The Practical and Logical Impossibility of Anarchism

The flaw in the anarchists' theory is that they cannot come to terms with the fact that capitalist society is dominated and protected by those who control the machinery of government, including the armed forces.

...

When the majority of workers become socialist there will be no need for an armed uprising. Workers will withdraw their support from capitalist parties and support the socialist party so that parliament, which controls the armed forces, will be composed of socialist delegates. If some capitalists did try to organise resistance they would reveal themselves as a small minority, lacking popular support

Lol.

Much as the SPGB continue to amuse and are for the most part terribly nice people, I'm not sure this is worth keeping in the library.

You might want to tell the writer of the article that:

Socialist Party of Great Britain has never advocated direct action. We have always insisted first on the need to get control of the machinery of government.

(my emphasis)

So this is a (badly written) diatribe attacking anarchism in order to justify parliamentarian tactics, done by someone who is misrepresenting themselves as part of a political tendency that while sympathetic to some aspects of anarchism, is not in fact anything to do with anarchism.

Why is it here again?

Who are they? Why are they pretending to be the SPGB if they aren't? Why are you posting a piece which features people deliberately misrepresenting their political affiliations? In what way are they libertarian communist, given that they they have an entire section saying anarcho-communism is rubbish? Nothing you're saying here makes any sense, tbh it's starting to feel a bit..

Edit: I mean, are you saying they're libcom because they eventually want to do away with capitalism having captured the apparatus of the State through parliamentary elections?

there is more to libertarian communism than just anarchism

So it is the whole bloodless transfer through voting capitalism out of existence thing then. I'd say how sweet, but they're actually pretty narky about it in that writeup. And tbh, given our decades of experience of "captured" states and what happens next, no I'd not regard that as libertarian communism. I realise we have an impasse at this point.

They have been printing a quarterly journal since 1989, meet regularly and have a website.

This lot? So why are they wrongly claiming they are the SPGB? And why are you actively promoting work where they do so?

jondwhite do themselves no favours either here or with their comrades in the spgb by promoting this 'Socialist Studies' group who are little more than an ossified remnant of the worst aspects of the spgb's past. Neither group can claim to be libertarian communists as such even if the 'impossibilist' tradition does have a claim to be part of a wider genuinely (by libcom definition) communist tradition which has rightly allowed jondwhite justification for some other of his library postings on this site.

Here is their explanation to your questions

You shouldnt've.

No really. A quick "we had an internal spat and now there's two tiny sects calling themselves the same thing, which we make even more opaque by posting their stuff up all the time because we agree on pretty much everything anyway" would have done. It wasn't an invitation to post a massive screed about it from 2002.

God knows I'm no great expert, but really, what a load of old twaddle.

The spgb's relationship to 'libertarian communism' was given an adequate hearing previously here:
http://libcom.org/forums/theory/are-spgb-libertarian-communist-19012015 and that aspect is best left there.
This particular text submitted to the library as a download without any other explanation or comment by jondwhite does not seem justified in my opinion.

Funny thing is jondwhite started that thread.

As I said on the thread Spiky linked to -

The SPGB and libertarian communism;

This pamphlet is an absolute pile of crap -- why is it on libcom?