is this bait
I hope it isn’t sectarianism to say that I’m pretty sure Anarchists of today are not advocating for the small kingdoms and land barons of 220 BC Europe, but trying to build Anarchism based on the foundations of today.
It is not sectarian and this post is bad but the discussion and comments are good so I’m leaving it up for now.
Fair enough!
I should clarify, your statement is not sectarianism, the post itself is shitty bait. What we should be talking about is the very real issue of Marxists tending to view social progression as a linear thing when it very much is not.
Oh no worries, I got what you were saying.
Ancient Germanic and Celtic tribes, famous for having no unjustifiable social hierarchies
Is this a joke? I thought anarchists were in agreement that anarchy is more than just statelessness. You may as well have posted a picture of Somalia c. 2010
Small kingdoms ruled over by petty hereditary rulers
Two grey sections are explicitly labeled as kingdoms.
The gauls technically weren’t a kingdom.
Edit: ah I wasn’t looking at north Africa
anarcho-monarchists
This is a good argument with a bad example. The Mediterranean in 220 BC was definitely not anarchist in most places, just because a society isn’t a “state” does not mean it was an anarchist society where people were free to determine the course of their own lives. If you roll this map back ~3000 years then yes, a lot of Neolithic societies were pretty close to anarchist ideals, where there were no “leaders” except for specific situations based on expertise, there was mass migration and tons of villages all with their own pottery styles and even languages mere miles from one another, a kind of veritable explosion of different ways of life all made possible by the recent spread of farming. States have only been around for roughly 5,000 years or so. Humans are millions of years old.
The dice are loaded. You can’t win. Because when the skeptic says “society,” what he really means is “state,” even “nation-state.” Since no one is going to produce an example of an anarchist state—that would be a contradiction in terms—what we’re really being asked for is an example of a modern nation-state with the government somehow plucked away: a situation in which the government of Canada, to take a random example, has been overthrown, or for some reason abolished itself, and no new one has taken its place but instead all former Canadian citizens begin to organize themselves into libertarian collectives. Obviously this would never be allowed to happen. In the past, whenever it even looked like it might—here, the Paris commune and Spanish civil war are excellent examples—the politicians running pretty much every state in the vicinity have been willing to put their differences on hold until those trying to bring such a situation about had been rounded up and shot.
I think this is somewhat overblown. Aside from the regrettable instance of the Spanish Civil War Communists have generally supported Anarchist revolts, even if they’ve had (usually proto) states, as long as it isn’t happening to them.
Lenin thought the Anarchists were not ready and supported the revolt anyway. Mao, in what should be famous but isn’t, was a strong supporter of the ill-fated KPAM, the largest and longest lasting Anarchist experiment ever, and supplied it as much as possible. Refugees from its destruction fled to the CPC and had their hands in developing large sections of Maoist doctrine. The Great Leap Forward, in particular, tried to incorporate many anarchist ideas.
Aside from the regrettable instance of the Spanish Civil War Communists have generally supported Anarchist revolts
Care to elaborate on the Spanish Civil War? Afaik, USSR was the only state to sell weapons to the antifascists
Just, the whole May Days shitfest…Stalin should have openly supported the CNT/FAI as well as the Republican government (I can understand him not wanting to back POUM) and to hell with the protests of the PF government in France. The Anarchists should probably have been a bit more compromising especially about military integration.
Stalin should have openly supported the CNT/FAI as well as the Republican government
I guess Stalin should’ve deployed Soviet armor and airforces to help fight Spanish fascism, maybe even send Soviet armaments and training cadres.
Wait no he actually did that.
The actual blame, yet again, rests on France and England chosing “neutrality” while the Italian and German fascists were running hog wild in Spain before Soviet intervention.
There can be arguments made that there could’ve been more done by the Soviets, if we ignore historical conditions that the Soviets faced a very real possibility of a two-front war against the Japanese imperialists in Asia and the German-Italian fascists in Europe thus having to prepare for such events, yet insofar as I’ve seen the Soviets did the best they could in the limited capacity that they could afford.
I’m not talking about the material support which was good and cool and I am in fact more sympathetic to Stalin in this.
But I think he does open himself to critique on his support of the USPC’s position of compromise with bourgeois Republican forces and their political position of not establishing a DOtP and, more damningly, rolling back the collectivisation established by the CCMA before it’s dissolution.
It is my opinion that this lack of left unity fatally weakened Republican forces on a key front and moreover robbed us of a Western European Socialist experiment.
There were good reasons for these actions, but in hindsight, I feel left unity would have been more productive.
