IriYan

1st of all globally libertarian is a specific mode with the anarchist movement, definitely anti-capitalist and anti-inequality of any sort (economic or political). What the FBI fabricated a pseudo ideology full of contradictions and sold it/financed it as libertarianism since the 50s (part of their counter-movement anti-communism enterprise which some of it was later banned in court) and spilled over to 3-4 other English speaking nations, has nothing at all to do with libertarianism (left libertarianism or libertarian socialist are also fake tags admitted by passive people that wanted to distance themselves from this “disease”. Anarcho-capitalism is equally a pseudo ideology. The rest of the world just laughs at the immaturity of the English speaking people shifting tags around to contradictory things because they are “pop”. The US effort to redefine a century and a half of political philosophy tradition to serve its own internal governmental pathology is purely a laughing matter for the world. Immature people develop immature movements. Or should I say people who refuse to read more than a page at a time can go out on social media and speak as theoretical authorities.

Libertarianism is well documented for a century and a half, it doesn’t need US fed propaganda and social media to defend itself. Pathetic UK monkeys seeing the US propaganda and reproducing it like good pups, have also fallen for this anarcho-capitalist/libertarian construct for the mentally challenged.

The one thing libertarians are known for is the proposal for class and social organization, to organize under certain minimal principles that ensure and protect the absolute equality of its members. And for communities (either work or living communities) to accept one and only one authority, of their collective organization and assembly, their collective decisions, on which they are free to participate and whose decisions only affect those who are part of it. That and rational communication within the assembly because individual leaps into the supernatural and metaphysical can only develop to collective chaos. So before entering the assembly you can leave your personal individualistic philosophy at the front door basket and pick it up on your way out.

Now, you want to build a house, within a libertarian community, other than your own labor and physical technical abilities, to house yourself, you need resources (tools and supplies, metaphysics you can add on your own to your own house, see if some entity through preyer holds the beams up on top of your head). The available resources are those that are collectively available to the community, whether in shortage or abundance it is a communal problem to determine, One thing will be for sure, if there is shortage you can’t have more than your share because that will prevent someone else from also building a needed house. Fortunately, since the libertarian uprising there is no market, no industrial market you can get supplies, You have what the community has.

You must be building that house for yourself, not to rent or exploit other people by it, correct? I don’t see why any libertarian community would have a problem with it.

In theory, in practice I suspect that a true libertarian community helps as a community everyone to build a house and expect everyone to be helping you, not because it is a law or a decision of the assembly to do so, but as part of solidarity and the realization that shelter, food, health care, education, entertainment, are all human necessities and the community is founded in providing all this for the community.

Does everyone get to have the same house, just as big, or just as complex, it is not up to theoretical or ideological criteria to determine, that would have been anti-libertarian, to have some mora/ideological authority to enforce an agenda on the community. It is simply up to the community to decide. If all one needs is a shady room, or a basement, to sit and play cello in their free time, why oppose it. If one needs a room and a kitchen and a small pad to raise spices and herbs and cook funky things, why not. Now if one wants to build a motorcycle that does 350km/h and we have no raw titanium and machining facilities to make valves for it, I am sure the community will have their objections to prostituting collectively just to get you those much needed 16 valves.

So, libertarianism is not for all, it is for those who are in need to end their exploitation (economic) and oppression (political), whether that is by boss, parent, spouce, teacher, cop, those who feel it know who they will be liberated from. The rest are only worried about losing luxuries and toys during a possible transition to an eggalitarian social organization. They are not ready because they benefit from capitalism, Fortunately they are a small minority in N/W Europe, N.America, Japan, HK, Australia/NZ and a handful of urban centers elsewhere where either intense industrialization is controlled by them or extraction of tremendous amounts of raw materials in high demand by industry (oil minerals etc.). The rest of the world is happy to be able to grow beans, rice, corn and eat it too without been treated as slaves.

The country that holds the record for number and percentage of people in prison is the US. In the US the percentage of black people in prison was higher than the percentage of black people in prison in South Africa during apartheid.

No other western/industrialized (at some stage) nation has had so many political exilees and people whose citizenship was revoked based on “anti-american” views than the US. At some point the general secretary of RCP was in exile in France with his citizenship revoked. So, not all states are equal, and their historic development as modern capitalist states should be studied within context.

What if class was to be determined by both economics (exploitation) and power (oppression), therefore in the USSR all the leninist reformists did was to exchange the wealthy upper class for the all powerful upper class. So at best Leninism is a bad reform of capitalism.

No state can ever achieve anything more than the liberation of the capitalist class. The only liberation for the masses is to seek alternative ways to self govern and abolish any centralized power structures from reforming again.

state means centralization of power, and in a classless society what class and who would represent it in this centralization of power?

anarchism acknowledges Marxist theory, but rejects the need for a state/beaurocratic apparatus, as it is considered to be fundamentally oppressive.

Acknowledges Marxist theory as much as acknowledging Newtonian gravitational theory may be a way to put it. Most of the ones I know either accept Marxist general theory as a whole, non-critically, and the rest are anti-communist/anti-marxist idealists, as much as any fascist would be. Because the true essence and reason for the existence of fascism is anti-communism.

There are many social relations that are oppressive, why limit it to state? Parents are oppressive, teachers, professors, bosses, cops, military higher officers, spouses, parents in law, … prison guards … they are all oppressive. Is it just the state? Is it a different class of people who oppress from those being oppressed?

the state is an abstraction of capital, and cannot liberate the working class, as it exists to perpetuate its own hegemonic existence, our subjugation.

