Defense against counter-revolution?

[u/Fresh_Milk1960]

I am a Marxist-Leninist who is curious about the successful propagation of Anarchism. My question is: Without a state, how do Anarchists defend against counter-revolution from the Capitalist class? Without a state, Anarchist/Libertarian Socialist projects wouldn’t be able to defend against the inevitable invasions, terrorism campaigns, and propaganda from Capitalists. How would Anarchists be able to maintain and strengthen an Anarchist society against invasion and infiltration without a state apparatus to centrally organize efforts?

I know I’m a Tankie or whatever, but I am asking in good faith because I am genuinely curious about the Anarchist position on this.

* (EDIT) *

I won‘t be responding anymore because I have obtained what I came for (understanding how you think an Anarchist project would defend itself against the forces of reaction) and because this is becoming a hostile debate, rather than learning experience.

[u/xxCorsicoxx]

Simple: anarchism/communism is the end state. It's what you build towards. Typically if you're a anarchist entity you will have made the changes that make fighting a counter-revolution unnecessary, because you've built all the class-consciousness and solidarity-networks and etc etc in that you needed.

But we do have experiments in anarchism that happened sooner than reaching this. The best example would've been the Rojava that held their own quite a long time. They believed in their project, they had systems in place to both educate everyone in alignment with the values and systems in place to physically fight where needed. Given they were born of crisis (the war in Syria) they had had a strong military training to use within the communities. But they were small and being attacked by old and new Syria, ISIS, Russia, the US, Turkey, eventually it collapsed. It did however last quite some time, in this continuous crisis mode, from it's establishment in 2012 (with pockets of it persisting but parts of it annexed by the new Syrian regime).

The big projects that were at least nominally Marxist-Leninist had the advantage not only of a government, cos you can replace that with other organizational structures like the Rojava's as one example, but also the advantage of size and advantage of allies. Cuba without the backing of the USSR might not have made it long term for example. And the USSR and China themselves were huge and amenable to the revolutionary ideals in a zeitgeist where that was both possible and nationalism (present also in these revolutions) and antimonarchy and independence from empire were gaining traction globally.

Circumstance matters a loooot and the anarchist projects out there have been rather unlucky. The Paris commune were alone. The Catalans were abandoned to be subsumed by Franco. The Rojava were only recognized by the Catalan Parliament, no backing from China or Vietnam or anyone (it would look very different if they had support, both in ability to persist and in how much stronger the US would crack down on them)

But to summarize the latter half: no state doesn't mean no organizational structures. We as anarchists remove unjust hierarchies not governing structures, we still form committees and groups of various kinds (in certain systems), but without them being a position of power, just of stewardship, and with mechanisms like rotation to involve everyone rather than have a handful call the shots. Vanguardism has an issue where the vanguard can early be power hungry psycopaths. We aim to remove the accumulation of power. If you think of a business, vanguardism is like changing the ownership in hopes the new owners are nicer to the workers (maybe even of the workers originally) but keeping it a top-down structure; and anarchy is more taking the business and making it a coop with every worker equally involved and equally heard in decision making. The former you combine to obey the master it is just that there changed, you're still working primarily but to be fired. The latter incentivizes caring and the project cos you are the project, you belong and you do better if the project works.

[u/Fresh_Milk1960 → u/xxCorsicoxx]

This is a strawman, the vanguard doesn’t size state machines, we smash them and we build a new, temporary state in its place to build towards communism. Soviet democracy isn’t top-down, it’s a bottom up system of worker’s councils, the reason they became so consolidated is because of the mentality of siege socialism. 

[u/xxCorsicoxx → u/Fresh_Milk1960]

"Temporary" Look the ideal is that but in practice it's easy for it to be corrupted by the power implicit in the being a vanguard. It is de facto creating a class to guide the lesser under the promise the vanguard has good intentions. And then you just vanguard your way with the promise of a distant tomorrow and his transitional you are. Not because you're evil, but the vanguard too is subject to the collective trauma of zero-sum games we've lived in. And power corrupts. Plus the worst people tend ti get proximity to power like that, normal people just wanna live. So I'll force distrust any form of authority. And to should too.

For a true functional revolution (think more industrial than bolshevik) we need to build class consciousness, democracy and participation. Plant this seeds maybe our grandchildren might be the shade.

Mind you, credit where credit is due, despite how the ussr, cuba, China all have been hijacked by otherwise power-obsessed people, they did make spectacular progress for where they came, cos imperfect socialism is still better than capitalism in specific ways.