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.
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! ↩︎
Thank you for the suggestion. Its good to learn something new everyday.
Going to read up on EZLN and if you have any suggested reading that would be great as well.
on Chiapas:
on Rojava:
on Revolutionary Catalonia and various aspects of the anarchism there:
most of these should be findable on Anna’s Archive, or by just googling the title. if not, i can track copies down.
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.