How do you and your friends decide what to do at the weekend when you don’t have a state or a hierarchy? It’s perfectly possible to make decisions by consensus.

I would actually turn the question around: do you really have solidarity if it is enforced by a state or a hierarchy?

Finally: is solidarity really so important? If the people are split in their opinion on an issue, exactly why is it so important to unite on one choice or the other? That seems like a terrible idea.

There is no such thing as a pure anarchist. It’d be hard to even define what that is.

You’ve got the super queer anarcho-nihilists, the hippie anarchists, the avant-garde autonomists who call themselves communists but lean more heavily towards anarchism than Marxism, the standard An-Coms that would claim the legacy of anarchism since the 19th century, the anarchist punks, and even some primitivists. And that’s just in America. All of these rather resemble spheres instead of formal ideological camps. There will certainly be a variety of stances from sphere to sphere on unified political programs, whether you should vote at all, the validity of Marxist class analysis, whether any kind of large structured formal organization is worth participating in, the acceptable levels of authority, proclivity for insurrection, whether to use direct democracy or consensus or pure self-direction or something else, and more.

Some movements have general assemblies and movement congresses in which they make decisions thoroughly but excruciatingly slowly. The Zapatistas are used to this and call it “the pace of good governance”.

Defining the state is something you can split a lot of hairs over, but I think it can broadly be seen as a formal supra-human entity that exclusively dominates a territory and exercises rights of control not afforded to individuals or smaller groups. If it peacefully overlaps with another entity, or if it doesn’t exercise any will that is not a direct wish of the people, or if it has no formal subordination of people and groups to itself but they participate voluntarily, you may call that governance without Government.

Many anarchists have no problem with things being managed by officials at a local level, with safeguards against people monopolizing the seats of power. From there you would have some sort of loose federation of localities, regulating trade and standards and any collective defensive force.

Solidarity without states or hierarchies is pretty easy, you just keep everything horizontal, and you have each person in charge of a part instead of 1 person everyone answers directly to. Sometimes you have someone who’s an avowed anarchist yet still ends up sort of being in charge of all the things, drifting into a de facto leader. It sucks when this happens, because it can be a cycle of people deferring to that one person rather than trusting their own agency or pursuing their own development, and also because if anything changes for that person it ripples through all the groups they’re a part of.

If there’s anything from anarchism you can inform your own politics by, let it be this. Leadership is an umbrella concept, it is a synthetic idea that most cultures did not have until the advent of capitalism, or contact with a bourgeois polity. It is a replacement for the idea of nobility that describes an essence that gives someone the right to rule. In fact, the bourgeois class had to invent the idea of leaders and leadership, in order to displace the ideology supporting feudalism. It is not the sine qua non of effective coordination. In many indigenous cultures, captains of war and spiritual masters have separate roles from the management of the rest of society. The latter is typically done by a group or council of elders, much like how the “alpha wolf” is a total myth, as the senior wolves in a pack are deferred to for their familial relations to other wolves. You don’t need to give up the idea of a vanguard party that executes class struggle to embrace leaderlessness. In fact, I think it would make your vanguard party stronger. With separate and rigorous domains of influence, you allow more people to participate and pursue distinction, minimize conflict over who wants to be in charge, prevent most stratification from emerging groups of people who have certain levels of power and people who don’t, and reduce any potential impact of infiltration, blackmail, or assassination.

My most basic stance. I would rather be an anarchist with high regard for contributions toward liberation from MLs in say China, than I would be an anarchist in the imperial core as I am.

