how long would anarchists tolerate MLs using a state to defend the revolution[...]?
I'd be asking for a clear plan for when this state is going to be dismantled, almost from day one. Because the state will always find a way to justify itself, and it's important to make sure that it has to work for it, and that there's a critical eye towards it.
That doesn't mean every aspect of the state needs to be removed immediately, of course. "Can this piece of the state be removed sooner?" is always a valid question, but sometimes the answer really is "no."
(And of course, being a state, it will somehow find a way to put people in power who have convinced themselves that merely asking these questions is a threat to the revolution, so I'd expect this sort of agitation to get me in deep shit pretty quickly.)
defend the revolution from fascists?
While there's a great argument to be made for states protecting against other states (it is, by and large, why states are everywhere and are the way they are), I don't think there's one why a state is better at protecting against fascism internally. Fascism is a rhetorical strategy that gives an in-group control of the state apparatus by appealing to enmity against an out-group. It requires an apparatus that gives a small number of people power over a large number. That apparatus is the state itself.
The withering away of a State created after the revolution and during the dictatorship of the proletariat in marxist theory isnt a willing choice to be made by individual people or by the communist party thats in charge of it. Its a passive change that reflects and happens proportionaly to the diminishing contradictions and changes in the material needs internaly and most importantly diminishing class strugle and imperialist contraidictions worldwide. When these things dont diminish and in most cases the communist party or state cant make them diminish (like the dominant in all historical examples external/imperialist aggression and global capitalist dominance and contradictions) then the state will not wither away. If you cant point to specific points in the existance of the USSR, Cuba , NK, Vietnam , China where in your opinion the state could have withered away to the benifit of the project and its existance but didnt then you saing " the state of an Communist project can never wither way" is ahistorical and based on nothing
If you dont wanna have it in the first place then point to the the points just after any historical revolution (cuban , russian , chinese, korean ,vietnamese,) or in general of communists coming out on top where the project absence of a state would have been benifitial and survivable for the project and its development
Frankly, North Korea is a generational monarchy. I like that they don't take shit from the US, but yeah.
What has led you to believe that the state will wither away at any point, especially in China? The Communist Party creates a class within itself that is self perpetuating. It led to the fall of the Soviet Union, it will happen again.
Rojava and the Zapatistas have both been taking territory without needing a formal state now that a giant Socialist state isn't sending in troops to quash dissent.
I mean your position on NK is irrellevant and asking what i personaly think about China or the USSR is irrellevant to the question and to the argument and explenation of the existance and withering away of the state as laid out by marxism. The question was
If you cant point to specific points in the existance of the USSR, Cuba , NK, Vietnam , China where in your opinion the state could have withered away to the benifit of the project and its existance but didnt then you saing " the state of an Communist project can never wither way" is ahistorical and based on nothing
Rojava and the Zapatistas have both been taking territory without needing a formal state now that a giant Socialist state isn’t sending in troops to quash dissent.
Rojava basicaly has a state. You would be hard pressed to find people in rojava, or leftists that have visited and fought there saying they dont have a state.Being more decentralized on some matters doesnt make you not a state. Maoist China for decades was extremely decentralized by "USSR" standards.Also even tho i support it, Rojava's existance as an "independent" project also was impossible without support and on the grounds presence by the greatest capitalist and imperialist superpower on earth and the momment they left they only avoided genocide and complete collapse by the turks because Assad and the Syrian state jumbed in, with which they had to now strike a deal. Also some of their "taking territory" included occupying and helping US occupy large part of syria's breadbasket and oil field and that still only happened because of the civil war and chaos western intervention brought to Syria
What zapatistas have done in their territory is amazing as far as the structure of their society goes but its no way comparable or scalable to any historical communist project .If the US or even Mexico really gave a shit about getting rid of the Zapatistas, they’d have done so. They only have like 10k people in poorly armed militias,occuppy less than 1/20th of mexico and it being mainly jungle, they have expanded barely to more than 10% of their original size in many decades and their combined population isn’t even half a million. They’re just a relatively small amount of people living in small villages in a jungle of little geopolitical importance not really caring about industrialization or any urban development. They don’t have a lot of infrastructure (that’s kind of the point behind their rebellion, they do not WANT a lot of industrial development because it goes contrary to their way of life), they have little modern equipment, little organization in their military, and they just rely on social cohesion and Mexico not being interested enough in a large organized suppression. They were mostly left to their own devices by Mexico cause they arent a threat to neither capital or that state and even their historical clashes put together have been minascule compared to the amount of warfare,undermining and agression on every front a state like Cuba had to face. The momment global capital or just the US diverted an iota of their attention to crush the Zapatistas they would have . That doesnt mean you shouldnt support them, it means its a local project posing little threat to domestic , let alone global capital, unscallable model to even a fraction of what was needed for actual socialist revolutions and countries to survive
