For some reason your reply never showed up in my notifications. Anyway, I just looked at these. Rojava has explicitly been labeled not anarchist but democratic-confederalism with liberal tendencies. They didn’t do much in terms of running a country or region since 2011 but I’ll read up more on this.
CNT FAI is a union with at most 1.6 million for a few years in the first half of 20th century, that’s neither an actual implementation of anarchism, nor a scale where it is relevant. However once you get to several millions and last for a long time governing (or whatever you want to call it) in a country is when I’d give it some points.
EZLN like you said isn’t even anarchist. I think you like the concept of libertarian socialism, which I also think has some merits if very carefully implemented. The general concept of local leaders controlling their own territory makes sense for the most part, but the problem is how they all are organized to work together.
They are horizontalist and demonstrate that the principles of anarchism work. They are compatible with the anarchist project.
You’re getting very specific and purist with these definitions, but most anarchists are a lot more pragmatic than that. We don’t need something to be explicitly called anarchist to recognise that they are doing a form of anarchism. Tellingly, a lot of successful horizontalist projects are indigenous in nature and don’t spring from a western form of anarchism. That doesn’t mean the concepts don’t work, it just means there are things to learn from them.
Also, if you want to tell me these aren’t horizontalist projects, can you tell me who any of their leaders are? If you can’t name them, it means there’s something anarchist going on, because anarchism literally means “without rulers”.
Also your understanding of the CNT FAI is wrong. It wasn’t just a union, it was part of an anarchist revolution that encompassed 7 to 8 million people that fought a civil war for several years. You can criticize it for its strategic errors, but you can’t say the society didn’t function. It absolutely did.
And this idea that “anarchism doesn’t work” could have been applied to capitalism when it was in its prefigurative stage during feudalism. It doesn’t work, until it does. One thing we can say for sure is that nothing else seems to fucking “work” if by “work” you mean “won’t continue us down to path of complete societal collapse”.
For some reason your reply never showed up in my notifications. Anyway, I just looked at these. Rojava has explicitly been labeled not anarchist but democratic-confederalism with liberal tendencies. They didn’t do much in terms of running a country or region since 2011 but I’ll read up more on this.
CNT FAI is a union with at most 1.6 million for a few years in the first half of 20th century, that’s neither an actual implementation of anarchism, nor a scale where it is relevant. However once you get to several millions and last for a long time governing (or whatever you want to call it) in a country is when I’d give it some points.
EZLN like you said isn’t even anarchist. I think you like the concept of libertarian socialism, which I also think has some merits if very carefully implemented. The general concept of local leaders controlling their own territory makes sense for the most part, but the problem is how they all are organized to work together.
They are horizontalist and demonstrate that the principles of anarchism work. They are compatible with the anarchist project.
You’re getting very specific and purist with these definitions, but most anarchists are a lot more pragmatic than that. We don’t need something to be explicitly called anarchist to recognise that they are doing a form of anarchism. Tellingly, a lot of successful horizontalist projects are indigenous in nature and don’t spring from a western form of anarchism. That doesn’t mean the concepts don’t work, it just means there are things to learn from them.
Also, if you want to tell me these aren’t horizontalist projects, can you tell me who any of their leaders are? If you can’t name them, it means there’s something anarchist going on, because anarchism literally means “without rulers”.
Also your understanding of the CNT FAI is wrong. It wasn’t just a union, it was part of an anarchist revolution that encompassed 7 to 8 million people that fought a civil war for several years. You can criticize it for its strategic errors, but you can’t say the society didn’t function. It absolutely did.
And this idea that “anarchism doesn’t work” could have been applied to capitalism when it was in its prefigurative stage during feudalism. It doesn’t work, until it does. One thing we can say for sure is that nothing else seems to fucking “work” if by “work” you mean “won’t continue us down to path of complete societal collapse”.