- cross-posted to:
- anarchism@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- anarchism@lemmy.ml
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How do you “become ungovernable together, render state violence unenforceable” against a government with huge amounts of police, prisons, and military infrastructure? Or is it just a case of “no more bourgeoisie” after you stop paying taxes, stop working, and stop rent payments? I hope those questions don’t come across as snide.
Thanks for the laugh
Reminds me of how Marxists-Leninist want to reach communism (aka class-less society).
That’s the difference between Marxist-Leninists and Anarchists in a nutshell. Marxist-Leninists focus on creating tangible material gains for the people, and we openly admit that we don’t have all the answers. We do what we can, we see what works and what doesn’t and try to improve going forward.
Nobody has been able to create a stateless and classless society so far, and some people have the intellectual honesty to admit that we don’t have all the answers. Then we have people like you, who provide no workable solutions, and continue to attack those who are making tangible improvements for lives of billions.
Stop playing along is a part (!) of the the becoming ungovernable indeed. It involves a lot of flexible asymmetric tactics that can not be found in a 150 year old book.
That isn’t very specific.
It can’t be. Context is key.
Any 150 year old book that gives ideas or at least an outline of how to overthrow the ruling class, is more valuable in my opinion than your meme, or your response that you can’t elaborate on how to reach that goal.
Along with 150 years of stunning success based on this approach.
Yeah, tell me about the stunning success of the USSR… or that of the CPC that switched back to Capitalism after starving millions to death.
If you can’t learn from your mistakes and just blame others for your failures you are not a “stunning success”.
I’m very thankful that I grew up in USSR, and it was a stunning success while it was around. The fact that it ultimately fell does not negate all of its achievements while it existed.
Russia went from a backwards agrarian society where people traveled by horse and carriage to being the first in space in the span of 40 years. Russia showed incredible growth after the revolution that surpassed the rest of the world:
- https://wid.world/document/soviets-oligarchs-inequality-property-russia-1905-2016/
- https://wid.world/document/appendix-soviets-oligarchs-inequality-property-russia-1905-2016-wid-world-working-paper-201710/
USSR provided free education to all citizens resulting in literacy rising from 33% to 99.9%:
- http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/PubEdUSSR.htm
- http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/anglosov.htm
- http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0000/000013/001300eo.pdf
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez
USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960’s, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Soviet_Union
- https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB5054/index1.html
Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 period while having better nutrition:
USSR moved from 58.5-hour work weeks to 41.6 hour work weeks (-0.36 h/yr) between 1913 and 1960:
USSR averaged 22 days of paid leave in 1986 while USA averaged 7.6 in 1996:
- https://www.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/1994/94B09_66_englp2.pdf
- https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs.t05.htm
In 1987, people in the USSR could retire with pension at 55 (female) and 60 (male) while receiving 50% of their wages at a at minimum. Meanwhile, in USA the average retirement age was 62-67 and the average (not median) retiree household in the USA could expect $48k/yr which comes out to 65% of the 74k average (not median) household income in 2016:
- https://www.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/1994/94B09_66_englp2.pdf
- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/could-you-get-by-on-the-average-americans-retirement-income/
GDP took off after socialism was established and then collapsed with the reintroduction of capitalism:
The Soviet Union had the highest physician/patient ratio in the world. USSR had 42 doctors per 10,000 population compared to 24 in Denmark and Sweden, and 19 in US:
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http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0735675784900482 (sci-hub for access)
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USSR defeated a smallpox epidemic in a matter of 19 days https://www.rbth.com/history/331857-how-ussr-defeated-black-smallpox
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The Social Consequences of Soviet Immunization Policies https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1997-812-03g-Hoch.pdf
Professor of Economic History, Robert C. Allen, concludes in his study without the 1917 revolution is directly responsible for rapid growth that made the achievements listed above possilbe:
Study demonstrating the steady increase in quality of life during the Soviet period (including under Stalin). Includes the fact that Soviet life expectancy grew faster than any other nation recorded at the time:
A large study using world bank data analyzing the quality of life in Capitalist vs Socialist countries and finds overwhelmingly at similar levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life:
This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development.
I am no socialist, but I am surprised to agree that the Soviet Union actually did something positive. Literacy did rise to 99% from some low number. That is to their credit.
Nice copypasta… but yeah a lot of hard working people tried their best to make the USSR work, just for the vanguard party to gamble it all away after turning the USSR into a petro-state in the 1970ties and failing to push through the later reforms when it all came tumbling down on them during the 1980ties with falling raw-material prices.
As I said… failing to learn from mistakes…
The implication that MLs aren’t learning from mistakes of USSR, of which there were plenty, is just projection on your part given that you cling to a 150 year old dogma that has been clearly demonstrated to be impotent in driving any real change.
If you had even a shred of intellectual honesty then you’d be able to acknowledge that USSR had plenty of amazing achievements while also being imperfect. China, Cuba, and Vietnam have learned from the mistakes of USSR and will do better going forward. Meanwhile, anarchists will continue letting their countries slide into fascism precisely.
