To answer your hypothetical, I want to break it into two implicit parts. The first is a critique that decentralization doesnt address segregation and the long history of racial oppression. You’re absolutely right! Decentralization of the economy was a demand taken up by people who had been craftsmen and commoners and were watching themselves get pushed into monopolistic economic arrangements like factory production and tenant farming. In this context, decentralization made a lot of sense! In the same regard, the hyper-centralization of the economy proposed by the Soviet Union was designed to, and successfully facilitated, rapid industrialization. We saw similar centralization and intensification of state power happen in capitalist developing countries like Singapore, Taiwan and Occupied Korea. To this day, most housing in Taiwan is state owned and leased by the occupants.

Segregation and white supremacy are related, intertwined but seperate issues from industrialization and inclosure. They require different responses. You point out that just communizing the south without addressing Segregation would be deeply problematic. I agree! Its trying to solve a problem of the long 20th century with tools of the 17th through 19th centuries!

But where we possibly disagree and definitely have a difference in emphasis is the best way to solve the problem of Segregation. You ask “is it authoritarian to march on the south?” And I would reply by saying that it depends on how you do it. Is there a way to do it that garners mass participation from the oppressed? I think there is.

When Lincoln announced that any slave who fought for the union army would be freed, slaves freed themselves en masse, and left the plantations without labor. Imagine how history could have played out if the North had said “all former plantation land is yours, go claim your 40 acres and the government will grant you the deed.” You would have seen land reform in the US from the bottom-up!

Compare this to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which was also, clearly just. It was between a socialist party with developmentalist and democratic aspirations in power vs warlords and monarchists. There was a right and a wrong side. But they didn’t have a mass base. There were no peasants ready to seize the farms, no workers ready to seize the factories. That was a just but authoritarian invasion (since we’ve insisted on using an imprecise and emotionally loaded word).

And once the workers have the factories and the peasants have the land and the baristas have the roastaries the question of administration becomes incredibly important and lines between dictatorship and democracy become more clear cut. Once we invade the south, who controls the land and in what manner? If we have Federated communes, who are their constituencies‐‐are they segregated? Do they include former bosses? Do they include the disabled?

These questions are where we need anarchism as a guiding moral beacon to say “no, Trotsky should not have ended elections in the Red Army” or “yes, the Bundists should have been given their autonomous zone”

I’m gonna say ahead of time that I’ve written a lot and I want you to read it in a spirit of good faith, I think you have some important points and they’re worth thinking through. I dont want you to become an anarchist again, but I do want you to seriously think through what I’m going to put forward and use the questions it poses to inform your leninism.

I’ve had this conversation a lot, where marxists (rightly) point out the need for unity in action, discipline to maintain that unity, and some level of centralization. The problem is that a lot of them swing from “no centralization ever” to “lets forget the anarchist critique of centralization and top down politics.” I think you can have both, and, MLs have created some of the best examples.

Israel has a central, legitimate body which does colonialism the legal way and uses vigilantes to expand its power while maintaining plausible deniability. This is a great framework for revolutionaries! Have a legitimate above ground organization “workers for a democratic economy” and a decentralized underground that can expand its mission without ever tarnishing the reputation of the above ground org. Many groups do this, with the Phillipine communist movement being the one that probably the most USians have organized with directly. Decentralization and centralization are tactics that make sense in different contexts.

What I’d argue is that how we do centralization is very important and needs to be informed by the anarchist critique. There’s a huge difference between a leadership body of elected, re-callable delegates and a leadership body which selects new members through an internal process. In the labor context, you can think about United Electrical vs UFCW for an example of each, respectively. They’re both centralized orgs that will punish their members for crossing picket lines and try to generate internal unity during the peaks of struggle, but one is deeply democratic and the other is a dictatorship.

But UE wasn’t founded by anarchists! Its most important early organizers were Communist Party members taking orders from the top down with almost 0 internal democracy! And yet they created the most democratic union in the CIO.

If the American labor movement had done what the Russian and Spanish labor movements did in the early 20th century and seized the economy, what kind of situation would have been produced by United Electrical seizing the economy vs What kind of situation would have been produced by UFCW or the Steelworkers doing the same?

If you think that matters, then you agree with the central argument of anarchism, you just have quibbles around implementation. Honestly, as our revolutionary movement matures anarchists will look more like MLs and MLs more like anarchists–the revolutionary movements of the future will not look like the revolutionary movements of the past.