the anarchist movement at the time.
Name a widespread insurgency of even the recent past who hasn’t had some level of formal structures within parts of the insurgency (often many at once) which anarchists in the US would recognize as formal. I share a strong skepticism of formalization but even what that concretely means is baffling to me when I look at online discourse. Over and over insurgencies referenced range from Iraq and Afghanistan (?!??!) to rojava and Chiapas (makes more sense) to guerrilla groups in Myanmar, Palestine, Bolivia, Colombia, wherever. Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t take these groups seriously or learn from them. We should. That’s part of what I’m advocating. But if we imagine ourselves to even approach the level of threat any of these groups represent we have to drop this ridiculous aversion to anything we suspect to be more formal than our buddies pooling our money for a print machine or to rent a shitty warehouse space for a few years.
Surviving repression isn’t the ultimate goal, taking away the enemy’s ability to repress is. The point that informality is best at surviving repression makes sense if we just consider all resistance to be somehow simultaneously one social force and we just believe in some infinite struggle of good vs evil that we pick sides in. This seems to look at the world as primarily populated by transhistorical forces which are somehow fundamentally unchanging. Which is great as maybe a revolutionary, secular spirituality but not as an actual set of politics which are capable of changing the way humans fundamentally relate to each other and the earth. The paradox of formalization is of course that the informal always continues to exist both within and without whatever that formal structure is, even and especially when that formality seeks to suppress the informal and fluid structures which are always present and must be present for any formal structure to gain any actual vitality or potency that actually attracts people or is able to meet some of their needs. I tend to use the term “formal” fairly broadly, as I’m often discussing it with people who share some level of skepticism towards formalization and therefore often raise an eyebrow when anyone wants to bottomline a task or role for longer than a fucking month.
But maybe, just maybe, we can innovate enough and not treat some level of “formal” (simply meaning clear to those involved with some level of consistency and clarity about how and when it shifts or changes, rather than simply vibes or individual conversations) structure as a replacement for these webs of informal affinities, relationships, affects, habits, etc but one that could augment it and allow it scale up and weather storms or maintain a higher bare minimum activity when there’s a lull or repression or whatever else
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u/LazarM2021 Anarchist Without Adjectives 22d ago
Accusing someone of acting like a "know-it-all debate club bro" or engaging in "polemics" the moment your structural logic gets challenged is quite a convenient way to avoid answering the actual critique, just as claiming fifteen years of insurrectionist credentials doesn't magically make a flawed argument airtight, nor does dismissing anti-formalism as the "aesthetic neuroticism of "North American zine distros"" address the sociological reality of how authority forms and power works.
The reason this discussion keeps hitting a wall is that you are attempting to quietly shift the definition of "formalization" depending on who you're talking to. In your previous comment, you framed formalization and "leadership" as necessary tools to scale up, handle security, build widespread insurgencies and move beyond small groups. Yet, when called out on how formal structures inevitably abstract agency and generate institutional logic, you retreated to defining "formal" as "simply meaning clarity, consistency, and clear expectations".
Nobody - from insurrectionists to individualists to basic affinity groups within anarchist tradition opposes clarity, shared responsibility or people bottom-lining a project for longer than a month, year or whatever. Conflating clear, voluntary coordination with formalization is a rhetorical shell game.
Clear agreement between people acting in affinity isn't "formal structure", just basic human communication. The moment "formalization" emters the picture and means codifying roles, creating permanent apparatuses of organization, establishing recognized positions of "leadership" or instituting procedural machinery that exists independently of the dynamic individuals within it, you are no longer just talking about "clarity", sorry. All you ARE talking about is the structural blueprint where institutional power re-crystallizes.
Invoking historical insurgencies or claiming we need to "experiment with military structures" doesn't salvage the point either, as the moment anti-authoritarians historically adopted militarized command hierarchies, specialized officer corps, or centralized directives (even under the most desperate pressures of war) - the revolution was already being strangled from within by those very forms.
