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?
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.
For that to happen there needs to either be majority in the state that think that way or a powerful enough propaganda machine to sway the general public. Not all states have that. If you are dealing with a country that has a well-educated population tactics like that simply won’t work. This also outlines why it’s vital for every anarchist movement to involve themselves with the general population as much as possible. So large portions of the population will think “oh those are the people that organise that game-night/open kitchen/workshop thing”. At this point it becomes a lot more difficult to paint them as violent terrorists because people know them and have had direct interactions with them. It also becomes a lot more difficult to walk back your deal without spreading discontent.
Everyone in that society is by my definition anarchist. When you give up your dependency on authority you become an anarchist. I’m not using the term as they would I am using it as I would. So to specify: Do you think that every single person would be willing to give up their dependence to authority? Because if they won’t they will form a state, when they do you need to coexist with that state.
The one follows the other… and a gigantic propaganda machine is no hypothetical. It already exists. And as you can see happening right now in Gaza, they don’t actually even need that propaganda machine working very well to prosecute a war of extermination against you.
I hope you don’t mind me saying this… but that’s extremely naive. Being “involved” with the general populace didn’t help the anarchists that was so deeply rooted in immigrant populations of the US during WW1. It didn’t help the Black Panthers who were deeply rooted in US urban communities during the Civil Rights movement. The Ukrainians barely remember the Makhnovists - the memory of the Torch Brigade and the SECC has been completely wiped from South African’s minds. All of them were deeply “involved” in the general populace.
That’s no different than saying everyone in the USSR was a Marxist, or that everyone in the US is a liberal.
Consider this… when the Makhnovists decided to replace the civilian section of the Kontrrazvedska (the Makhnovist counter-intelligence network) with the KAD (Commission for Anti-Makhnovist Activity) because the civilian section of the Kontrrazvedska was found to be too heavy-handed, they had to go look far and wide for people that actually understood anarchist political theory well-enough to make it a properly anarchist organ - the vast majority of the people working and bleeding under the Makhnovist flag actually knew very little about anarchism apart from a few slogans.
If your anarchist society relies on the ideologically pure, your society is screwed - in fact, if you rely on the ideologically pure it will nnever come into existence in the first place.
I don’t understand what this means… I don’t go to the doctor to tell them how to be a doctor.
Native reservations are political. They are designed to imprison and contain - and that is exactly what the capitalists are offering you in this hypothetical situation of yours.
No, you are not. If you were isolated, they wouldn’t be negotiating with you because they’d be too busy exterminating you and crushing your revolt. Isolation means inevitable destruction.