this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
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It's disappointing to see how db0 has developed, although they'd say the same about me. I really don't recall them being this way a long time ago. They used to be more level headed but now it seems like, ironically, they are a petty tyrant of their e-fief and they guard it jealously against imagined threats lurking in every shadow.
They aren't even capable of engaging with reasonable arguments. They just snap to accusations and knee-jerk reactions where they assure themselves that they are always in the right. The tragedy of this is that db0's skepticism towards hierarchy and how power is wielded apparently only extends outwards and never inwards into self-critique for how they act.
There's a good argument for the anarchist hero Nestor Makhno being authoritarian. He ordered the summary execution of leaders in his own military, deploying his military secret police(!!) to carry out the executions. Volin, then-head of what was ostensibly the civil administration oversight body, the Military Revolutionary Council, which had mandate over all things that weren't about conducting war or where it fell into a state of exception (e.g. Makhno finally giving Grigoriev exactly what he deserved when Grigoriev pulled a gun on Makhno) and so it was expected that Makhno would have held a trial and that there would have been sentencing. Except Volin wasn't in the room when this order was issued so the executions were carried out and only after did Volin express dismay at this action by Makhno.
Volin being in the room when decisions like this were made meant that he did keep a check on Makhno at other points, such as when a domestic Ukrainian printing press was printing material that Makhno deemed to be "too sympathetic" towards the Bolsheviks and so Makhno ordered that the newspaper be banned and their printing press be destroyed. Volin countermanded this order based on anarchist principles and on the fact that it was a matter for the civil administration and not for the leader of the military to decide.
There are other examples of Makhno's actions being just as "authoritarian" as what you'd find people criticizing communists for, including using the military secret police to establish terror cells in the USSR to subvert the government (remember this next time you hear the "stabbed in the back" trope that gets trotted out routinely), but these get overlooked or excused as being "Bolshevik propaganda". Meanwhile most sources are either anarchist, pro-Makhnovshchina, or they are primary sources from actual anarchists like Volin and Belash; never let facts and sources get in the way of an opportune handwaving, I guess?
There's other matters, like his personal conduct and the way he established a clique of officers around him and insulated himself from everyone else while ruling by edict, and the very tricky matter of the way that the Black Army treated the Mennonites. But that's a long story.
Suffice it to say that I don't need to explain that memes that glorify Makhno are certainly permitted there, despite him very easily qualifying for the title of authoritarian dictator himself. I already know that zero discussion would be permitted on this because either it would require db0 to acknowledge that even figures like Makhno had to, at times, resort to "authoritarian" measures (not that every time it was justified), and that almost any criticism of communist leaders could easily be applied to Makhno as well, or it would require acknowledging that Makhno was authoritarian and thus memes that lionize him are not permitted. Both are anathema to a dogmatist like db0.
Though I guess with specters like comrade Cowbee haunting the mind of db0 with the latent awareness that he will bring a very well-reasoned argument and the historical sources to back it up, is it any wonder why db0 acts like they're afraid of their own shadow?
Interesting, I knew about Makhno's banditry towards the bolsheviks, but not about having a secret police or shutting down that Ukrainian printing press! I tend to agree, there's a selective blindness going on that seems ideologically driven, and I think it's because dbzer0 as an instance is gaining more Marxist sympathies as a whole. Heightened contradictions and all that.
This is the thing that puzzles me, db0 regularly uses me in particular as an example whenever they want to make a point about Marxists, despite me not representing every Marxist or even speaking with them in days. It seems like I'm a go-to example, but as that thread showed it doesn't look like they particularly care to represent my views accurately.
It was really brain-melting seeing anarchist comrades I knew well, who had denounced the Cheka and the Stasi and so on, take one of two routes when I raised the Makhnovist military secret police - either they'd deny it and claim it was merely Bolshevik propaganda (lol) or they would immediately switch to defending it and providing justifications despite not being aware of it up until that point. I was already deeply questioning my anarchist politics at this point but to see anarchists, some of whom I sincerely respected, start doing the same thing that they'd lambaste "tankies" over really shook me and it led me to question the dogmatism that I became aware of, which eventually led me to get serious about materialism. Ultimately, it speaks volumes that an anarchist movement irl required the establishment of a secret police force during a period of civil war to defend the revolution. I'm not going to say that their every action was justified but if you lean into it, it says something about the nature of and the necessity for concentration of authority and of state apparatuses. I guess I wasn't quite hardheaded enough that I could ignore this for long, although only by a narrow margin.
