audrbox comments on Solarpunk

[–] audrbox@beehaw.org 1 point 9 months ago (6 children)

To clarify, I'm an anarchist. I don't think the state should exist, period, and I think it's self-defeating to try to impose communism via the state.

But more to the point, my original comment was in response to your analysis of OP's questioning of China's alleged human rights abuses. I was interested in your dialectical thinking because I hadn't seen it applied so clearly before and I wanted to use it as a learning opportunity. I'm coming away feeling more educated, which I'm grateful for. But I'm also not convinced your analysis allays worries about potential abuses mentioned in the OP, and I wanted to say as much. So ultimately, I'm not really arguing for anything specific, mainly because I don't pretend to have concrete answers. If anything, I'm arguing for greater political imagination. Liberal democracy is obviously not the answer, but I'm not convinced an authoritarian socialist state is either. So how could we build on the works of Marx and other communist thinkers to come up with a way to implement communism that avoids the pitfalls you yourself have admitted are potential problems with a communist-party-controlled state?

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[+] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 4 points 9 months ago (6 children)

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[–] audrbox@beehaw.org 1 point 9 months ago (5 children)

I understand what you mean I think, and I want to be clear that I'm not some utopian anarchist who thinks we can just magically become communist overnight. As you said, class struggle will continue. My point isn't that we should try to avoid the contradiction, it's that a socialist state is not a great way to navigate its resolution and that we should try to imagine other ways of doing so that don't run the real risk of becoming abusive and/or failing to adhere to the will and needs of the people. It's hard to write out a concrete idea here because it's not something we've collectively spent a ton of resources trying to imagine. But people are wildly creative, and I think it'd be a disservice to us to not at least try to imagine something better.

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[+] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 3 points 9 months ago (5 children)

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[–] audrbox@beehaw.org 1 point 9 months ago (4 children)

Imagine a community of workers who, through ground-up organizing (say, through unions or mutual aid networks), collectively overthrow the bourgeoisie and seize the means of production. The bourgeoisie need to be prevented from taking the means of production back while the workers implement communism, so the workers organize a militant force that, through consensus, can be temporarily spun up to defend the revolution--but only for as long as everyone agrees the defense is necessary. Then the reactionaries are kept in check, but the power to perform this subjugation is firmly rooted in the will of the people, without the risk of the power becoming disembodied or consolidated in the hands of the few.

Obviously there are lots of immediate concerns about this (how do you ensure reactionaries don't throw a wrench into the whole thing, etc.). But this is where I think more imagination is needed. Surely it's possible to solve these issues without giving up on the idea that power should be fully in the hands of the proletariat and not a disembodied structure?

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[+] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 3 points 9 months ago (4 children)

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[–] audrbox@beehaw.org 1 point 9 months ago* (3 children)

Let me ask you a different question because I feel like we're talking past each other on this: what do you mean exactly when you talk about "dominating the bourgeoisie"?

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[+] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 3 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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[–] audrbox@beehaw.org 1 point 9 months ago (2 children)

So, it seems like you're saying two separate things here: (1) class struggle inherently involves a monopoly on violence, and (2) a monopoly on violence is strategically necessary for the proletariat in order to build a classless, stateless society. Can you clarify which one you mean, or if you mean both?

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[+] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 2 points 9 months ago* (2 children)

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[–] audrbox@beehaw.org 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

Ok, so this is where I'm lost. I can understand why one would find a monopoly on violence to be strategically necessary to achieve the goals of the revolution (though I disagree). I don't understand how you can argue class struggle inherently involves a monopoly on violence, unless you are just defining class by who happens to have a monopoly on violence (which would defeat the whole point of class struggle). The entire concept of "a monopoly on violence" is a product of bourgeois society--they are the ones who built the structures that legitimized certain types of violence while restricting and punishing other types. So to negate the existence of the bourgeoisie, we negate the existence of those structures. Which fundamentally means tearing down mechanisms by which anyone can wield a monopoly on violence.

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[+] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

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[–] audrbox@beehaw.org 1 point 9 months ago

Fuck, I'm tired. I was thinking "upper class" but said "bourgeoisie"--you're totally right on that lol.

Nonetheless, my point still stands, and your second paragraph feels spiritually on the level of a democrat giving an ultimatum about voting for the "lesser of two evils". You're taking a really complex problem that has plagued us for thousands of years and claiming that the only solutions are either (a) undo all of civilization, or (b) do what this German guy suggested a century ago. That is a lack of political imagination.

To your point, the state was constructed over the centuries via class (and gender and ethnic and neurotype and ) struggle between the subjugating and the subjugated. It continues to exist because those contradictions still exist. Even after centuries of revolutions of various kinds, all with the goal of leveling inequalities and boosting the position of the subjugated, we still have this same state of affairs--just with a rotating class of subjugators. How's this one going to be different? Because this time the subjugated are using dialectics? Because we want to eliminate class? I don't find that convincing. The only way we're ever going to eliminate class and other categories of subjugation is by eliminating the mechanisms by which they exist. The fact that you can't think of any way to do this that isn't reverting to anarcho-primitivism is not a valid reason to reject the premise.