From another perspective if you are in the imperial core as an anarchist you should support AES critically as it undermines the state power of your own government and conversely it is good to support anarchist movements that direct their actions against the imperialist state because that strengthens AES. It’s a symbiotic relationship so to speak.

anarchists oppose the existence of all states. i would say this is a prerequisite for being an anarchist. but i certainly have solidarity with the people inside states. and of course there are situations in which although i still oppose all the states, given the state of reality i still think it’s good that a state is defending against, or attacking, an imperialist power.

i think one of the issues anarchists tend to have with marxists is the particular way in which they go about solidarity with states. obviously i understand the concept of critical support, and a lot of the way that this kind of discourse is more about not wanting to have to constantly add disclaimers about how you know that the state in question still does bad things, because you’re simply trying to talk about the good thing it’s doing. and i’m sympathetic to that. but i really dislike the way it seems to just turn into team sports where you support any state that opposes the west, and the critical part of critical support just never gets heard. and y’all also have a habit of dismissing any struggle or attempted revolution against authoritarian governments as western interference. which to us is a massive violation of our responsibility to have solidarity with the people, who are the ones who actually matter. it’s not that we aren’t aware of the possibility of western interference, and how it can corrupt a revolution with a communist and/or anarchist character into just fucking capitalism and liberal democracy and i don’t think we’re any happier about that than any of you. but the proper response to western interference in a situation like that is for anarchists (and i would argue, the communists as well) to act autonomously in support of the struggle, attacking the state directly, and also by trying to root out the western interference and participate in the more general organisation in ways that help preserve the leftist character of the revolution.

as for why marxist states get all the flack… well i don’t think this is entirely true. at least in my circles we’re far more critical of capitalist and imperialist states. and the uh, actually politically active anarchists, we tend to attack the state that we’re from, or living in. but yeah, we certainly are critical of marxist states.

in theory, we should have a lot in common. our aim, anarchy, is perhaps not identical to, but at the very least compatible with and similar to the supposed endgame of marxism, stateless communism. but well, we don’t trust you, or anyone else, with power. even before the marxist states of the 20th century, the classical anarchists were concerned that siezing control of the state would simply lead to their priorities being corrupted by that power. and thus though they may have started with good intentions, the state’s primary purpose becomes its own maintenence. it ends up in direct opposition to the original aims of the revolution. i might not think it’s the right approach but i would be fucking delighted if there were a marxist revolution that reached stateless communism in a timely fashion.

and history has proven us right. marxist states have failed, become more concerned with protecting their power. to you, a state with a government which calls itself marxist, and which opposes western imperialism might not seem like a failure - but our priorities are the elimination of the state and all authority. so when we hear that is the goal, but the goal is never reached because the means used to achieve it aren’t consistent with the actual intended result, yeah that’s a failure. not to mention the fact that every time we have tried to cooperate with marxists, particularly MLs, they have betrayed us. i come from a historically anarchist area of spain, that still has a lot of us here. growing up i was introduced to anarchism by some of my school teachers and friends of my parents. and the mistrust of communists among spanish anarchists is incredibly strong over the civil war, and it’s not like i don’t understand why. tho i do have some significant criticisms of spanish anarchism too.

and yeah, it’s not like we’ve ever been allowed to say, create small-scale autonomous anarchist communes within communist states. or you know, stay alive.

i hope that provides some context. i don’t mean to be sectarian or start arguments about who did what in the spanish civil war. i meant to accurately convey what anarchists tend to think and why. but also like, i don’t disagree. i’m actually p comfortable on hexbear and the non-sectarian rules make a big difference. but it’s literally the first place i’ve ever had MLs be even remotely nice to me as an anarchist. i think this community works p well, but in terms of actually organising politically i don’t really see how we can get beyond those differences.

lastly i wanna address the stuff about how to achieve anarchy decisionmaking, and air a massive complaint about the kinds of anarchists u are likely to encounter online, which may actually help u to understand us/relate to us better.

so like i have been active as an anarchist since i was 16, and i’m 29 now. and in that time i’ve had many, many good, serious, anarchist comrades. but though these kinds of people obviously do exist online, its not the typical person you expect to encounter online calling themself an anarchist and it’s something that has frustrated me for years but i kinda came to terms with it. but i was talking to my partner about it recently and realised that it understandably really really upset them and i realised how it must look to people who don’t have my background.

