Imagine you are a person fighting in an anarchist revolt. You have captured a sizeable chunk of land but the front line has grown too large and you can’t progress further. The state that you have been fighting approaches you with an offer: They recognise you as a sovereign (however that would look like) entity but you have to give away most of the land you’ve captured. They will leave you with the primary city and enough surrounding land to feed everyone.
What would be your position? Would you be willing to make a deal with the state?
Thry can’t be trusted. No deal
I think they can be trusted to act in their best self-interest and this deal is that.
It allows them to:
Wrong. The logistics is on the side of the capitalists - they will absolutely be able to take your city at a later date. If logistics is on your side it means you are winning the war, and have no reason to accept such a silly deal.
Why would they care about casualties?
Yeah but they want all of it, and will not be satisfied.
Yeah. Of course they would. Theyre authoritarians.
Would it? Do they care
They don’t want that, though. They want to punish, make examples, and have slaves.
I imagine the state as more a liberal representative democracy. Some place that has freedom of speech and relatively fair elections. The kind of country that actually needs public support to enact their rule. Not an authoritarian hell-scape, I wouldn’t trust any deal they make anyway.
I (barely) remember the 90s, when most people would say i lived in one of those. Nah, still dont trust it as far as i can throw it.
I would not take any risk
I expanded on the scenario in the other comment in this thread. But what If you wouldn’t have a choice? If it’s between fighting to the last person or taking the deal?
I would rather compromise and trust that the spirit that started this is strong enough to withstand any future attacks. With this time you have the opportunity to build up your defences, reach out to the people in the state and build networks that will keep you safe in case they attack again.
You can’t. You have allowed them to isolate you in what is essentially a reservation - a bantustan. You ensured your inevitable collapse when you took that deal.
So you would rather keep fighting a hopeless war? Slowly losing people until they break through your lines? Alienating those in the state by allowing the state to paint you as warmongers? Instead of accepting a refuge and using what you have to keep fighting?
And is being a reservation really a problem? Why must it lead to collapse? You can start leeching all of the radicals from the state. Slowly building up a collective industry, maybe have some of those collectives/syndicates operate inside the state. If they pay tax why should the state mind.
I think there could exist potential in a dual-system. Obviously I don’t like it, and would fight against it, but if it could be a path forward to practically achieve our goals should we not at least try to examine it?
The fact that they are attempting to negotiate is proof that there’s nothing “hopeless” about it.
You mean that thng they are already spending untold amounts of treasure doing?
No enemy will ever provide you with “refuge.” You pose an existential threat to their precious status quo - they have no intention of peacefully co-existing with you. They want to destroy you utterly and this (supposed) “offer” is designed to put them into a position from which they can eventually do exactly that.
Why don’t you ask all the colonised people of the world that?
Are you typing this from within Rojava? Or Chiappas?
Now that is what I would describe as “hopeless.”
Political tourism is not going to compensate for you giving up the fight when you had the capitalists on the ropes.
Look, I understand what it is what you are trying to get at… complete victory is an impossibility, even if this hypothetical scenario results in a Dien Bien Phu-style defeat for the capitalists.
But if you’re going to negotiate, you’re going to have to be in a position to get something more than simply being isolated into a nice, compact target that they can destroy at their leisure once they have recovered from the shock (which they will, because logistical capacity is on their side - not yours).
It’s like ole’ Sun Tzu says… don’t waste your energy trying to figure out what the enemy’s intentions are - concentrate on understanding what it is that they are truly capable of and base your strategy on that instead. That is how you avoid traps like the one you have hypothesised here.
I find it interesting that with just the description of “A state” you have immediately imagined a worst possible enemy for yourself.
Against a state like that I’m inclined to agree with you. If they truly have no intention of coexisting then obviously the deal would be a trap. However I would immediately ask how, in such hostile environment, did you manage to get a revolt started in the first place. My original scenario imagined a lot more liberal state that would not have enough power to stop the movement before it grew to open revolt, however with the monster you’ve imagined I don’t think it’s possible.
Do we? Is every person in the world capable of being an anarchist? What would you do with the people who don’t want to be? To say we pose an existential threat to states is to say that no person would voluntarily choose to live in the state if they have the option. I don’t know if that’s the case but I do think that states think that some people will always be loyal to them.
There is a crucial difference here they owned the land before. Our revolt is carving it out. Obviously being forced to a reservation by a colonial power is wrong. But I don’t see this like that. It’s closer to a revolt down-sizing in order to maintain cohesion.
They all are like that. There are no exceptions. I truly hope that the pretentious fakery of these (so-called) “liberal democracies” has not lulled you into seeing these entities as something which they are definitely not - place the ruling elites of the most “liberal” state in jeapordy, and it won’t take long for them to reveal what they truly are and always have been.
They don’t. Let’s give one of these “liberal democracies” the benefit of the doubt (rather unrealistic of us, so only for the sake of the argument) Let’s say you’re dealing with a regime that has a Bernie Sanders at it’s head - they offer the deal in good faith, you take it. In four year’s time, you are now dealing with a regime headed by a Ronald Reagen - voted in literally because of the “weakness” of the Bernie regime when it comes to dealing with the threat posed by these “anarchist terrorists” - and now suddenly you have well-funded armies of right-wing paramilitaries perpetrating genocide on your enclave while property developers are lining up to sell it’s land to the highest bidder. And that’s just the start.
Have you never wondered why liberalism is so much more effective at maintaining imperialism than fascism is? That’s why - the fascist is our weakest enemy.
That doesn’t matter - an anarchist society (or something close enough) doesn’t require anarchists. It only requires a society that has normalised said society being run from the bottom up - whether the people in such a society call themselves “anarchists” or not is irrelevant.
That, too, is immaterial because the capitalist status quo will see and treat your revolt no differently. If they can isolate you, they can destroy you. If they can dictate what you can do economically, they can destroy you. If they can control you industrially, they can destroy you. If they can hamper you socially and politically, they can destroy you.
I truly wish anarchists would read about warfare with the same enthusiasm they read political theory - for an anarchist, it comes with the territory… figuratively as well as literally.