Zizek says that "politics proper is thus something specifically 'European'" and that left needs to appropriate the "the true Eu- ropean legacy from ancient Greece onwards" (A Leftist Plea for Eurocentrism). Albert Camus says something similar in "The Rebel" that rebellion is essentially a modern western phenomenon. Even Marx and Engels "had supported Bismarck's war against France, and Engels had applauded the expansion of the 'bourgeois' United States into the continental southwest at the expense of the "lazy Mexicans.' Similarly, Engels jusÂtified Germany's annexation of Schleswig from Denmark as 'the right of civilisation against barbarism, progress against quiescence'"(Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship) You might just dismiss this as historic prejudice, spooks etc but I do not see any scenario in which a revolutionary movement does not in anyway appeal to the identity of proles living in the area. The fact that nationalism is an "imagined community" or that it is a fluid historic construct makes no difference. People respond to social myths not appeals to egoism or self-interests. Lenin himself said that class consciousness normally does no go beyond trade union consciousness.
Does leftpol deny that nationalism or at the very least friend-enemy distinctions will always exist and that people do not want to live in some open borders society? If you're still skeptical consider how diversity tends to lower social trust and how all the communist projects of the 20th century were in some way nationalist.
The book excerpt is from Olga A. Narkiewicz's "Marxism And The Reality Of Power 1919-1980" It's out of print.
Xavier Bennett
fuck off nationalist, I reject your spooks
Zachary Roberts
Communism can manage without Marx.
Blake Torres
How is that true? Even anarchist de facto have to establish dictatorships of the proletariat since expropriation necessitates force and revolution is inherently an authoritarian imposition of will.
Thomas Campbell
Oh boy this is gonna be a ride. Zizek is an edgy socdem at best. …fiction? Really buckoo? Have been criticized by certain Marxists and daddy mike as well. libcom.org/library/a-critique-of-the-german-social-democratic-program-bakunin Then stop being a socdem. Lenin was wrong and was trying to argue for a party of bourgeois intellectuals handing down socialism to the proletariat. If I didn't I'd be flying a rose and be in the dsa instead of rocking the strike flag and organizing my workplace and appartment building.
Communism will happen as the result of the proletariat's struggle against the bourgeoisie, not by the proletariat reading marx(ists) en masse. This idea of the movement of history comes from uncle karl's historical materialism, arguably Marx himself can be found to saying "Communism can manage without Marx". More specifically, Marx's own ideas aren't the end all be all of communism, else we'd all be still using the memefesto as a blue print and cheering when jewish niggers go broke. wew, Fredrich "slaves have it better than proles" Engles trying to dodge the arguments against hierarchy with talk of steam engines and violence being authoritarian was shit in the 19th century and is shit today. Calling violence inherently authoritarian is asinine ideology that ignores the context violence occurs, claiming a proletarian revolution and a bourgeois counter-revolution are both authoritarian because they both involve violence against class enemies is the height of absurdity akin to the modern centrists declaring everyone who isn't a pussy liberal to be real fascists. Such ideology can only be compared to that dril tweet about no difference between good and bad things.
The Rebel is Camus' political treatise Bakunin was a slavic nationalist Kropotkin discusses socialism in one country in the bread book and yet i dont see anarchist labeling him a socdem. And how have these revolts faired without leadership? Spontaneous movements like 68' in France, Occupy Wall Street. etc tend to fail. You don't have to worship everything marx wrote to realize that most successful revolutions couple intellectuals with the working class. You cant note that both revolution and counter-revolution involve violence and still be in favor of revolutionary terror like Trotsky said. It's in no way to being ambivalent to the class nature of the violence. Are we supposed to pretend that organize violence doesn't presuppose a state?
Also Bakunin famously denounced "the people's stick" i.e. it being okay for the state to use terror because it calls itself the people's/worker's state. Not something i agree with but it's ironic you cite "daddy mike" and criticize me on violence
Cameron Martinez
Damn it sure is easy to justify your particular brand of state violence when you're so myopic that you consider alternatives to also be state violence with no fundamental differences.
Ah shit got it confused with the plague. And Marx was a liberal as a younger man. Sometimes people change ideologies. Here is Bakunin a bit later in his life (same link as below)
If you can accept that socialism in one country can indeed exist there's no way this wouldn't be incorporated into the national identity of the people living there. You claimed communism will happen as a result of class struggle without proles reading marxism en masse. That hasn't been the case. Land bread and peace are pretty self-evident economic demands but beyond that without any sort of ideological guidance things don't escalate. That's the iron law of oligarchy. Not only does democracy lead that way people need masters to guide them. Not every bureaucracy will be as big as a shit show as the USSR but saying the proles must emancipate themselves is meaningless imo. >Violence itself is not authoritarian, to claim it is regardless of context is poor analysis at best and deceitful equivocation at worst. I meant to say "can." I don't view "authoritarianism" as a bad thing and neither did Engels in the text im referencing but fine. Im not talking about a street gang. Obviously in a revolutionary situation you need large scale planning and delegation. That's a state in all but name. >If you think Bakunin was opposed to violence or revolution then you're woefully misinformed Nice strawman.
