This presupposes that all Marxist-Leninists want to do is nationalize industries while leaving the structure and machinery of the bourgeois state intact. This is of course nonsense and backwards. It’s not for nothing that communists always talk about establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat. Because everything else flows from that. The bourgeois state is not simply seized, but smashed and replaced with a proletarian state that has a fundamentally different class character and a fundamentally different power structure. Compare the structure of liberal democracy with that of Soviet Democracy or China’s Whole Process People’s Democracy. They are night and day.
Marxists-Leninists when they fight off imperialism using a state: several socialist countries with vastly improved standards of living in the past and present wherever you look.
Anarchism when they fight off imperialism using (???): ummm, I got nothing here because I cannot think of any examples. The best that would realistically happen is that they fight off imperialism temporarily, set up some communes, and then they get crushed by a “state” that is more organized and unified than they are.
The only real examples that could be called anarchist “states” are the Paris Commune (some elements of it) and parts of Spanish Republican Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. And they both collapsed spectacularly, precisely because of their anarchist characteristics, which prevented organizing a capable army to defend themselves, or mobilize productive forces to supply their existing soldiers with the logistical capacity they required.
He upholds the Zapistasas as an example of success “Horizontalism” but fails to recognize that the Zapistas are still, functionally, a state. I guarantee that if the Zapistas somehow managed to seize state power in Mexico and implemented their current policies on that scale, he’d stop supporting them for creating a bourgeois state.
“The vanguard party becomes the new bourgeoisie” is a type of libservantive argument based upon misunderstandings of bourgeois propaganda for the truth.
This presupposes that all Marxist-Leninists want to do is nationalize industries while leaving the structure and machinery of the bourgeois state intact. This is of course nonsense and backwards. It’s not for nothing that communists always talk about establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat. Because everything else flows from that. The bourgeois state is not simply seized, but smashed and replaced with a proletarian state that has a fundamentally different class character and a fundamentally different power structure. Compare the structure of liberal democracy with that of Soviet Democracy or China’s Whole Process People’s Democracy. They are night and day.
Marxists-Leninists when they fight off imperialism using a state: several socialist countries with vastly improved standards of living in the past and present wherever you look.
Anarchism when they fight off imperialism using (???): ummm, I got nothing here because I cannot think of any examples. The best that would realistically happen is that they fight off imperialism temporarily, set up some communes, and then they get crushed by a “state” that is more organized and unified than they are.
The only real examples that could be called anarchist “states” are the Paris Commune (some elements of it) and parts of Spanish Republican Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. And they both collapsed spectacularly, precisely because of their anarchist characteristics, which prevented organizing a capable army to defend themselves, or mobilize productive forces to supply their existing soldiers with the logistical capacity they required.
He upholds the Zapistasas as an example of success “Horizontalism” but fails to recognize that the Zapistas are still, functionally, a state. I guarantee that if the Zapistas somehow managed to seize state power in Mexico and implemented their current policies on that scale, he’d stop supporting them for creating a bourgeois state.
“The vanguard party becomes the new bourgeoisie” is a type of libservantive argument based upon misunderstandings of bourgeois propaganda for the truth.