theory is just the actual knowledge of what socialism is based on

obviously capitalism is bad, but in order to truly understand why socialism is the next step you'd need the theoretical understanding of why you have to take certain positions on things and theory is a hundred years of incredible activists and revolutionaries questioning and refining the thinking behind socialism.

favoring people over profits compared to profits over people is enough for me to say it’s the better way to do stuff

until a truly stateless society there will always be one group with control over the state oppressing the other. the point of the dictatorship of the proletariat is to use the power of the state to oppress the bourgeois in turn.

a centralized government is required in order to push back against capitalist encirclement. there's a reason the only actually existing socialist governments that still exist have utilized democratic centralization.

The “dictatorship of the proletariat” vanguardist approach has only built a new bourgoise ruling class in its place, and I already addressed your later half.

That’s why you abolish the state immediately. The new “proletarian” state rulers will become as mad with power as their predecessors

give reading a shot, its fun. dont always have to read the dudes from the mid 19th century, there are 21st century contemporary writers who actually write pretty informally

then again a lot of us are really just nerds about the politics/history s*** so we love to argue over the internet / read about it

the next question is what next? how do you actually abolish capitalism?

over the past year and a half i started reading theory and it's honestly one of the most fulfilling activities i've ever done. I started with Malcolm X's The Autobiography of Malcolm X - which i highly recommend - and realized that there is so much knowledge out there that I am completely ignorant to and that reading is the only real way to get that information.

many problems we face today, our predecessors have already spent hundreds of hours considering, and it would be a disservice to yourself imo to also consider yourself opposed to these issues without considering their informed insight.

theory is the gateway to building an actually useful a***ytical framework to observe society: one that isn't the given framework pushed on to you to preserve the status quo. ultimately, the choice is yours and not everybody has the time or capability to read, but I'd personally highly consider it.

Will the anarchists be the ones policing any attempts to make a new state
Otherwise that's just a power vacuum or corporate feudalism

yes but the difference is that the apparatus of the state can actually be used to fulfill the needs of the people instead of the needs of the bourgeois. i know you're already aware of the very obvious and inarguable improvement to their material conditions people under communism experience, so I'll ask what is your alternative?

abolish the state immediately and get bulldozed by capitalist encirclement? from 1918-1920 one year after the 1917 revolution, 14 capitalist countries invaded Soviet Russia. the anarchist uprising in spain was crushed by a few thousand poorly trained soldiers due to the decentralized nature of their forces. etc etc

You are going to be dealt with if you try to make a state in some way, probably with social shunning and backlash from the community. Abolishing hierarchy takes vigilance. You also create and maintain the social systems to reward cooperation, altruism and mutual aid, and shunning things like greed and "rugged individualism", and generally trying to rule over others.

It wasn't really due to their decentralized nature, it was simply because of the militarized Soviet state in sabotaging anarchists and arguably helping the Franco nationalists in the process. The reason CNT-FAI fell down in Spain was due to being attacked by both Stalinists and Franco nationalists. It's revisionist history to say that it was due to the nature of decentralized forces not working, because they do currently exist and they work well, especially within the ranks of the Rojavan YPG fighting back against the Turkish state and ISIS, and also there's been plenty of groups in armed struggle throughout history that operated decentrally against imperialists, especially in indigenous cultures.

I'm not a fan of the red statist rhetoric being identical to American nationalist right-wingers, which should speak volumes.

Basically, the thing about "never achieving anything concrete to socialism" is that these projects never abolish the state and do quite the opposite, they increase their authority over the people, and justify it with their own paranoia of existential threats. Socialism isn't when the government does stuff, it's when the people themselves, as individuals, have control of the means of production. To ignore this is weird. I've laid it out about the bare-metal issues of the state ITT. Lenin himself helped create these conditions by forcefully taking control of worker-managed Soviets with the Bolsheviks, and as always, the means intertwine in the ends.

