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Does anyone have any thoughts about the (seemingly?) contradiction that although Rojava's political economy was organized though autonomous local councils the organization was done by a cadre party that still practices Leninist discipline?
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Apr 27, 2020 00:51
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gradenko_2000 posted:my very novice opinion is that Rojava worked/works well enough to try to thread the needle of having a socialist project where you necessarily do not / cannot have a state of your own. yeah but it's a bit chicken and eggy - it's the best fit for stateless projects so state-level projects are few, which means there's not much to point to as an example. Still, what the Zapatistas have done in particular is impressive and I hope their very realistic approach to anarchism (mixing in syndicalism with other anarchist trends where appropriate is a great idea) grows and becomes a great case study.
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Apr 27, 2020 01:05
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Yadoppsi posted:Does anyone have any thoughts about the (seemingly?) contradiction that although Rojava's political economy was organized though autonomous local councils the organization was done by a cadre party that still practices Leninist discipline? I don't know about that, and would love to hear from someone that does. But tangentially, the Zapatistas do have a centralised part of paramilitary to respond to crises quick. The trick is that it's neutered against attacking it's own populace both by ideology and circumstance (each individual region is trained to be effective resistance in the case that happens, essentially), so they don't implement stuff that doesn't have broad approval. What's against anarchist thought is power structures not under egalitarian control; more central coordination that has that mandate from individual local units is another thing. So something like, say, a panel of experts to help coordinate the economical balance could be a component if it were useful and beholden totally to the people. Of course, anarchist thought posits very few areas require these structures, but still... e; cleaned up phrasing dex_sda fucked around with this message at 01:33 on Apr 27, 2020 |
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Apr 27, 2020 01:24
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gradenko_2000 posted:my very novice opinion is that Rojava worked/works well enough to try to thread the needle of having a socialist project where you necessarily do not / cannot have a state of your own. pretty much this. the transformation to of the PKK from communism to democratic confederalism seems like a reaction to the end of the cold war. an independent communist kurdistan seemed impossible in the foreseeable future, so they had to adapt. in Syria, also had the benefit of the Syrian government pullout early in the war. The PYD didn't really have to seize power, it took power in a vacuum.
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Apr 27, 2020 02:04
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doesn't rojava benefit from a cozy or at least nonhostile relationship with the USA because it makes it logistically easier for the USA to threaten syria in some way or other, like playing host to nearby military bases or something
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Apr 27, 2020 02:49
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Ferrinus posted:doesn't rojava benefit from a cozy or at least nonhostile relationship with the USA because it makes it logistically easier for the USA to threaten syria in some way or other, like playing host to nearby military bases or something I was being kind and referring to pre-US occupation Rojava
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Apr 27, 2020 02:55
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would rojava exist without the gulf states and turkey wrecking the syrian state
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Apr 27, 2020 03:29
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punk rebel ecks posted:Good post. whats wrong with statism. not a dig against you specifically but why do anarchists sound so similar to right wing reactionaries
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Apr 27, 2020 03:35
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Very interesting how people get all high and mighty over stanning communist leaders when a woman is in power 
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Apr 27, 2020 04:55
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punk rebel ecks posted:So what your guys's opinions on Rojava and libertarian socialism? Does is it seem like a realistic alternative to push left wing politics as an alternative to liberalism and social democracy? Pener K had a take I generally agree with. Dem confed is a strategy for a people that are unable to have a nation state of their own, such as the kurds. Not an ideal state of affairs but much better than the alternative that the Syrian government offered them. The ML prediction on rojava essentially proved true. The ypg was unable to maintain independence from Syria after the pullout of American support. As it stands they'll most likely be reabsorbed into Syria with token autonomy after the situation has settled. I think Rojava will be remembered much like the CNT and Free Territory before it, an idealistic but ultimately doomed struggle against forces it just couldn't compete with.
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Apr 27, 2020 05:51
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Dreddout posted:Pener K had a take I generally agree with. Dem confed is a strategy for a people that are unable to have a nation state of their own, such as the kurds. Not an ideal state of affairs but much better than the alternative that the Syrian government offered them. To be fair, if Rojava was run by MLs would the situation be different?
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Apr 27, 2020 05:56
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StashAugustine posted:To be fair, if Rojava was run by MLs would the situation be different? Probably not.Dem Confed was influenced by ML thought, mainly because Occalan used to be an ML. MLs have a history of using similar guerilla strategies during the cold war. You could make the argument that post long march Mao had a similar strategy, as did Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. For a more concurrent example, the Phillipines Communist Party has essentially created a parrallel state in the areas they control. Those were different historical circumstances with different material conditions obviously but the parallels are there. The syrian kurds were hosed no matter what they chose. They made some hard compromises and eventually the conditions for Rojava's independence were no longer teneable. As it stands they fought bravely for their sovereignty and socialism. Any leftist that tries to argue that they were mere puppets of the US is behaving in an extremely childish and idealistic manner imo.
