As an anarchist who lives in a middle class neighborhood with a whole foods I shop at using my tech industry salary, these indigenous Mayans are a bunch of fucking posers if you ask me.
Wow nothing in the wiki about their failure to compete in the space race, I'm going to edit that in myself.
I think the problem is more the inclusion of these things in the wikipedia article rather than the fact they exist right
First, China does not export revolution;
Would be a lot cooler if it did tbh
If they're not exporting revolution, that means we've gotta import it. I imagine once an official revolutionary movement exists in the west, certain media or government elements in China would offer support provided we're on the ground putting the work in
I think you would have to be pretty successful already for the Chinese to take interest. I'm sure after you did a successful revolution they'd be willing to help but I doubt you'd see any material support until then
China needs to fix it's revolution import-export balance. Currently the CIA is importing too much.
I think Xi is just telling us that he isn't going to do all the work for us and we need to get things started in the imperial core before he can even think about helping
If we can get :amerikkka: to start balkanizing, I'm pretty sure he'd change his tune a bit
imagine the response if China openly funded a separatist communist insurgency in an imperial core nation. Half a million NATO troops on the ground in seconds.
not leftists because they eat meat
A loud minority of this site genuinely believes that.
Throwback to when mentioning that you drink milk got you ten replies calling you a rapist
Sssshhhhh - the radlib pmc soy fiends who won't eat the bugs will hear you!
"C'mon Marcos! You gotta try it at least *once*" :speech-r::cmnd-marcos-pog: :stalin-smokin:
I think the way Zapatistas didn't let me bribe them to let me create an OSHA Exclusion Zone to open salt mines with imported slaves was pretty authoritarian.
Why don’t zapatistas simply just vote for communism like responsible citizens smh my head
This is like when someone who's never written a line of code tries to tell me how to do programming.
Bit random, but the one major takeaway I took from the Zapatistas is, that actually declaring war leads to the state having to engage with you as a belligerent, which limits their options somewhat, ironically. If you're just doing an autonomous zone, or whatever, they have less legal hurdles to gas, beat and arrest everyone, than when you're starting a war. Though, of course, you still have to be prepared for war, lol - but it's much more straight forward this way
Just to add, though it's been a while so take my vague recollections for what they are, but: The Mexican state was forced to acknowledge and negotiate (when they previously had refused) only because of some long-standing international war treaty that obliges member states to open negotiations with belligerent war parties - something a state wouldn't ever consider with, let's say, a random group of activists of whatever color (usually, they simply pretend to listen, never negotiate on even ground - because the ground isn't even). The way I see it, the initial declaration of war serves as a milestone of both internal coherence and legitimization towards larger governmental bodies. This in turn forces these bodies to negotiate, which further legitimizes the belligerent faction.
But also, never forget how they organized in secret for about a decade before ever making that declaration of war.
If you’re just doing an autonomous zone, or whatever, they have less legal hurdles to gas, beat and arrest everyone, than when you’re starting a war.
When you've established a front-line and secured territory, you force the state government to spend real blood and treasure trying to reclaim it. In a country plagued by Tory-Disease, where every kind of public spending is :haram: and libertarian-conservatives would much rather balkinize the superstate into a dozen different Bitcoin plantations - a la El Salvador or Honduras - the ideological schism that creates can paralyze the state response.
US Native Peoples who have tried to do Zapatista-tier shit have not faired as well, by contrast, because the American neolib/neocon groups that run the country are perfectly okay just doing human wave attacks of General Custards and scorched earth marches a la Sherman with their unlimited money supply.
But Americans don't really want any Custards or Shermans in south of their own border. So Latin American governments aligned with the US always have to do their campaigns on a strict budget and at the expense of their own financial constituencies.