Nathaniel Roberts
Camus is one of the few anarcho-syndicalists who wasn't a complete cuck, the other being Sorel
Ayden Lopez
Why? Communism hasn't happened yet, else we wouldn't be living in capitalism now. Except the worker's have often been more radical than those supposedly providing ideological guidance, as can be evidenced by the early history of the russian revolution and Allende's Chile. When I say that communism is going to be the result of struggle, I mean that it is going to be the result of proletarians responding to the conditions they find themselves in rather than embracing ideology. Materialism shouldn't be a controversial position on a socialist board. An theory constructed by a fascist with anecdotal evidence isn't particularly good. Well if you need some bourgeoisie brat to lead you fam that's your deal. And I've criticized that view in my last two posts. Authoritarianism, as in the concentration of power of an elite class, is bad because said elite class will develop interests opposed to that of the majority. In our present case this is evidenced by the bourgeoisie and their servants having interests that diverge from that of the proletariat. The conflation of authoritarianism with violence is bad because it justifies the concentration of power through equivocation, this is how you get red capitalists who think exploitation is good if you call money "labor vouchers". Going by this Amazon is a state because it possesses large scale planning and delegation. If power isn't concentrated in the hands of a few and wielded for their interests, which Anarchists and even Marx himself argued against, then it has shed one of the key components of states have had since inception and can't rightfully be called a state. Were you not implying that Bakunin's people's stick comments was opposed to revolution?
There are Catalan socialist right now who argue in favor of separatism on the grounds that they are proletarian nation cuz of the anarchist period. Canadians named the father of Medicare for All, Tommy Douglas as the greatest Canadian. There's a natural predilection to find things exceptional about your group and mythologize them. >Materialism shouldn't be a controversial position on a socialist board. If you exclude Camus and Sorel. He wasn't a fascist when he wrote the theory nor is this idea unique to him. Goes back to Plato. If you think your anarchist commune can competently direct a war by all means. Outside of small groups i dont see a world in which there is no concentration of power. Reading stuff from the likes of Enrico Malatesta about how if you fear a coup you should arm every strikes me as autistic and naive. Going by the "State And Revolution" alone a state is a public power with the power to levy taxes over a geographic location and has special armed bodies. Catalonia had all these things. Rojava has all these things. There's no situation aside in which you have a large scale rebellion in which you don't do these things. No Bakunin is autistic. The Sandinistas cracking skulls is not the same as Pinochet doing so. Even if in both cases it's a bourgeois republic doing so i don't reject state violence. He does.
I should note that Plato saying oligarchy degenerates into democracy and then into tyranny is not the same as Michels saying Democracy becomes an Oligarchy. But both agree that the internal contradictions of democracy result in a new non-democratic form.
David Cooper
Nigga are you making a human nature argument? If I'm remembering it correctly it's the reason he joined them though. It's teleological horseshit no matter who it comes from. Vulgar causality that doesn't analyze material conditions makes for a poor theory, the problem with the ilo is that it doesn't investigate why concentration of power happens, it just claims that it does because it does. Divergence of interests brought on by hierarchy explains why such concentration of power happens and provides a better solution that to give up and join Mussolini. That should be fairly self-evident. If your idea of statelessness is a loose collection of hippy villages then I can't understand why you'd ever get into communism in the first place tbh. Well that was written a century ago, but in essence he still is right. The population at large should have enough power to prevent would be rulers, whether from outside or inside, from wielding power for their own ends against the interests of society at large. Else you're just going to end up with capitalism of some sort. There's your problem, it contains the sames errors within it that Marx and Engles made by expanding state well past its historical roles and incarnations. If I'm not mistaken it was because of the arguments brought on by this use of state that Engles (late in life) recommended replacing state with the french or german word for commune, but I have to work tomorrow and don't have time to research it at this moment. At any rate the problem with the conception of state that defines it as powers exerted over a particular geographic area is that it ignores the concentration of power wielded by and for an elite class against the interests of the general population, which has been an integral component of state since at least Rome. If we are to see that negated, as it was in Catalonia, Ukraine Free Territory, and early SFSR, then it can't rightly be called a state as we understand them to function despite the existence of organized violence in a territory. Assuming we're talking about when the sandinistas were still nominally revolutionary, I not only agree but that's been my point for the last few points. Bakunin is clearly in favor of organized proletarian violence to expropriate the mop, I thought you were arguing this constituted a state?
Yes HOOMAN NATURE exists. Out-group homogeneity bias and preference for your tribe exists. Nani? He claims it's a matter of technical necessity that you have to delegate power and this creates a divergence of interests and the concentration of power Communist are notoriously vague on how exactly their stateless society looks like. Marx pretty much shrugs and so does Chomsky. The most you get is a federation of communes and syndicates with voluntary association. Do you realize that necessarily means mob rule and paranoia? There's nothing stopping the collective from marching to your house and arresting you because catgirls are counter revolutionary. I was.
Why do lefties always have to be so shitty on the national question?
Jayden Bell
Lenin said this:
Like OP saids is Marxism the height of European thought? Explicate how the orientalists and third worldists are wrong then, Marxism / Communism as we know it in the west is a fundamentally white European exclusive idea and it should stay that way, everyone else can make up their own socialisms.
Eli Russell
lol the other thread where a Zig Forums guy is asking for things to read and people are only recommending the OGs like marx lenin etc but when they say one thing off base they are DEAD AND WRONG STOP READING THEM
just lol
Lincoln Bailey
Better than the ubiquitous bible-tier "you didn't interpret it correctly" argument.
Henry Anderson
No, it just happened to originate in Europe because Europe was first to develop such analysis. It could have been developed by Kaluo Ma-xing or Sharil al-Massani and nothing would change since the analysis of capitalist relations would be fundamentally the same, much like the equations describing thermodynamics or gravity would be the same no matter where they got discovered. That's why Marx and Engels called it scientific socialism.
Carson Sanchez
The bible is a parable of metaphors. Anyone who uses sola scriptura will have a hell created for them in their own personal reality