So, as is customary, you've replied to me and so it's only right that I provide you with yet another item to add to your reading list [PDF Warning]. Fortunately Kontrrazvedka: The Story of the Makhnovist Intelligence Service is short, but it's quite comprehensive for the topic of the Makhnovist military secret police (Kontrrazvedka being the Ukrainian term for them.) There are other mentions of them in other historical sources but they are often small and fragmentory.
Azarov is a contemporary Ukrainian anarchist so it's really hard for his work to be reflexively dismissed as a source too, which is nice. I still think he handles the subject with kid's gloves, honestly, but at least he stuck his neck out to write this work and he did criticize the Kontrrazvedka, which is more than I can say for some anarchists. (It's a bad period of history to be a prominent anarchist living in Ukraine though and I wonder how he's doing.)
Congrats on being promoted to boogeyman status. That's something we could all aspire to be lol
Yep, what you describe is a similar path I took from anarchism to Marxism. Seeing anarchist movements forced through necessity into making concessions and adapting structures that normally go against horizontalism was one of the bits that propelled me towards Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and then the rest of the Marxist canon. And thanks for the book! There's no chance I can get to it anytime soon, but it's absolutely getting added to the list of books I intend to read.
Hope Azarov is doing well too, that's terrifying.
And yep, I've basically been a boogeyman for quite a few people for quite a while now. I don't really get it though, I'm one of the least confrontational and least aggressive people that talk about Marxism here on Lemmy.
I legit think it's this! You're always so calm and composed and you treat the comments you're arguing against with such respect, more than they often deserve. I think it makes it really hard for people to argue against you in a compelling way, and it pisses people off that their arguments look so bad in comparison to yours
I've had similar thoughts, and I find it really funny that it provokes such hatred. The reason I do it is so that none of my points can be dismissed due to their delivery, that's also why I give a lot of leeway for what others say and focus on the points at hand no matter how rudely they're given. Nia Frome's On Dialectics, or How to Defeat Enemies is a great essay on why that works well.
You don't need to be threatening to be perceived as a threat, I suppose.
I think that's what's more threatening, as comrade Are_Euclidding_Me pointed out. It's easier to dismiss rude or confrontational people, no matter how justified they are, than someone that avoids slapfighting.
It's actually Russian (контрразведка), Ukrainian would be Kontrrozvidka (контррозвiдка), which is almost the same anyway.
Oh that's interesting to know, thanks for the correction!
Makhno used Russian and Ukrainian words pretty much interchangeably (which is typical of Southern and Eastern Ukraine), and most information got through Russian-language sources anyway.
I always appreciate learning and people who have a commitment to accuracy, so these corrections might not seem like much but it matters to me a lot.
Books!
(not that I'm gonna read anytime soon)
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"You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you add to your to-read pile"
— Seneca, probably
db0 is trying to bait you because they refuse to (likely could not even if they tried) actually engage with what you say. I'm sure they think this is very smart and "anarchist" of them to be doing.
Probably, I agree, though I think it's backfiring if that's true.
It's certainly not working, lol. Stay comfy, friend.
Thanks, you too!
It's also wild that db0 acts like you're some kind of violent and aggressive evil tankie who flips out at a moment's notice, when you're probably one of the most patient and kind people I know when you're interacting with libs. I would not have the patience you do to deal with their smug bullshit and circular arguments time and time again.
Tbf on your Mahkno section, he wasn't exactly normal for anarchists of the time. He advocated for an anarchist vanguard. That's organising along lines of ML hierarchy but for anarchist means. It's very muddled in its own way.
That's a good point. Not to come off as snarky towards anarchists but there's only a couple of anarchist projects that we can even look to as historical examples - in Ukraine, in the Spanish Civil War, in Korea with the KPAM (extremely briefly and it seems like a lot of the scholarship on it is bound up in the Korean language, if it even exists.)
Often anarchists use Rojava, aka AANES, but they really aren't anarchist (although I tend to avoid debate on this matter) and then there's the MAREZ led by the EZLN, often just referred to as "The Zapatistas" (which irritates me because it gives those western chauvinist vibes) but they explicitly reject the label of anarchism because it's from a western political and colonial paradigm. Can't say I'd have any objections to that even if I did have a say, which I don't.
Both the Malhnovshchina and Revolutionary Catalonia are really good examples of hierarchies and anarchist vanguardism of a sort, not to mention of states themselves, so it's a catch-22: I'm going to look at it and my conclusion will be that these structures are a necessity to advance and defend the revolution, at least insofar as they were able to, but I could see anarchists rejecting this and arguing that it's a quirk of history and that they aren't necessary and that it is possible to advance an anarchist revolution without it. I can imagine that some anarchists would argue that these structures are also what led to each revolution failing too, although I've never come across a good argument or any sources that seem to vindicate this position.