What the Zapatistas really have going for them is the handcuffs Americans have put on the Mexican government to keep Mexico from ever becoming a serious military threat. Its the same advantage left-leaning groups in Europe, Africa, and central Asia enjoyed in the wake of WW2. No allied military can ever be allowed to challenge US hegemony (else you end up with some jumped up Qaddafi or Hussein) so doing a straight-up insurrection inside that country can kinda-sorta work simply because the state government is never allowed to be strong enough to deal with you and then pivot.
Yeah, I think there are many, very specific factors that led to this strategy working out for the Zapatistas, which aren't easily found everywhere else, especially the imperial core. For one, they found themselves on the periphery, being a historically barely developed part at the edge of Mexico. But other than location, the timing of it all was also immensely important, I think. Being in the organized position to actually be able to formally capture territory and declare a war on the day that NAFTA came into effect - which meant land privatizations of small parcel communal farmland, effectively threatening the local way of life - was most crucial. And I'm not sure how long NAFTA has been in the talks, especially around that area, but I figure it was, if even, barely an idea on the horizon when the Zapatistas started organizing, forming indigenous decision making bodies and building military power as a guerilla group. They've always been organizing for indigenous liberation, and when the colonial state apparatus at the behest of empire tried to reach for the commons once more, they were ready to actually do something about it.
imagine criticizing the zapatistas instead of wishing them the best and supporting the product of their labor.
Zapatistas: ''we don't fit into the modern traditional socialist definition"
still getting shit on by no grass touching mfs
I think it could be classified as such, but I think they self-describe as an indigenous movement first and foremost. I've read some things from them that essentially ask why they'd frame their struggle in terms of political philosophies that originated in Europe.
I don't know how representative that is of their mentality, though, and while I get it to an extent I think if you re-invent the wheel it's OK to call it a wheel. Although it's not really re-inventing anarchism or socialism so much as it's returning to certain pre-Columbian indigenous governing practices, some of which influenced European political ideas that developed into anarchism and socialism? But then those didn't have to exist in the face of repression by a modern capitalist state. I guess maybe it's best to understand all this context without digging in a bunch on this?
I’ve read some things from them that essentially ask why they’d frame their struggle in terms of political philosophies that originated in Europe.
Racialising materialism is ridiculous.
"Why should the Chinese frame their struggle in terms of political philosophies that originated in Europe" is an equally ridiculous thing to say. Materialism is materialism and throwing it away because a german thought of it instead of any indigenous people in mexico really grinds me the wrong way.
It's like saying gravity is European therefore we don't use the theory of gravity because we don't see why we should believe in anything a euro thought up. The origin is literally irrelevant.
By all means adjust the revolutionary theory to the local conditions, revolutionary theory must always be unique to local conditions and makes complete sense... But rejecting marx because he's european is purely racial bullshit.
I have a different perspective on this. I think it's pretty clear from Subcomandante Marcos' history that he has a good understanding of Marxism. It's not like the Zapatistas as an organization aren't built out of fundamentally Marxist notions of labor and commodity production. Given the huge amount of indigenous ways of knowing that inform the actual regular people that make the movement exist, why not frame the conversation more around the synthetic indigenous thought than strictly in terms of Western-centric European Marxists? I don't think that's the same as saying that European political philosophy is useless by merit of its whiteness.
The natural sciences are plenty eurocentric too (look up Kitasato Shibasaburo, or Bose, or many others who were denied credit for their work) but social science is even moreso
Using Marx and admitting he is a very important person is okay, and so is doing communism without reading or specifically caring about Marx, but seriously insinuating that "communism was invented by Marx" is utterly moronic regardless of who does it imo. But so is hating Marx
It reminds me a lot of permaculture and homesteading stuff, where everything you'll find on the internet is credited to 2 or 3 anglos from 1985, which it's fine that they did good stuff and ima let you finish, but also this was the de facto mode of farming for 99% of humanity before European capitalists took over--it's them that reinvented the wheel
Yeah, that part I disagree with for the reasons you stated, but it's good context to have on the movement. It's been a while since I read it, so it may have been more "this is an indigenous movement first and whatever else second," too.
