masquenox

Piss off, bootlicker.

You can’t radicalize a liberal during the worst fucking time to radicalize a liberal.

So when is the correct time to radicalise them? When they're asleep? You know, like they are as long as there's a lib in the Waffle House?

Libs have their hearts in the right place but believe in the system

How can your heart be in the right place if you believe in the status quo?

Fascists can be converted reasonably quickly

I said it was easier - not quick.

Liberals need you to convince them

They can't be convinced - and that's not just my opinion.

they’ll probably stay where you leave them.

I'm afraid not - liberals are perfectly easy to reel back in. The very function of liberalism is to co-opt radical ideas and make them subservient to the status quo - to play the political carrot as opposed to the political stick (the latter being what they keep fascists around for).

I want the people more committed to ethics.

How can you trust people's ethics when they can be so easily convinced of that which is utterly unethical?

Tl;dr:

I'm not disagreeing with you.

No point in wasting time on them anymore.

I'm afraid it goes a lot deeper than that. I don't think the left really grasps the true nature of the relationship between liberalism and fascism. Biden had to lose to allow the other lot in... if liberals are seen to wield the stick (as opposed to the carrot), liberalism becomes useless to the ruling elites. And that's really the way our (so-called) "liberal democracies" have always worked - the liberals do the lying, the fascists do... the other stuff. The only difference now is that the Oct 7th attack has shone a spotlight on a lib regime and caught them with their hands stuck inside the genocide cookie jar.

This is something all antifascists will have to grapple with - it doesn't matter how good you become at beating up fascists... if you are only beating up fascists you are only hurting the part of the weed that's growing above ground. If we can't find effective ways of problematising and confronting liberals and liberalism itself, we are simply playing wack-a-mole... until the liberals hand the mole the keys to all the tanks, of course.

An anarchist society isn’t a building. It’s a tree.

Flipping the metaphors doesn't change anything - except the metaphors. We know how trees work, too.

As soon as you start planning and designing parts of this society you start ignoring other peoples contribution

So whose "contributions" are you waiting for? Tankies? Liberals? Fascists, maybe?

stifling their liberty and self-determination.

Says who? You?

State socialists are the ones who are designing society according to their own vision

Pretending that anarchists getting serious about preconfiguration is comparable to tankie's plans to murder, torture, starve and generally brutalise the working class into accepting their warped ideas of what they cynically call "socialism" isn't just facetious - it's downright incoherent. It seems to me that you don't have much faith in your fellow anarchist's abilities... apart from peddling empty propaganda, that is.

I cannot really contribute to the discussion of heavy industry or agriculture,

Well, I sure do know that you don't know squat about trees... so, I guess you're right on that count.

I would love to start a tech-collective but I don’t have the contacts. That’s why I spend most of my time on here, it feels like the only place I can actually contribute.

I asked you this before, and you didn't answer. So here it is again... are you starting to see the disconnect?

It’s chaos compared to centralized power structures,

Again... says who?

The difference between anarchists and statists is that we embrace the chaos

No, we don't. Something tells me you haven't actually seen much chaos in your lifetime.

Any concrete societal structure can only be maintained with control.

No society can survive without control - and that goes double for an anarchist one. An anarchist society will have to be better at controlling things than a statist one - that is the whole point.

I still won't believe that leaving a black woman holding the bag the Dems took turns shitting in when it became obvious that they were utterly losing is some kind of coincidence.

Every fascist is a fallen comrade the capitalists got to first with the wrong solution?

Not every one... there are lots of utterly irredeemable people in the fascist rank-and-file. And there's no point in trying to differentiate which is which when they are marching down the street.

There is one thing that we on the left needs to take cogniscance of. The (so-called) "liberal democracies" we exist under only allows for the existence of two distinct ideologies - liberalism and fascism. It is only logical that when the one fails, people will attempt the other.

There's a good reason why overtly fascist regimes rely on much, much more overt and direct forms of censorship than liberal ones - it is far easier to throw a spanner into the logic machinery.

The problem with liberals is that liberal propaganda starts making more and more sense the higher up in the working class' class structure you go - a well-to-do lawyer from an upper-working-class family is going to be far more invested in the capitalist status quo than a hot-dog salesperson who is struggling to pay the rent. The more invested somebody is in the status quo, the more their logic will shield them from critiques of said status quo. Where you sit is where you stand... like the German quote goes.

There's a distinct class thing going on here which we on the left has completely ignored - you can just hear it in the way liberals talk about people lower down the economic pecking order. Just see how upper-middle class folks talk about the "hillbillies" and "inbreds" that (supposedly) all voted for Trump.

If you think you can actually radicalise liberals you probably haven't tried talking to them during an election year.