Between the late 1800s and early 1900s the state became an insurer of labor law and justice, the welfare state was born, rights to pension, an 8hr day, sick leave, vacation, overtime pay, were all provided and were promised by the state. So we can say the state backed off and became hostile to capital. Between struggle (labor syndicalism) and the capitalist state there was a dialectic transformation, the social democracy was born. Today the state has absolutely surrendered to the powers of the banking financial world system, made out of a handful of banks and financial institutions mainly based in NY, London, Frankfurt, Paris, maybe even in HKong, Tokyo, to a lesser extent. All states owe to private global markets to such a degree that just one or two clicks down on their bond ratings and they are bankrupt and in the hands of IMF and other bankers to implement the most vicious neo-liberal reform anyone can imagine.

This means that when leninists propose on taking over a state that just means removing it from the markets and sentencing the population to starvation and misery. “Abolishing the state” is just as suicidal. Should there be a thing like political responsibility for genocide proposed by pseudo revolutionaries, who want to enforce their fantasy on people already suffering because of capitalism?

governance need not be heirarchichal; I promote collective mutual determination as an egalitarian system by which society can organize.

As long as you speak of “a system” you imply, like it or not, a centralized system, a system that supervises whether the system is implemented correctly or not. That constitutes an authority. Whether this authority and enforcement is conducted by “anti-authoritarians” who as a minority forced their terms and conditions on a society, we are speaking of a revolutionary vanguard, an authoritarian force over the entire society (under the state and within state borders).

By the way, the collapse of the Syrian state had a gradual effect of Turkey moving sourth, Israel and Libanon moving further east, Iran moving west, I am uncleat of Jordan is taking a piece of the pie, and some Iraqi authorities are eyeballing the Kurdish management of some areas they would like to grub as well. So by abolishing a state these days the remaining states in the globe legitimize the neighbors all grubbing a piece without anyone being a state to protest. Assad’s only friend is too busy fighting the entirety of NATO playing a game on the heads of the residents of ex-Ukraine.

can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools

As long as your focus is to destroy and dismantle instead of constructing an alternative and an escape route from capitalism you will be condemned by history as a force of nothing beneficial to humanity.

As long as you preach -isms- from a high tower looking down on people without ideology, and you refuse to accept that the dialectic between leninism and libertarianism has already materialized, that more than a million people have been living OUTSIDE of capitalism, in autonomous communities, for nearly 30years (this next new year’s eve), decide in their communities EVERYTHING about their own lives, mostly using consensus, and their federation (2 levels) is designed to serve the community not to dictate to the community, you are more authoritarian and stuck up than you really think. Now these people have liberated themselves from capitalism, they live outside it, they are unaffected by it, other by having to fend off some para-military attacks here and there 2-3 times a year, their values and principles are even more strict than the early 1900s CNT constitution, and they laugh really hard and stick a finger up to all revolutionary vanguards, but you keep speaking hypothetically, what if society did this and that and the other thing.

If you want to be heard, you should be looking up to indigenous peasants, farmers, not down. If you want the residents of the favela to follow bureaucrats and academics to social change, you are in worse shape and dillusion than the average tankies. If you want children industrial workers in SE Asia to look up to your ideology and rhetoric, to buy your story, I assure you they think you are dumber than they are.

Who gives a flying ** what “anarchism” acknowledges.

That’s Popper’s and Milt.Friedman’s way of laundering fascism as a legitimate ideology, a useful tool for capitalist domination and anti-communism.

Being against humans can’t possibly be a human ideology, so fascists don’'t count under this protectionist umbrella, I hope.

why does this comment dance between ultra-naive to ultra-troll in my mind?

Now this is a wider issue, the Red Army did liberate the largest part of Europe from Nazi rule, the US basically tried to liberate France but the Red Army was in Germany before the US crossed the border. In Yalta the three, US/UK/USSR divided the pie, Spain and Greece went on the other half and remained fascist till the 70s (meaning anticapitalists were executed, prisoned, exiled, etc). Yugoslavia went its own way. The US UK handed Hung/CZ over to them, but unlike other places the USSR had to use force to take over what was given to them in the pe cutting.

This is not defense of tankie-ism it is pretty much what happened. Now between 90 and 2024 the 90/1 agreement was no Nato expansion beyond its current borders, and that was severely violated by NATO, to the last ring around the chain being Ukr and Belarus. So the not so red not so hot army anymore had to either react or accept total defeat and submission to NATO. There was no alternative for Russia other than to turn history back which in 30y proved impossible.

I am not passing judgement on which dictator is better, I hate Biden as much as the next guy, but the narrative of recent history appears to have left out all petitions to the UN filed by Russia for the violation of the agreement. The UN’s excuse, NATO is not a UN member, and you can’t blame any particular state member of NATO for what NATO does. Unfortunately a state (Russia) which wasn’t part of the Yalta agreement the SU was, signed an agreement with NATO, not with any particular country. They should have had a better lawyer and not a drunk for a president.

So Russia will evolve to yet another oil-rich country that is blockaded and cut-off from world markets like Iran and Venezuela. Unlike Iranians and Venzuelans Russians get really nasty when they get pissed, hungry, or out of vodka. So this is not going to go well too far too long. We shall see. Oil production and distribution, held by a handful of US based multinationals, will increase their profits in a further restricted oil market. So Iran, Russia, and Venezuela’s isolation does serve a profitable industry’s interests.