The USSR gave women the right to vote and get an education since their founding. They were among the first countries in the world to have a woman minister (possibly the very first). They put a stop to the old regime of the tsars, which included semi-servitude (serfdom was abolished earlier but still existed to some extent). Later on several people (mostly black people from the USA) visiting the USSR were amazed that they felt like a citizen there, and not like a minority.
Sankara in Burkina Faso vaccinated 1 million children, and stopped the exploitation of women (stopping forced marriages, allowing them to get an education, making men share the chores). He also had the army build infrastructure projects like roads and wells for rural villages.
The revolutionaries in Cuba put a stop to years of colonial domination (first from Spain, then from USA). Cuban people were effectively slaves to their bosses, and prostitution was the main reason Amerikans visited Cuba. All of this stopped, and now they are poor because of the embargo, but they don’t have to work for the mafia. They get free healthcare (eye and dental included) for free. In remote villages, they have a permanent doctor and a dentist comes once a week.
Vietnam had been a colony for much of their history. Ho Chi Minh’s fight started way back during the second world war when Japan seized the “Indochina” colonies and ruled over Vietnam as ferociously as the French did. You can find articles written by Ho on marxists.org, where he details examples of French atrocity towards his colonized people. Settlers employed Vietnamese people in quasi-servitude and were allowed to kill and maim them for the slightest transgression. Now that Vietnam has their independence, this does not happen any more.
In China, Mao put a stop to the exploitation of women as well. Feet binding (“traditional Chinese culture” if you believe some people) was common in some areas, and it was effectively maiming women for an ideal of beauty. There were also famines every decade in China, and the PRC put a stop to them – they faced one major famine, because a huge drought and adverse weather that year was combined to the deep reforms of the cultural revolution, (but the death toll is disputed, because the higher estimates use shoddy methodology) but that was just one famine after their founding and absolutely none since then. They also gave their pride back to their people, who had just come out of the century of humiliation and were addicted to opium by and large, introduced by the English as a form of imperialism. People in China were so poor that in the 60s, having a tractor to work your farm was a luxury and the talk of the town (and either was reserved for rich landlords or, starting with the PRC, were progressively but rarely being rolled out). Today they’re building museums, libraries, theatre houses and other public interest projects that put to shame our best architects in the west.
As legitimate curiosity, please give me some examples of social progress anarchists have achieved too.
He did fire striking teachers, because there were other ways in Burkina Faso to make your problems heard and addressed. But they didn’t, they went straight into the strike right after the new government was established. And in this case the context is different from a typical strike where workers demand better wages or working conditions: the union that launched the strike was essentially owned by Joseph Ki-Zebo, a university professor, who wanted to have power for his party instead of Sankara. There were other unions that tried to coup the government, and others that worked alongside Sankara’s government.
If you think about it strikes are the resolution of a contradiction when the state does not give you other means to resolve it. In a healthy society, there is no need for strikes because your grievances are addressed in different ways. Strikes essentially evolved in class society because it cuts production, it cuts the exploiter right where it hurts and forces them to take action. If you provide people with the means to achieve results without stopping production – and I’m guessing anarchists plan for this as well – then you don’t need strikes.
However I wouldn’t say that because there was a teacher’s strike in Burkina Faso where the teachers were fired, that authoritarian power will always fail us. Even if the strike was about better working conditions, which it wasn’t. This is one ~shaky incident in a country that otherwise achieved progress on an unprecedented scale in the short 4 years Sankara remained in power, while being embargoed. Compared to what came before, this was an incredible upgrade to the people of Burkina Faso. Today, there is not one youth in Africa that doesn’t know Thomas Sankara. He still gives hope to the people.
sounds like trolling.
it’s a strong assumption to say that anarchists didn’t take part in these struggles, actually that other left leaning people didn’t take part tbh.
iirc bolshevik means minority, so it would at least imply that they worked with others before sending to jail many people who didn’t think like their leader.
I’m legitimately asking for social progress anarchists have achieved in their own projects. If we go by the metric that several groups took part in struggles (despite the struggles I listed above being led by marxist-leninist principles), then it would be fair to say there were marxists taking part in anarchist struggles like in Spain, and then that would mean we can’t ever point to a group’s achievement because it was achieved with the help of thousand of different people.
iirc bolshevik means minority
Yeah probably… I don’t know Russian haha. But by the time of the October Revolution they were the majority, otherwise they would have never had the momentum needed to actually achieve the revolution. And yes, probably there were anarchists and even social-democrats (the bolsheviks were after all the leftmost faction of the socialist party of Russia) in their ranks who may have thought “look I don’t entirely agree but this is as good as it’s gonna get”. Like I said earlier, what matters is that the bolsheviks (to name just them) worked on marxist(-leninist) principles. They would not have let a socdem take a cadre position and do socdem stuff (advocate for electoralism, appeal to both sides to stop the hostilities…).
If you’re interested in learning how a vanguard party works (the vanguard party, as I’ve learned recently, is only the party that is successful, it’s not a title you decide for yourself but something that happens to you), Harman wrote a bit about it in his book: https://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1979/marxism/ch10.html
The USSR gave women the right to vote and get an education since their founding. They were among the first countries in the world to have a woman minister (possibly the very first). They put a stop to the old regime of the tsars, which included semi-servitude (serfdom was abolished earlier but still existed to some extent). Later on several people (mostly black people from the USA) visiting the USSR were amazed that they felt like a citizen there, and not like a minority.