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Apr 27, 2020 06:19
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mila kunis posted:whats wrong with statism. not a dig against you specifically but why do anarchists sound so similar to right wing reactionaries If you are asking me: The issue is having the state having a hand in so many industries at once is that at some point it's going to be too big to manage. Sure you can have the state controlling healthcare, large resource industry, and public transportation. However, having the state having various businesses like restaurants don't make much sense. There is only so much that a government can focus on at once and only so many people who can checked to be held accountable. I used Venezuela as an example because the government was nationalizing things for the state to control that it had no business controlling, like electronic shops and malls. Thus many of the businesses the government expropriated were inefficient and corrupt. There is also the factor in which why anarchists don't like statism. Because at the end of the day, much like private enterprise, the government is merely an entity that can be used as a tool. The more government gets used the more power it has. And while it growing in power can have strong benefits, it can very well grow to the point where it becomes difficult if not impossible to control. It will be difficult organizing strikes or other methods of civilian power against the government if the vast majority of the populace works for and purchases products from said government. I however, am not an anarchist. I'd describe myself as a type of socialist who's ideology is a mix of syndicalism, social democracy, and a bit of anarchism and Marxism all thrown in a blender. I have no problems with nationalizations and the state owning industry. In fact, I widely support the notion of "if anything is too big to fail and cannot be broken up then it should be nationalized." However, I do believe that there is a limit of just how much the government should ideally own, as well as having an economy that is a sizable split of government control industries, cooperatives, and small/medium traditional private business. punk rebel ecks fucked around with this message at 06:27 on Apr 27, 2020 |
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Apr 27, 2020 06:25
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mila kunis posted:whats wrong with statism. not a dig against you specifically but why do anarchists sound so similar to right wing reactionaries words can have multiple uses and meanings, and what concerns we have with state power come from very different backgrounds. Marx uses the word "capitalism" a lot, but you'd hardly conflate him with a capitalist just because they use the same word. As for the actual differences that's going to vary wildly from anarchist to anarchist. I call myself a political anarchist, bit I see it as more of a process to be applied where all power must be questioned and limited within my own understanding of the social systems. As such, my goal is to always be the person focused on moral concerns and critiques, the protection of the unpopular and unwanted, and to challenge both myself and my comrades to avoid recreating the old evils in the new world to be. The enemy isn't Bezos or Musk, it is the systems of control which amplifies their dumb bullshit and forces others to obey. Strip them of power and they're just two weirdos you wouldn't want to talk to at a party.
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Apr 27, 2020 07:25
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mila kunis posted:whats wrong with statism. not a dig against you specifically but why do anarchists sound so similar to right wing reactionaries it's different depending on what anarchist you are, personally I think there is a good old fashioned contradiction between having a powerful central command and a society of communal and individual empowerment, command which is what is ordinarily associated with statism. That contradiction continues to mound until it resolves - sometimes as fall, sometimes as abandonment of some of the lofty ideas. It's a concept even in more Marxist thought, as indicated by Engels, for instance - that ideally a state would wither. Anarchism just likes to start from that end goal and work from there. But that's just my take dex_sda fucked around with this message at 10:14 on Apr 27, 2020 |
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Apr 27, 2020 10:12
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dex_sda posted:it's different depending on what anarchist you are, personally I think there is a good old fashioned contradiction between having a powerful central command and a society of communal and individual empowerment, command which is what is ordinarily associated with statism. That contradiction continues to mound until it resolves - sometimes as fall, sometimes as abandonment of some of the lofty ideas. I'm gonna intervene at this point for people not to confuse the Bakunin's Young-Hegelian conception of dialectics with Marx&Engels's more orthodox Hegelian conception. The bakuninist take is basically that social contradiction is bad and effort should be taken to just resolve all of it as soon as possible, and it always is possible within a reasonable timeframe provided that human subjective consciousness is on the level of the task. The orthodox take is that contradiction is in general not resolvable: a resolution of a specific contradiction requires specific conditions that people can't necessarily produce due to limitations in either their subjective consciousness or their objective conditions. Also that trying to prematurely resolve a contradiction can work like vandalism, just destroying something with the potential to bring out something good, merely losing the potential. (That abstract theoretical difference presumably has played an actual historical role in how marxists in general have been much more conservative than anarchists when approaching newly understood social contradictions.) The marxist conception of communism ultimately accepts the contradiction between centralization and empowerment of the individual as necessary, imagining that once the state is gone and the center isn't there just to satisfy the