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this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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Memes of Production
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That's not what I meant.
They don't require centralized allies, nor do they necessarily require strategic allies at all depending on the circumstances.
The point I was making was if the US had undergone a Catalonia style anarchist revolution nationwide in the 1930's, It then would've been able to render aid to Catalonia, which had much less productive capacity pre-revolution, and thus could not out-logistic the 4-on-1 battle they faced. As an aside, an Anarchist US would not be dependent upon outside help to defend itself militarily from Mexico or Canada, had they wished to intervene. Nor would any other nation have been able to interfere due to the logistics of landing an invasion force and holding all that territory, or competing against the industrial capacity of the US.
I was also pointing out that in the specific scenarios where this style of organization was attempted but destroyed, they were destroyed due to their specific circumstances, not due to any aspects of it being decentralized. You appear unfamiliar with the details of both the Spanish Civil War and the Ukrainian Black Army which would make that apparent, otherwise you would not be making such blanket statements.
It would be like if I pointed to Germany losing in WWI or France quickly falling at the start of WWII purely due to both having a centralized governments. That would be an absurd statement because each lost for a multitude of reasons including logistics, war fatigue, tactics, the specific defense treaties they had signed before hand, etc.
What research are you referencing when making that statement? What is or is not a trusted network?
If there were large Anarchist territories, the places with abundance could transfer that excess to the places that need it, or people could easily move away from places with scarce resources to places with them, as they would not be land-locked to their particular area due to poverty. A large mutual aid network really does solve the problem of scarcity. If you want to see that depicted in a very realistic and sensible matter, I implore you to read The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin.
I don't mean this as an insult or to demean you in any way, but I think that without you personally wanting to do more research into this area to go beyond the surface level idea or theory, you will likely always remain skeptical of it regardless of its efficacy. This is a natural response, as you're already quite familiar with how our current systems operate, and they're quite old, so they seem quite viable just by their very nature of being the current default.
I've proved some research material in my previous comments, and I could provide more if you're interested, but ultimately I don't think any of my arguments will be terribly convincing without the real-world context to back it up, which is out there, but I realistically cannot provide all of that in a comment chain.
Before we keep going, I want to point out something that keeps happening in this thread.
Several times now when a structural problem gets raised, the response shifts away from the actual mechanism and toward theory, examples, or suggestions that I just need to read more. That’s not really answering the question.
For example earlier you argued that anarchist societies fail because centralized states destroy them:
But when I pointed out that repeated defeat by centralized systems suggests centralized coordination might provide advantages in logistics and defense, the response became:
That’s moving the goalposts. Those cases can’t simultaneously be evidence that anarchism works and irrelevant when someone analyzes why they failed.
The same thing happened with scarcity. Earlier the explanation was:
When I raised resource conflicts, the answer became:
But that isn’t actually addressing the issue. That is the logistics problem. Saying resources can be moved doesn’t explain how a system coordinates that movement across large territories without creating large coordination structures.
The Switzerland example also ends up reinforcing the same point. You said:
But Switzerland’s militia system works inside a highly organized federal state with centralized logistics, infrastructure planning, and national command structures. The armed population doesn’t replace those institutions — it operates alongside them.
And if the argument is that widespread armament prevents power concentration, the United States should be the clearest counterexample. It has one of the most heavily armed civilian populations in the world, yet power has still concentrated in many of the exact ways you claim militias would prevent — corporate capture of politics, entrenched political elites, expanding bureaucracies, and increasing economic centralization.
So the issue clearly isn’t just whether people are armed. It’s how large systems coordinate power.
At this point there’s also the repeated suggestion that I simply need to read more to understand the issue:
Disagreement isn’t evidence that someone hasn’t read enough. Looking at the same cases — Catalonia, Rojava, the Black Army — and drawing a different conclusion is not ignorance. It’s interpretation.
What I’ve consistently asked about, and what still hasn’t been directly addressed, is the operational mechanism when cooperation fails.
So I’ll ask it again directly:
If two communities strongly disagree about something critical — water rights, land use, energy infrastructure, whatever — and neither side is willing to back down, who actually enforces the resolution?
Because if nobody enforces it, then the stronger group simply imposes its will. And if a federation, council, or militia enforces it, then you’ve created a governing authority performing the same coordination and enforcement roles states historically evolved to perform.
That’s the piece I still haven’t seen a clear explanation for.
If there is a clear answer to that question that doesn’t eventually recreate some kind of durable authority structure performing those roles, I’m genuinely interested in hearing it.
But if the answer just circles back to “the councils,” “the federation,” or “mutual aid,” without explaining how conflicts are actually resolved when communities refuse the outcome, then we’re just going in circles. At that point there isn’t much left to debate here, because the core mechanism that the whole system depends on still hasn’t been explained.