- cross-posted to:
- lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
Their lives are blissful… free from the burden of self doubt.
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Zapatistas, PKK.
Zapatistas do not consider themselves anarchist
Only because they don’t want to label themselves or be limited to a single ideology. They want their community to evolve as it needs to in order to protect itself.
In praxis they are anarchists. You don’t need to identify as some ideology in order for it to apply to you. For example, Americans and Israelis do not usually consider themselves Nazis, but their governments operate with heavily fascist tendencies, and both nations have a long history of engaging in genocide.
See also: the Paris commune.
See also also: numerous indigenous communities around the world.
I also just finished Radical Antiquity about anarchist/anarchist-like societies in the classical period. Well worth the read, IMO.
Anarchism can work for three years in the urban centers of a small backwards European economy, before collapsing into a dictatorship that drags on for the next 40 years.
Check and Mate, liberals.
Liberalism is collapsing into fascism right now. It always has, and it always will. It is inevitable.
If we want to resist the rise of fascism, it would be good to learn from an example which was more successful at doing so than every other nation in mainland Europe, no?
How does capitalism inevitably lead to fascism?
Basically, the issue with capitalism is that the more wealth you have, the easier it is for you to make more money. And since money can be used to buy goods, services and influence, there is always a way to use money to gain more political and social power. With that political and social power, you can push society and the legal system in the direction you want to go. So you can use your wealth to gain power, and then you can use your power to change laws and society so that you can make even more wealth and power. It’s a positive feedback loop.
Obviously, though, if the billionaires and ruling class are accumulating more and more of our society’s wealth, that inevitably means that there’s less for everyone else to go around - therefore, working class people feel poorer and poorer. Meanwhile, the economy is going absolutely great for rich people, so inflation continues to go up - everything gets more expensive, but wages don’t increase. The wealthy just keep more and more of the wealth for themselves. To accumulate more and more wealth, they change the laws so that they can avoid paying taxes, so public services collapse. Politicians are lobbied to ensure that public funds are diverted away from where it is most needed - housing, healthcare, transportation, infrastructure - and instead into industries where their class interests most benefit from it, such as weapons manufacturing and extractive industries such as fossil fuels and mining.
The working class are bound to notice that their lives are getting shittier and shittier, and if that situation is left unchecked, the working class would realize that the ruling class are fucking them over, rise up, and overthrow their rulers. Obviously, the ruling class need to do something about this, but there’s no solution that the ruling class can offer. They’re causing all of the problems, to fix them they’d have to give up some of their wealth and power - and that’s not something they’re going to do. So they need to find someone else to blame the problems we have in society on. Unfortunately, though, no matter who they blame the problems on, and no matter what they do to “fix” it, the issue will continue to persist, because the material conditions underlying the issues are, very intentionally, never addressed.
So, the conundrum returns: The ruling class said that minority A caused all of the problems, minority A is persecuted and oppressed, but society doesn’t actually get any better. Either the problem wasn’t minority A, or minority A just hasn’t been oppressed enough yet. So the ruling class can either escalate the oppression, or they can shift the focus to another minority group. The division continues to escalate in terms of how vitriolic and extreme it is, and it also continues to divide the working class into smaller and smaller groups.
To get the working class to buy into this hateful message, they need to take advantage of our worst instincts, and one of those instincts is the in-group bias. The majority are manipulated into being suspicious, then intolerant, then hateful, then violent, then genocidal, towards whatever the targeted minority of the day is. Anything that can be used to divide the working class - sexuality, nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender identity, age, all of these will be used as wedges to keep the working class split apart and not working together, because they know that if the working class actually unite against them, they are completely and truly fucked.
That’s exactly how fascism manifests. It’s because it’s possible for people to accumulate power through wealth. This is why capitalism must be abolished. If we do not abolish capitalism, fascism will always return. It’s just a matter of time.
But can't capitalism can be reformed?
While, of course, some laws to reform capitalism can be passed, and would definitely alleviate the worst harm caused, over the long term, capitalism cannot be reformed.
Any attempts to reform, democratize or socialize capitalism may yield short term improvements to quality of life of the working class, but if capitalism is not abolished, it will always reassert itself, and capitalism inevitably leads towards fascism.