individualities of particular classes of society at the expense of others, the relative powers of two sides of the contradiction can oscillate around a hands-down superior conceptual equilibrium point in terms of both productivity and individual freedom. Communism for them is only the step where the class contradiction has been resolved, and the beginning of a post-history with its own post-historical contradictions (history being the history of state societies, defined by the class contradiction). So the end of history is not a point where social contradiction in general is resolved and society has nowhere to advance anymore. The reason even the first marxists ridiculed anarchists is not that they didn't see the existence of the contradiction between centralization and individual empowerment but that they saw it clearly and didn't consider it something that could be overcome at least until communism itself would be at the end of the line. Materialist dialectics considers all of nature dialectical and doesn't imagine that resolving the contradictions that are behind e.g. basic natural laws is on the agenda on any meaningful timescale. Human society is just an aspect of nature with its own scientific laws that can be found and utilized to change it similarly to how you'd change chemical compounds to other chemical compounds. And also similarly to chemical compounds, it has its own meta-level gravitational pull: sort of like chemical compounds gravitate to minimize the energy they contain, human society gravitates to increase forces of production. That pull to increase forces of production is why the contradiction between centralization and empowerment of the individual is not resolvable until some social breakthrough that actually makes decentralized technology productively superior, and at that point the marxist vision of communism would be at the end of the line because it would have developed around centralization and unable to just use the new forces of production while keeping the old relations of production.
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Apr 27, 2020 11:47
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uncop posted:I'm gonna intervene at this point for people not to confuse the Bakunin's Young-Hegelian conception of dialectics with Marx&Engels's more orthodox Hegelian conception. The bakuninist take is basically that social contradiction is bad and effort should be taken to just resolve all of it as soon as possible, and it always is possible within a reasonable timeframe provided that human subjective consciousness is on the level of the task. The orthodox take is that contradiction is in general not resolvable: a resolution of a specific contradiction requires specific conditions that people can't necessarily produce due to limitations in either their subjective consciousness or their objective conditions. Also that trying to prematurely resolve a contradiction can work like vandalism, just destroying something with the potential to bring out something good, merely losing the potential. (That abstract theoretical difference presumably has played an actual historical role in how marxists in general have been much more conservative than anarchists when approaching newly understood social contradictions.) This all squares away with my understanding of it, I'd just like to highlight the point of difference in opinion: anarchists like me think this contradiction is already resolvable, and that it is advantageous to resolve it with egalitarian ideas. Indeed it may be that advances in information technology and especially communication that we're relatively recent beneficiaries of were necessary for that (to accomodate decentralized communication, and also decentralized access to learning). So it's perfectly reasonable to even agree with the first marxists that at the time the idea was utopian, but think it may begin to be workable at scale now. It may also be why we are starting to see anarchist state-like communities of bigger and bigger size. dex_sda fucked around with this message at 12:07 on Apr 27, 2020 |
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Apr 27, 2020 12:00
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dex_sda posted:This all squares away with my understanding of it, I'd just like to highlight the point of difference in opinion: anarchists like me think this contradiction is already resolvable, and that it is advantageous to resolve it with egalitarian ideas. Indeed it may be that advances in information technology and especially communication that we're relatively recent beneficiaries of were necessary for that (to accomodate decentralized communication, and also decentralized access to learning). So it's perfectly reasonable to even agree with the first marxists that at the time the idea was utopian, but think it may begin to be workable at scale now. It may also be why we are starting to see anarchist state-like communities of bigger and bigger size. Well, for now we take what we have been given by our predecessors, so there's still the extra step of doing experimental tech with new relations of production in place that enable that experimentation. In any case, centralization needs to create its own gravediggers (as in the new decentralized tech must be developed on the basis of a centralized society). You get what I mean, even though we have free and direct communication, actual existing production systems use the communication for command relations because those who do that generally fare better on the market than those who let their production facilities just communicate however they like. You would need to solve how production facilities that are commanded by no one would coordinate better than facilities that take commands. Also small correction to my previous statement: I made the gravitation of human society sound too simplistic and economistic, obviously people have always struggled to be able to produce how they like and found niches where they could do so, and the point of communism and post-history is to free humanity from those kinds of laws of history. So actually ramping down production just because that is what you want should theoretically become possible once the antagonisms that lead to more productive societies/classes conquering less productive societies/classes are gone.
