this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2024
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Anarchism
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Discuss anarchist praxis and philosophy. Don't take yourselves too seriously.
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No, I am just pointing out that I had already correctly described this initially and we have now come full circle. You entered this conversation with a sense of correcting what I had said.
I am not being obtuse, you are being inconsistent. When it suits your criticism of what I said, you call those instances anarchist. When I say it is funny an anarchist instance has such an undemocratic process, suddenly you say it is wrong to call them anarchist.
By arguing that existing practice justifies it as not going against basic anarchist principles. It is all very confused given the apparent superposition status of these instances as anarchist and not anarchist, of course.
It is, of course, a major decision. It is censorship.
Yes, that is true. If you establish bylaws of a collective first and then people join they consent to them, initially. But of course we aren't talking about that at all.
Of course nobody said everything needs a vote. This is just very silly straw manning.
I did correct what you said. The whole past 100 years have showed us lessons. Not just these dates. This is not hard to understand.
The instances are anarchist because anarchists run them. They are not full of anarchists. An instance that is run by anarchists but open to others doesn't always have to always require a voting by non-anarchists. There can be an internal affinity group handling this. There can be plenty of approaches to this, depending on the time and effort one can afford. Sure in a perfect world, everything would be done much more perfectly, but we do what we can with the time we have. If only you would request the same level of purity from the authoritarian regimes you support...
How is that a naturalistic fallacy? Did I prescribe something as "good" or whatever because of we're doing it already? No, I said that the current practice is consistent with anarchist principles. To argue the opposite you have to argue 2 things. 1 that setting some rules as soon as the instance opens (including defederated instances) is anti-anarchistic. And that 2. Anarchist running an instance deciding that some instances are too toxic to federate with is a "major decision" that always requires voting.
That's exactly what we're talking about! Just because we don't do it in your approved manner doesn't mean this isn't exactly what we did.
"And not everything is a major decision", just ignore half of what I said, whydontcha.
What I said initially: "Perhaps they are thinking of the “anarchists” that just watch YouTube videos to get angry at “the tankies” based on a misunderstanding of history in the 1920s"
I am of course not saying "the only things are from the 1920s", but that this is a primary focus. And when asked about the time periods you think of as primary, they popped up. Full circle, lol.
Right so they are anarchist instances. And they make important decisions about federation by fiat of a couple admins. And that is very funny for anarchists to do. Inventing scenarios that didn't happen to say how they are reasonable is... not relevant. In many ways you implicitly acknowledge how silly it is, because none of your examples are, "a couple admins just decide it", instead you talk about affinity group subsets. Or is that meant to be euphemistic cover for "a couple admins"?
Personally, I don't think "two people make the important decisions" is complaining about imperfection when it comes to an anarchist instance. It's really just unexamined centralization that is otherwise an implicit part of the process of hosting software. And it's very funny.
The "purity" is "basic correspondence to the core principals of what you claim to be". I'm not a big stickler, really. But please do tell me about the regimes I support and how I am inconsistent on this. I expect you to be able to explain this without my input, as you are so certain, right?
A short version of the naturalistic fallacy is, "what is, is what should be". That you justify what should be simply because it is how things are done. That is the logic you presented! "You don’t vote on each ban your> admins and mods take either."
You did not say the latter, actually. But you did say that you don't vote on each ban, as if this justifies the practice. It sounds kind of like these instances should!
No I don't and I already responded to that. This situation is not one of what people joined, it was a censorship decision, it required a change. Gotta flip that 'block' button and all that.
Yes of course it is, at least if you want to say you are anarchist. That's a major decision and it is something that even "authoritarian" instances can accomplish. I know that anarchists could do it even better!
No, it is not what we are talking about.
It's funny because while I didn't ignore that, because I've already directly said in no uncertain terms that I disagree 3-4 times, you ignored my response to what you said: it's a silly straw man.
Curious what that misunderstanding is. Do you feel the betrayal of the Anarchist Kronstadt sailors, Nestor Makhno's black army, CNT of Spain, or the lengthy list of offenses against the IWW were just an oopsie?
It would take a huge amount of space to do those 4+ things justice. I'll share in some of them but I think it would pretty quickly be something deserving its own thread or maybe just some reading recommendations.
Re: Kronstadt, calling that a betrayal is just incorrect. First, they launched a mutiny directed at the Bolsheviks ("no Bolsheviks in the Soviets", so the lines went), of course the Bolsheviks would act in opposition. It was a direct, oppositional fight, not getting stabbed in the back. In addition, part of the "betrayal" narrative depends on characterizing the Kronstadt mutiny as emerging from those who had fought at Kronstadt for the October Revolution, as in, it was the people who fought and died alongside Bolsheviks for freedom who were later jailed and killed by them. But this is also largely inaccurate. The Kronstadt sailors mutinying drew heavily from new recruits from the south that had never been part of Kronstadt during the revolution, they were building their own structures (many of them questionable) using the principles they learned from the diverse ancom traditions in the south. I recommend reading contemporary accounts and items as close to the Soviet archives as possible.
Re: Makhnovschina, this one really requires reading heavily, to get a sense of the oppositional forces. It is, of course, much easier to justify a betrayal narrative here given the repeated alliances and breaking of alliances, the Red Terror, etc. These were people who fought side by side against the Whites, there is no doubt, and the Bolsheviks went to war against the Blacks and heavily oppressed them. My gut inclination was initially to say it was simply a mistake, a wrong. But if you delve more deeply into the specifics of operations, what the realities meant on the ground, it becomes clearer that this was not simply a revanchist attitude by the Bolsheviks, but a direct, material opposition due to the need to feed the workers in cities. This is why the Red Army faced no resistance in the cities and why the Black Army's entire operation was deeply interlinked with the peasantry, namely a petty bourgeois peasantry premised on isolation and, oddly, frequent entitlement to the products of the city, which the Black Army often stole in order to support the peasant communes run by their mayors. Rather than bridge this divide, the Black Army greatly exacerbated it, worsening starvation conditions. And this was not limited in impact just to the region of Machnovschina, as it had long been an exporter of grain to the north. This did develop into a sectarian fight, though it was also not simply The Reds breaking alliances to attack The Blacks. As autonomous groups, subsets of The Blacks often declared agreements to be over sporadically and took up arms and killed of their own volition. So if we call it betrayal, I would say a qualified one.
Re: Spain I would ask you to be more specific.
Re: IWW that publication is a lengthy polemic about every perceived grievance they could muster, and mostly not about the IWW at all, including the inaccuracies about Kronstadt that were belabored without merit until the opening of the archives. I don't know what you would want me to do with it except to suggest reading extensively and not relying on pamphlets. Every polemical claim requires investigation and specifics.