It’s very demonstrably not even the case in most cases we deal with that everyone getting something acceptable is more fair than some getting their favorite. Maybe in a hyper-egalitarian situation that is the case, but in most cases there are some who have more at stake and are more vulnerable. It’s important to remember what it means for a situation to be fair, a situation that we would impartially approve of (say, by not knowing who we are in a situation and acting in our self-interest). In such a situation, you’d want those with the most at stake to get their way, even if they’re the 49% and the rest aren’t happy with it. If we don’t accept that then it’s really unclear why we anarchists give a shit about consensus.

In this case, everyone may find a particular choice acceptable, but find the overall decision-making situation unacceptable. Like, if you’re disabled, and you rarely get to eat foods that you enjoy, and your friends invite you out, you may find certain restaurants acceptable because they at least have fries or a salad you can eat without throwing up but you’d love to go to one of two restaurants. Your friends eat out every other week and can eat pretty much anything, minestrone, rotini, a whole plant-based ice cream cake each, whatever. You may find those acceptable restaurants acceptable, but find it unacceptable that your needs and desires don’t outweigh the others for this decision-making.

It’s not fair. It’s obviously not fair, even though everyone is getting the acceptable option. In this case, going where you want, even if the others would prefer not to go to those restaurants, is fair. And most group decision-making situations today are like this.

it used to study social choice theory a lot and so it was in the position you’re in now. In the end, it turns out most of the math is completely irrelevant because people don’t act according to rational incentives, but what they believe they’re incentivized to do. In most systems, people exhibit behaviors that lead to two-party systems and all the other problems with FPTP. That includes all the “good” systems like Condorcet, Borda, etc. with the exception of range voting, where people actively vote more for unpopular options thereby giving “fringe” options a chance.

Anyway, it isn’t really true that it matters to all voting. If you’re forming a consensus, that counts as voting since you’re documenting your preferences or your motivational profile, for instance.

Oh right you had by two years ago encountered one of its swine names, okay, yes. it thought you had only known it as edible by that point.

As for you/your, it is generic in the same way they/them is generic, but it/its is what affirms its identity so you/your serves as degendering in the same way that they/them’ing transfems is. And because it’s often done punitively for transfems it can be intensely triggering to be you/your’d or they/them’d. In fact, a local Queers for Palestine chapter punitively degendered it and doubled down on it, which split the group into those who supported transmisogyny and those against it, just the other week (obviously with most members supporting transmisogyny). Such things are common enough in its life and often fresh that it’s a pretty fresh wound whenever it gets referred to with you/your or they/them, and in general it’s found that others who use it/its first and third person are anywhere from ambivalent to preferring second person it/its.

That seems to be a reasonable inference but one rather unfair thing it’s noticed with neopronouns is that inferences that we make naturally with traditional pronouns don’t really apply to neopronouns. A lot of folks who use fae/faer have noted how people make all kinds of bizarre assumptions about them on the basis of these pronouns, like that they’re deceptive. And then, we naturally infer that if someone uses she, they also use her, hers, herself, etc. But a similar kind of extrapolation is someone using certain first and third person pronouns to using a corresponding set of second person pronouns, like if someone refers to faerself as “this fae thinks…” then it seems like a reasonable inference that fae may want “would this fae like to…?”

You may have noticed some of this yourself, but these are some of its own observations of neopronouns and the current state of affairs over the past few years.

Oh its second person pronouns are it/its now.

it had no idea it was so recognizable? What about the name is reminiscent of it?

Neat! it may be something that ghosted you several years ago due to leaving behind its Discord due to abuse. Was very astounded to see you again in another life.

A question that’s been burning for half a week now: Are you the same naeva that was on the VFCJ Discord once upon a time?

Edited:

• “On the other end were historical materialist-style communists (henceforth histcom) who were largely distinguished by their opposition to the other prominent histcom tendency of the time, Leninism.”

