From a recent discussion: what is a "big project"?
A big project is a kind of cause and effect of the state. Why do you need a state? For big projects. Why do you need big projects? To support a state.
Big projects are not things like "science", "agriculture", or knowledge about them. Those are done by networks. Big projects are things like massive tombs, army corps organizations, jet fighter models, nuclear weapons, state law books etc. They are organizational or engineering.
Genocide, as an exercise in organization and engineering, is one of the well-known big projects. Civilization would be better off if we didn't have states to do these things. Some people would mourn "but where did our great big projects go" and the cost of those things was always people suffering genocide.
/fin
@richpuchalsky
all that being true, there are a number of big projects that i think are worth doing.
firstly, communist revolution itself is a big project requiring massive, world-spanning coordination and unity. with all due respect to anarchism, i cannot take seriously any anarchist who sees revolution as something for individuals and small groups only.
next is the re-organization of worldwide production away from the ecological destruction that capitalism perpetuates, which is a difficult problem to resolve since it involves literally every supply chain that exists.
this goes hand in hand with another indispensible big project, the rebuilding and healing of collapsed ecologies around the world.
if these problems were solvable without the need for mass-scale organizational structure of some kind, we wouldnt even need a revolution to carry them out, and they would already be underway.
the fact that big projects in capitalist society are fucked up and exploitative is more a reflection of capitalism than of the nature of all big projects.
"i cannot take seriously any anarchist who sees revolution as something for individuals and small groups only"
Yeah, I know, you're a state socialist who is never going to learn from the fall of the USSR or from anything else. Ready to keep doing the same doomed things forever.
@richpuchalsky
historic anarchist revolutions were not carried out by individuals and small groups, but by organizations with memberships ranging in the 100,000s and millions. my point is made without reference to the difference between anarchism and "state socialism", however little i accept such a label.
do you think there is something basically wrong with organizing at large-scale, with "big projects" of any kind? if so, why?
"massive, world-spanning coordination and unity"
(when challenged)
"memberships ranging in the 100,000s and millions"
A network is not a hierarchy. Yes, I think that there is something wrong with large-scale hierarchies, which is to say that I'm an anarchist. I'm used to state socialists loftily saying that they can't take anarchism seriously while they make it clear that they haven't thought about their own historical failures and why they happened at all.
@richpuchalsky
the ussr was absolutely a massive failure, and i agree that way too many people claim to be a communist while making up bullshit excuses for that failure. on this, i dispute nothing.
i think that it is possible to organize on a large scale without hierarchy, and i see this kind of network structure emerging in all historical attempts at working-class revolution no matter what ideological banners they fly.
obviously, no movement has ever succeeded at organizing masses of workers on a really global scale, cos that would literally be the world revolution right there. still, i see no reason why hierarchy would be necessary.
i am a communist whose theory draws mostly on marx and luxemburg, and i am not a "marxist-leninist" or trot or maoist. the way i see it, revolutionary workers power must be an armed force, but it is also a mass force, one which cannot allow itself to be led by a dictatorial clique of bureaucrats. i have organizational disagreements with anarchism, but anarchists are some of my closest comrades for a reason.
In other words -- you're a state socialist. I didn't say that you were a Marxist-Leninist, Trotskyite, or Maoist.
I heard all of this stuff many times before. Luxemburg wrote similar things about anarchism, of course. Her analysis was wrong and Marx' analysis was wrong. Bakunin predicted exactly what happened to the USSR, which fell not because of war but because its own people hated it. They'll hate your projects too.
Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
ROZALIA SOFIA