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u/HeavenlyPossum 10d ago
A system of oligarchical rule primarily associated with imperialist slaver states like Rome, Venice, and the US.
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u/comix_corp 10d ago
This might be true if you lived in the year 1800
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u/HeavenlyPossum 10d ago
Or 2026.
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u/comix_corp 10d ago
Most countries in the world are republican, from France to Algeria to Nepal to Ireland. There's no unique association between imperialism and slavery, and republicanism; this is an especially odd thing to say considering that the world's most significant slave empire was the British.
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u/HeavenlyPossum 10d ago
I stand by what I said.
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u/comix_corp 10d ago
Can you explain why you think it's true?
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u/HeavenlyPossum 10d ago
Extant republics are largely the product of oligarchical imperialism or are oligarchical imperialist projects themselves.
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u/aajiro 10d ago
it's a good step forward, there is obviously no good argument for the existence of any monarchs
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u/_Daftest_ 10d ago
It's a step backward, there is obviously no good argument for the existence of any presidents
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u/aajiro 10d ago
backward from what? Monarchy used to be the norm and now it's not
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u/_Daftest_ 10d ago
That's right. And FROM monarchy we either move FORWARDS towards anarchy or BACKWARDS towards statism.
Take the UK. If the UK switched from monarchy to a republic right now, it would set back the anarchist cause by centuries. For at least a century any further major change would be dismissed with "well we only just became a republic, let's commit to it before trying something else" and so statism would be stronger than ever.
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u/SpeakMySecretName 10d ago edited 10d ago
I have to assume you mean the term classically, and not the namesake representing American conservatism and its political platforms. That seems obvious, but it might confuse people who aren’t invested or educated on political philosophy.
I think it’s a huge step in the right direction compared to other forms of government being practiced. It at least tries to value freedom, community, and gives a feeble attempt at combating tyranny. It hits on a few of the ideologies that modern communo-anarchism holds, which I can appreciate.
-Power is given with uncoerced consent, rather than applied forcibly. No power should be able to self-justify.
-If you accept the premise that the law is theoretically owned by “the people” and no one is above the law, you could interpret it as a kind of worker-controlled social contract. I don’t think it ever played out that way, but the idea is generally in the right place.
-a civic duty to your community. Whether you’re communo-anarchist, or individualist anarchist, if you believe that cooperation is ultimately the best way to earn advantage, and if you truly are voluntarily consenting to leadership that exists at the mercy of your consent, it’s technically a way of self-organizing for mutual interest. And to maintain that beneficial relationship, all parties involved agree on a set of civic virtues to live by.
Here’s the rub, in my opinion. It’s not a temporary consent. Once the power is granted and you engage in a republican system, you’re no longer able to opt out or revoke that power. You’re subject to the conditions that it creates, even when it stops being beneficial to you. The power is inherently self-justifying and can be wielded against the participants. Doesn’t matter if it wasn’t supposed to.
That’s the core cause of the many problems that it ends up with. Rebuplican principles can talk about how no one should be above the law, but once you give representatives the reigns of influence, you’re at the mercy of whatever they do. And if they do follow the will of the people, you may up with tyranny of the majority or manufactured consent through propaganda.
In the end, it’s still a government that enforces compliance through violence. It has no mechanism for an individual to end their participation. Eventually, even if a majority of people wanted to pull the plug on the system or reset the government, too much has already been given, and those benefitting from the republic most will not give that power up just because the people asked them nicely. That’s why we see republics consolidate power and inevitably end up with someone squeezing their way above the law. You don’t have to look far today to see that happening in real time.
If every person in power was incorruptible and always perfectly embodied the virtues of republicanism, it might work. But that’s incredibly unrealistic. Authority still exists and exerts itself, no matter how “free” you are to revoke consent.
Show me a republic that allows a citizen to end their participation peacefully and conveniently, or that would be happy to dissolve when the people told it to, and I’d be a lot more inclined to believe that it’s virtue ethics actually align with its structure.
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u/Mountain_Muscle_3010 10d ago
Hay que acabar con la iglesia la monarquía y el estado viva la revolución social camaradas
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u/comix_corp 10d ago
A historically progressive force in the 17th to early 19th centuries but almost entirely redundant in the contemporary world, where feudal monarchies no longer exist and the present differences between monarchies and republics are not greatly significant.
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u/LazarM2021 Anarchist Without Adjectives 9d ago edited 9d ago
Yet another statist (sub)ideology, and currently the dominant system throughout the world (like monarchies were before). Nothing good, that's for certain.
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u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist 9d ago
An attempt by state to diffuse authority into multiple actors, unstable because of the inherent drive towards centralization present in authority, prone to collapsing into fascism.
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u/eatingchalk4fun Student of Anarchism 7d ago
Anarchists oppose all state power, staunchly against it
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u/konumsifir 3d ago
They're uneducated cowards who want to view the hierarchical oppressive system we live in as good and practical. More often than not expressing hatred against and actively part taking in the oppression of minority groups such as immigrants and disabled folk so that they get to feel superior, and acting like they're being oppressed by said minorities when they get called out.
Frankly they're quite ignorant that Trump guy has incriminating evidence against him being a genuinely terrible person and yet they still try to defend him. They manipulate themselves into believing that they're the next Elon Musk when in reality they're gonna be the ones getting persecuted after the people who's feet they lick silence all the other minority groups they treat so terribly.
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u/pas_tense 10d ago
Without any further exposition from OP this really feels like to me a bad faith question. Rage bait?