Sankara in Burkina Faso vaccinated 1 million children, and stopped the exploitation of women (stopping forced marriages, allowing them to get an education, making men share the chores). He also had the army build infrastructure projects like roads and wells for rural villages.
The revolutionaries in Cuba put a stop to years of colonial domination (first from Spain, then from USA). Cuban people were effectively slaves to their bosses, and prostitution was the main reason Amerikans visited Cuba. All of this stopped, and now they are poor because of the embargo, but they don’t have to work for the mafia. They get free healthcare (eye and dental included) for free. In remote villages, they have a permanent doctor and a dentist comes once a week.
Vietnam had been a colony for much of their history. Ho Chi Minh’s fight started way back during the second world war when Japan seized the “Indochina” colonies and ruled over Vietnam as ferociously as the French did. You can find articles written by Ho on marxists.org, where he details examples of French atrocity towards his colonized people. Settlers employed Vietnamese people in quasi-servitude and were allowed to kill and maim them for the slightest transgression. Now that Vietnam has their independence, this does not happen any more.
In China, Mao put a stop to the exploitation of women as well. Feet binding (“traditional Chinese culture” if you believe some people) was common in some areas, and it was effectively maiming women for an ideal of beauty. There were also famines every decade in China, and the PRC put a stop to them – they faced one major famine, because a huge drought and adverse weather that year was combined to the deep reforms of the cultural revolution, (but the death toll is disputed, because the higher estimates use shoddy methodology) but that was just one famine after their founding and absolutely none since then. They also gave their pride back to their people, who had just come out of the century of humiliation and were addicted to opium by and large, introduced by the English as a form of imperialism. People in China were so poor that in the 60s, having a tractor to work your farm was a luxury and the talk of the town (and either was reserved for rich landlords or, starting with the PRC, were progressively but rarely being rolled out). Today they’re building museums, libraries, theatre houses and other public interest projects that put to shame our best architects in the west.
As legitimate curiosity, please give me some examples of social progress anarchists have achieved too.
Didn’t Sankara fire teachers for daring to strike for better working conditions and have them all replaced by people with no teaching experience?
No matter how moral someone is, no one is infallible. Authoritarian power will always fail us.
Of course. The USSR didn’t have the history of black slavery and prejudice that the US has. That doesn’t mean racism and prejudice doesn’t exist.
He did fire striking teachers, because there were other ways in Burkina Faso to make your problems heard and addressed. But they didn’t, they went straight into the strike right after the new government was established. And in this case the context is different from a typical strike where workers demand better wages or working conditions: the union that launched the strike was essentially owned by Joseph Ki-Zebo, a university professor, who wanted to have power for his party instead of Sankara. There were other unions that tried to coup the government, and others that worked alongside Sankara’s government.
If you think about it strikes are the resolution of a contradiction when the state does not give you other means to resolve it. In a healthy society, there is no need for strikes because your grievances are addressed in different ways. Strikes essentially evolved in class society because it cuts production, it cuts the exploiter right where it hurts and forces them to take action. If you provide people with the means to achieve results without stopping production – and I’m guessing anarchists plan for this as well – then you don’t need strikes.
However I wouldn’t say that because there was a teacher’s strike in Burkina Faso where the teachers were fired, that authoritarian power will always fail us. Even if the strike was about better working conditions, which it wasn’t. This is one ~shaky incident in a country that otherwise achieved progress on an unprecedented scale in the short 4 years Sankara remained in power, while being embargoed. Compared to what came before, this was an incredible upgrade to the people of Burkina Faso. Today, there is not one youth in Africa that doesn’t know Thomas Sankara. He still gives hope to the people.
sounds like trolling. it’s a strong assumption to say that anarchists didn’t take part in these struggles, actually that other left leaning people didn’t take part tbh.
iirc bolshevik means minority, so it would at least imply that they worked with others before sending to jail many people who didn’t think like their leader.
I’m legitimately asking for social progress anarchists have achieved in their own projects. If we go by the metric that several groups took part in struggles (despite the struggles I listed above being led by marxist-leninist principles), then it would be fair to say there were marxists taking part in anarchist struggles like in Spain, and then that would mean we can’t ever point to a group’s achievement because it was achieved with the help of thousand of different people.
Yeah probably… I don’t know Russian haha. But by the time of the October Revolution they were the majority, otherwise they would have never had the momentum needed to actually achieve the revolution. And yes, probably there were anarchists and even social-democrats (the bolsheviks were after all the leftmost faction of the socialist party of Russia) in their ranks who may have thought “look I don’t entirely agree but this is as good as it’s gonna get”. Like I said earlier, what matters is that the bolsheviks (to name just them) worked on marxist(-leninist) principles. They would not have let a socdem take a cadre position and do socdem stuff (advocate for electoralism, appeal to both sides to stop the hostilities…).
If you’re interested in learning how a vanguard party works (the vanguard party, as I’ve learned recently, is only the party that is successful, it’s not a title you decide for yourself but something that happens to you), Harman wrote a bit about it in his book: https://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1979/marxism/ch10.html
Hey i am sorry I thought you were trolling.
I will take the time to answer you properly later. Thank you for the link
Cheers I look forward to your reply.