Remove if against rules but need to be brought up. Admin of db0 seems to think everyone to the left of the db0 instance is out to kill/murder them. Then for some reason does more massive rants against cowbee.
Idk if should be in different comm but with this and their support of angry quoka user getting worrying
EZLN can’t be considered anarchist either. They explicitly said they weren’t anarchist and that saying they were endangered their project entirely as it could divide them, further evidence of that is shown in the fact that they reorganised in a way I think can only be described as soviet-style organising due to losing territory to cartels. They have reorganised into something that is clearly a hierarchy.
Yes 100%. The successful anarchist projects used these structures or were pushed into using these structures to survive.
Perhaps, we can only speculate and there’s no way any anarchists will agree entertain the idea unless they’re already sympathetically ML-aligned and likely to slide back and forth between anarchism and MLism anyway. I am one such person. I am ML but deeply sympathetic to criticisms of hierarchy and, in particular, anarchist community building feels very good to be part of, it feels right, I’ve been part of several such communities. The problem is that it does not defend itself well at all.
Hook me up to a blood pressure monitor and then claim that MAREZ is anarchist and refer to it as “Chiapas” or “The Zapatistas” and watch those numbers climb lol. There’s something about referring to a primarily indigenous political movement by their location rather than their chosen name that really gives the same vibes as a colonial era Brit on safari referring to “the natives” or some subspecies of animal; it’s almost like invalidating the legitimacy of their polity by not respecting it enough to call it by its name.
I think you and I are working along similar lines here. In many respects I’d love to still be an anarchist but your political position isn’t a sports team where you can just pick out the one you favor the most. This isn’t intended to sound facetious but I’d genuinely love for anarchism to prove me wrong but, until that day comes, I think there are fundamental flaws in how anarchism analyzes the world, how it prioritizes its political goals, and how it functions in terms of organizing and defending itself.
MLism isn’t without flaws or valid criticisms but it has an answer for big questions/problems that emerge in most anarchist models like how do you navigate working alongside people who aren’t deeply political and who aren’t open to being politicized to a high degree - think of your average middle aged mom and pop who love their grandkids and enjoy gardening but they just aren’t ever going to engage with theory deeply enough to develop into the model anarchists capable of achieving full political self-actualization, or however you want to describe it. In terms of politics, they are going to be followers, essentially, and that’s okay - a movement should be able to accommodate that without expecting them to be at every organizing meeting and to engage with hundreds of hours worth of theory reading.
In terms of the general population, all of us here (regardless of political orientation) would be in the top 1% for political engagement and that’s not to flatter us but rather to point out that we can invite others to become more political and we can educate/agitate/organize to develop the political consciousness of people but it’s naive to expect that everyone can and/or will reach this level. And, let’s be honest with ourselves, it’s hard enough to get this particular demographic to do the reading (I’m very much guilty of this myself btw so I’m not pointing the finger at others, I’m just being realistic) so I don’t think it’s a viable strategy to expect that the median person in terms of political development and engagement would fare better. But let’s presume that it is, as a thought experiment - what so we need to do create the conditions for that median person to achieve a high degree of politicization?
Imo we would need to do away with capitalism and colonialism, we obviously would need to have a revolution to achieve that, we would need to defend the revolution, we would need to fundamentally change how work functions so that they have enough free time for their political development, and we might just need to wait until we are a couple of generations on from that person because culture changes slowly and often people get very set in their ways that makes it very hard to get them to budge.
And how do you achieve all of that in a practical sense? For me MLism has a viable, practical answer. I don’t see most anarchist tendencies having one though. To oversimplify, there’s a chicken-and-egg problem that MLism (or vanguardism) has a solution for.
I’m sure none of what I’ve written here is news to you though.
I think some anarchists recognise that it is easier to radicalise, agitate and politicise people under capitalism than it is under socialism and this leads them to believing that socialism is a greater enemy to their project than capitalism because it’s easier to grow anarchist numbers under it.
That’s a really interesting perspective and it’s a very dialectical take on something that I haven’t considered before. I’m gonna need to turn this over in my mind.
To add, there’s also anarchists that believe that socialism is good, just not good enough, and thus advocate for anarcho-pacifism within socialism and standard violent revolutionary anarchism within capitalism, including critical support for socialist revolution if that pans out. We can see the latter in practice with the red anarchists in the Russian Civil War that joined the red army.
Definitely. I know that likewise, personally, if shit was kicking off and it was being led by anarchists while the communist movements were languishing or being counterrevolutionary then I wouldn’t hesitate to throw my support behind the anarchists.
I don’t care about my position being vindicated or having “my team” win; stopping the rising tide of fascism and overthrowing capitalism are so much more important to me than ideological distinctions.
Ideologies are toolkits and what matters is the goal. The specific toolkit used to achieve that is not very important so long as the goal is achieved.
Agreed.