this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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The coup in Bolivia kind proved that even social democracy is off the table if it interferes with imperialist interests.
This is a problem that all anti-capitalist ideologies have to face.
The capitalist hegemony has an interest in preventing nations from shifting away from the status quo, so socialist, anarchist, whatever revolution that is fought, however it is fought. It will have to carry out some practices that would be decried as authoritarian to protect themselves from outside interference.
I don't see how you would protect yourself in that scenario, you seem to think they just let it happen on purpose which certainly wasn't the case, America is just a lot more powerful than any third world country. I do agree that the rich will always fight any attempt because they loose power and money from such a move and as soon as you interfer with imperialistic interests you are fucked byond recovery anyway.
I don't see how to protect this hypothetical socialist state either. Cuba has managed to escape any attempts that the US has made to overthrow it's democratic mandate but it had the support of the USSR in it's early stages and there's no hegemonic power right now that could be of similar help.
I'm not a particularly bright person, and I don't think I'll ever have a proper answer.
There is a lot that's wrong with Cuba and I certainly wouldn't want to live there but it's one of if not the only better places (in terms of things like access to healthcare, housing and such) in south America despite heavy sanctions and the dictatorship but I have absolutely no idea how they still exist, it's a fucking miracle considering the the circumstances and they do it at very high costs in terms of technological progress. What I always viewed as huge mistake is the UDSSR or China as partner, they never cared much about the ideology (they did kind of care for a perverted version supporting some parts whenever it was convinient for the powerful but really not much) and fought for their own interests, doing so wasn't/isn't just a risk to your reputation which would be fine but also your autonomy and many of their goals aren't any less imperialistic than Americas.
Chile was coup'd by a faction in its own military with western backing, not actually invaded by the west. Chile could have prevented this by preemptively purging fascist officers in the military. This would have saved Chile but condemned it to being called fascist on lemmy.
My main issue with authoritarian attempts to achive anything close to socialism failed because of coruption and similar shit if they didn't just use it as nothing but a talking point in the first place so I don't see that as viable option to achive any kind of equality ether.
That the USSR managed to last long as long as it did despite being invaded by more developed nations multiple times during the aftermath of its revolution and eventually collapsed largely due to its own internal corruption does put paid to the idea that some authoritarian measures will help protect a socialist state from external attempts to destabilise it.
The problem seems to be one inherent within the structure of states. Any heirarchical structure like that is fit to be abused by someone sufficiently self interested that they'd put their own interests above the interests of the people gestures at Mikhail Gorbachev selling the USSR out to the Western core for his own enrichment.
Anarchism, being decentralised, might be able to withstand some of the issues that were present in the late USSR. But previous anarchist attempts have been crushed by outside actors much easier than socialist attempts.
I don't really know what there is to be done.
Absolutely but authoritarian states are at a even higher risk in that regard and you got enough powerful enemies as a socialist already. One of the biggest issue for Arnachism next to the absurd amount of very different interpretations is ironically Socialism/Communism, parts of many revolutions had Arnachist ideas and so did big parts of the historic worker movments (Black is the flag of the Arnachist and Red of the Socialist worker) but they never really managed to get any of them in to the new system even after a successful revolution. It's all a very tough question and I wish I had good answers but I fear the truth is none of us dose, at least we oppose fucking capitalism I guess, that's a start and history has shown it can spread to bigger parts of society in some cases.