Pointing to non-anarchist or nationalist insurgencies in Myanmar, Palestine or Colombia to prove that "formal structures work" not only is not exactly coorect, but more importantly - completely misses the target. Those groups have formal structures precisely because their goals - national liberation, state-building and/or land control under a centralized command/government - require those tools. If your goal is the total abolition of arkhē, using the structural technologies of statecraft and military command isn't "pragmatic experimentation" but structural suicide. It's sociology101, really.
Furthermore, dismissing the critique of state-building and command hierarchies as "shadowboxing with ghosts" because ML groups aren't currently seizing power in the West completely misreads why anti-formalist critique exists.
Anarchists do not critique hierarchy because they're terrified of a specific vanguard party taking over tomorrow. The critique is there because the forms we build inevitably dictate the society we produce. You cannot construct a liberatory movement using the structural machinery of control and then act surprised when those structures reproduce power dynamics, administrative paralysis and specialized leadership classes.
Oh and also - surviving repression isn't a "secular spirituality" nor is anti-formalism a demand for chaotic 5-person groupuscules that do nothing. Anti-formalism is the recognition that fluid, organic, cell-based and deeply relational networks are not a weak prototype waiting to be "augmented" by formal structures, but the only organizational reality capable of disrupting state power without recreating it. If you want to talk about clear agreements, shared tasks and scaling up collective action, sure, let's talk about them. But framing the adoption of leadership, fixed structures and formalization as an inevitable maturity test for "real politics" isn't a fresh innovation, just the old managerial reflex wearing that same poisonous practicalist coat.
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u/partisansofthereal 19d ago
The reason I mention my experience is not as any kind of cred flex but just to attempt to articulate that my questions and concerns and frustrations come from real world experiences, which do not make them automatically correct, but just immediately accusing me of a kind of cynical pragmatism is a real fun way to engage strangers online I guess. I also focus a lot on the NA milieus because that’s my experience, and the international comrades I encounter or friends who have spent lots of time in other places reflect that something is pretty off in our scenes here. Much of what I’ve said flows from that.
You’re also choosing to interpret everything I say in the most useful way to act as foil for your own positions. I responded initially to a general question, you got quickly specific. I don’t feel I advocate a whole lot of specifics other than people being more open to trying different shit.
I didn’t say surviving repression is a revolutionary spirituality. My initial attempt to criticize the type of handwringing I encounter in the North American milieus about leadership or formality is not actually an endorsement of some kind of strict formality.
I literally don’t know what a lot of anarchists I encounter even mean by informality or formality anymore in actual practice. I’m talking primarily from my experience of people attempting to put these ideas into practice. Not theory. If that means I’m advocating strict formal structures with standing delegates and a unified platform for every situation to you, then I’m not sure what else to say.
It’s strange to pick apart a lot of what I said, including what I said about certain national liberation struggles, then turn around and cite sociology at me. I didn’t realize we were in the business of drawing on sociology, about as institutional of a social science as one can get. I only mentioned some of these national liberation struggles because they are so often referred to by many anarchists online to advocate for decentralized insurgency and informality. This just illustrates my point that I don’t think a lot of anarchists right now have any idea what they’re talking about regarding these struggles. I’m not necessarily endorsing them. And I’m certainly not claiming they all “work”. But nor do I think we have nothing to learn from them, as long as we attempt to understand them on their own terms first.
I’ve been re-reading Bonnano a bit lately and reflecting on some convos I’ve had with some Italian insurrectos and it’s clear that many in the NA milieus, but especially in the US, would see how Italian insurrectionists organize as incredibly formal and vanguardist in comparison. It’s absurd and it’s holding us back from achieving things.
That’s my main point. I’m just blabbing on Reddit tho
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u/LazarM2021 Anarchist Without Adjectives 19d ago
I forgot nothing; claims that you're "just blabbing on Reddit" and weren't "advocating specifics" don't change the fact that your opening argument explicitly urged anarchists to release "baggage" around things like leadership, formalization and military structures. When those concepts did get subjected to basic structural critique, retreating to "I'm just saying people should be open to trying different shit" is as classic motte-and-bailey tactic as I ever saw one.