How can you ask for a "timetable" of a state's dismantlement when its existance according to a marxist is an unavoidable outcome of the existance of domestic class contradictions and struggle and of geopolitical and international contradictions and aggression. What "plan of when the state will be dismantled" should Lenin have given in 1918 when a fascist genocidal war that the USSR obviously wouldnt have survived and prepared for with a decentralized and semi dismantled state (let alone a USSR that attempted to be "Stateless" in the 30s) was 20 years away without anyone , including Lenin, could have guessed. What "plan on when the state is gonna be dismantled" could Cuba or North Korea give you after their revolution when even more than half a century later they still find themselves under unimaginable aggression in every level by the world's superpower and entire western capital dominion that you cannot possibly theorize how to resist it and survive against it with diminished state power, let alone statelessness.
The withering away of the State created after the revolution and during the dictatorship of the proletariat in marxist theory isnt a choice to be made by a communist party thats in charge of it. Its a passive change that reflects and happens proportionaly to the diminishing contradictions and changes in the material needs internaly and most importantly diminishing class strugle and imperialist contraidictions worldwide. When these things dont diminish and in most cases the communist party or state cant make them diminish (like the dominant in all historical examples external/imperialist aggression and global capitalist dominance and contradictions) then the state will not wither away. How many aspects of the state and at what point in the existance of the USSR, Cuba , NK, Vietnam , China in your opinion could have withered away to the benifit of the project and its existance but didnt? If you cant come up with anything solid even with historical hindsight and Lenin answered you in 1918 a perfectly valid " idk depends, could be 20 could be 200 and we maybe wont even make it that far in order for that to happen" , would that mean that the theory of the state withering away is wrong in and of itself or that marxist lenninists just want excuses for the state to stay around
I'd be asking for a clear plan for when this state is going to be dismantled, almost from day one. Because the state will always find a way to justify itself, and it's important to make sure that it has to work for it, and that there's a critical eye towards it.
That doesn't mean every aspect of the state needs to be removed immediately, of course. "Can this piece of the state be removed sooner?" is always a valid question, but sometimes the answer really is "no."
(And of course, being a state, it will somehow find a way to put people in power who have convinced themselves that merely asking these questions is a threat to the revolution, so I'd expect this sort of agitation to get me in deep shit pretty quickly.)
While there's a great argument to be made for states protecting against other states (it is, by and large, why states are everywhere and are the way they are), I don't think there's one why a state is better at protecting against fascism internally. Fascism is a rhetorical strategy that gives an in-group control of the state apparatus by appealing to enmity against an out-group. It requires an apparatus that gives a small number of people power over a large number. That apparatus is the state itself.
The state will never be willingly dismantled
As it turns out, snakes do not often eat their own tails.
The solution: a revolution for your revolution.
Unless the state is crafted to be dismantled over time by design. I think there was a srsly wrng episode about that?...
The withering away of a State created after the revolution and during the dictatorship of the proletariat in marxist theory isnt a willing choice to be made by individual people or by the communist party thats in charge of it. Its a passive change that reflects and happens proportionaly to the diminishing contradictions and changes in the material needs internaly and most importantly diminishing class strugle and imperialist contraidictions worldwide. When these things dont diminish and in most cases the communist party or state cant make them diminish (like the dominant in all historical examples external/imperialist aggression and global capitalist dominance and contradictions) then the state will not wither away. If you cant point to specific points in the existance of the USSR, Cuba , NK, Vietnam , China where in your opinion the state could have withered away to the benifit of the project and its existance but didnt then you saing " the state of an Communist project can never wither way" is ahistorical and based on nothing
If you dont wanna have it in the first place then point to the the points just after any historical revolution (cuban , russian , chinese, korean ,vietnamese,) or in general of communists coming out on top where the project absence of a state would have been benifitial and survivable for the project and its development
Frankly, North Korea is a generational monarchy. I like that they don't take shit from the US, but yeah.
