I’m sure this has been asked before, so sorry if it was.
But from my very surface level understanding of this, communism is about workers collectively owning the means of production. If a dictator is controlling the means, do the workers really own them? To me it just seems like centralised capitalism.
“we have not seen anarchism at a [large scale]” this is extremely debatable, historcally speaking large communities have existed in pseudo anarchistic systsms off and on across the world. The general counter is to claim that hierarchal governance, especially the state, are variously metastable governance systems which outcompete anarchistic communities. But this is only historically supported inasmuch as they did “win out”, but that is not actually evidence that it’s the only metastable form of large scale governance.
I may be off base, but adding to that, isn’t the winning out just colonialism coming in with violence in most cases?
I understand your point.
For e.g. rural village in the past might have no contact with the outside and run like an anarchist community.
However, when we talk about modern nation state, I believe we have not seen successful implementation of anarchism yet.
One problem is that even if it works internally, what would happen when a colonial power tries to conquer it? Like how the US is now trying to claim Greenland, the Panama Canal, or even the nation of Canada?
A centralised power has more resources to mobilise and therefore potentially able to hold off foreign assault (see Vietnam, China).
Please note I am not implying that authoritarian communism is ideal. I am just pointing out the difficulties of not having a central authority.
well, anarchism is completely antithetical to modern nation states, so if you’re using that as the basis for evaluation you’re obviously going to be misled. it also begs the question of what a “successful implementation” of anarchism–or any form of leftist ideology in governing–actually is, because ask five leftists and they’ll give you six answers to that. nonetheless, and as far as i’m aware, in spite of their massive difficulties (and despite a non-anarchist self-identification in the first case) both EZLN-held Chipas and Rojava are widely held as successful, practically applied examples of anarchist theories of practice and production. likewise, so is Revolutionary Catalonia.
i would encourage you to look to the Spanish Civil War or the EZLN occupation of Chiapas as examples, because this was simply not a problem for either of them. particularly in the former case, the Spanish anarchists acted very similarly to a “centralized” power in fighting the Francoists (until they were organized into the broader Republican military).[1]
and it should be noted, as an aside: what eventually undermined them and destroyed their power were not the Francoists but purges and aggression conducted by other leftists in the Spanish Popular Front against them. anarchists are, quite legitimately in my opinion, pretty aggrieved at their historical treatment by other leftist ideologies! ↩︎
to add, the point of Rojavas and “centralized” military forces - this is where syndicalists tend to find their strongest justifications, in having built in systems of military federation that are demonstrably effective without making it super incentivized to do power centralization.