most of the anarchists i meet online are not really anarchists. i don’t mean they’re ancaps (who are about as anarchist is national socialists are socialist), they are people who have heard a bit about it and think it’s a good idea, but have no fucking clue as to any theory, praxis, or what applying anarchist principles really means. and i don’t mean they haven’t read theory in the elitist sense, cuz i do dislike when people act like having read all the classical leftist texts is a necessity when it can be kind of ableist and elitist. but u do need to understand the theory of your professed politics one way or another, even if it’s learning from more experienced members of your group.

i’m sure there are more reasons than the two i’ve come up with, but they’re both definitely a thing. firstly, when some anarchist (and other leftist, tbf) commuities online start to suddenly increase their numbers, it’s usually because some left-leaning liberals heard about it. and i used to agree with the people who made this mistake, i used to think it was a good thing, a way to teach people and bring them in. but i’ve since realised that it dilutes the serious people and serious conversation to such a degree that there it’s not really an anarchist community anymore. it’s just a place where liberals argue about electoralism and repost articles from mainstream media sites.

and secondly, and most tragic to me as a trans person, i’ve found that a lot of the people causing the influx of libs is actually trans people. don’t get me wrong there are many good serious trans anarchists, and certainly the ones who have been active for more than a few years became anarchists before the period of intense visibility and backlash against us really started. but because we face so much discrimination outside of leftist communities, and sometimes in them to a certain degree, it’s seemed like a huge volume of rather lib trans people have flocked towards online anarchist communities as a safe place, without having worked through the lib brain worms. and that also creates a really heavy focus on US electoralism because ppl are scared of like, getting murdered or legislated out of existence if they’re not pushing for this electorally insignificant political group to vote as hard as they can.

if u wanna know proper anarchists, be very thourough when looking online. or go out and find irl groups who actually do things.

achieving anarchy, is not about democracy. some anarchists use the term, but they use it essentially to mean the same kinds of non-hierarchical organisation that those of us who don’t use the term want. the term has just been so corrupted by liberal democracy that i’d rather have nothing to do with it. achieving anarchy essentially requires two processes to happen side-by-side. since there is no possibility of using the existing mechanism of the state to organise after a revolution, the creative and destructive processes have to happen at the same time. we need to build our own methods of surviving, mutual aid networks, distribution and logistics, etc. we need to be able to survive when capitalism abandons us. but anyone who thinks that this is sufficient to do away with the power of the state and capital is sorely mistaken. the state must be destroyed by violent resistance just the same as any other revolutionary theory.

in some cases we can take advantage of the fact that state power is actually decreasing in many rural areas. i’m part of a project that is doing that. and honestly i’m so burned out (not to mention disabled) by years of action, that i’ve been slightly checked out of the protest and direct action side of things. but i do hope to be able to return to that one day. but yeah the place our project is in, is in a rural area of spain that is more or less just abandoned by the state, and their ability to enforce or surveil is very limited. the most we ever see of any state interference is them occasionally dropping water on some trees when there is another wildfire. and that is p nice but us, and the other people living in this region, have gotta be able to deal with the fires on our own, because they can barely manage to do that.

but yeah. violent resistance, revolution, insurrection, is necessary.

gonna add another comment about decisionmaking since i guess i reached a character limit

How do you have solidarity when you can’t support states or hierarchies?

this line in particular is super interesting to me, as an anarchist, cause it seems to imply that you and I have completely different conceptions of what ‘solidarity’ even means. to me, solidarity is about supporting other people who’re on my general side of this whole class war business, on a personal, individual, level. states don’t enter into it. idk how one would even show ‘solidarity’ to that kind of inhuman authority, nor why you’d want to. what does solidarity have to do with states and hierarchies to you?

i just got home from work and am heckin’ tired, but i may come back and reply to more of your post later.