Hello, just wondering if there are any nexus members who are familiar with or adhere to this line of thinking. Personally I think Marx is more relevant than ever. For those who aren't familiar I'll give you a very brief rundown.

Marx is often considered the Charles Darwin of sociological theory, and his ideas are still very popular in academic sociology and anthropology circles. Marxism is a materialist theory of social development.

The notion that social consciousness is determined by environment could be the central tenet of Marxist theory. Individuals are a reflection of their social environment and all of its culture(s)/values/ideas/etc.

The overall mode of production (i.e. the economy), or the means by which a particular society's members secure the evolving material requirements of an expanding population, determines overall the society's political and social structure (though not without some reverse influence).

A commodity's value (in economic terms) is determined by the "socially necessary" labor time required to produce it. Commodity producers earn wages that are less than the value of the commodities they produced in the given period, thus earning a "profit" for the capitalist who employs them. This relationship between worker and owner is the foundation of capitalism. Exploitation ensues, yada yada, revolution, etc...

That's enough to get an idea.

"Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand."

— Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 1858

Sometimes when I'm tripping (or not!) and get that really broad perspective view of existence, Marx makes a whole lot of sense...

Have you read any Adorno? If you're interested in Marxist critique of society/culture, you might dig his vibe:

Theodor Adorno - Minima Moralia

I have found, when pondering this (or thinking of something completely different!) while on a psychedelic, I have grasped a non-materialist Marxism, or at lest a non-exclusionary form that allows for nonmaterial events. That is, the elves or the strophariad have shown me that while Marxism is an apt explanation of human interaction (on a large scale and when dealing with resources; i.e. economics) it is still riddled with marx's own personality flaws (pompousness/inabIlity to deal with criticism) and isn't ALL that's going on (as most marxists and I would venture to say Marx himself can't cope with.

..Marx was still really an Economist..personally i find the entire field of economics somewhat suspect in many of it's assumptions and 'value' criteria..

i don't think any state that's claimed to be Marxist has ever been much more than junta-totalitarian (maybe there's hope for Nepal)
..on the other hand, that 'Socialist' is such a dirty word in the USA is ridiculous and disturbing to me..
Iron Lady Thatcher was a classic anti-Marxist (extending this to then include liberal socialism) ..she said: "There is no 'society', there are individuals and there are families."
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Marx has made a few brilliant analyses. One of the first people who actually recognised that there is a huge tension between a 'free market' and 'capitalism'. But all his talk of revolution is pure speculation.

Most marxists also hugely misinterpret him, thinking that his assumption that people will revolt at some point, actually is an excuse for violent actions.

The key problem with Marxism has always been it's naive assumptions about the state. They usually claim that the political structure and organs of society are entirely dependent on the mode of production and is the instrument of class power. WHILE this is indeed the case, the history of the 20th century has clearly shown the hypothesis of the state as a self-perpetuating institution to be very true. Marxism also seems to usually deny the tendency of party beaurecrats to become a ruling class themselves, too needing a revolution to overthrow them.

The now-almost-defunct school of though known as left wing communism has historically been the only professedly Marxist grouping to recognize this. I recommend look into left communism in china during the cultural revolution for a Marxist critique ofthe Leninist state: http://www.marxists.de/china/sheng/whither.htm

..thanks for that interesting read AluminumFoilRobots..so the seeds of counter-revolution grew also in China in the late '60s, no doubt to be brutally weeded and exterminated..that paper was maybe the last moral hope for the Chinese communist party.. (oh, and the guy who was kept under house arrest for the rest of his life for arguing against the Tiananmen Square Massacre)
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An older but perhaps more keen (for speakers of germanic languages) marxist critique of authoritarian-statist socialism is Rosa Luxemburg's "Marxism or Leninism?" http://libcom.org/librar...ismMarxismRosaLuxemburg1
I like this one for its chillingly prophetic nature, having been originally published in 1904 - some 13 years before leninism gained precedence in international communist circles. I sometimes like to wonder how things would have turned out if the german revolution of 1919 and specifically the Spartacist league would have been successful instead of the Bolsheviks in Russia.

