My dad told me the same thing. They’re getting it from the media they consume.

You are asking me to give you a simple answer to a question that does not have one. As I said before, that problem is foundational to anarchist theory, and the entirety of anarchist discourse is dedicated to solving it. Directing you to writings by anarchists discussing how to organize and defend an anarchic form of society is the best I can do. David Graeber is a prominent anarchist writer and anthropologist that I highly recommend checking out.

You may as well be asking me to solve death. Death is a fact, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do everything possible to fend it off for as long as possible.

I find this video by Andrewism to be a good introduction to how anarchy can be organized.

This article focuses more on defending an anarchist society from an external military threat, but has relevant discussion of how to defend the social structures more specifically as well.

The question of how to deal with power hungry people is fundamentally the same question as how do you prevent the establishment of hierarchy in the first place. That is essentially the foundational question of anarchist political theory, so any writing on anarchism is relevant to this.

socialism never works

This is the main reason people are on your case. It’s an extremely reductive statement that’s been repeated ad infinitum by Procapitalist propagandists in defense of the status quo. Socialism is an incredibly broad and diverse philosophical and political tradition that has led to an enormous amount of positive change, even if a “perfect” socialist state has not yet been established.

I’m looking for an alternative to communism/soc/anarchism that can actually work.

That’s great! You can start by actually discussing communism/socialism/anarchism with other leftists in a nuanced manner, without repeating the same old tired tropes designed to keep us from even thinking about alternatives to capitalism. Front-loading every conversation with the presumption that every alternative to capitalism that has ever been conceived of simply “doesn’t work” and “could never work” is, again, reductive.

Sorry if I came off as an asshole, but I’m so tired of the dreamers, what are you going to do when the capitalists come to your cozy village, how will you deal with egomaniacs and power hunger in your anarchy group, etc. are the questions to discuss, IMO, not if stalin did or did not kill more or less people (he was a brutal dictator, we don’t want that).

It might surprise you to hear that anarchists do discuss how to deal with egomaniacs and power hunger quite often, but you wouldn’t know that because you are the one coming in and obnoxiously debating over how many people Stalin has killed. I must ask you again to please take responsibility for yourself instead of blaming others for the lack of productive discourse.

I got you banned? Take some responsibility for yourself, you were being insufferable in that thread. Obviously people are going to be speaking sympathetically about socialism in latestagecapitalism, you chose to antagonize everyone by making reductive arguments and moral grandstanding over historical events you know little about, like you’re doing now.

I’m an anarchist btw, I’m not the biggest fan of the USSR or the PRC either, but you are simply refusing to engage with the topic in good faith.

I speak only for myself, and I happen to believe being a sociopathic robber baron isn’t genetic.

we

You took it there.

The boomer ellipsis drives me nuts. It gives me a very ominous feeling, like something is being left unsaid that I’m supposed to extrapolate. The only time I use an ellipsis in text is when I want to indicate that the thought is incomplete.

An exceedingly dangerous activity indeed.

Grammatical gender will never make sense to me, and I suspect that’s because it actually just doesn’t make sense.

This is the first time I’ve been called old, yet I can’t really dispute what they said.

Only because the very concepts of ownership and the collective-individual dichotomy are necessarily vague and subjective. China considers themselves socialist because they equivocate the people with the state. If the people are collectively represented by the state and the state owns (some of) the means of production, then at least transitively the people own (some of) the means of production.

As an anarchist I don’t believe the state adequately represents the interests of the people, nor do I think it could even if it were radically democratic and egalitarian, though I would still certainly prefer that to the existing status quo. Somewhere a line must be drawn arbitrarily and I prefer to draw it on the other side of authoritarian state control.

Socialism isn’t when the government does stuff for the people, it’s when the people take matters into their own hands and do stuff for the good of each other. Even if a state behaves in the most benevolent way possible, it is not socialist unless the workers have collective ownership of the means of production.