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Apr 27, 2020 12:29
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uncop posted:Well, for now we take what we have been given by our predecessors, so there's still the extra step of doing experimental tech with new relations of production in place that enable that experimentation. In any case, centralization needs to create its own gravediggers (as in the new decentralized tech must be developed on the basis of a centralized society). You get what I mean, even though we have free and direct communication, actual existing production systems use the communication for command relations because those who do that generally fare better on the market than those who let their production facilities just communicate however they like. You would need to solve how production facilities that are commanded by no one would coordinate better than facilities that take commands. That's for sure, but it pays to notice that in information tech there recently has been a sort of a revolution. IT started as computers doing calculations, but now, they're networks linked together with decentralization and redundancy. Of course one must be careful of applying those abstract lessons to human society, but it's the way the world appears to be going currently. It may very well be that orthodox industry is simply lagging with the implementation of these new tools that could enhance it - and part of it might be due to capitalism preventing the processes that are necessary in a cooperative economy. (e; this might be why the zapatistas are successful: they unshackled from capitalism while embracing the way tech allows them to communicate between each other and with the wider world). I think you also understand my point of view about this. 
dex_sda fucked around with this message at 12:41 on Apr 27, 2020 |
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Apr 27, 2020 12:36
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Yadoppsi posted:Does anyone have any thoughts about the (seemingly?) contradiction that although Rojava's political economy was organized though autonomous local councils the organization was done by a cadre party that still practices Leninist discipline? I don't think MLs get to own tactics like "being organized" and "led by a tight knit group"
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Apr 27, 2020 16:20
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setting aside things like power grids and pandemic responses, you need a state to both defend yourself against other states and to prevent counterrevolution and the resumption of capitalist relations within your own society
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Apr 27, 2020 18:10
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https://twitter.com/WSWS_Updates/status/1254769149697351682
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Apr 27, 2020 19:14
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fixed 
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Apr 27, 2020 19:18
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Can't wait for all the r/stupidpol users to join SEP
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Apr 27, 2020 19:18
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dex_sda posted:That's for sure, but it pays to notice that in information tech there recently has been a sort of a revolution. IT started as computers doing calculations, but now, they're networks linked together with decentralization and redundancy. Of course one must be careful of applying those abstract lessons to human society, but it's the way the world appears to be going currently. It may very well be that orthodox industry is simply lagging with the implementation of these new tools that could enhance it - and part of it might be due to capitalism preventing the processes that are necessary in a cooperative economy. (e; this might be why the zapatistas are successful: they unshackled from capitalism while embracing the way tech allows them to communicate between each other and with the wider world). I think you also understand my point of view about this. I think it’s a vast oversimplification to call the capitalist internet of google and facebook and aws “decentralized,” but that’s as far as I can take it. cool discussion :-)
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Apr 27, 2020 19:19
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Ferrinus posted:setting aside things like power grids and pandemic responses, you need a state to both defend yourself against other states and to prevent counterrevolution and the resumption of capitalist relations within your own society That’s why I consider myself on the right-wing of the leftcom communizers. Dauve’s critique of the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, that they were doomed as soon as they reified capitalist relations by having a hierarchical chain of command strikes me as dumb. Of course, I’d be on the left wing of a state-centric revolution, so when the rev comes I’ll either be exiled from the commune or sent to the gulag by the vanguard party. So maybe don’t listen to me.
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Apr 27, 2020 19:39
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Constantly LARPing posted:That’s why I consider myself on the right-wing of the leftcom communizers. Dauve’s critique of the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, that they were doomed as soon as they reified capitalist relations by having a hierarchical chain of command strikes me as dumb. Realistically speaking the anarchists were doomed the moment the war started as were the republicans It's hard to overstate just how much of an advantage the falangist had in men, weapons, and access to foreign support. It's a credit to the popular front that they lasted as long as they did. The only way republican Spain could have survived would have been to purge the military before the war started. Once the scw kicked off a nationalist victory was fait accompli
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Apr 27, 2020 20:05
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Dreddout posted:Realistically speaking the anarchists were doomed the moment the war started as were the republicans or if FDR actually cared enough about stopping fascism to stop texaco from floating franco $texas in loans and oil
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Apr 27, 2020 20:40
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Apr 27, 2020 22:25
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCj1P3nlxlg
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Apr 27, 2020 22:27
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i, too, have never heard of the labour theory of value
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Apr 27, 2020 22:35
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finally a point of unification between the glorious green and the rebellious red: gently caress this rear end in a top hat
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Apr 27, 2020 23:02
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what a stunning take lol
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Apr 27, 2020 23:51
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incredible lol
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Apr 28, 2020 00:47
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Apr 28, 2020 01:23
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sex √(−1)
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Apr 28, 2020 02:38
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyxAJr6kc5c
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Apr 28, 2020 08:21
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Big fan of Mystery Salt Lady.
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Apr 28, 2020 13:52
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GunnerJ posted:Big fan of Mystery Salt Lady. same
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Apr 28, 2020 17:34
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