• “On the other end were specific tendencies among historical materialist-style communists (henceforth histcom). These histcom tendencies were largely distinguished by their opposition to the other prominent histcom tendency of the time, Leninism.”

Not really a correction, but someone pointed out privately that it can be misread like ‘histcom’ refers to leftcoms, rather than leftcoms being a specific contingent of histcoms, the communists following in the tradition of Marx and Engels.

Ah okay. Understood, thank you for clarifying and sorry for misunderstanding.

One thing it will say as a critique is that while there is a lot of misrepresentation of anarchism online, it’s worth being careful not to go to the opposite extreme of being a terminally offline anarchist, as it were. In its experience with organizing, there’s a lot of anarchists out there who are intensely insecure about not wanting to be one of “those” anarchists online. The consequence is that they don’t just resist NATO propaganda, but genuinely important additions to structural analysis because they basically assume anything new is like, terminally online stuff that doesn’t matter. it’s had to waste a shitton of time and energy organizing to resist anarchists who will not get with the times and end up being incredibly chauvinistic because they’re too busy throwing out dogwhistles abt how the other anarchists are children with no experience with REAL organizing, when everyone would’ve been better off if they sat down and listened and evaluated things they were being educated on instead of desperately trying to detect and avoid “terminally online” elements of anarchism.

For that reason it pretty much never tells anyone to be wary of “internet anarchism” because they overcorrect into this incredibly out of touch terminally offline anarchism that really slows down organizing and causes a great deal of harm.

You don’t really need to read something as specific as anarchist theory to challenge a bias towards Leninism.

If Leninism itself leaves comparatively too much to be desired, or plenty of other strategies have something sufficiently desirable that Leninism lacks, that’s enough to challenge Leninism.

Anarchism is a very specific strategy, centered on prefiguration, as well as effective and horizontal power building that developed in Europe in response to an increasingly industrial society. But of course, plenty of effective and horizontal power building movements arose in response to different conditions and weren’t anarchist. The Zapatistas are explicitly anti-anarchist (though another commenter in this thread you were interacting with seems to be implying that they self-identify as anarchists and it’s the rest of the world that refuses to acknowledge them as such???), and are an anti-colonial movement centered around a national identity of being colonized.

What distinguishes anarchism is that, because it is in response to industrial society, it developed strategies specific to a structural analysis befitting industrial society. Even if nothing about anarchism turned out to be compelling to you, there would still be plenty of room to challenge Leninism. The organic centralists of the ICP have plenty to say about Leninism, as do councilists, and all of these theories share with anarchism all kinds of desirable things that Leninism lacks.

But that said, a pretty comprehensive reading to get an idea at least for what contemporary organizational dualists are up to these days is Turning the Tide which was published May of last year.

As for why it shifted to anarchism, so for background, it was for a while just sort of sympathetic to both historical materialist-style communist strategies (what you call ‘Marxism,’ henceforth ‘histcom’) and anarchist strategies. Namely, a lot of left-communist doctrines and anarchist doctrines had a great deal of predictive and explanatory power, and seemed to provide a plausible way to combat the ubiquity of domination (especially the domination of nonhumans, which was of particular interest to it). So it was never a Leninist histcom, but it was pretty sympathetic to histcom approaches.

Two things make histcom approaches extremely unappealing. First, histcom texts and discussions are extremely unconducive to filling in holes in their structural analysis. Be honest, how much success have you had explaining suicidism to a group of Leninists who’ve never heard of it? How much success would you expect if you did this: Go from Leninist group to Leninist group. They aren’t antecedently anti-psychiatry. Make them listen to mad people about why therapy and psychiatry must be smashed at all costs.

it can tell you from experience that your success rate will be very low. Leftcoms have this problem to a great extent too. This is a problem. At the pro-Hamas actions where it is, a Leninist group that hates queer people keeps trying to infiltrate the actions and capture members, the majority of whom turn out to be queer or queer allies. That is truly how far behind their structural analysis is, putting aside the fact that they’re a well-known abusive cult here. This is not cherry-picking, it is par for the course for large Leninist groups with local chapters everywhere to have no cognizance of anti-queer violence, sanism, suicidism, speciesism, no conception of what heteropatriarchal slurs are, no willingness to understand the transmisogyny of punitive degendering, just a total lack of analysis of our objective or subjective conditions.

