she didn't even publish "The Russian Revolution" and supported Lenin and his revolution, and lets no forget that it was written before she undertook her own revolution, thus before she had to actually face running it
what was the last successful "anti authoritarian" revolution then? How will counter revolutionaries within and without be dealt with in a non"authoritarian" way? Authoritarianism may be an evil buts its a necessary one
If AMLO decided that the Zapatistas existing was a threat to Mexican Capital he could crush them in one day. They are allowed to exist, they're not "liberated".
I mean yeah. We are powerless. They could kill every single one of us tonight and it wouldn't even make the news. I would never say we were successful at liberating literally anyone.
I suppose part of my point is that we exist in a sort of equilibrium, where the state and its capitalist analogs do not simply smother us- out of a combination of a) not recognizing us as a threat, and b) not being willing to casually slaughter its own citizens. And there are both ideological and material components of both a and b.
This might sound liberal, but we have an ability to build things up from the individual and small-collective level, and our personal choices can point in a revolutionary direction. We are stuck in hegemonic liberalism (which is not going to change any time soon), and as such our survival is largely connected to staying in the good graces of liberals, of maintaining a position such that in a cost-benefit analysis, it wouldn't make sense to kill us off.
We can make noise about what foreign countries are "advancing socialism" all we like, and it's not going to do anything more than make the target on us less blurry. We can form unions and party structures (which are good, although capitalist institutions in this country have 80+ years of success in getting the better of them), and potentially accrue big victories but also become a choicier target to crack down on. We can go full insurrectionary and get totally merked. Or, we can build anti-capitalist ways of living in ways that are not ostentatious, but directly secure most of the means of production of decent lives organically, and in a way that will allow us to resist climate change, attract people, and maybe even start a PPW from.
I am sympathetic to all of these but I favor the latter.
Vietnam isn't inside US territory, it's across an ocean lol, not quite the same thing as a region inside Mexico.
Vietnam was the underdog but they still had at least some form of weaponry and an actual army (as well as aid from USSR and China), Zapatistas have a population of 360K people and no real military equipment.
This is true but it has nothing to do with the Zapatistas. Cartels are the only force that breaks that monopoly on violence. Honestly a cartel could probably eradicate the EZLN
Al Qaeda literally had weapons and money from the CIA laying around when they became "enemies" of the US, and continued to receive funding from Saudi billionaires with seemingly limitless wealth. Also, they are willing to kill 100 innocents to kill one infidel. Zapatistas have ancient bolt-action rifles and make their money selling $60 bags of coffee to white liberals. They are allowed to exist by the Mexican state.
The zapatistas are to be admired yes, but have they actually expanded out of Chiapas? Not denying that they are doing very important things, but they can't even get out of a single province. Now imagine running the biggest country in the world
Iran literally executes people in public daily. When western backed protestors were rioting, they used live rounds on them. How in the fuck is Iran not "authoritarian" lol
idk if they could be considered "civil" considering that the Supreme leader and the Parliament have considerable power compared to other countries plus they are a right wing theocracy who should only be supported due to their anti imperialism
If Rosa would have succeeded, how much freedom could she have given the fascists, the restaurative monarchists and the tradcaths in Germany, or the industrial magnates whose assets she was about to expropriate and who could've picked from a giant pool of reactionary WW1 vets to be hired as mercenaries? While her state would've been seen as at least as much of a threat by the US and UK as they saw in the Soviet Union? At a time where the reaction in Germany brought machine guns to protests and signs saying "if you pass here, you'll be shot"? As she said herself, die Revolution wird so gewaltsam, wie es die herrschende Klasse nötig macht. The revolution will be as violent as the ruling class makes it necessary. This is the ruling class that funded and enabled Hitler. How much violence would they have made necessary in this case?
We're not talking about stable and pacified societies here. They are necessarily something else than that if they have conditions that enable a socialist revolution. In societies about to be gripped by revolution, defining freedom as the freedom of the people who'd murder you gets you fucking murdered.