It's much easier to de-extremify (or even radicalise) a fascist than a liberal, and the reason why is pretty clear to me now - liberals are far, far more invested in the maintenance of the status quo than the rank-and-file fascist is.

neither the youtubers nor us online anarchist can provide a solution to this problem.

That's a grand old way of saying that anarchists should only be comfortable and content with being edgy propagandists.

To solve this problem you need people with experience of heavy industry alongside environmental experts to coordinate using self-managed principles.

So where are they, then? Where are these discussions taking place? Where is the theoretical discourse that makes preconfiguration an actual possibility happening?

Do you know of any?

Our job is to get people to collectivize

You are not going to get the working class collectivised with nothing but empty propaganda. The working class isn't dumb, you know... they will always side with that which is more concrete - you know, that very thing anarchists seem afraid to offer?

Leave the job of figuring out how to do things to the people.

Are you not of "the people?" It seems to me that leaving all the really difficult stuff to "the people" has almost become an orthodox holy cow for anarchists these days... that must be why they assume screaming "organize!" at everybody will someday (somehow) magically raise anarchism from out of the political leper colony it presently finds itself in.

When talking about anarchy the only thing we can talk about is what it mustn’t be.

And why is that?

all of the different voices come together to build something.

Oh, certain voices are coming together, all right... but the anarchist one doesn't seem to be in the room where it's happening, does it now?

As anarchists we cannot build anything individually.

Nobody is saying that they should.

When we say “organize” we don’t have anything specific in mind

Yes. I know. That's why it isn't working.

No anarchist worthy of the name should have a concrete idea of what anarchy looks like.

Says who? Some Beardy McDeadguy, perhaps?

Sure you can have approximations and speculation

Ie, an actual theoretical grounding? There are only so many ways in which you can build a building, you know - it doesn't hurt to actually know that BEFORE you are forced into building it under the most exacting of conditions.

I remember reading through this all more than a decade ago... I had my quibbles with it back then, but in general there's a lot of good stuff in there.

Now... take a look at all the anarchist "influencers" on youtube, or just the generalised discourse you see in anarchist online spaces - and tell me if you see the disconnect.

That's not actually true at all.

They pour all this contrived hatred on poor immigrants because immigrant labour is the cheapest - and most expendable - labour around. And by assigning blame onto poor immigrants they manufacture the necessary consent to sicc more and more state violence onto poor immigrants in order to keep this source of labour as cheap - and thoroughly terrorised - as possible.

That's why. It's so damn basic you can find all of it in the second book of the Old Testament.

Since I took food as an example I’ll use that because we all need food

True, but food is also the easiest one. Food sovereignty is not the only kind of sovereignty an anarchist society would require in order to be viable. There is also energy sovereignty, mineral resource sovereignty, technological sovereignity and more - and I rarely see anarchists engaging with those... perhaps because they are not as easily dealt with as food sovereignty.

Instead of massive monoculture farms

Monoculture farming has more to do with colonialism than profiteering - the latter is merely the method preferred by imperialist and sub-imperialist states to ensure the accrued power and privilege resulting from it stays with those land-owning elites who support the status quo. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with monoculture - certain things will simply be better cultivated that way, even in a decolonised society. Democratised food systems would be nice, though.

supply chains thousands of miles long

This is unavoidable if you intend on having any kind of industrialised society. You can't expect an anarchist farming community to also build and design it's own agricultural machinery - and that doesn't even take into account the raw materials needed for production.

food would be grown close to where people live

This would make trade inevitable. Not all crops can be grown everywhere - and that means people will inevitably start trading for the things that aren't locally available to them. That is, unless you violently prevent them from doing so - but doing that also means your revolution has already failed.

Let's be clear - this...

through networks of community gardens, small-scale permaculture farms, and cooperative distribution.

...does not food sovereignty make. When it comes to food production, an anarchist society is going to need far, far more sophisticated and better-supported food production infrastructure than what you are imagining.

The tools and materials needed, (yes, even some that are industrially produced) could be made in worker-run, federated workshops

I have no interest in a society where the height of technology is only the machinery necessary to produce a spade. In order to be viable, an anarchist society won't just need workshops - it will require factories and large-scale industrial complexes, supported by well-established (and extremely large) scientific and technological institutions. Only a relatively small amount of all of this can happen in a localised matter - even in a fully-democratised and socialised society (which is what an anarchist society would have to be).

I know, I did a shit job of explaining it

You did a shit job of explaining it because you don't understand it well enough - just like Einstein famously said. I would go further than that - I'd also say you also don't understand the world in which this proposed economic system would function well enough.

You know, there was this absolute doomer - Mark Fisher - who opined that imagining the end of the world was easier than imagining the end of capitalism. I disagree - imagining the end of capitalism is not so hard... as long as you stop obsessing over replacing capitalism and begin understanding that a post-capitalist society will, instead, be built on top of a capitalist society. Ie, a historical process that actually has precedent.