TLDR: Statists measure success based on the state, so in order to convince them that anarchism us successful we would need to stop being anarchists.
"For anarchists who do know something about anthropology, the arguments are all too familiar. A typical exchange goes something like this:
Skeptic: Well, I might take this whole anarchism idea more seriously if you could give me some reason to think it would work. Can you name me a single viable example of a society which has existed without a government?
Anarchist: Sure. There have been thousands. I could name a dozen just off the top of my head: the Bororo, the Baining, the Onondaga, the Wintu, the Ema, the Tallensi, the Vezo…
Skeptic: But those are all a bunch of primitives! I’m talking about anarchism in a modern, technological society.
Anarchist: Okay, then. There have been all sorts of successful experiments: experiments with worker’s self-management, like Mondragon; economic projects based on the idea of the gift economy, like Linux; all sorts of political organizations based on consensus and direct democracy…
Skeptic: Sure, sure, but these are small, isolated examples. I’m talking about whole societies.
Anarchist: Well, it’s not like people haven’t tried. Look at the Paris Commune, the revolution in Republican Spain…
Skeptic: Yeah, and look what happened to those guys! They all got killed!
The dice are loaded. You can’t win. Because when the skeptic says “society,” what he really means is “state,” even “nation-state.” Since no one is going to produce an example of an anarchist state—that would be a contradiction in terms—what we’re really being asked for is an example of a modern nation-state with the government somehow plucked away: a situation in which the government of Canada, to take a random example, has been overthrown, or for some reason abolished itself, and no new one has taken its place but instead all former Canadian citizens begin to organize themselves into libertarian collectives. Obviously this would never be allowed to happen. In the past, whenever it even looked like it might—here, the Paris commune and Spanish civil war are excellent examples—the politicians running pretty much every state in the vicinity have been willing to put their differences on hold until those trying to bring such a situation about had been rounded up and shot."
i am someone who is quite convinced that socialist state building projects are the primary and most effective way of fighting capitalism and imperialism. not trying to “gotcha” but i have been curious for some time like others in the thread what the anarchist template for defending the revolution looks like.
That’s a great question! And is actually the point of the chapter this comes from. This is a brief explanation, I highly recommend checking out David Graeber’s work if you’re interested in more (he’s a very funny writer).
To start, who are we safeguarding it from? Without a state or a central authority you would need to convince every single neighborhood, workplace, household and so on that they should change. There’s no military to coup, there’s nowhere for a dictator to sit, and as for occupation, doesn’t work too well against guerilla tactics which are entirely decentralized.
Also, an anarchist revolution won’t look like a state takeover. Rather than chopping off the head and taking its place we work on hollowing out the state and replacing it with secondary support structures. Which is what we’ve been doing since the fall of Spain. We were told to sabotage the enemy and stay hidden, and we never stopped (This is called security culture, and it was adopted when black anarchism became the dominant anarchist strain after the collapse of syndicalism) Like roaches, if you start seeing anarchists then we’ve already taken over.
The other states, for example. Soviet Russia got immediately invaded by other capitalist states.
Sadly, guerilla tactics don’t work too well without outside support from industrialized states. With a firepower difference between a modern state and a decentralized collective, you don’t have much of a chance. Even in ancient times, when that difference was absent, states tended to win simply due to organizational advantage, allowing them to consistently concentrate their forces better. This was how states came to dominate to world.