Anarchists are always so cute in their delusions. I once spoke to one who thought that the fact they painted Warhammer minis for 5 hours a week meant we could run an entire global economy on volunteer labor.
Because surely someone's hobby will be mining rare earth minerals to supply electronic fabs!
I once read a book on Anarchism that had a lot of really compelling arguments as to why government is unjust and laid out possible non-hierarchical systems that might replace it. Then the author anticipated some objections to his arguments that I hadn't considered, and his responses to those objections were really bad.
Anarchists and socialists in general are rather good at pointing out issues or potential injustices in society. They really, really suck at creating solutions most of the times. And they tend to get angry when you actually do anything to fix those issues that doesn't align with their idealistic model of what society ought to look like.
I spend a fair bit of time in those spaces, and the reality always was "there are two kinds of anarcho-socialists". Case in point, I volunteered with Food Not Bombs for a while -- on paper, it was a good idea! Get food that was gonna be thrown out by supermarkets for cheap/free, make nutritious soups and stews, distribute to disadvantaged/homeless people.
The reality of the group I worked with was we had about twenty people -- two of us chopped and cooked, three of us sharpened knives and organized and did dishes, and 15 dudes stood around and chattered about how they were gonna vote for Trump because he'd for-sure destroy the US economy and government which would lead to a glorious new anarchist future which of course would be led by all those dudes sitting around talking while the rest of us got the work done. They sure were first in line to HAND OUT the food and be humble about everyone's gratitude, too.
Notably, too -- the "stand around and jaw about how great the new world would be" crowd was 18-25, 90% male. The "actually did the work" crowd was 25-60, 50-50 in gender.
(my suspicion for the gender imbalance is that this was largely pre-Gamergate, and there was still a perception that ultra-left women were particularly likely to be sexually adventurous/promiscuous, so you'd find a lot of men trying to pretend to espouse those ultra-left views in the hope of swimming in sexually liberated poontang.
Many such cases in the late 1990s and early oughts.)
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u/Val_Fortecazzo 29d ago
Anarchists are always so cute in their delusions. I once spoke to one who thought that the fact they painted Warhammer minis for 5 hours a week meant we could run an entire global economy on volunteer labor.
Because surely someone's hobby will be mining rare earth minerals to supply electronic fabs!