Sure, once you've got a socialism going and it's reasonably safe from outside threats, things look different. It's a good discussion to have how to ensure that the structures that were necessary to bring about revolution and make it succeed don't become too entrenched, too overreaching for a society that is not at war with itself anymore and not under constant threat from hostile outside powers dominated by bourgeoise class interests who want to destroy you. But a socialist society to which that applies is as much a hypothetical as a parallel universe in which Luxemburg and Liebknecht overthrew the bourgeoise state. It is something that has never applied to any existing socialist project so far. So we'd also have to deal with the question how to get to that point, and i'm not saying that to pile more burden of proof onto you, i'm saying that because it's at least as important as the question when and how to cut back the power of the party.
If Rosa would have succeeded, how much freedom could she have given the fascists, the restaurative monarchists and the tradcaths in Germany, or the industrial magnates whose assets she was about to expropriate
Any of these is just as easy to assassinate as an anti-capitalist.
Centralized decision-making has its weaknesses and bottlenecks, no matter what ideology it's in service to. In contrast, you can't reliably take down a hive just by killing the "queen".
That's why I tried to allude to bees instead of ants.
Entomology gang can into relevant! Reality has a progressive bias, and socialist persuasions can be bolstered not just by philosophy and critical theory, but by all of the social sciences and even much of the natural sciences.
Rosa had small disagreements with Lenin on the USSR and suddenly she's an anarchist lmao, you really can track who anarchists/liberals support by if their revolution succeeded or if it failed/they died early.
Take Liebknechts name out of your username, lib.
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she had more in common with Lenin than with any "libertarian"
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she didn't even publish "The Russian Revolution" and supported Lenin and his revolution, and lets no forget that it was written before she undertook her own revolution, thus before she had to actually face running it
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what was the last successful "anti authoritarian" revolution then? How will counter revolutionaries within and without be dealt with in a non"authoritarian" way? Authoritarianism may be an evil buts its a necessary one
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If AMLO decided that the Zapatistas existing was a threat to Mexican Capital he could crush them in one day. They are allowed to exist, they're not "liberated".
You could say that about a lot of communists in the West too.
Each of us are "allowed to exist", our organizations are "allowed to exist".
I mean yeah. We are powerless. They could kill every single one of us tonight and it wouldn't even make the news. I would never say we were successful at liberating literally anyone.
I suppose part of my point is that we exist in a sort of equilibrium, where the state and its capitalist analogs do not simply smother us- out of a combination of a) not recognizing us as a threat, and b) not being willing to casually slaughter its own citizens. And there are both ideological and material components of both a and b.
This might sound liberal, but we have an ability to build things up from the individual and small-collective level, and our personal choices can point in a revolutionary direction. We are stuck in hegemonic liberalism (which is not going to change any time soon), and as such our survival is largely connected to staying in the good graces of liberals, of maintaining a position such that in a cost-benefit analysis, it wouldn't make sense to kill us off.
We can make noise about what foreign countries are "advancing socialism" all we like, and it's not going to do anything more than make the target on us less blurry. We can form unions and party structures (which are good, although capitalist institutions in this country have 80+ years of success in getting the better of them), and potentially accrue big victories but also become a choicier target to crack down on. We can go full insurrectionary and get totally merked. Or, we can build anti-capitalist ways of living in ways that are not ostentatious, but directly secure most of the means of production of decent lives organically, and in a way that will allow us to resist climate change, attract people, and maybe even start a PPW from.
I am sympathetic to all of these but I favor the latter.
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Mexico has planes with bombs, they could obliterate the Zapatistas
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Vietnam isn't inside US territory, it's across an ocean lol, not quite the same thing as a region inside Mexico.
Vietnam was the underdog but they still had at least some form of weaponry and an actual army (as well as aid from USSR and China), Zapatistas have a population of 360K people and no real military equipment.