The New Deal prevented the US from sliding into fascism in the 20th century, so that’s ultimately a good thing, but it did not go far enough, and that’s why we have the resurgence of fascism in the 21st century America.
Liberalism is collapsing into fascism right now. It always has, and it always will. It is inevitable.
No shortage of historical touchstones to support this theory.
If we want to resist the rise of fascism, it would be good to learn from an example which was more successful at doing so than every other nation in mainland Europe, no?
Tito’s Yugoslavia?
Socialism can work for 35 years in the urban centers of a small backwards European economy, before collapsing into a genocidal civil war and splitting into multiple smaller backwards European states.
Check and Mate, anarchists.
Cuba has lasted longer than 35 years. And it isn’t European
And most of the eastern european socialist states fell without any civil war or violence
That’s not true at all. Federal leadership changed (nominally) democratically.
Then the police violence against leftist parties was nearly universal.
Oh, you’re a socialist? I don’t care enough to argue with you, I thought you were a liberal. Carry on!
Oh, you’re a socialist?
I’m a historian.
If all you care about is winning, your best odds are siding with the American imperialists. Liberals rule the world, one way or another, and have for centuries.
If you want an enduring experiment in left politics, you’d be safer with Lenin, Mao, Kim, Castro, Chavez, or Mandela.
But anarchism is far more radical of a political theory. It isn’t stable. It hasn’t produced a long track record of success. It doesn’t have a formula you can apply with any degree of confidence.
Maybe it can work. Maybe we’re just not forward thinking enough. But we’re not there yet.
Trying to argue for anarchism based on Spain in '36 is like pointing to the Branch Davidians in Waco as proof of the success of theocracy.
If all you care about is winning, your best odds are siding with the American imperialists.
You’re the worst historian I’ve ever heard of.
It isn’t stable. It hasn’t produced a long track record of success.
A “historian” unfamiliar with the Zapatistas, an anarchist group with over 300,000 people living under it, remaining stable in a very unstable environment for decades.
You’re the worst historian I’ve ever heard of.
The Zapatistas aren’t running Mexico. They’re barely even running their own little corner of Mexico
You may be a terrible historian, but you’ve got a bright future as groundskeeper, with the expertise you’ve demonstrated in moving goalposts.
They’re barely even running their own little corner of Mexico
You might want to work on denying reality, though, that’s really only effective in very limited career paths.
Zapatistas always rejected the anarchist label to my knowledge. Extremely cool and good, and I am glad anarchists take so much inspiration from it…but that movement doesn’t/didn’t spring from the European political theory of anarchism the way that the anarchist elements of the Paris commune or Spanish civil war did!
It’s definitely a counter example to a claim I don’t think that guy was making (he didn’t say “the only anticapitalist projects with longevity are Marxist Leninist ones” ).
Zapatistas always rejected the anarchist label to my knowledge.
They do the classic anarchist thing of being like, “we don’t need to put a label on it, we are who we are and do what we do”, despite clearly and evidently being organized around anarchist principles.
It’s definitely a counter example to a claim I don’t think that guy was making
He literally claimed that trusting marxist-leninist leaders would be “safer” than organizing by anarchist principles.
As anarchist as I am, I have to say…
To be fair, Spain is not currently anarchist. So I’m not sure we can really say that this ‘worked’.
Most people mean ‘worked’ as in ‘functioned on a basic level’ rather than ‘survived outside military pressure’, though. When they say “Anarchism doesn’t work”, they generally mean “Anarchism, as a socio-economic system, is inherently non-functional” rather than “Anarchism can be destroyed, or has never lasted against outside forces.”
In such a cutthroat (and often outright evil) world, though, it needs to be able to last against outside forces in order to work.
The outside forces will never stop, so unless we find a way to overcome them, lasting anarchism will never be achieved.
I mean, I agree, that’s just not the angle most people are attacking from when they say “Anarchism can never work”
[anti-anarchist purges ensue, resulting in the victory of the literal fucking fascists]
“Phew! At least we stopped those dangerous anarchists from functioning!” - People Who Use Terms Like ‘Anarkiddie’ Seriously, Probably