What has led you to believe that the state will wither away at any point, especially in China? The Communist Party creates a class within itself that is self perpetuating. It led to the fall of the Soviet Union, it will happen again.
Rojava and the Zapatistas have both been taking territory without needing a formal state now that a giant Socialist state isn't sending in troops to quash dissent.
I mean your position on NK is irrellevant and asking what i personaly think about China or the USSR is irrellevant to the question and to the argument and explenation of the existance and withering away of the state as laid out by marxism. The question was
Rojava basicaly has a state. You would be hard pressed to find people in rojava, or leftists that have visited and fought there saying they dont have a state.Being more decentralized on some matters doesnt make you not a state. Maoist China for decades was extremely decentralized by "USSR" standards.Also even tho i support it, Rojava's existance as an "independent" project also was impossible without support and on the grounds presence by the greatest capitalist and imperialist superpower on earth and the momment they left they only avoided genocide and complete collapse by the turks because Assad and the Syrian state jumbed in, with which they had to now strike a deal. Also some of their "taking territory" included occupying and helping US occupy large part of syria's breadbasket and oil field and that still only happened because of the civil war and chaos western intervention brought to Syria
What zapatistas have done in their territory is amazing as far as the structure of their society goes but its no way comparable or scalable to any historical communist project .If the US or even Mexico really gave a shit about getting rid of the Zapatistas, they’d have done so. They only have like 10k people in poorly armed militias,occuppy less than 1/20th of mexico and it being mainly jungle, they have expanded barely to more than 10% of their original size in many decades and their combined population isn’t even half a million. They’re just a relatively small amount of people living in small villages in a jungle of little geopolitical importance not really caring about industrialization or any urban development. They don’t have a lot of infrastructure (that’s kind of the point behind their rebellion, they do not WANT a lot of industrial development because it goes contrary to their way of life), they have little modern equipment, little organization in their military, and they just rely on social cohesion and Mexico not being interested enough in a large organized suppression. They were mostly left to their own devices by Mexico cause they arent a threat to neither capital or that state and even their historical clashes put together have been minascule compared to the amount of warfare,undermining and agression on every front a state like Cuba had to face. The momment global capital or just the US diverted an iota of their attention to crush the Zapatistas they would have . That doesnt mean you shouldnt support them, it means its a local project posing little threat to domestic , let alone global capital, unscallable model to even a fraction of what was needed for actual socialist revolutions and countries to survive
How can you ask for a "timetable" of a state's dismantlement when its existance according to a marxist is an unavoidable outcome of the existance of domestic class contradictions and struggle and of geopolitical and international contradictions and aggression. What "plan of when the state will be dismantled" should Lenin have given in 1918 when a fascist genocidal war that the USSR obviously wouldnt have survived and prepared for with a decentralized and semi dismantled state (let alone a USSR that attempted to be "Stateless" in the 30s) was 20 years away without anyone , including Lenin, could have guessed. What "plan on when the state is gonna be dismantled" could Cuba or North Korea give you after their revolution when even more than half a century later they still find themselves under unimaginable aggression in every level by the world's superpower and entire western capital dominion that you cannot possibly theorize how to resist it and survive against it with diminished state power, let alone statelessness.
The withering away of the State created after the revolution and during the dictatorship of the proletariat in marxist theory isnt a choice to be made by a communist party thats in charge of it. Its a passive change that reflects and happens proportionaly to the diminishing contradictions and changes in the material needs internaly and most importantly diminishing class strugle and imperialist contraidictions worldwide. When these things dont diminish and in most cases the communist party or state cant make them diminish (like the dominant in all historical examples external/imperialist aggression and global capitalist dominance and contradictions) then the state will not wither away. How many aspects of the state and at what point in the existance of the USSR, Cuba , NK, Vietnam , China in your opinion could have withered away to the benifit of the project and its existance but didnt? If you cant come up with anything solid even with historical hindsight and Lenin answered you in 1918 a perfectly valid " idk depends, could be 20 could be 200 and we maybe wont even make it that far in order for that to happen" , would that mean that the theory of the state withering away is wrong in and of itself or that marxist lenninists just want excuses for the state to stay around