Is your definition of success the establishment of a socialist state? Because anarchists are never going to do that.

My definition is the ability to defend the revolution and prevent a counter revolution. Marxists have been able to do this, but Anarchists have not. Incidentally, Zapatistas have actually started creating more central system now as well. Anarchists are free to demonstrate a working alternative to that though.

You don’t actually believe that basically nothing has changed since before the industrial revolution, do you? That seems intentionally obtuse.

You can’t actually address what I said without making a straw man can you?

Sure, propaganda works as long as it has some material basis behind it. Whose propaganda it is has no impact on that.

All effective propaganda is based on truth.

I mean the working majority that tries to make a living in the hellscape that is Europe.

this one I think https://www.dafont.com/bradley-hand.font

it’s an authentic reenactment it turns out

Unsurprisingly, The Economist’s article peddles a false narrative. Livestreamers and video games are merely the surface of a deeper phenomenon. TikTok and Xiaohongshu thrive only because China’s middle class isn’t impoverished. What makes these platforms persuasive is that they undercut Western myths by contrasting middle-class life in China vs the US.

China has a positive image in the world because it’s leading in sustainability, building world-class infrastructure, pioneering tech in emerging fields, and maintaining safe, clean cities at scale. Its foreign policy, while not flawless, is far more benign than the America’s. No constant wars. A major ally for developing nations. Growing global brands. Standing firm against a bully in the tariff dispute. Meanwhile, tourists who document their visits, are dismantling claims of a police state or genocide.

To date, nobody has shown a more effective approach to organizing that I’m aware of. All the successful movements follow roughly the same formula. The nature of society has not fundamentally changed in a century, so there’s no reason to think that methods of organization need to drastically change as well. Just look at MAS in Bolivia as a very recent example.

I’m not sure who these MLs are that you’re referring to, but the whole point of ML approach is to do all these things you’re talking about and couple that with education that provides a clear theoretical understanding of what the problems are, and what the solutions need to be. The whole contribution of Lenin to Marxism was to provide the structure for organizing a revolutionary movement.

Sure, in initial stages you’ll have many different orgs. This was the case during Russian revolution as well. However, eventually a single unified vanguard emerges and people get on the same page regarding how to move forward. There is no mechanism for creating a unified vanguard under anarchist approach where there is no central authority by design.

But anarchists tend to be materialists, and praxis often takes priority over just theory.

Are you implying this is somehow different from Marxists?

I generally agree that there’s no one size fits all approach. However, any effective organization needs to be grounded in material reality. Discussing concrete examples of organization like Zapatistas is useful because they are achieving something tangible, but saying that people dreamed up plenty of ways to organize society is not very useful of itself.

The fact that anarchists can’t agree on a unified course of action is a big part of the reason why all these different ways of running society that people have dreamed up remain firmly in the realm of fantasy.

because DPRK is an existing socialist state

It’s an ideological competition between different ways of organizing society. We have a western model of capitalist organization and the socialist model advanced by China. The western model is visibly failing in every regard right now, so there is every reason to expect that more and more countries will look to Chinese model as a result.

A socialist revolution cannot magically abolish relations that have been internalized by a society born out of capitalism. The notion that you can just flip a switch and transition from one type of society to another is precisely what underpins anarchist achievements to date.

A Commune, in Marxist-Leninist theory, is a revolutionary political-economic structure where the proletariat collectively owns and democratically controls the means of production, abolishing capitalist hierarchies and bourgeois state machinery. It is rooted in the analysis of the Paris Commune of 1871 by Marx and Engels who saw it as a prototype of proletarian dictatorship. The key aspect of a commune is that it embodies direct workers’ democracy, dismantling the separation between state and society. Lenin further expanded this as a transitional framework where a decentralized network of soviets composed of laborers self-govern, eroding class distinctions and advancing toward a stateless, classless communism.

The distinction between Marxists and the anarchists is this: (1) The former, while aiming at the complete abolition of the state, recognize that this aim can only be achieved after classes have been abolished by the socialist revolution, as the result of the establishment of socialism, which leads to the withering away of the state. The latter want to abolish the state completely overnight, not understanding the conditions under which the state can be abolished. (2) The former recognize that after the proletariat has won political power it must completely destroy the old state machine and replace it by a new one consisting of an organization of the armed workers, after the type of the Commune. The latter, while insisting on the destruction of the state machine, have a very vague idea of what the proletariat will put in its place and how it will use its revolutionary power. The anarchists even deny that the revolutionary proletariat should use the state power, they reject its revolutionary dictatorship. (3) The former demand that the proletariat be trained for revolution by utilizing the present state. The anarchists reject this.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch06.htm

The way I see it, the brain is essentially a neural network that builds a model of the world through experience. It then uses this model to make predictions. Its primary function is to maintain homeostasis within the body, reacting to chemical signals like hunger, emotions, or pain. Our volition stems from the brain’s effort to achieve this balance, using its world model as the foundation for action.

Welcome to the real world ignoramus.

90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes

Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jones-bank-earnings-01-12-2024/card/chinese-household-savings-hit-another-record-high-xqyky00IsIe357rtJb4j

Social mobility in China being far better than in the US https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-social-mobility.html

The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-richer-than-europeans-wealth-report-finds-2022-9

The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf

From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4

From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&amp%3Blocations=CN&amp%3Bstart=2008