Probably the critics of anarchism that I take the most seriously are survivors of decentralized genocides or warzones who tend to become staunch conservatives upon immigration to western democracies. They may recognize shit sucks, but also assume any boat rocking will return society to a much worse baseline.
Among radicals, revolutionaries and other critics of the status quo there's a general lack of awareness of *how much worse things can be* and I think factoring such in is important.
This is not to say that I think such critiques of the anarchist project hold up ultimately. But they're the ones I think should be treated with the most respect and care.
And to some degree this boils down to a question of risk tolerance that I'm not sure can be so easily or objectively resolved. A slave that refuses to revolt because they infinitely more fear a return to even worse horrors than they desire the utopia of liberation is not so trivially in the wrong.
One thing we should learn from such folks is to temper our rhetorical moves around casting the present in the most darkly dystopian terms.
There's a strong tendency by anarchists to frame the existing hellworld we live in as the Worst Of All Possible Worlds. To really emphasize it as the darkest night imaginable, so as to justify ANY revolt or risk taking against it.
But this move is dead on arrival to those who've seen nightmares beyond capitalism and democracy.
Relatedly I think this is also a reason to pay *extra* attention to the analysis of those anarchists who emerged from such contexts, were granted the relative stabilities and privileges of western democracy and still chose anarchism.
Someone who lived through the Lebanese civil war or the Rwandan genocide and still chose anarchism is far more insightful than western anarchists who clumsily point to McDonalds as hell on earth.
I don't know a lot of developed *writing* unfortunately. I have talked with, organized and fought alongside a handful of anarchists who lived through such, but most anarchists don't have much interest in writing so...
@mutual_ayyde @rechelon Highly annoying that they assume states imply complexity and larger states mean more complexity, and that they basically just view the state as the whole of society. I'm inclined to believe that revolution would tend to result in the formation of autocracies over democracies, and thus anything resembling anarchy would be even less likely, but I think the analysis here is somewhat limited in its usefulness by having states be the benchmark for complexity.
I could see it being the case for instance that a revolution could result in the formation of an autocratic government that has limited actual influence over the territory it claims and people self organize within it in more complex and generally less legible ways, resulting in a net increase in social complexity within that area.
This is true for a subset of radicals, and has historically been true for focused antifascists in particular, which is among many reasons why I historically gravitated to antifascists back during the pre-2017 era when they were often marginalized within radical communities, but it is not true for a huge swathe of radicals and anarchists (not so coincidentally among whose ranks hostility to antifa is common). Taking our present world as the worst possible is quite common.
One common criticism among the anti-antifa set is the concern that antifascism degenerates into liberalism and functional defense of the status quo. This can be true enough! (Look at the antifascist to CIA-paid CVE researcher pipeline.) But this critique often comes with an implicit rejection of Three Way Fight and an assumption that some nazis are defacto allies in toppling the status quo, whose removal can only make things better.
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