Second, histcom texts and discussions are extremely incapable of recognizing abuse, or even conceiving of what abuse even is, and it’s often downplayed! Abuse is, to be clear, a huge issue in anarchist spaces, especially Food Not Bombs chapters. It’s not specific to any tendency. But after starting a pro-survivorship specific organization nearly a decade ago, what it’s found is that anarchists have the tools to unlearn abuse and learn what abuse is. To recognize that abuse is ubiquitous, that we are all born fascists and colonists and must unlearn that violence, that to address abuse is to assume it will occur and to study, analyze, and plan accordingly.

Histcoms, and especially Leninists, are not in a similar position. And this seems to be a phenomenon that owes itself to the origin of both traditions. Where anarchists are incredibly willing to recognize Bakunin’s treatment of his Jewish comrades and the incredible trauma and pain that must have caused, histcoms are generally extremely unwilling to admit to Marx and Engels’s pattern of forming abusive relationships with those more vulnerable than them and forcing them into isolation. Or, they’re unwilling to really put themselves in the uncomfortable position of really sitting with Lenin’s choice to harbor Bauman after Bauman drove a woman to suicide by abusing her over a long period of time. To really sit and internalize what she must have felt, what she would have felt knowing Lenin upheld Bauman to the point that he is today memorialized with a statue while she is forgotten, having gotten to achieve nothing.

it thinks it understands why Leninists and mainstream Leninist texts so frequently do this. This denial is a way of maintaining social strength. If you admit to atrocities, it makes your ideology less appealing. But it sees it differently. If you are willing to sit with the atrocities and the pain of your ideology, and really grapple with the mistakes in analysis and action that made those atrocities possible, then you’re willing to do the work to ensure you don’t immediately drive off victim-survivors. Abuse denialism doesn’t wave a red flag with a yellow hammer and sickle, it just raises a red flag. One that says “you’ll be victimized here too.”

Addressing abuse among revolutionaries is such a pressing issue, and over and over histcoms (including some leftcoms!) glorify their favorite figures, deny the historical record when it says these people are abusers, even to victim-survivors. How could anyone reasonably conclude that a tendency that consistently does that over and over could ever be the right path forward?

Abuse among anarchists is just as ubiquitous, but if you talk to an anarchist about power dynamics as being central to abuse, they won’t hazily quote Engels’s “On Authority” at you and say the concept of ‘power’ is reductive or whatever. They’ll understand. And they’ll genuinely improve and do better next time when figuring out who to deplatform and who to empower. They’ll recognize anti-survivorship, they’ll recognize when some org refuses to center a victim and is kicking out an abuser for appearances without actually listening to what the victim wants or needs for their safety. Anarchism just has a better fucking track record at being a bulwark against chauvinism and abuse.

it was never really sympathetic to Leninism in particular, but it was sympathetic to other histcom tendencies, and to some extent it still is. But a lot of love’s been lost from these experiences, and hopefully that answers your question of how it shifted from histcom-leaning to anarchist-committed.

But as it said above, if you don’t find anarchism convincing, it would far sooner you gain an interest in the ICP than sticking with Leninism.

Something seems backwards here. It’s not like the Zapatistas call themselves anarchists but the rest of the world refuses to acknowledge it. The Zapatistas have on multiple occasions said they do not care for anarchism, but they are often portrayed by the rest of the world as anarchist.

it/its.

Some of your impression is precisely what it’s thinking of in its description? So it’s a little confused when you list them as differences in our interpretation. Like the way it’s seeing it is some of the listed items are just repeating it and then wondering why these two identical things are different? There should be no mystery there!