But the seeds of all this go back to Marx. Lots of people like to totally exonerate him of all authoritarian tendencies, but they are unmistakably there. But they're in me, too. It's an easy tendency to fall into when you're red in the face with indignance.

I always hated talk of marxism to be honest..it was a trendy discussion while I was in college but that was about it. Same with Leninism..just too many "isms" I guess. There is stuff of value in there sure, as with anything I guess. These guys are dead and gone though..whats more relevant is what we think now reguardless of what these other dead guys thought 100 years ago.

actaully what it really is I think is that I have heard too many cliche college type discussions of the subject in some attempt to come off as sophisticated. it is the same as when I hear anarchy come up among teeny bopper punk kids who just want to piss their parents off and break stuff..99% of them dont even know what anarchy really is.

Saying that you´re an anarchist is a contradiction already: How could organised or enforced anarchy exist?

^do you know what anarchy REALLY was? Read Emma Goldman. It is not what most here tend to assume it is 99% of the time when I hear the term used here on this site.

Yeah, I used to revel in discussing the finer points of the oblique Marxist theory, but then I realized that shackling myself to dead ideas (despite their aptness or "truth" is a form of mental slavery that, as we have seen, tends to limit the actual expression of spontaneous acts of liberty (i.e., the 'real' revolution). But, reading the left-communist classics (or not-so-classics), these people at the left of the Social Democracy movement in the late 19th-early 20th centuries noticed these same contradictions in the socialist movement and made many important contributions to a social theory that is ACTUALLY liberating, rather than the dry stultification-passed-as-liberation that most Marxist parties have.



ugh. I literally hate this statement. That and "communism is perfect in theory, but for human nature yada yada". I find these statements to be more nauseatingly pseudo-intellectual than even the most boring Boring as Fuck marxist/libertarian-communist social theory.

Ok..so you think you can force anarchy onto society? Without the use of violence?

And then.....if you have an anarchistic society, so no government, no police, no military? So what if some group of people start to organise themselves? You can not forbid them to, because you have no police, remember.

And then..what if some group of people who´ve organised themselves decide to seize power? It should be an easy thing to do in a truly anarchistic society where there´s no police or military, where the people aren´t organised.

A truly anarchistic society would be totally powerless against violent take-overs. Powerless, because all 'power' has been abolished.

There are places on earth that have been anarchistic for a while, like parts of yemen, afghanistan or somalia. The anarchy never lasted longer than a few months. Eventually someone comes in to 'restore order' and excercise limitless power.

becasue you dont understand the true history of anarchy or what it stood for. Again..go back and study the true history of anarchy.

http://www.spunk.org/tex...an/sp001520/emmabio.html

The fact that you liken true anarchy to the state of afganistan is proof that what you refer to as "anarchy" is not classical anarchy at all. It is a modern (mis)interpretation. Sure..that kind of "anarchy" is rediculous and would never work.

Anarchism really comes from a position of decentralized authority. From that point you have dozens of schools of thought on the subject exploring how order would emerge absent a central governing body. As for the question of violent take-overs, there is the most profound example, albeit not in a stateless society, in the Spanish Civil War. The anarchists gathered supporters, formed militias, etc. The Popular Front (anarchists, communists, republicans) lost, but the anarchists were certainly not powerless in their struggle against fascism.

Anarchists, though opposed to centralized power, heirarchy, and coercion, are not opposed to organization. A confederation of communities can perform any and all the functions of a government, including defense from aggressors. Consensus is to be built voluntarily from the bottom up.

Criticism of "anarchistic" characteristics in the Middle East and Africa are much different than criticism of something like the Spanish communes of the 1930s. One way to look at this critique is through a Marxist lense, in keeping with the OP. Marx insisted that the development of capitalism was a neccessary precondition to socialist revolution. Much of Spain's anarchist tendency came from the conditions of industrial cities, an outgrowth of capitalism. On the other hand, Afghanistan is an undeveloped country that hasn't had its "bourgeois revolution" yet. I don't have time to elaborate further, but there's one way of looking at it.

some would call Mohammed Doud Khan's republic afghanistan's "bourgeois revolution".

