Hey now the RoK has legitimacy from being formed by the collaborators with the former ruling imperial power(Japan)
Taipei and Pissrael got it through genociding the natives
The ROK is more of a colony of the US, Israel is a settler-colony and Taipei is a holdout from a civil war.
*insert arms for every other state*
The quest for statehood is an important part of gaining national sovereignty in an era of imperialism. Even if you support ending statehood, surely you can see the utility of worker-states like Cuba in protecting their people against the US Empire, no?
I thought Anarkiddies believed that it only requires a fervent enough belief of the Magic of Freedom to keep reactionaries within and imperialists abroad from scuttling your revolution before you even manage to round up all of the ruling class?
/S
Even if you support ending statehood, surely you can see the utility of worker-states like Cuba in protecting their people against the US Empire, no?
I do think that the Cuban government is doing good work to oppose US imperialism and even keep their local proletariat afloat (if there was ever a counterexample for my thesis that states are bad, it would be Cuba IMO), but despite its statehood, not because of it. Like just because an organization does some good things does not mean that I have no critiques about the various hierarchies and modes of domination that organization simultaneously imposes upon its people. Like my support for Cuba is critical support for exactly this reason.
but despite its statehood, not because of it.
Dismantling statehood, including the orgs that keep Cuba alive like the Cuban revolutionary armed forces, is exactly what the US wants them to do. Your proposals are the exact same as the US, their primary enemies who want to see them fall. Not dodging the state-department anarchist label very well.
Like my support for Cuba is critical support for exactly this reason.
Must be very important to Cuba to have the support of western anarchists.
Dismantling statehood, including the orgs that keep Cuba alive like the Cuban revolutionary armed forces, is exactly what the US wants them to do. Your proposals are the exact same as the US, their primary enemies who want to see them fall.
No it’s not.
wants far more than merely dismantling the centralized state.
wants total, complete, permanent submission, to rape the Cubans for their wealth, perpetual enslavement and genocide. I advocate decentralization so that the Cuban people have the best chance of defending themselves from these exact US demands. And I absolutely do not want Cuba to disarm at all; I want to see them stay armed and able to defend themselves against the
oppressors. But that doesn’t mean I have to turn a blind eye to all the other forms of domination and non-horizontalness that the Cuban state, as a state, allows to develop.Must be very important to Cuba to have the support of western anarchists.
… Are you insinuating I shouldn’t support liberation for the Cuban people from
imperialism, uncritically for the people of Cuba and critically for the state that lords over them? Like why are you trying to make an enemy to the Cuban people out of me? Seems like a silly move on your part.Not capitulating to your bullshit-ass campist framing. Thought you fucking knew better.
Anarchism has had zero historical successes, and the 20th century showed that only national liberation struggles backed by proletarian states had any success at defeating capitalist empires.
The USSR, Cuba, China, Vietnam, all defeated fascist / capitalist states not via dismantling or “decentralizing” power, but through centralizing it in the hands of workers capturing and holding state power. They all explicitly dismissed anarchism as being worthless for the uplifting of their people, and many times had to fight against anarchists who sided with the reactionaries, or advocated dismantling worker-power.
The historical ignorance and arrogance of western anarchists is truly astounding. Name me a single historical success of anarchism in defeating capitalist-imperialism. The USSR defeated nazi germany, Cuba defeated the US. How many batallions did the anarchists field in those struggles that were some of the most important events in the 20th century?
Yeah I’m just not interested in relitigating the anarchism vs. Marxism debate with you. If you’re seriously interested, check An Anarchist FAQ or consult our literature instead. This debate is over a hundred years old, and neither of us are smart or creative enough to come up with a truly novel argument that hasn’t been said a thousand times before.
