I guess same way people screeching anarkiddies while not having read any theory ever
chapotraphouse
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Slop posts go in c/slop. Don't post low-hanging fruit here.
I wouldn’t say anarchists are a monolith in this regard. There are multiple networks which have some overlap, but aren’t necessarily the same. Like someone who gets radicalized on Reddit is going to be different from someone who gets radicalized because their sister volunteered for Food Not Bombs a lot. But both may have read the bread book.
Probably because most western socialists come to leftist politics not through on-the-ground organizing, but rather, some dissatisfaction with their own society that leads them to seek alternatives. The first place to seek alternatives is going to be looking to the past or reading theorists, and then it depends on a lot of factors on who they'll sympathize with. It's often just aesthetics because I've organized with both Marxist and anarchist organizations and there's not a whole lot of difference when you're actually outdoors.
Also there's a long history of western states using Trotskyism as a cudgel against leftist organizing. It's cooked into the standard education now that Trotsky was supposed to be party secretary after Lenin, but Stalin betrayed them all. That's the standard understanding of how things went, so that takes a lot of time to disentangle. The primary operating mode of the western mind is an imperialist xenophobia and depending on how they get over that will say how their political outlook may shake out
Also I can't stress enough how much of simply an aesthetic it is, at least in the west. It doesn't matter. Unless you live in like...Greece or the Philippines or somewhere in rural Colombia, there aren't warring factions of Marxists and anarchists. The only sectarian conflict I've ever seen in person were when cops were involved, like the "Maoist" groups that would overturn tables at Food not Bombs or show up at PSL events to call the organizers a bunch of crackers.
On the ground you gotta understand how little of this actually matters. There simply isn't major conflict. Anarchist and Marxist groups cooperate all the time. They might have disagreements on how to do stuff or what symbols to use, but it basically never matters. The closest thing to a sectarian conflict that I can remember among the groups I roll with is around 2021 some of the anarchists I knew wanted to boycott the covid vaccine. But they ended up getting it anyway so who cares
I think it’s a couple of things
Western chauvinism inculcates “those are bad countries doing bad things in a bad system” which takes a lot to unlearn.
Authority can and always is abused for corruption and has been abused for corruption in communist systems, which in part justifies the charge that any system with structural authority will be abused for corruption.
Angst vibes lead to a “fuck every system” attitude.
By standing against all authority structures that actually exist or have existed, they are immune to criticisms based on reality, so I think to a degree it’s a stand you take when you want to take a stand but don’t want to accept that reality is always flawed.
Communist states are often militaristic which sits uncomfortably close to nationalism.
Anarchist here. You don't get taught to hate MLs, you just get exposed to a lot of MLs making aggressive and ill-informed arguments against anarchism and it gets on your nerves.
I don't hate Lenin either, even though his writing is full of the same sort of thing, and I don't particularly disagree with him about much. I think tankie vs anarchist is mostly a disagreement about definitions tbh.
Probably in the minority with this one, my "grudge" originates from reading this: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq-full#toc562
And while it's much more toned down since then, it is still present as what you describe as "You have to be extremely angry about it and treat anyone who doesn't disavow them as though they're literally going to kill you." - which from my perspective is more like that the leaders of the USSR tended to resort to abuse of power in order to hold power and MLs are very vehement about the fact that these were no big deals or even were completely necessary to keep the project going, while, coming from anarchist circles, from my perspective these events change the nature of the project itself. This is mostly why i can relate to trots more - they are not afraid to call out what they perceive as self-serving use of power as mistakes, or even crimes.
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2021/10/15/cointelpro-fbi-anarchism-disrupt-left/
Thr answer is always CIA
As an anarchist, how it went for me:
Read history. Have intimate relationships with at least two tankies (all my relationships end badly, so its a sure way to build a grudge).
Marx was cool though (sometimes), and I've got some ml comrades who are doing pretty much the right thing, and most importantly: I'd rather be murdered by my hot problematic ex in a few years than some shitty nazi tomorrow. So if there are firing squads for the anarchists, my last wish is that one of my exes do mine, please.
If I get my way, you guys can run the trains.
If none of this makes sense, read some less myopic history. The USSR was unquestionably better than the czarist regime, by a lot, and it was the worst most reactionary group of communists kind of giving communism a bad name by being generally shitty about being bare minimum decent¹. Also the bolsheviks killing all the other communists, not just the anarchists. Yes they moved Russia, technologically, farther in their short life than basically any civilization in history, but they did it by shitting on the core ideas of communism for some peripheral crap Marx said was 'probably a thing you need sometjing like to get there, I think'. There's an opportunity cost thing, and I'll give them more understanding, but they do not get a full pass for bad behavior just because they were communist. What's the incident where the term 'tankie' was born? Remember that one?
Yes they were better than the other world powers, but by as little as they could get away with while still calling themselves communist, like they relished the misery, fetishized the sacrifices, and frequently missed the god damn point. They ruled for a people they weren't willing to trust or like, a lesson robespierre had already fucking taught us, and that poisoned the idea of communism, or at least the word, for a lot of people. Thats why I still have to call myself an anarchist instead of an anarcho-communist if I want to turn libs.
¹which, yes, set the entire rest of the world against them. They had a few teeeensy difficulties. They still used it as a license to be otherwise just as awful as everyone else, and handled their problems in utterly deplorable ways.
which, yes, set the entire rest of the world against them. They had a few teeeensy difficulties. They still used it as a license to be otherwise just as awful as everyone else, and handled their problems in utterly deplorable ways.
To be absolutely clear, the poor and lackluster decisions and retreats from "pure" Marxism and Leninism were by far the result of material conditions over a personal desire for power. The USSR was the world's first socialist experiment and thus went on to make mistakes which would be corrected by later socialist experiments which would survive the 90s, but many of those things were forced by the invasion of 14 imperialist powers and the genocidal war campaign of the Nazis shortly after.
The history of Marxism (from the Marxist perspective) can be seen as legitimately taking the most successful form of liberatory thought and action in the modern day and trying to make it continually work in the cruel world we're born into. It's not perfect, but it's been shown to work on a scale larger than any other strain of thought, and socialist revolutions have fed more children who'd gone hungry before than anything else prior or after.
For more context in this worldview, I highly recommend Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti and Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo