I had a discussion with @[email protected] recently where they insisted that Anarchists on Hexbear accept Lenin’s analysis of Imperialism and therefore all support “Actual Existing Socialist” states such as Cuba, USSR and I guess North Korea as well.
In fact, they argued it’s the reason most anarchists of Hexbear don’t like to discuss anarchism away from hexbear, explicitly because outside anarchists do not support “AES”.
So I’m curious to see what your thoughts are on this. If you’re an anarchist who supports “AES” how do you square this support with the conflict these states have with anarchist theory on hierarchy?
That makes about as much sense as “anarcho-capitalism”. Of course it’s no fun to have your mental gymnastics questioned outside of Hexbear 😅
But ok, for the sake of argument, maybe a dysfunctional late-stage AES is a more suitable ground for building something in the shell of the old. At least people in these states know from first hand experience just how bad state control can get.
Edit: curious that you left out China in your list of AES.
I’m actually not up to date on what the ML analysis on China is lately. Do they still consider it “AES” or is it seen more capitalist nowadays? I can’t always keep up with the mental gymnastics on display :D
Hexbear doesn’t care about the answer to that question. They support modern-day Russia which doesn’t have any pretense of socialism. Their stance is first and foremost anti-American. Anything else is window dressing.
Do they? I have blocked a few but mostly I see them either being sad at conscription of ukranian people to fight dumb imperial shit (conscription being bad seems uncontroversial to me), and supporting resistance to USA imperialism as necessary while acknowledging the Russian state is deeply disfunctional and exploitative.
Using anything about America to justify Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine is an obvious attempt to rationalise their support for something indefensible. The only involvement America has in this particular war is helping the victim of an invasion defend themselves.
I don’t think many people are glad Russia invaded.
You should probably not confuse countries and people though, while invading is bad the usa and allies using this as a proxy war to weaken Russia has just resulted in more Ukrainian people dying. It’s not actually helping any of the people in the invaded regions to conscript them and send them into a meat grinder to die. Regardless of who ends up paying taxes to whom after all this shitloads of normal people on both sides are dead, while elites lose nothing either way.