The point I wanted to relitigate is the ridiculous “your proposals are the same as the US” framing, which you didn’t respond to basically at all, because you know it’s bullshit. Absolutely, there are self-styled anarchists in the West who tow State Department narratives. Same with self-styled state socialists from the West (e.g. Socialist Workers’ Party in
are fucking Zionists, Platner/AOC/Sanders enjoyers, the entire Twitter left), because liberalism is the monoculture in the West, and it is something Westerners (like myself) of any political persuasion must spend a lifetime unlearning. It’s a problem with Westerners, not necessarily anarchists. You’re being obnoxious and unhelpful when you reactively assume that every anarchist, that anarchism itself, is in line with
interests.If you wanna yell at me for being an annoying Westerner I’ll eat that, but to then cast all anarchists into that bucket is ridiculous.
I guess my question, more directly, is how you think a more loosely and decentrally organized force could stand up to such outside pressure. Historically, such organizations tend to either die off against more vertically organized groups, or adapt some degree of verticality, which happened in Spain, Makhnovschina, even the Zapatistas (which claim neither Marxism nor anarchism, to be clear). Even if your end goal was full horizontalism, do you believe that to be achievable now, against imperialism?
I guess my question, more directly, is how you think a more loosely and decentrally organized force could stand up to such outside pressure.
I do not necessarily agree that a decentrally organized force needs to be a loosely organized force.
Historically, such organizations tend to either die off against more vertically organized groups, or adapt some degree of verticality, which happened in Spain, Makhnovschina, even the Zapatistas (which claim neither Marxism nor anarchism, to be clear).
Yeah I would actually argue that those organizations’ turns towards verticality, while absolutely understandable in the moment, were part of their downfalls (except the Zapatistas so far, thank goodness). At the same time…I do not necessarily want an anarchist organization to last any longer than it needs to. Anarchy ought to be permanent, but specific organizations ought only exist as long as they’re needed. In particular, military organizations really should put bounds on their existence (e.g. to win and demobilize after specific goals).
Even if your end goal was full horizontalism, do you believe that to be achievable now, against imperialism?
Absolutely. If anything, IMO, adopting non-horizontal modes of revolutionary organization is like doing revolution on Nightmare difficulty. Because if the resulting revolution successfully repels the imperialists, we’ll have to undo all the various hierarchies that inevitably crop up from within the non-horizontal revolutionary organization. (And btw, allowing hierarchies to develop is something that anarchist groups accidentally do all the time, e.g…the Makhnovschina and CNT-FAI in Spain.)
That’s fair pushback on categorizing decentralized organization as loose. I do think my point that some level of verticality helps with coordinating that which is under them still stands, but I didn’t explicitly make that point clear.
That’s an interesting point, bringing up the adoption of verticality into anarchist organization as a factor in their downfall. I do think the Zapatistas provide an example of the positive effects, however. Anarchist organizations never seem to want to do so, but instead adopt verticality as a response to their conditions. Those conditions do not go away immediately upon adopting these new techniques, so I do not see the connection.
For example, the CNT-FAI adopted more centralized structures as they began to be pushed back and beaten. This, in my opinion, points to the effectiveness of some level of verticality, and means they ought to have pivoted to some degree of verticality earlier. I don’t see the verticality as accelerating their downfall, but too little too late, so to speak.
Mind you, verticality is not a goal, in my opinion, it’s just something neutral that can either help or hinder depending on implementation. I see class as the primary problem, not hierarchy, and therefore intra-class hierarchy as not inherently an issue. That doesn’t mean polytechnical education, advanced political education, and more to bring people up to higher levels of participation and flexibility within a future communist system won’t be critically important, and that these measures won’t reduce unnecessary hierarchies. It does, however, mean that I don’t view hierarchy itself as bad.
The point I’m getting at is that anarchist groups don’t necessarily form hierarchies by accident, but as a concession out of necessity. I give them a bit more credit, that these were conscious, pragmatic decisions to boost effectiveness. I think this is further cemented by the fact that, whether you believe them to be genuinely liberating or only partially so, it has generally been the groups more open to vertical elements to organizing that have lasted at scale, in the face of coordinated imperialists.
I suppose, in the end, that’s always going to be the uncrossable bridge between Marxism and anarchism, the question of class vs. hierarchy.
Either way, thanks for the insight!
Bro said “give me all the bias”
Famously, support for US neocolonies isn’t biased at all: just common sense
That’s also biased.
