the anarchist/ultra-left dispute about states necessarily bypasses the very real struggles for national self-determination of peoples.
… yes. and i don’t have an easy answer about what to do for all those people but i do have a pretty easy principle that “states are tools of oppression” and “we should oppose them killing anyone.”
I don’t have any problem with the existence of the state. I think it’s an inevitability following from Spinoza’s humanist anthropology, as set out in Frederic Lordon’s book I explained earlier.
The problem is one you have to confront: as a documented, passported citizen of a state, it is in fact for you to reconcile how reconcile these views. That on the one hand, Israel has no right to eixst; that no state has a right to exist; that Palestinians are justified in ‘armed resistance’ for a Palestinian state; but that this also has no right to exist and should be abolished like all the rest. But not before the Jewish state, of course, and if that were to happen, then I guess we’d just see what happened to the Jewish minority there and it’s for someone else to mourn the consequences.
All the while, you’re telling millions of people who either grew up and still are stateless (because of UNRWA, the Arab states, and the UN’s bespoke definition of Palestinian refugees), or those Jews struggling for a state of their own for the first time in 2,000 years, that actually you know better than them and the struggle for a nation state is the wrong thing to want.
I think this is a crucial and fatal weakness in the anarchist/ultra-left ideology.
It’s a contradictory mess of views for a leftist to hold, covered by Lordon in the first chapter of his book.
… yes. and i don’t have an easy answer about what to do for all those people but i do have a pretty easy principle that “states are tools of oppression” and “we should oppose them killing anyone.”
Then you need to think harder.
this is just posturing. you don’t have a reasonable solution to the conundrum either.
I don’t have any problem with the existence of the state. I think it’s an inevitability following from Spinoza’s humanist anthropology, as set out in Frederic Lordon’s book I explained earlier.
The problem is one you have to confront: as a documented, passported citizen of a state, it is in fact for you to reconcile how reconcile these views. That on the one hand, Israel has no right to eixst; that no state has a right to exist; that Palestinians are justified in ‘armed resistance’ for a Palestinian state; but that this also has no right to exist and should be abolished like all the rest. But not before the Jewish state, of course, and if that were to happen, then I guess we’d just see what happened to the Jewish minority there and it’s for someone else to mourn the consequences.
All the while, you’re telling millions of people who either grew up and still are stateless (because of UNRWA, the Arab states, and the UN’s bespoke definition of Palestinian refugees), or those Jews struggling for a state of their own for the first time in 2,000 years, that actually you know better than them and the struggle for a nation state is the wrong thing to want.
I think this is a crucial and fatal weakness in the anarchist/ultra-left ideology.
It’s a contradictory mess of views for a leftist to hold, covered by Lordon in the first chapter of his book.