• impartial_fanboy [he/him]
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    4 years ago

    I’m sorry but that’s just fucking bullshit dude.

    By succeed I mean that capitalism is abolished and that socialism/communism is implemented wherever there are humans. Both are necessary and as of yet neither have occurred.

    A lot of people succeeded without recreating the same institutions.

    Except they did, just because they didn't recreate all of them does not mean that the ones they did recreate somehow don't/didn't exist. And as time has gone by, they've become more like bourgeois states not less.

    Why bother doing the Cold War if that’s true? Why kill Allende? Why terrorize Venezuela? Why kick Evo Morales out of power?

    Capitalist states compete to be hegemonic, as capitalism has developed what counts as hegemonic has grown with each successive hegemon. To the point that now it requires a state's hegemony to be global, so any competition on Earth to the hegemon's hegemony will be stopped (or attempted anyway) by that hegemon regardless of whether the competition comes from other would be aspiring capialist states or non-capitalist ones. That the US decided to do a bunch of coup's/war's in countries that didn't want to listen to it does not determine whether or not those countries were anti-capialist and not just anti-US capitalist, let alone socialist. It just means that those rebelling could not be submitted by more subtle forms of control, i.e. market discipline etc.

    But at the end of the day, there is no way forward without essentially a gigantically centrally organized apparatus telling people what to do even though they’d rather not.

    Lack of imagination is not an effective argument. The key word is 'centrally', that is where anarchists disagree with you and honestly so do many flavors of Marxists. You can call it semantics as much as you want, I can't convince you that the way systems are organized affects the behavior of those engaged in the system if you don't believe it, it's basically a truism. The other issues you raised mostly stem from the material conditions of the countries where they were implemented. States that are more materially well off tend to be less coercive because they can afford not to be (the USSR is a good example of this phenomenon in a single country). Should a revolution actually happen in the first world (especially the US) the revolutionaries would be able to implement less violent means of coercion because the material conditions afford such luxuries as long as they did not choose a model of organization that encourages excessive use of force--hence the universal conscription and such.

    What else is the idea of universal conscription except exactly that?

    A self-destructive hierarchy. Read some anarchist theory if I'm not explaining it well enough for you.

    And it ain’t what Bakunin or NJR are talking about.

    Well yeah but like I said, I don't care about them. I was trying to clear some misconceptions you had about anarchism. I'm not trying to convince you to be an anarchist, just that they might have some ideas that are useful for aspiring revolutionaries.

    I’ll let the rest of the anarchists speak for themselves.

    Fair enough.