The aspie as revolutionary

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I wonder if Pierre Dominique Toussant L'Ouverture, the leader of the slave revolt that ultimately created what is now the nation of Haiti, was on the spectrum-he was an uneducated slave who supposedly learned enough to organize escaped slaves living in the jungle to overthrow the French, in a place where slave owners were MUCH rougher on their slaves than Americans ever were. He was also a visionary-he tried to make room for the minority whites who didn't flee in his government. He was killed by Napoleon's troops in an attempt to retake the island, after which his successor simply exterminated the island's whites. As noted, Jefferson may have been an aspie, and I think Franklin was too.

Jefferson was as close as you could get to anarchist in 1776. He rejected most religion, urged the people to rebel every 10 years, and was extremely skeptical of most government. Hamilton was a proto-fascist, but Jefferson would be considered radical-left today. Those two men engaged in a personal feud that nearly ripped apart the nation. Washington was more general than politician-he was useful as a figurehead, since military leaders have been generally revered in American history. Jefferson was the real core of the revolution. Jefferson, by the way, HATED to give speeches, preferring to deliver a written State of the Union paper to Congress via courier. That tradition was maintained until FDR, who realized that a spoken SotU would be widely broadcast on radio, and FDR was the master of radio.

I'm an anarchist too-I wonder if it's common for aspies to be anarchists? Aspies here like Ron Paul, and Paul is practically anarchist himself. Communism has always been about authoritarian rule. In fact, a Russian named Mikhail Bakunin said that Marx's inchoate "fixes" for capitalism would result in dictatorship, and cast himself out of the House of Marx and declared that the state would never go away on its own, but needed to be wiped out in one blow. Bakunin's ideas eventually became anarchism. But the English Enlightenment thinkers were heading in that direction in the mid 18th century. As for Mao, he was an Asian Lenin, a guy who simply wanted to lord it over others as revenge for being rejected by society.

I personally am fascinated by Pol Pot, not because he killed craploads of people but because he recognized that eventually technological society will collapse and he tried to speed it up. There is a whole subset of anarchists who argue for returning to the hunter-gatherer age, or maybe simple ranching and agriculture. In a world that can't feed itself-a sixth of Americans regularly go hungry, in the world's richest nation-the concept has appeal. It would involve the death of billions, yes, but in my mind it's inevitable anyway. The numbers of hungry are increasing by 100 MILLION A YEAR! I think we've reached the carrying capacity of the planet, and any further monkeying with the food supply is more harmful than beneficial. The benefit to Ron Paul's ideas is that America would quit trying to hold back this inevitable correction. Yes, it would be nasty. But humanity would be better off in the end.

Hmn. . . Fascinating and informative.

Myself I would classify Jefferson as a reformist. . .


Also. . . response to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism ?

One of several currents of anarchist thought. Since anarchists are, by definition, lacking central leadership, there are about a half-dozen different strains of anarchism floating around, from primitivist anarchism, whose adherents want to return to a hunter-gatherer society or a society with no more than crude ranching and agriculture, to the communists and syndicalists, who are most like regular Leninists and the 1960s New Left, to anarcho-capitalists who believe in unfettered free markets. I tend to come down more on the side of free markets and private property with the typical small town social network taking the place of government. I do think that huge cities are unsustainable in the long run (a hundred years or longer) and that eventually people will return to small town living. Small towns can be oppressive, especially if the people in charge are arrogant or closed minded, but humans can apply what we learned from urbanization-openness and tolerance-and apply it to small towns. You don't NEED cities to be tolerant.

"Communism has always been about authoritarian rule."

I guess I'm mostly curious about the apparent contradiction between this and the existence of anarchist communism.


I'm more or less an anarcho-syndicalist.

Right, it must also be recognized that the connection to anarchism that an-caps have is rather tenuous. One can plausibly connect individualist anarchists and market economics together to get an-caps as some anarchists believe to be plausible, however, others reject the notion. That said, I would put my money on cities simply because they allow for more variety and opportunity, and can allow for activities with bigger economies of scale, and can be more efficient in terms of resource use(public transportation, taller buildings, etc)

It's basically the difference between those who followed Lenin and those who followed American radicals such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, both of who called themselves anarchists and who were still close enough to communism to be more similar than different. Communism was rather nebulous in many ways until the First Russian Revolution, then Lenin wrenched it drastically towards totalitarianism. Since he was the first Communist national leader, everybody followed him, including Stalin and the Asian communists such as Mao, Kim Il Sung, and Pol Pot.