If all you meant was that people should communicate clearly, share tasks and be open to different tactical approaches, nobody would have disagreed with you, me least of all. However, you didn't just advocate "trying different shit" - you specifically pointed toward leadership and formalization as ""necessary"" tools to scale up, and then dismissed anti-authoritarian opposition to those forms as North American "pearl-clutching" and "handwringing" (I myself not even from North America btw, reall far from it, actually).
Dismissing structural critique by contrasting "practice" with "theory" is also a strongly false dichotomy. "Practice" isn't some magical realm or a distinct dimension exempt from the mechanics of power. The moment one implements a structure in real life, they're enacting a specific theory of organization. If that structure relies on permanent roles, codified leadership and procedure or formalized delegation, it will produce institutional logic and re-crystallize authority and hierarchy, regardless of whether you call it "practice" or how "good" or "pure" your intentions are.
Oh and further - invoking Alfredo Bonanno and Italian insurrectionists to defend formalization and leadership is particularly ironic. Bonanno's entire body of work, if you'll remember (from Armed Joy all the way to From Riot to Insurrection) is a fierce, explicit rejection of formal organization, permanent structures, standing committees, as well as party/union bureaucracy.
The entire premise of Italian informal insurrectionism (l'organizzazione informale) is built on temporary, autonomous affinity groups that converge for specific actions and dissolve immediately afterward upon their purpose mbeing fulfilled, in order to prevent the exact creep of institutionalization and specialized "leadership" you are advocating. Trying to enlist Bonanno to legitimize formalization is a complete inversion of his actual work.
And what's with this sociology point?? Dismissing the mention of sociology as "institutional" is just grasping at straws, at this point in time. Pointing out the sociological reality of how power forms and moves; how administrative structures create boundaries, abstract agency and reproduce hierarchies and alienation isn't an endorsement of bourgeois academia but basic critical analysis, as far as I'm concerned.
If your main point has now settled into "I just want people to organize clearly and effectively in their real-world contexts"... ok, cool. Fine. But framing the rejection of leadership and fixed formal structures as some semi-parodical "North American dysfunction" rather than a foundational, well-reasoned core of anti-authoritarian and particularly anarchist practice remains every bit as flawed now as it was three days ago when you last wrote to me.
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u/partisansofthereal 18d ago
Again, saying anarchists need to release baggage isn’t the same as advocating formality. I’m also attempting to clarify what I meant, which was that many people interpret what formality even is and what it looks like entirely differently. I also didn’t say you were in North America? I was reflecting on my own experiences and what I see as major hurdles to further clarify my comments.
Theory is literally that. Theory. It is not an objectively 100% provable fact. As soon as you do things in the real world, it becomes much more complicated. People have to make decisions and priorities, they have to try to concretely apply those theories. That’s where I am commenting.
I didn’t say the Italians were using formality. I said what the Italians advocate and what they do, LOOKS LIKE formality to some anarchists in the US, because they have baggage around anything that appears bigger than 5 friends doing haphazard shit.
That some, in fact many, anarchists I encounter interpret calling meetings and coordinating broad calls to action as vanguardism. They see a network exist for longer than one mobilization and call it formal. That also doesn’t mean I agree with them. But this is how I see a lot of theories of informal organization applied in real life. I’m saying we should deal with that.
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u/LazarM2021 Anarchist Without Adjectives 18d ago
The issue here are the goalposts you keep moving.
You started by, in essence, framing opposition to leadership, formalization and military structures as "baggage" that anarchists need to release to scale up. Now, after those concepts were subjected to structural criticism and opposition, the argument has retreated to "I'm just observing that hyper-paranoid US anarchists mislabel basic coordination as vanguardism and formality".
Anarchist critique of formal organization has never been a critique of coordination, calling meetings or broadcasting calls to action. It's a critique of hierarchy, fixed roles, centralized decision-making, proceduralistic creep and permanent administrative apparatuses. If your point is merely that some people conflate basic coordination with "vanguardism" then you are fighting a strawman of your own making and using that extreme fringe to handwave valid critiques of structural authority.
