this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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Who said anarchists and their friends will not defend from outside threats? The Spanish anarchists organized and fought for 3 years against overwhelming odds when they had to.
Yeah , but ...
In Paris we fought and were massacred.
In Korea/Manchuria we fought and were massacred.
In Ukraine we fought and were massacred.
And as you say in Spain we fought, but then we were massacred.
There's more of course, but you get the idea.
Something probably should be done differently in the future.
So? How many slave revolutions did we have before it was "technically" abolished (it's still ongoing, but at least illegal in principle)? We had legal slavery for like ~6K years until it was abolished. Capitalism only exists for ~400 years and there were hundreds of failed democratic revolutions. Anarchism as a movement is barely over 150yo and no anarchist revolution happened before 100 years. Just because things don't happen overnight, or even in our lifetime, doesn't mean they're impossible.
So, yeah, looking at those examples I'd say we should try to prevent our opponets from going fascist.
If there's anything fascists are good at it's murdering lots and lots of people, so Id say we should stop them from gaining a following or try to remove their following if they already got one.
Easier said then done, but, to steal your words, doesn't mean it's impossible.
Remains to be seen if anarchism can ever win though.
Statist forces have always triumphed.
Monarchy always triumphed over democracy until it didn't. Slavery always triumphed over abolition until it didn't.
But none of those triumphs were inevitable.
It's nice to think they were: I'd rather live in a world without slavery and with democracy but there was no guarantee of success except the fact that in hindsight it was successful.
Not all forms of government have won out. Nor will all possible forms of government succeed.
Yes, but looking forward from their end, with your perspective, none of them were possible. My point is that it's fallacious to claim that just because it hasn't succeed yet, it can't succeed.
Nowhere does this preclude future victory: this is an accurate representation of the current state of affairs. Anarchy has 0 victories and it remains to be seen if there will be any.
Until 1783 Democracy had no modern victories either, and it very much remained to be seen if it would.
Make a point. Don't make me assume what your point is and then just restate random facts still without making a point.
My point is and always has been the same: we don't and can't know if Anarchism will win out against statist forces or not. All we know is that it never has.
If you're expecting a more polemic argument about Anarchism Bad or something you won't find it. I wasn't here to debate anarchism: just to add a caveat.
I mean your argument boils down to "we can't see the futurere" to which I can only answer "well duh". There's nothing there.
Now we're just waiting to see if anarchism will have that moment where they'll triumph.
Does anyone else feel like we are in a prisoner’s dilemma with this?
Every empire's days are numbered, it's not like anything is destined to be forever. I wonder how many days are left for the Zapatistas?
Past performance is no indicator of future performance. It's entirely possible that the Zapatistas cause the collapse of the Mexican government just as it's possible that they fade away into oblivion.
The luddites were annihilated and their philosophy has never been as prevalent or popular as it was in their uprising. While there's still a chance of a popular resurgence they still missed their best opportunity and were crushed by the state.
History has hundreds of suppressed revolts to every success.
That's not to say it's hopeless: just that it isn't inevitable. We'd like to believe that with enough tries you can succeed but that is a fallacy.
Also notably, the Kronstadt anarchists held a general assembly to dicsuss the question of "shall we accept Lenin's ultimatum, or fight a battle against the Red Army?" and decided democratically to fight.
(The battle was extremely bloody, anarchists lost and the Red Army won, at the cost of losing at least 5 times more people. Considerable numbers of anarchists escaped to Finland.)
In short: anarchists can use heavy artillery when needed, even if they know that war is not healthy - neither for them or the society they want.