this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
1229 points (98.5% liked)
Microblog Memes
6015 readers
3543 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There's a good retrospective on the mass protest movements of the 2010s called If We Burn. The main takeaway I got was that leaderlessness and horizonalism do not work.
If you don't pick your leaders, they will pick themselves.
Anarchism is the worst social order, except for all others that have been tried.
Anarchism can't defend itself. That's the point. Either it gets coopted and recuperated under capital, or it gets hijacked by reactionary forces for their own purposes.
While Marxism-Leninism gets hijacked by reactionary forces for their own purposes and gets recuperated under capital after that.
The USSR lost the Cold War, but there's plenty of ML counties still around. I'm sure you'll whine they aren't paradises, but they're all generally progressing and developing in a positive direction (when they aren't being strangled to death like Cuba)
Not a lot of anarchist spaces by comparison. There's the Zapatistas and they're pretty cool, but like, the record is pretty clear.
And before the end of the cold war, USSR was a reactionary country governed by an elite for its own interests. It's the same in China. The same in Vietnam, the same in Cuba (but at least there they have the excuse of the unjust US politics against them).
Eliminating homelessness, eliminating illiteracy, eliminating hunger, increasing life expectancies, increasing graduation rates, increasing quality of life, actually existing socialist countries accomplish incredible things (some more than others, admittedly). They're not perfect utopias, but you can't ignore the context they exist within (i.e. they're still developing countries and they exist within US global hegemony)
I'm sure you have some specific criticisms of China or Cuba or whatever, but they're doing pretty fucking good considering what they're up against.
While you keep on dreaming of utopia, I'm more concerned with defeating than US empire in the real world. Anarchism can't.
Capitalist countries did the same thing without building walls to stop their population to flee…
Not a single capitalist country has eliminated homelessness. Why is that? Why are life expectancies falling in the US?
Also, Berlin is in the middle of East Germany.
The wall was to separate what was basically an island of Western control from the rest of East Germany. It was kind of a weird political situation.
USSR “solved” homelessness putting people in prisons and psychiatric hospital… and even then there still was homeless people. Authoritarianism doesn't work.
And Berlin west was a weird political situation, but my argument still holds. People flee DPRK or China…
The US puts more people in prison than the USSR ever did, yet its homeless population is huge.
And there isn't a giant wall around China lol
Authoritarianism doesn't work, whether capitalistic or communist.
And travel is very restricted in China.
Seems to be working so far. 🙄
China's life expectancies have recently surpassed the US. Did you know that?