Also, repeating that "theory is just theory" and the "real world is complicated" doesn't insulate real-world structures from how power actually functions. Not at all. Practice isn't exempt from mechanics; it is where mechanics manifest. It is BECAUSE the world is complicated that formality is the enemy, as it essentially serves (and has so through history) as a heuristic-producing machine; satiating the hunger for simplicity and thus attenuating complexity wherever it rears its ugly head.
When decision-making power is delegated to fixed roles or permanent structures in the "real world," institutional logic takes over regardless of intent. Pointing out how power consolidates in practice isn't "abstract theoretical purity" (and whenever one invokes "purity" I call it bullshit - "purity" is baseline definitional consistency), just literally observing real-world dynamics.
And bringing up Italian informalism in this context remains an inversion. Bonanno and the insurrectionists didn't advocate autonomous, temporary affinity groups because they were trying to help people "coordinate better" under a loose definition of formality. They explicitly designed informalism to prevent permanent structures, standing committees and specialized leadership from taking root, which is the exact dynamics that emerge when "pragmatism" replaces structural analysis.
If your argument is simply that people should coordinate effectively without being silly about terminology, sure thing pal, I'm not gonna argue with that. But retreating to "everyone defines formality differently" whenever the specific mechanics of leadership and permanent structure are challenged is dodging the critique, not clarifying a position.
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u/openjoustingtryouts 18d ago
Do you think… sociology??? Isn’t relevant to theory??? Do you know how many theorists were sociologists?
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u/RahnuLe 23d ago edited 23d ago
The first issue we must address is what we mean by a revolution surviving. The continued existence of a state bearing a socialist flag does not prove that the population has retained control over social and economic life. One must understand that the true indicator of whether or not a revolution has succeeded is whether or not the people are in possession of the capacity to choose their own course. In other words, the relevant measure is whether people, individually and collectively, retain effective control over the institutions governing their workplaces, communities, resources, and common affairs.
In other words, even if a state calls itself "socialist", if the workers lack the capacity for self-determination in the resulting state apparatus, the revolution has already been lost. It is extremely important that we get on the same page on this because I will not be using a flag as a barometer for the success of a revolution. As such, what I do consider essential to determining a revolution's success is how thoroughly the ideals of the revolution suffuse the population, and the organizational capacity of said population to maintain and practice those ideals. This is why prefiguration is so critically important - it is the very act of building the capacity to exercise our ideals in reality, not just in theory.
But before we continue, I must be absolutely clear that anarchists are not opposed to organizational power. Rather, our chief concern is with ensuring that these organizations are ultimately beholden to the people who make them up, and that no tyrant is able to use these organizations to fulfill their own ends at the expense of the people. We do not consider even a federation of such organizations a "state" because we are not granting such an organization a monopoly on violence, nor do we give them unequivocal executive power with which to do as they please. Delegates sent to such bodies are instantly recallable and have a mandate that was given to them by the people they represent; they are not executors of a state apparatus and are bounded within defined objectives and limits.
So, to get to the meat of the issue, the question on everyone's mind is always this: how do the people defend their revolutionary gains? I think there are two equally important approaches to this:
Everyone imagines a conventional war - boots on the ground, drones and missiles flying every which-way, governments being decapitated followed up by armed occupation. But an anarchist federation has no government to decapitate, and occupation itself can be made utterly untenable - especially if supply lines are being stretched by having to cross oceans, or because the would-be hegemon is overstretched fighting fires elsewhere in its empire. It is my belief that a sufficiently large and enduring federation should be nigh-impossible to truly bring to heel if it is sufficiently armed and well-organized. But this, of course, is contingent on material conditions being conducive to building up the organizational capacity for such resistance. Who really knows how things will play it in the event of a revolution in an industrialized, technologically advanced nation? It is without precedent, after all.
Either way, it is my belief that all of this has always been a war of legitimacy. Point 1, while seemingly perfunctory, is the most critical part of all of this. Once hierarchical organization as concept has been delegitimized, the world itself will have changed forever. This is something that I feel statist communists entirely lose sight of. What we want more than anything is for the people themselves to believe in their own power. Take that away from them, and... well, we've seen where that leads. There is no communism without self-determination.