Interesting women.
But there isn´t one single definition of anarchy, realy.
Some people refer to 'wallstreet' as anarchy: anarchocapitalism.

What all the definitions of anarchy seem to have in common is a total decentralisation of power, either through the absence of power, or through some form of communitarianism.

The point is that i believe we do need authority, just like the DMT-nexus is not completely free of enforcement either.

My metaphore for this is: if a person infected with AIDS dies of the flue...what is the REAL cause of death? I would say that it´s not the influenza. Aquired immuno deficiancy syndrome causes exactly what it says it does. If you have no defence system, no 'police-cells' in your body, you will die of anything that attacks your body. If our subject wouldn´t have died today because of the flue, he/she would die tomorrow because of one of the many other virusses or bacteria we all encounter everyday, that normally are totally harmless to us. Your body, and mine, are at this very moment flooded with virusses, bacteria and fungi that could cause immense, lethal harm if it wheren´t for the 'police-cells' inside our bodies.

A society that has to weak a defence-system will at some moment become like afghanistan, somalia or yemen.
So maybe the police isn´t always our best friend, but policemen (and laws) are as vital to society as doctors, teachers and the people who pick-up garbage.

Why is the world so fucked-up? because there are realy sick people out there who have a lust for power.
All the halliburtons of this world would take the opportunity to seize power, the moment they get the chance. So they shouldn´t be given the chance.
There is no substantial difference in this regard between al-shabab, al-qaida and FARC or halliburton, BP and shell. Never make the mistake of thinking that we don´t have those kind of forces within our society.

..if we don't venture towards extremes, then political 'anarchists' are simply against over-centralized power..
the original idea of the USSR was that the individual local 'soviets' (councils) would fairly represent the wishes of the local worker..ha!
and i guess the USA exists so that individual states could group-defend against England invading..the federal government was meant to run
the mint and the army, and (as Thomas Jefferson wanted it) not maintain a 'standing army'..

the key problem to me is over-centralized power by a minority, which can happen under almost any system where some have greater
access to wealth or weaponry than others, so i defend 'anarchists' and agree with polytrip..
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on the surface the word An-archy is self explainatory, it means without (an) government (archy)

this does not mean without order or imply chaos, on the most basic level it means that there is no body to set itself up over the people in a hierarchical way

If one examines the very word democracy, demo means people and cracy means rule, this means that the population rules themselves, it does not imply representation, in this way democracy implies self government, not a separation of government with an independent agenda, this is identical to the fundamental principals of anarchy

There is no implication in anarchy that laws cannot exist or be enforced, rather the implication is that the system of legality cannot be separate or distinct from the people, it must stem from the will of the people and lack independent will altogether. Simply put anarchy implies that there is no separate agenda or will from that of the people, ergo there is no government of the people.

The typical use of anarchy is a pseudointellectual straw man designed to be easy to slander and retort against. This version is aligned with chaos and disorder and the concept of lawlessness, however those who propagate this concept are typically uneducated, even when they have tenure.

Those who have labeled themselves anarchists in a political sense are seldom anarchists in the philosophical sense, because they tend to propagate their own agenda

in more than one sense democracy and anarchy are inseparable, and both have the problem of majority will being able to impinge upon the freedom of the minority, however whenever separate agendas exist that are being imposed upon one group by another then democracy is not taking place, democracy is not the coercion of the few by the will of the many, for once that occurs then the people are no longer governing themselves, they are governing others, which is representation, something antithetical to democracy

at the most basic level every individual is a practicing anarchist, they make their own decisions, they rule themselves, what they wear, drink, listen to, read etc, these are all actions of governing self

Anarchistic business models can be remarkably successful, but since social inequality is the main tool of retaining political power they are targeted by the state, which has a vested interest in ensuring social inequality.