Their lives are blissful… free from the burden of self doubt.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Oh, you’re a socialist?

      I’m a historian.

      If all you care about is winning, your best odds are siding with the American imperialists. Liberals rule the world, one way or another, and have for centuries.

      If you want an enduring experiment in left politics, you’d be safer with Lenin, Mao, Kim, Castro, Chavez, or Mandela.

      But anarchism is far more radical of a political theory. It isn’t stable. It hasn’t produced a long track record of success. It doesn’t have a formula you can apply with any degree of confidence.

      Maybe it can work. Maybe we’re just not forward thinking enough. But we’re not there yet.

      Trying to argue for anarchism based on Spain in '36 is like pointing to the Branch Davidians in Waco as proof of the success of theocracy.

      • bearboiblake [he/him]@pawb.socialOP
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        2 days ago

        If all you care about is winning, your best odds are siding with the American imperialists.

        You’re the worst historian I’ve ever heard of.

        It isn’t stable. It hasn’t produced a long track record of success.

        A “historian” unfamiliar with the Zapatistas, an anarchist group with over 300,000 people living under it, remaining stable in a very unstable environment for decades.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          You’re the worst historian I’ve ever heard of.

          The Zapatistas aren’t running Mexico. They’re barely even running their own little corner of Mexico

        • brynden_rivers_esq@lemmy.ca
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          3 days ago

          Zapatistas always rejected the anarchist label to my knowledge. Extremely cool and good, and I am glad anarchists take so much inspiration from it…but that movement doesn’t/didn’t spring from the European political theory of anarchism the way that the anarchist elements of the Paris commune or Spanish civil war did!

          It’s definitely a counter example to a claim I don’t think that guy was making (he didn’t say “the only anticapitalist projects with longevity are Marxist Leninist ones” ).

          • bearboiblake [he/him]@pawb.socialOP
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            2 days ago

            Zapatistas always rejected the anarchist label to my knowledge.

            They do the classic anarchist thing of being like, “we don’t need to put a label on it, we are who we are and do what we do”, despite clearly and evidently being organized around anarchist principles.

            It’s definitely a counter example to a claim I don’t think that guy was making

            He literally claimed that trusting marxist-leninist leaders would be “safer” than organizing by anarchist principles.