For example, G&W’s claim that we used to play and experiment with hierarchy and now we don’t is precisely what it’s referring to when it says they reject the ubiquity of egalitarianism. They think there were just all kinds of social experiments, varying by season, by place, and so on (but definitely not by material conditions, nothing changes between seasons after all, apparently).

Other members of your list though are part of the core issue with the book. They have that whole chapter about how their book isn’t about the origin of inequality, but this contradicts several points in their book. The fact is, G&W shirk discussion of inequality (and provide a really shitty argument for doing so, but that’s not really relevant to why it’s a bad citation here), but very obviously do discuss inequality at great length at multiple points.

Anyway, as for a recommendation, try this series:

• 10. David Graeber & David Wengrow’s The “Dawn of Everything”: The Wisdom of Kandiaronk
• 10.1 Graeber & Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything”: What is an “Egalitarian” Society?
• 10.2 The Dawn of Everything: How Graeber & Wengrow’s book sets us up for political failure
• 10.3 The Ingredients of Dominance Hierarchy: Graeber & Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything, Chapter 3
• 10.4 What Really Causes Seasonal Social and Political Structures? The Dawn of Everything Chapter 3

Anyway, it doesn’t think there’s enough evidence to say its interpretation of the book doesn’t encompass yours. its point is just that the book is confused and often misleading, though its merits outweigh its demerits.

Hmmm is it really THE very reason?

It’s certainly a reason, but here’s maybe why we shouldn’t think it’s all there is to the story. Let’s take it as a given that we should uncritically accept the traditional conception of our species as the most advanced. Plenty of other creatures’ languages and cooperation and writing systems are so robust and yet they don’t achieve that same status. And indeed, us reaching this level of advancement happened very quickly. These seem to suggest other events led to this, beyond just what our biology happens to be.

In any case:

we became so advanced…

The traditional ways in which we think of ourselves as having progressed the most involve concepts formed by our contemporary settler-colonial world. So it thinks we should be critical of that as well. What would be so incorrect about using other metrics, like how much we produce according to ability and distribute according to need? Along that axis, we’re clearly far less advanced than plenty of other groups. Instead, we consider ourselves as having progressed the most because of technological capabilities, independently of the value of their impact.

It seems plausible that while there are plenty who could have created the technological capabilities to do great atrocities as we have, only we found ourselves in the external, material conditions to develop those capabilities.

The citation is frustratingly misleading in this context.

David Graeber and David Wengrow’s book is a very eye opening and worthwhile read. But it is also widely acknowledged by now to be full of sophistry. What they do well is piece together a lot of loose bits of important cultural anthropology out there into one big compilation strewn into a narrative. For anyone interested in cultural anthropology, it’s a great way to see everything all at once.

But they do also regularly leave out things in extremely misleading ways, create strawpeople, and act with a kind of penetratingly charismatic confusion.

In this particular context, the citation is egregious because they are attributing a conclusion that was borne out of the blood and sweat of researchers who G&W malign in a really dishonest way. Here’s something we’ve known since the 80s thanks to the work of cultural anthropologists studying the most egalitarian human societies in the world: Human egalitarianism was ubiquitous in early societies. But those cultural anthropologists are precisely the people that G&W have an axe to grind against.

G&W first of all provide gross misrepresentations of how these anthropologists come to their conclusions (or leave it out and act amused and confused at why some particular researcher they cite came to their conclusion). They second of all want to argue that this narrative is actually reactionary in all kinds of ways, and actually reject the ubiquity of egalitarianism in early human societies (and even reject that we can even come to any conclusions about early human societies, opting to start merely forty thousand years ago in the Upper Paleolithic Era, which has all kinds of methodological issues). But in fact, plenty of evidence suggests G&W’s narrative ends up being far more reactionary.

And yet here, this article suggests it’s G&W we can thank for the conclusion that early human egalitarianism is naturally ubiquitous! How backwards!

It’s a worthwhile read, but it does not belong in this article.