Latin American Communism was a direct result of Russian meddling in the area to counteract American influence. It was basically post-Stalinism with some local flavor mixed in. The New Left in the US was a good chunk of Latino communism, some Asian traditional beliefs, some Russian influence, and some stuff that was just plain weird at the time. Hillary Clinton at one point espoused beliefs similar to those found among the Khmer Rouge. The New Left had a special hatred for soldiers and police. This was likely unique in communism. The communism that exists in modern America is a degraded form of New Leftism.

The an-caps are closer to the militia movement than to the anarchist mainstream, which is why I prefer to call myself a "free market anarchist" because I'm not an an-cap or a communist type anarchist.

As for cities, I'm reminded of Buckminster Fuller's idea that something grows until it gets too big, then it ceases to exist or be viable, or gets smaller. Modern cities certainly qualify. Maybe we'll always have cities, but they won't be 20 million people strong. "City" is relative anyway-a million people was big during the Industrial Age. Various mining camps in Old West Nevada had around 25-30,000 people during their peaks, and that was considered huge in the desert. Virginia City had a population of 25,000 in 1870, and Goldfield in 1908 is estimated to have held 30,000 people, by far the largest city in Nevada at the time, albeit a tent city. In 1940 Nevada's biggest city was Reno with around 20,000 people. In 1900, San Francisco had 450,000 people, by far the largest city west of the Mississippi. I think it was tenth or eleventh in the nation. In 1787, the nation's biggest city was Philadelphia with 30,000 people. See? It's all relative.

American cities have sprawled out so much that the Census Bureau talks of "consolidated metropolitan statistical areas" now, instead of cities. New York has around 20 million, Los Angeles around 16 million. If you count "Southern California" as one huge city, then it has maybe 35 million people, which would make it possibly the planet's largest urban area, or at least in the top five. (The Census Bureau counts Los Angeles and San Diego as separate entities. San Francisco is counted separate from San Jose, which is lumped in with Monterey Bay and the Salinas Valley. No, it doesn't make sense.)

Well, is there really a difference? By an-cap, I am essentially lumping together all free-market anarchist movements, including the agorists and such.


It is all relative. I do not think that cities have a reason to get smaller though other than perhaps a love of suburbs that white people express, and usually these suburbs are less healthy than the cities.

Ok? I am not that surprised. If anything to me, the better move is to consolidate the areas and fit more population in smaller geographic areas.

There comes a time when every minority has to take a stand and I feel the time is coming...

We do have to remember that many of our fellow aspies have no idea they are on the autism spectrum, yet - official diagnostic criteria 1994. So may be a little while before we are fully formed, we may even end up as the majority a movemnet is already forming and I am sure leaders will come and go.....

Anarchism as an alternative to order and sanity? No thanks, mon.

No. Just...no. Lenin was NOT the be-all and end-all of communist theory. Secondly, Lenin was not totalitarian. While his position was for life, during his tenure, the workers' councils embodied the will of the proletariat. Totalitarianism in the USSR didn't come about until Stalin, when it became a degenerated workers' state.

Well, he was not really opposed to terror as a tool of imposing his will and supported secret police, and he was a state socialist and thus wanted economic control over the nation(ok, so, he is pragmatic enough to implement the NEP, so what?), so I mean, if you combine those 2, then it seems that he was a totalitarian. Certainly Lenin was not the end all of communist theory, but then what shall we describe as communist theory? The ideal utopia that Marx pointed to but never gave instruction to achieve, instead leaving his work to historical inevitability? We do need a non-nebulous concept.

On the subject of non-nebulous concepts...how about Hoxhaism? Titoism? Trotskyism, council communism, Luxemburgism...you know, just some examples.

Yes, Lenin was unwavering in his positions. He supported the Cheka because his country was a new concept to the world, its security needed to be ensured. The Red Terror was in retaliation for Kaplan's attack on Lenin and Uritsky's assassination. I'm not about to endorse Lenin's policies, but to say future socialist leaders took after him is simply untrue. They took after Stalin.

Ah, yes, the slew of various ideologies associated with communism, but which ultimately have less prominence than the Leninist variants that have been found in major areas claiming the system. Perhaps more than I have will to remember, but certainly a bunch of competing concepts, each with various adherents detracting from adherents of other variants is hardly non-nebulous, and I doubt that any group could say with finality which one is the real communism just as no anarchist can say what true anarchism is, so both end up being nebulous(and yes, I know there is anarcho-communism too to make things more exciting). This term, "communism" is also often invoked with the notion of it's perfection as well, so therefore the real communism will be the working one, the only thing is that none of them have had any great proof of real-world functionality. So, still, we have a nebulous concept.

Well, they certainly did not completely repudiate him. Not only that, but Stalin was not taken up ideologically by non-USSR countries so much as Lenin was. They do not usually call it Stalinist Maoist so much as Leninist Maoist.

I'll only end up getting very irritated if this debate continues...I'd like to end it here, if I may.