this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
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There's a good retrospective on the mass protest movements of the 2010s called If We Burn. The main takeaway I got was that leaderlessness and horizonalism do not work.
If you don't pick your leaders, they will pick themselves.
Anarchism is the worst social order, except for all others that have been tried.
Anarchism can't defend itself. That's the point. Either it gets coopted and recuperated under capital, or it gets hijacked by reactionary forces for their own purposes.
While Marxism-Leninism gets hijacked by reactionary forces for their own purposes and gets recuperated under capital after that.
The USSR lost the Cold War, but there's plenty of ML counties still around. I'm sure you'll whine they aren't paradises, but they're all generally progressing and developing in a positive direction (when they aren't being strangled to death like Cuba)
Not a lot of anarchist spaces by comparison. There's the Zapatistas and they're pretty cool, but like, the record is pretty clear.
And before the end of the cold war, USSR was a reactionary country governed by an elite for its own interests. It's the same in China. The same in Vietnam, the same in Cuba (but at least there they have the excuse of the unjust US politics against them).
Eliminating homelessness, eliminating illiteracy, eliminating hunger, increasing life expectancies, increasing graduation rates, increasing quality of life, actually existing socialist countries accomplish incredible things (some more than others, admittedly). They're not perfect utopias, but you can't ignore the context they exist within (i.e. they're still developing countries and they exist within US global hegemony)
I'm sure you have some specific criticisms of China or Cuba or whatever, but they're doing pretty fucking good considering what they're up against.
While you keep on dreaming of utopia, I'm more concerned with defeating than US empire in the real world. Anarchism can't.
Capitalist countries did the same thing without building walls to stop their population to flee…
Not a single capitalist country has eliminated homelessness. Why is that? Why are life expectancies falling in the US?
Also, Berlin is in the middle of East Germany.
The wall was to separate what was basically an island of Western control from the rest of East Germany. It was kind of a weird political situation.
USSR “solved” homelessness putting people in prisons and psychiatric hospital… and even then there still was homeless people. Authoritarianism doesn't work.
And Berlin west was a weird political situation, but my argument still holds. People flee DPRK or China…
The US puts more people in prison than the USSR ever did, yet its homeless population is huge.
And there isn't a giant wall around China lol
Authoritarianism doesn't work, whether capitalistic or communist.
And travel is very restricted in China.
Seems to be working so far. 🙄
China's life expectancies have recently surpassed the US. Did you know that?
I mean, anarchism was the initial state, so it has been tried. It seems that it is not very resilient against being replaced by other systems, so it can't really be the best system in the real world.
Unlike the resilient anti-capitalism of Marxist states amirite.
It's almost like you need to learn and evolve from the mistakes of the past to create systems that work in the present.
For example, when white colonizers land on your shores, don't ignore them and start an escalating series of tribal wars to sell them war-slaves.
Also, maybe don't have slaves.
See? We've already improved on proto-anarchism.
Yes. And by improving and changing the system, it by definition stops being anarchism and becomes something else. Which is what I was saying.
The anarchists love to come out of the woodwork whenever democracy is having a bad day, then they disappear whenever someone mentions medicine being more of a global effort.
Yes, I'm sure an entirely fragmented world full of companies protected by privatized militias would be extremely cooperative, with the added bonus modifier of there being no borders.