Israel
You don’t really need bias to come to these conclusions.
That’s not how the legitimacy of a state works. A state doesn’t become illegitimate because of war crimes.
when does it then, in your opinion?
Legitimacy is in my opinion just a concept that has been invented by a ruling power to disenfranchise a secessionist state. It stems from the feudalistic times when the legitimacy of a heir was crucial. Rivaling nobles both claiming to be the heir. That’s where legitimacy originally came from.
This concept has persevered through time, somehow, even though nobles are a thing of the past. The only metric that can somewhat measure legitimacy is whether the citizens inside are in favor of the state as such, as they usually form the state. However, even this does not decide legitimacy. Even a dictator-state with a population that hates him can have legitimacy. Purely because that state exercises real power over a region and its legitimacy isn’t contested by other states.
Let me take North Korea as an example. It started out as a people’s revolution, at the time you would say that North Korea would be legitimate in that sense. South Korea has legitimacy as it was the state that controlled the region up until that revolution. If we lived in a perfect world, the revolution would have been completely succesful and the legimitacy would have fully transfered from ROK to DPRK. However, we dont. Both hold some form of legitimacy, ROK as the original ruling state, and DPRK as the people’s preference at time of the revolution. Currently, ROK, too, has some legitimacy coming from its population, since it transfered from a dictatorship to a democracy, increasing its popularity among the population.
So my view is that both can be legitimate in different ways. Then it comes down to who de facto rules the land. Other countries recognize whoever they prefer geopolitically. But picking a side is inherently biased and ignores and discards the legitimacy of the rival state. Only people led by propaganda will pick a side.
Other factors include genocide, historical claims, ethnic differences, religious differences etc etc
What, exactly, do you think happened to all the people over which the ROK (in effect NATO) extended it’s authority after the armstice who disagreed with the apparent legitimacy? Do you not believe that there was and has been strife between the new state and its populance since the armstice? Are you not aware that the entire armed forces of the ROK are dirrctly under the US’s command? Will absolutely nothing except external condemnation make a state illegitimate to you? Who does it take to legitimize the struggle of the people within ROK for you?
What I said is that legitimacy is just a term used to disenfranchise rivaling states. States claim legitimacy, even though such a thing does not exist. Legitimacy was a thing from the nobles, when a child could be a legitimate heir or not.
The only real thing in existence is force. There are all kinds of reasons to claim legitimacy (all the factors I mentioned), but none of them decide legitimacy in essence, since legitimacy is not a thing.
ROK claimed legitimacy due to it being the state that had control in the region at first. But a reason to claim they were not legitimate was the fact the populace didn’t support them. Both of these arguments are valid. None of them decide anything, because the world doesn’t work that way. The only thing that matters is that ROK controlled the land at that time, the countries that recognized ROK supported them, but that the populace didn’t support them at the time. Those are the facts that should be taken at face value. Of course its claims legitimacy. And of course DPRK challenged that legitimacy by arguing it did have the support of the people, however, it had to fight for control over the region, which was partly successful, and some countries recognized them. The facts were as they were, both claimed legitimacy, both had valid reasons to do so.
All the other countries or ideologies picked a side on the matter which was most beneficial to them and that is that. I just don’t see the value as an individual to pick a side on the question of legitimacy. Looking at the measurable facts is much more useful.
Both my citations occurred before these territories claimed independence. In fact, these periods preceded efforts to retake the old territory.
Not unlike the American Confederacy or the South of Vietnam, two territories we’ve got no problem acknowledging as illegitimate.
Explain what you think the word bias means and why its presence should be disqualifying
Bias means being opinionated/having preconceptions on a topic. I never said it was disqualifying. I just pointed out that he had a lot of bias on a lot of these geopolitical issues in a humorous way.
Most (slightly knowledgeable) people are more nuanced than that, that’s why it stood out.
And then you came along and said “I believe the US State Department.”
I know which opinion I find to be far more questionable.
Not at all. People love making assumptions here.
I believe reality is very nuanced.
