this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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Communism requires someone to distribute goods and assign labor. That person is effectively going to be your state at essentially any scale above a family.
And if you want to live in a developed society, you need a state to defend against invasion and colonization, arrest murderers and rapists, and regulate trade (even if trade is only external).
Communism does not require a state. What part of "a stateless, classless society" are you failing to grasp?
Even state authoritarian communist nations at least ostensibly seek a stateless, classless society. That's the whole fucking point.
And you don't need a state for those other things either. Do you think anarchists just throw shit at the wall and hope for the best? There are functioning anarchist communities which have no state. If they did, then they wouldn't be anarchist.
That distribution doesn't have to be top down. And as communism is a stateless society, the entire concept is predicated on the absence of top down distribution. Read up on democratic confederalism, parecon, project cybersin (admittedly done with the presence of a state but there's nothing about the system the necessitates one).
The CNT-FAI, zapatistas, rojava, and free territories of ukraine can all speak to decentralized militias. For auth-left examples just check out maoist militant orgs, they drew a ton of inspiration for anarchists in how to manage militias.
Most anarchists are prison abolitionists, I'm not going to summarize that one, look into it if you wish
Market economies can and have existed in horizontal societies. There's nothing inherently contradictory regarding trade regulations in a horizontal society