It's interesting how Makhno and Arshinov leaned harder into vanguardism after they fled Ukraine with the collapse of the Black Army where they developed platformism as a response to what they identified as critical flaws within the Makhnovshchina.
I wonder if Makhno wasn't so bitterly opposed to the Bolsheviks, for obvious reasons since he had such a personal stake in opposing them, if he would have taken Arshinov's path and ended up going full-Bolshevik in the end?
EZLN can't be considered anarchist either. They explicitly said they weren't anarchist and that saying they were endangered their project entirely as it could divide them, further evidence of that is shown in the fact that they reorganised in a way I think can only be described as soviet-style organising due to losing territory to cartels. They have reorganised into something that is clearly a hierarchy.
Yes 100%. The successful anarchist projects used these structures or were pushed into using these structures to survive.
Perhaps, we can only speculate and there's no way any anarchists will agree entertain the idea unless they're already sympathetically ML-aligned and likely to slide back and forth between anarchism and MLism anyway. I am one such person. I am ML but deeply sympathetic to criticisms of hierarchy and, in particular, anarchist community building feels very good to be part of, it feels right, I've been part of several such communities. The problem is that it does not defend itself well at all.
Hook me up to a blood pressure monitor and then claim that MAREZ is anarchist and refer to it as "Chiapas" or "The Zapatistas" and watch those numbers climb lol. There's something about referring to a primarily indigenous political movement by their location rather than their chosen name that really gives the same vibes as a colonial era Brit on safari referring to "the natives" or some subspecies of animal; it's almost like invalidating the legitimacy of their polity by not respecting it enough to call it by its name.
I think you and I are working along similar lines here. In many respects I'd love to still be an anarchist but your political position isn't a sports team where you can just pick out the one you favor the most. This isn't intended to sound facetious but I'd genuinely love for anarchism to prove me wrong but, until that day comes, I think there are fundamental flaws in how anarchism analyzes the world, how it prioritizes its political goals, and how it functions in terms of organizing and defending itself.
MLism isn't without flaws or valid criticisms but it has an answer for big questions/problems that emerge in most anarchist models like how do you navigate working alongside people who aren't deeply political and who aren't open to being politicized to a high degree - think of your average middle aged mom and pop who love their grandkids and enjoy gardening but they just aren't ever going to engage with theory deeply enough to develop into the model anarchists capable of achieving full political self-actualization, or however you want to describe it. In terms of politics, they are going to be followers, essentially, and that's okay - a movement should be able to accommodate that without expecting them to be at every organizing meeting and to engage with hundreds of hours worth of theory reading.
In terms of the general population, all of us here (regardless of political orientation) would be in the top 1% for political engagement and that's not to flatter us but rather to point out that we can invite others to become more political and we can educate/agitate/organize to develop the political consciousness of people but it's naive to expect that everyone can and/or will reach this level. And, let's be honest with ourselves, it's hard enough to get this particular demographic to do the reading (I'm very much guilty of this myself btw so I'm not pointing the finger at others, I'm just being realistic) so I don't think it's a viable strategy to expect that the median person in terms of political development and engagement would fare better. But let's presume that it is, as a thought experiment - what so we need to do create the conditions for that median person to achieve a high degree of politicization?
Imo we would need to do away with capitalism and colonialism, we obviously would need to have a revolution to achieve that, we would need to defend the revolution, we would need to fundamentally change how work functions so that they have enough free time for their political development, and we might just need to wait until we are a couple of generations on from that person because culture changes slowly and often people get very set in their ways that makes it very hard to get them to budge.
And how do you achieve all of that in a practical sense? For me MLism has a viable, practical answer. I don't see most anarchist tendencies having one though. To oversimplify, there's a chicken-and-egg problem that MLism (or vanguardism) has a solution for.
I'm sure none of what I've written here is news to you though.
I think some anarchists recognise that it is easier to radicalise, agitate and politicise people under capitalism than it is under socialism and this leads them to believing that socialism is a greater enemy to their project than capitalism because it's easier to grow anarchist numbers under it.
I'd argue that the Socialist-Revolutionary Party was doing an anarchist vanguard without calling it either anarchist or vanguard, so it wasn't that unusual.
Thank for writing this comment I have learned much.
You're welcome. It's very much a sketch rather than being something comprehensive. I've read a fair bit about the Makhnovists although I'm no scholar. I tend to keep this stuff under wraps a lot of the time because often there's not much point sharing it - it's liable to just fuel online slapfights that produce little aside from spectacle.