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This is true but it has nothing to do with the Zapatistas. Cartels are the only force that breaks that monopoly on violence. Honestly a cartel could probably eradicate the EZLN
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Lol vietnam was a country of dozens of millions of people being armed and funded by a global superpower.
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Al Qaeda literally had weapons and money from the CIA laying around when they became "enemies" of the US, and continued to receive funding from Saudi billionaires with seemingly limitless wealth. Also, they are willing to kill 100 innocents to kill one infidel. Zapatistas have ancient bolt-action rifles and make their money selling $60 bags of coffee to white liberals. They are allowed to exist by the Mexican state.
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The zapatistas are to be admired yes, but have they actually expanded out of Chiapas? Not denying that they are doing very important things, but they can't even get out of a single province. Now imagine running the biggest country in the world
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Are these huge capitalist countries under attack by sanctions and sabatoeurs?
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Iran literally executes people in public daily. When western backed protestors were rioting, they used live rounds on them. How in the fuck is Iran not "authoritarian" lol
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At this point you're just being obtuse
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Lol. There is no valid argument for our against aUtHoRiTaRiAnIsM because it's not a thing
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ahh yes because communist/socialist countries were famously hindered, whats a venezuela?
let's get this back on topic, a Venezuela is when the government does things
& the more things it does, the more Venez, well, a governmental entity is
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you started talking about Iran for some reason while the discussion was on socialist countries
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idk if they could be considered "civil" considering that the Supreme leader and the Parliament have considerable power compared to other countries plus they are a right wing theocracy who should only be supported due to their anti imperialism
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fair
If Rosa would have succeeded, how much freedom could she have given the fascists, the restaurative monarchists and the tradcaths in Germany, or the industrial magnates whose assets she was about to expropriate and who could've picked from a giant pool of reactionary WW1 vets to be hired as mercenaries? While her state would've been seen as at least as much of a threat by the US and UK as they saw in the Soviet Union? At a time where the reaction in Germany brought machine guns to protests and signs saying "if you pass here, you'll be shot"? As she said herself, die Revolution wird so gewaltsam, wie es die herrschende Klasse nötig macht. The revolution will be as violent as the ruling class makes it necessary. This is the ruling class that funded and enabled Hitler. How much violence would they have made necessary in this case?
We're not talking about stable and pacified societies here. They are necessarily something else than that if they have conditions that enable a socialist revolution. In societies about to be gripped by revolution, defining freedom as the freedom of the people who'd murder you gets you fucking murdered.
Sure, once you've got a socialism going and it's reasonably safe from outside threats, things look different. It's a good discussion to have how to ensure that the structures that were necessary to bring about revolution and make it succeed don't become too entrenched, too overreaching for a society that is not at war with itself anymore and not under constant threat from hostile outside powers dominated by bourgeoise class interests who want to destroy you. But a socialist society to which that applies is as much a hypothetical as a parallel universe in which Luxemburg and Liebknecht overthrew the bourgeoise state. It is something that has never applied to any existing socialist project so far. So we'd also have to deal with the question how to get to that point, and i'm not saying that to pile more burden of proof onto you, i'm saying that because it's at least as important as the question when and how to cut back the power of the party.
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Any of these is just as easy to assassinate as an anti-capitalist.
Centralized decision-making has its weaknesses and bottlenecks, no matter what ideology it's in service to. In contrast, you can't reliably take down a hive just by killing the "queen".
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That's why I tried to allude to bees instead of ants.
Entomology gang can into relevant! Reality has a progressive bias, and socialist persuasions can be bolstered not just by philosophy and critical theory, but by all of the social sciences and even much of the natural sciences.
Rosa had small disagreements with Lenin on the USSR and suddenly she's an anarchist lmao, you really can track who anarchists/liberals support by if their revolution succeeded or if it failed/they died early.
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Make another passive aggressive edit and people will agree with you.
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Yes.
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