submitted for discussion - the "woke" CIA recruiting ads

Fair enough. My point is a more aggressive, more organized version of communism routinely comes along and destroyed the anarcho versions, and has done so repeatedly over history. Whatever you want to call it. AC was stillborn in much of Asia as it fell to revolutionary forms. Pretty much every state polity that has been communist has been some form of M-L, be it Juche in North Korea, Maoism, Castroism, etc.

I don't think we disagree in principle, but if you have objections to the terms I used fine. Again, it doesn't matter what label you put on it, only the characteristics.

Oh, and who is stating that you can get to Anarcho-communism without using democratic means or violent revolution? Amaris, repeatedly. Of course, Amaris never answers exactly how that comes to pass.

Pyotr Kropotkin, often considered the father of a-c, always espoused for a sudden transformation to a fully realized post-state communism that would inevitably occur throughout the world all at once. To say it's fanciful is being merciful. It's completely inane.

What other means are even possible? Even if it's some sort of spontaneous movement from below, then that's a form of democracy.

Have to disagree there - if you don't use legal means then you are almost certainly going to run into opposition, and that will no doubt lead to violence. Amaris has stated it's impossible to change systems such as the US from within. So even if done by the majority if they reject legal means it's not democratic.

And everyone simply agreeing in overwhelming enough numbers? In a society Amaris claims is totally dominated by capitalist propaganda?

Again, Democratic Socialism is much more attainable. I have no concept of how the vision of Kropotkin as evidently espoused by modern a-c adherents could possibly work in an era of facebook algorithms and mass marketing.

Aye, there's the rub. In order for AC to work as desired, it requires a phase shift in human behavior. The standard model human is self-interested, not especially egalitarian, prone to violence, and extremely short-sighted. All of which doom not just anarcho-communism but any anarchy-based society to failure in pretty short order. To put it in simple terms, humanity is not mature enough to make such a system viable. It will always wind up generating some variety of repressive authoritarian power structure as the most ruthless decide to exploit everyone else to their own benefit.

Give it a few thousand more years of evolution and try again.

This presumes the democratic legitimacy of the existing system, rejection of which is at the very heart of the anarchist position. And yeah, you'd probably have violence, but revolutions tend to.

Agreed. I could see it theoretically happening by legal means changing the Constititution or governing articles of the respective nation, but that seems very unlikely at this moment. And, as you say, not the means which these groups feel have legitimacy in the first place.

So that leaves you with revolution, and not only are those very often violent, they often don't end up with their aims. History is replete with well-intentioned revolutionaries whose revolutions have been taken over by extremists, and even when successful almost always end up with the same corruption they were initially opposing.

I'm not quite as down on human nature as Lanz, but even when the majority is well meaning, which has often been the case in these revolutions, they often are compromised by the worst among them. It's not that people are bad per se, it's that organized evil routinely beats disorganized good.

Tragedy of the commons plays a significant role as well.