Statists either don't read the Critique of the Gotha Programme or grossly misinterpret it like Lenin did.

@abc

This is the quote that gets often brought up from Parenti: “the revolution that feeds the children gets my support.”

This is a bad statement once you really think about it, because you could make this same argument about the transition of feudalism into capitalism or even state capitalism into neoliberal capitalism, I'm not surprised considering state capitalists generally like perpetuating capitalist property norms.

corporate fuedalism

Sometimes, when recognizing this fact, this is when the statist will offer another argument. They will say “okay, so the workers do not own the means of production, but socialism does not happen in a day! Socialism is best understood as the transition between capitalism and communism, thus what these projects are practicing is socialist.” But while this also sounds reasonable, it is just another one of Lenin’s conjurations, a meaningless tautology, even a piece of placating anti-socialist propaganda. Because such a description offers zero features to identify when an economic or social system is socialist, it implicitly encourages the replacement of progress in worker control with bare aesthetics and empty promises. If socialism is just “the transition between capitalism and communism” after all, and does not come along with any attendant features to identify that a society factually fulfills this descriptor, all it requires is a government claiming it will one day become communist. It is a definition requiring a time machine to verify, an invitation for rule by charlatans.

When a state believes that all it must do to be considered socialist is call itself socialist, it then has no obligation to actually change the conditions which represent capitalism. Quite the opposite of these projects representing transitions from capitalism to communism, as authoritarians will sometimes admit in their arguments about “developing productive capacities,” they actually represent programs to build out the infrastructure of capitalism, only controlled by the state instead of a market of private capitalists. Worse, in many cases, market control increasingly returns to private capitalists anyway.

Rothbard and his friends were f***ing idiots

But the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.

Engels was actually very right here in some aspect about state ownership still being capitalism, but the "technical conditions" part was proven very wrong by history, actual material a***ysis can tell you this.

The "technical conditions" have never reared their head, and will probably never will.

There has been and there will never be true worker control under a socialist state. It always be state capitalism draped in empty aesthetics, the best you get is basically a glorified psuedo-social democracy state with market liberalization

it would be ideal to do that and then use that knowledge in a meaningful way to progress society, but the only thing it’d do for me is help me argue better which isn’t so fulfilling. hate to be a downer :/

No, you are going to be dealt with. You can sully the legacy of communists projects, but I can only point to martyrs and impotent critics when it comes to the anarchists. You're using history as a scoreboard, and you aren't even in the game.

"Creating and maintaining social systems" sounds an awfully lot like a state to me. Policing sounds like a state to me. Hell, deciding the values of a society sounds like a state to me. If you want to do that without hierarchy, anybody who attempts to do those things with a hierarchy will defeat you in short order. That's simply a strong organizing principle for an institution.

The problem isn't some inherent corruption in the idea of an institution. The problem is the lack of organization on the side of the working class. Look at any successful revolution. Look at any gains ever made for the common man. They were won through protracted struggle. Those victories have been distorted. You don't even recognize them now. Your edenic view of a post-state society is just what the state looks like in a post-capitalist society.

"it's when the people themselves, as individuals, have control of the means of production"

they did in maoist china - there were communes, and factories and agriculture were collectively owned by the workers. i dont get what you mean, are you critiquing hierarchy and the existence of a vanguard party? why is abolishing the state your main ruler of progress?

You do know organization and societies can exist without a state, right?

Also Engels "On Authority" is probably one of the worst refutations of Anarchism i've ever seen, it's a strawman

thats just the state of the left in the united states. in the philliphines and in india they are waging a peoples war and use revolutionary theory to guide them.

it's not just to argue more, to be called a communist you must engage in praxis and organizing - its not just an identity, and its not just about arguing online (even though my other post made it seem that way).

there are plenty of revolutionary actions you can take today in your community. mutual aid, tenant organizing, protesting, antifa, etc

They can exist if a capitalist state allows them to.
Not if they threaten power. They are weak. They will lose.