I must say I’m impressed at your level of engagement and I admire how much thought you’ve put into this, I truly did not expect it, and although I don’t agree with all of your criticisms completely I do agree that it’s a biased presentation and I don’t take all of its information at face value either.

I’ve dug into some of its claims as I read it, and some things were truer than I expected and others were interpretations of the truth, but I never found anything that made me feel the author was being dishonest with the reader on purpose. Though some things lack adequate justification or are matters of opinion stated more assertively than they should be, I don’t think the author is trying to lie to me anymore than you could say they are lying to themselves.

I consider it a very interesting and eye opening resource with many reality-rooted ideas of how things could work and how they have worked, but to your point it’s not convincing enough that this is the right way or the only way. However, my goal in sharing it wasn’t to convince you of all of that but instead to try to give you a better idea of how anarchism might work at scale and dispel the notion that an anarchist society would not be capable of providing basic needs for its people, I hope you can see how that could be possible even if you reject some of the more modern and larger scale examples as “not really anarchism.” There are other contemporary “not really anarchism” areas like the region of the Zapatistas and Rojava in Syrian Kurdistan that are of interest to me as well.

I disagree with some of your criticisms, for instance although I can recognize that civil rights have been progressing over the decades under Liberalism I can point to very many examples of backsliding and ongoing systemic issues that are just as harmful to marginalized people of today as they were when the mask was off. Through a certain lens you might think that we have more black slaves today under the legalized slavery of the prison labor system in the United States than we did under the slave trade, but granted that’s “more equal” in that it’s not limited to black people and it’s also a function of population growth.

Any concessions towards equality from the ruling class have these kinds of asterisks and those rights vanish as quickly as they appear under a system of rule. I agree with the author that the only truly equal society that’s possible would be one that actively resists any form of oppression (including economic oppression) and violence-backed authority and by definition that begins to take the shape of socialism, communism, and anarchism. Just as you point to KPAM and say its characteristics were a result of benevolent (debatable perhaps) rule by a warlord, I feel the same about any egalitarian progress today under Liberal capitalism, and that power apparatus is a short distance away from becoming fascist and undoing all of that progress. That used to feel like hyperbole, but feels all too real now.

Thank you for the engaging conversation. I don’t think we disagree as much as I thought we might, nor do we completely agree, but I’m glad we had an open minded conversation. I’m not a devout and completely convinced anarchist but I’m definitely an anti-capitalist and anarchism feels like a good target to push towards from our current state, maybe along the way we’ll find a better stopping point or a point of diminishing returns, but that’s the direction I would like to see us taking from here.