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Zapatistas falsified your statement, Rojava is too argument against scaling issues. We can arbitrary move scales from these hundreds thousands or a few million

Zapatistas falsified your statement, Rojava is too argument against scaling issues. We can arbitrary move scales from these hundreds thousands or a few million for Zapatistas and Rojava, but I would argue that if these structures work on that scale then they should on scale of tens of million too. The trick is to add some federational or confederational structure where locals can easily undelegate chosen delegates. Currently in federational states its usually impossible or very hard to undelegate representatives and so they do what they want for a few years.

simonh 3y ago
The Zapatista movement is almost entirely rural. What capital intensive industry have they built and run? In fact they are adamantly opposed to big infrastructure projects in their region. That's remarkably prescient because they would erode economic equality. Of course communitarianism can absolutely work at the community level, I discussed that above, the problem always comes when you try to scale that up to more 'lumpy' and specialised economic activities. As soon as some economic and social activities have dramatically more economic and social consequence, or are dramatically more resource intensive than others, the problems start setting in. The Marxist view is that communism can only work in industrial settings because Marx viewed it as about the control of capital. The actual evidence in reality is that it only works in culturally and economically homogenous societies, which mostly means rural ones.
- TotalCrackpot 3y ago
  I would say with both Rojava and Zapatistas we see very oppressed minorities who were fighting for self determination, I think that's one of of the reasons they are more interested in these horizontal structures. Revolutionary Catalonia was somewhat similar in their identity being questioned by Spanish conservatives. People in urban areas usually consider themselves privileged compared to inhabitants of rural areas so they are less interested in these modes of social organisation, even if they are usually still oppressed by capitalist mode of production as workers.

simonh 3y ago

The Zapatista movement is almost entirely rural. What capital intensive industry have they built and run? In fact they are adamantly opposed to big infrastructure projects in their region. That's remarkably prescient because they would erode economic equality. Of course communitarianism can absolutely work at the community level, I discussed that above, the problem always comes when you try to scale that up to more 'lumpy' and specialised economic activities. As soon as some economic and social activities have dramatically more economic and social consequence, or are dramatically more resource intensive than others, the problems start setting in. The Marxist view is that communism can only work in industrial settings because Marx viewed it as about the control of capital. The actual evidence in reality is that it only works in culturally and economically homogenous societies, which mostly means rural ones.

TotalCrackpot 3y ago
I would say with both Rojava and Zapatistas we see very oppressed minorities who were fighting for self determination, I think that's one of of the reasons they are more interested in these horizontal structures. Revolutionary Catalonia was somewhat similar in their identity being questioned by Spanish conservatives. People in urban areas usually consider themselves privileged compared to inhabitants of rural areas so they are less interested in these modes of social organisation, even if they are usually still oppressed by capitalist mode of production as workers.