Being ungovernable together is just a euphemism for being disorganized. Meanwhile, the state that has the monopoly on violence is highly organized. Anarchists might want to ponder why militaries aren’t federalist efforts, but I guess that takes a level of introspection that would no longer make one an anarchist.
It’s not so much that the state has a monopoly on violence. It’s that for it to not have a monopoly on violence, it would mean that non-state actors would have to choose to do violence.
That’s not an easy choice to make, is it? History is filled with accounts of crazies who chose violence but who chose it because they like the idea of violence more than for any other reason… and they ended up monsters. It’s admirable that people would not want to become that.
When is violence justified? Against whom? How can you safeguard things so that the even initially justifiable violence doesn’t go too far, spin out of control? More importantly, possibly, is what you do after your violence succeeds… you’ve built up this paramilitary force to perform the violence, they’ve won, and now they’re de facto in charge. You end up with goons running the show, because you needed goons to beat the other guy. You might be a goon yourself. That’s nearly always bad. You almost need some separate organization afterward, of civilians, to take over. How do you keep it separate during the struggle?
It might be more accurate to say that the state doesn’t so much have a monopoly on violence as that it’s just the only group out there sociopathic enough to want to use it.
I have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that the USSR had amazing achievements despite being later run down to ruin by a corrupt homegrown elite.
Meanwhile, it’s either ignorant or utterly disingenuous to claim that CPC switched back to capitalism. So, lets’ correct some of your nonsense here.
All the core economy in China is publicly owned, and this accounts for around half of the overall economy. Far from switching to back to capitalism, CPC allows some capitalism in special economic zones. Arguing that this makes China capitalist is akin to arguing that Canada is communist because we have free healthcare here.
On top of this, China has lots of cooperative ownership with huge companies like Huawei being cooperatively owned. Meanwhile, workers enjoy high degree of participation in the decision making process.
And of course we can see that work in China is being directed towards common benefit as clearly evidenced by the fact that China is the only place in the world where any meaningful poverty reduction is happening.
It’s disingenuous to claim that China isn’t capitalist when the majority of its productive population lives in or near the “special economic zones” by now (aka the large cities in the south) and by far the most of it’s GDP comes from capitalist ventures (this includes Huawei).
Yes it retained some pockets of socialism in the rural country side and their capital city to keep up appearances.
I’ll repeat this fact once again since your reading comprehension is evidently lacking: all the core economy in China is publicly owned and state owned enterprises account for half the economy. And you’re now arguing against cooperative ownership as well here?
Yes it retained some pockets of socialism in the rural country side and their capital city to keep up appearances.
Some pockets being half the economy. You show an amazing lack of intellectual honesty bud.
You do know that state-monopolist capitalism exists and is practiced in many countries, not only China?
Is it really necessary to post these kind of “memes”? All it does is get people feel superior, or feel upset, depending if they have the “correct” belief. Reddit is already full of this crap, so why bring it here? This is exactly what I was talking about in my discussion yesterday with @yogthos.
If you want to discuss about anarchism and communism, by all means go ahead. But it should be based on actual arguments, and with the goal of better understanding each other, not creating pointless drama.
ML states are pretty much the only places that the west hasn’t managed to colonize. USSR, China, Vietnam, and Cuba lifted countless people out of horrific conditions and provided them with food, housing, healthcare, education, and jobs. Anarchists are glibly dismissive of that because they never had to experience conditions that colonized people exist in themselves.
There’s a good reason why anarchism is only popular within the imperial core where anarchists reap the benefits of imperialism. Millions of people are subjected to incredible amounts of suffering to support western anarchist lifestyles, but that’s of no concern for people like @poVoq@lemmy.ml who have nice comfortable lives built on the backs of the developing world. It’s no wonder that these people see no rush to change things.
The only mental gymnastics happening here are the ones necessary to rationalize the fact that anarchists failed to achieve any tangible victories against capitalism in over a century. It’s quite telling that anarchists spend all their time denouncing existing socialist projects instead of enacting any meaningful change in their own countries.
Anarchists of Lemmy strong!
@yogthos@lemmy.ml take a blunt, chill. Anarchism is a failure for thinking democracy isn’t easily manipulated through the majority’s identitary purpose. Communism failed by putting a single leader in charge.
Syndicalism, the true worker’s freedom. Green Syndicalism smokes blunt the true Earth’s freedom.
Communism has liberated and continues to liberate people from the yoke of western oppression across the globe. That’s hardly a failure just because it’s not everyone’s preferred form of society.
Any real freedom requires capitalism to first be overthrown, and if people don’t like communist approach for doing that then the onus is on them to come up with a workable alternative. Our planet is literally dying, and we only have a few decades left to prevent the worst case scenarios which include our own extinction. Smoking blunts and making community gardens isn’t going to cut it I’m afraid.
Not going to classify myself as communist or non communist or whatever, but just wanted to mention we may not even have a few decades
Yeah, it’s pretty scary to watch just how rapidly the climate is unraveling.
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