chat

Sure. Given the numerous benefits that the people’s republics have offered the working masses, it logically follows that showing them violent resistance or hostility would only alienate others from anarchism. In this respect, I am anarcho-pacifist: violence against a bourgeois state is probably inevitable, but it would be very counterproductive against a people’s republic (or a similar phenomenon like the BRV). Therefore, decentralisation and the disuse of state institutions are phenomena that other communities are going to have to be persuaded to adopt through example, if we can demonstrate a good enough example.

Many anarchists refer to the Red Army’s suppression of the Makhnovshchina as evidence that state socialism naturally excludes anarchists. Now, I have mixed feelings on the Makhnovshchina: it had some good accomplishments like redistributing land to poor peasants, but it was also too willing to collaborate with the rural petty bourgeoisie, so it is not my favourite example of anarchism. That aside, if the Makhnovshchina had been more cooperative with the Bolsheviki then I think that it is at least plausible that the Free Territory would have survived longer. After all, the Bolsheviki never hunted down Apollon Karelin, and Freetown Christiania is surviving despite its uneasy relationship with the bourgeois state, so I am reluctant to believe that the violence between anarchists and state-socialists all came down to fatalism or structural defects. Per Paul Avrich:

According to Emma Goldman, Makhno’s object was to establish a libertarian society in the south that would serve as a model for the whole of Russia. Interestingly, Trotsky once noted that he and Lenin had toyed with the idea of allotting a piece of territory to Makhno for this purpose,[8] but the project foundered when fighting broke out between the anarchist guerrillas and the Bolshevik forces in the Ukraine.

To keep it succinct, though, I am anarcho-pacifist towards the people’s republics.