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Diving Into the Wreckage: Nationalism, Liberation and the Bourgeois State Part 2 (Lenin)
🕑 Added 2023-12-22 11:00:10 +0000 UTCSean and Varn return with part two of their series on nationalism and the nation state. In this episode, the discuss various Marxist conceptions of the state including Otto Bauer, Rosa Luxembourg but especially Vladimir Lenin. What is the relationship between people and nation? Class and nation? And what is to be done? Full episode for patrons!
Comments
Derick Varn
I think the anarchist tradition prior to the 1980s/90s has a better track record of realizing the dangers of nationalism--But and this is a trend line in AK Press, Maoist and Liberal national liberation traditions mixed with anarchism pretty deeply in the 90s and aughts, and today a lot of "actually existing anarchists" have an emotive moral valence around this that leads to Maoist theory sneaking in.
The Antifada
andy here. i can't speak for my colleagues but i think our general position is that when anarchists further the class struggle and push towards proletarian revolution, we support the anarchists and take them seriously. if sean and varn dismiss anarchism today as a subculture, it's a reflection of the lack of relevance of those revolutionary class struggle anarchists still in operation to the broader anarchist milieu. marxist milieus, of coure, should be held to the same standard.
Matt Crossin
I agree they should take anarchism more seriously, particularly the classical tradition of anarchism (and particularly the overwhelmingly dominant mass anarchist tendency), which hardly ever gets talked about - but the Zapatistas are not ‘anarchist’, and Rojava even less so. And despite anarchist involvement and influence nor is the IWW. Also most anarchists are and always have been anarchists communists
Andrew Miller
I’m curious about the final thoughts where it sounds like you claim that anarchism is merely a fashionable subculture without any real project to show for it, and then reiterate that you can’t rely on national identity to move the communist project forward; all while ignoring very alive and real anarchist projects like the Zapatistas, the Kurdish autonomous regions, or to a lesser degree the various industrial unions under the CNT (and sadly far lesser now the IWW). I would love for you to take anarchism as seriously as communism even if you don’t subscribe to it as an ideology. Where’s Andy when you need him?! (Says me also named Andy)…
