Luxembourg’s “socialism or barbarism” slogan is interesting to contemplate if you take “barbarism” not to mean “brutal badthing” but “the nonuniversal societies existing outside the borders of centralized states”

Like, maybe socialism is the natural next evolutionary step of “the state” but there are alternate viable equilibria from this other branch

I’m sure anarchists are going “right on” but unless they’re pure no gods, no masters, no bedtimes chaos lovers (who I admire) they all just seem to want to set their own states up at different levels of granularity (I by no means trust the current Portland anarchists to set up a good one and am fine with the existing state suppressing them)

But how does that work? Tempted to point out the Holy Roman Empire federational model but that did in fact yield to nationalism (and the fact centralized states repeatedly outcompeted federations)

The Indian caste system? That has potential, it’d be unremarkable to point to the American race-caste system as part of why socialism was uncharacteristically weak here. Of course that polycentric assemblage famously fell to foreign domination for a while too