I tried explaining my problems with tankies without calling them tankies. In fact, I used their own terminology to describe my disagreement with them. It, uh… well it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
George Orwell fought in the Spanish civil war on the side of the Marxists. His army was betrayed by the Marxist-Leninists. After that experience, he wrote 1984, in which a totalitarian government uses “newspeak” to suppress dissent by suppressing the very ideas that people are capable of communicating. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Marxist-Leninists describe their disagreements in terms that turn criticism of them into gibberish. I think it’s exactly what Orwell was writing about based on his experiences.
Textbook communism is an ideal utopia that can never be achieved.
Except for in Catalonia
Huh? You mean Catalonia in 1936-1937?
Fan of Chomsky I presume?
Yeah, but that’s just an attempt at something like communism. They didn’t reach full communism.
And also Australia
Can you expand on that?
During the Spanish civil war, Catalonia was governed by the Marxists and the Anarchists. They dismantled the state and gave control of the government over to the trade unions. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the middle of a war, and they were making progress every month. Until they were betrayed by the Marxist-Leninists.
So they failed to maintain control?
Western leftism is plagued by a culture of purity. Only upholding failed projects, because they never actually had to contend with the messy realities of governance.
Agree ,
Oh, I fully support non-western communist movements, such as the Haudenosaunee. Do you respect the Haudenosaunee as communists, or am I about to hear a racist rant?
You could at least cite the Zapatistas, or something.
The Haudenosaunee might be considered ‘primitive communism’ though I think that’s an unfair characterization, while I think Engles and Lewis Henry Morgan were ultimately correct in their broad assertions about origins of the family and class stratification, the particular focus on the Haudenosaunee was based on a lingering, erroneous, assumption that indigenous Americans were somehow more primitive, or existed in some ‘state of nature’.
But it’s even more of a stretch to assert that the modern Haudenosaunee, as a cultural and political entity are Communist in the modern political sense. There is no coherent Haudenosaunee sovereignty movement that also has strong anarchist or Marxist ideological convictions, akin to what we see with Neozapatismo.
But if you have a counter argument, I’d like to hear it.
They were Anarcho-Syndicalist and tbh we have never forgotten them. The collapse of the CNT was one of the greatest tragedies in human history.
One of the only large-scale “communist” societies that worked, and it was promptly destroyed by authoritarians.
Stalin: It’s going to be at least another hundred years before I can do communism
Catalonia: Yeah so it’s been a few weeks and we’re already doing communism. Come visit and shoot a Nazi!
Stalin: Fuck fuck fuck they’re making me look bad. Uhhhhhhh destroy Catalonia!