Red_Army wrote:Well here again you run into the problem that everyone has with anarchism. You are just making assumptions about what would happen in post-revolutionary society just based on hope and dreams. You have no examples of a successful military without hierarchy. Every successful military in the world has had discipline and hierarchy as components and this is not coincidence.
I have two issues with this statement. 1, I myself only advocated for a
largely de-hierarchised army and so do most anarchists. Makhno, Durutti, my own avatar, Cipriano Mera were all leaders of their respective forces, technically only the last was an official General, however they all wielded authority, with everything that entails. Granted they deferred to their soldiers and their elected representatives, but at the end of the day they had the last say. There was also discipline, as much as could be obtained under the circumstances. Some more Orwell on the topic.
Orwell wrote:Later it became the fashion to decry the militias, and therefore to pretend that the faults which were due to lack of training and weapons were the result of the equalitarian system. Actually, a newly raised draft 'of militia was an undisciplined mob not because the officers called the private 'Comrade' but because raw troops are always an undisciplined mob. In practice the democratic 'revolutionary' type of discipline is more reliable than might be expected. In a workers' army discipline is theoretically voluntary. It is based on class-loyalty, whereas the discipline of a bourgeois conscript army is based ultimately on fear. (The Popular Army that replaced the militias was midway between the two types.) In the militias the bullying and abuse that go on in an ordinary army would never have been tolerated for a moment. The normal military punishments existed, but they were only invoked for very serious offences. When a man refused to obey an order you did not immediately get him punished; you first appealed to him in the name of comradeship. Cynical people with no experience of handling men will say instantly that this would never 'work', but as a matter of fact it does 'work' in the long run. The discipline of even the worst drafts of militia visibly improved as time went on. In January the job of keeping a dozen raw recruits up to the mark almost turned my hair grey. In May for a short while I was acting-lieutenant in command of about thirty men, English and Spanish. We had all been under fire for months, and I never had the slightest difficulty in getting an order obeyed or in getting men to volunteer for a dangerous job. 'Revolutionary' discipline depends on political consciousness--on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed; it takes time to diffuse this, but
it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barrack-square. The journalists who sneered at the militia-system seldom remembered that the militias had to hold the line while the Popular Army was training in the rear. And it is a tribute to the strength of 'revolutionary' discipline that the militias stayed in the field-at all.
In short, it would be a mistake to call the Anarchist way of doing things unworkable.
2.You claim that "You are just making assumptions about what would happen in post-revolutionary society just based on hope and dreams." This is undeniably true. Nothing even remotely resembling an Anarchist state has ever appeared and the closest approximations didn't for much longer than one-three years. This is what happens when you dare to dream big. Abolishing coercive power is a difficult, dangerous task but the rewards are far greater than could ever be achieved if you shrug your shoulders and say "se la vie". Everyone dies eventually, why live a long, hopeless life in the dark when you could burn like a candle? Because if you do you'll burn out? Sounds a poor deal to me.
The first time I came in contact with an unsavory depiction of Makhno is in the fictional tale: "Makhno's Boys" written by Isaac Babel. I know it is fictional, but his depiction of the brutalities of both White and Red Guards got him in deep trouble with the Soviet State (eventually leading to his execution) so I don't see any reason to question its honesty. He depicts them as ordinary soldiers (raping women and murdering peasants for supplies). Its possible that Makhno's troops were morally superior to the Reds and Whites in treatment of religious and ethnic minorities, but I don't think its popular for the participants of any civil war to be morally pure.
Oh I don't think ever Anarchist was a saint, some probably joined up because they thought it meant looting with no laws. The evidence seems to show that the majority really beleived in what they were doing (granted Makhno's example probably did more for that than book learned theory).