I do genuinely believe that most of what the Makhnovists did in terms of establishing a state and defending it were necessary, and I try to be careful not to treat it as some gotcha like a debatebro would.
Every time comrade ReadFanon comments I learn new things!
I wanna do another "Uphold ReadFanon Thought" post but more general and not just neurodiverse related.
But also
Not helped by the recent changes made to limit how many pages of comments/search/etc you can get.
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MOOOODS. Please gimme a dump of all ReadFanon comments
Also please gimme a dump of all comments that contain emojies
so I can make a post telling people what emojies have been most used.
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I bet there are some emoji that have never been used lol
First you spin up a Lemmy instance , then you subscribe to every community, then you pull the data from your server. 😎
That's a great idea! A lot to take on but a lot of users would probably appreciate it!
Makhnovian anarchists were highly idealistically aligned with a petty bourgeois agrarian base and actively opposed to prole city interests. Rather than find a way to bridge these interests into a coherent whole, they tended to just steal from industrializing cities and break shit, demanding the products of those industries but not paying for them. This was rationalized as being very anarchist, same as then not providing any food to those now further-impoverished workers.
At a basic level they just amplified a class antagonism between classes oppressed by the bourgeoisie rather than uniting them to create a lasting revolution and weakening this antagonism over time. Many of them literally just idealized agrarian life as being the only valid way of being of the people, and not coincidentally were the children of small landholders. Unsurprisingly, they constantly ceded ground to the bourgeoisie in the western regions, particularly industrializing cities, and had to repeatedly re-mobilize against a threat they could have more permanently ended if they weren't solely focused on establishing and defending an agrarian-centric, parasitic, petty bourgeois "commune".
This is also the antagonism that eventually led to the so-called "betrayel" by the Red Army, who was putting down the Whites for good. The Makhnovians just plain could not stop forcibly stealing from cities and destroying their materials to support their "communes" while letting the Whites rebuild in (alienated!) cities, threatening to destabilize the entire revolutionary project in what is now Ukraine. With the Red Army increasingly present in those cities, this led to repeated direct conflicts, with "anarchists" stealing from them and bombing their buildings or setting fire to their materials, often over an inventive idealistic froth like you see from db0. Being "anarchists", who came into existence as militants just as often as they disappeared back to "the people", it was also often conveniently impossible for the black army to promise to exercise discipline, even though they repeatedly did so when they actually wanted to, with highly hierarchical ranks and coercion. After hundreds of back-and-forths of escalations and false promises and excuse-making, the Red Army finally abandoned the pretense of being allies and rapidly crushed the Black Army. This is spun as some kind of sneaky betrayal by the Reds by Western chauvinistic "anarchists" that tend to just be embarrassed liberals rather than an expected outcome of constant provocation and intentionally escalated oppressed class contradictions.
I don't disagree with what you've said here and I want to get back around to this comment to reply more thoroughly but in the meantime, in matters of the "betrayal" trope, this is the official communiqué that Makhno issued publicly upon signing a treaty with the Red Army:
...but this doesn't gel with the current narrative of the duplicitous Bolsheviks and the persecuted underdog Makhnovist victims.
Yes, indeed. There is also a heavy dose of LARPing in the narrative, as if the white imperial core settler "anti-tankie" has so much in common with the small Ukrainian landholder's son caught up in a world historical revolution and civil war. All one has to do is apply the label: "leftist", "anarchist", "collectivist", "horizontalist", and suddenly you share in their pain because you profess a completely non-acted-upon belief against capitalists and hierarchy. And through this alchemic transformation, you can be assured that your true enemies are actually other white imperial core leftists who profess an alignment with communist thought, and damn they're gonna "betray" you, too! Truly aggrieved, aren't they?
That's the weirdest part to me that I've complained about for a while, that these people who have never faced the vaguest hint of a prospect of violence from communists except, in extreme cases, on the level and seriousness of a bar fight, talk about the reds murdering them like by calling themselves anarchists they are connected in a material way to these events, which are then transposed forward to the present circumstance. Them talking about cops brutalizing them makes perfect sense, because that's a realistic possibility, but communists? Come on.
It's reminding me of nationalist drivel about how neighboring nations are "eternal enemies" and so on.
db0 has always been like this.
On the Lemmyverse or before that point?
Ever since the db0 lemmy instance has existed, at least.
Yeah, on not surprised to hear that. I was a latecomer to Lemmy. db0 has been around longer than that though.
I'm not sure if my experience of db0 changed when I became an outsider (not that I ever knee them personally) or if they changed over time but it's sad to see their ziq-ification regardless.
It's unfortunately common among "leftists", usually sheltered Westerners who see politics through their own self-actualization more than a world historical project.