It wasn’t a hostile discussion or anything, i didn’t even go full “the kulaks deserved it” (although the mod that single-handedly banned me did go full “the kulaks did not deserve it”). I just laid out plainly and calmly that revolutions are inherently authoritarian, that Luxemburg said “the revolution will be as violent as the ruling class makes it necessary” and that there’s one Trotzki quote i 100% agree with: “If the October Revolution hadn’t succeeded, the world would have known a Russian word for fascism 10 years before Mussolini’s March on Rome”. Basically the whole “Jakarta Method” train of thought laid out clearly and without calling anybody names.
Note that this was on an explicitly left-leaning server that does not allow cops and troops to join. Also after several days of another poster starting destructive, aggressive bad faith arguments in the politics channel until a number of users went “disengage” on her and the channel had to be frozen until recently, when she immediately started being hostile and arguing in bad faith again, which got her not one, but two warnings from the same mod without further consequences. Meanwhile, when i defend AES without attacking anybody, that’s apparently too much for her to handle. No advance warning, no “sis, you’re talking to me as a mod here”, not even a notification that i got banned.
The best part is that according to screenshots a friend just sent me, she’s now completely going off about “authoritarians”. The nerve some people have.
Sorry for posting pointless internet drama here, i just needed to vent.
You did sort of reinvent anarcho-bidenism and the premise of that FBI anarchist publication.
Not sure if I’m familiar with this one. Do you have a link?
Never been a fan of this phrase. The people that take part in it like it too much and can hide behind multiple layers of irony while unironically supporting it.
I only ever used anarcho-bidenism to ridicule radlibs and “anarchists” who parrot the state department, and on the website people only really use it that way.
Here’s the FBI thing: https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2021/10/15/cointelpro-fbi-anarchism-disrupt-left/
To counteract this common narrative… https://archive.ph/GnQtp#selection-483.18-483.151
Here are FBI MLs too, which actually existed: https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/167878
I could have told you about Maoist feds upon request. I have zero doubt that the Austin Red Guard has those connections, Black Hammer was sponsored by a Russian agent, etc. etc. The US takes impotent enemies and pits them against its threatening enemies, especially the ones with more chaotic ideologies (as, it cannot be stressed enough, the original memo does still say). That does not mean there are not good anarchist and maoist movements or that either is a State Dept. plot, but that on a sociological level the nominally-anarchist/Maoist cultural trends in the US are easier to steer in the direction of useful idiocy against actual opponents of the US. Remember, Trotsky was the biggest useful idiot of all, not any anarchist or Maoist.
My point is, the actual declassified papers of the FBI show that this “anarchist infiltration zine” never happened. It was proposed and then discarded. Either they didn’t think we were enough of a threat to put the effort into subverting, or they thought they wouldn’t be able to make anarchists fall for it.
ML feds did happen though, and were rather succesful, because when the State Dept. plants reached a high enough position of authority within the party, no one dared questioning them.
You may not be saying it intentionally, and I believe you aren’t, but it’s a massive narrative in mainly ML circles that us anarchists were just useful idiots, and we’re against leftism as a whole, and we’re easy to infiltrate, and most of us are CIA/FBI plants etc etc, and the only source of this is that one zine, which didn’t actually happen. Continuing to post it and show it without further context just keeps reinforcing that narrative.
I’ll need to look more at the reporting.
What I said is that anarchist cultural trends in the US are vulnerable to useful idiocy, which is exclusively my point and which I am generally pretty clear about with discussing “anarcho-bidenists”. My instance is one with anarchists, including among admins, and they know that I’m not talking about them even though some of them are literally American anarchists, a matter made clear by the fact that they, unlike those I complain about, don’t fall for this “third campist” bullshit that you see some American anarchists go off about so frequently online.
Can you tell me with a straight face that anti-“tankie” hysteria isn’t useful idiocy or that those spaces aren’t frequently brimming with people who fashion themselves anarchists or ““libertarian socialists””?
I think I do believe that early on anarchists tend to demonize socialist countries, and give them no real nuance or charitability, which does lead them to believe things that are objectively just cold war propaganda, and often times it is difficult to call this out because it’s viewed as siding with the enemy. In my experience most do end up moving on, while still firmly opposing them but for more theoretical and pragmatic reasons and not because of an abstract notion that they are evil. I do agree this is harder to happen if one became an anarchist via people that call themselves anarchists but advocate for completely antithetical things in practice like NonCompete, or straight up co-opters like Vaush.
I don’t believe as a whole that disagreement, callout and suspicion of tankies and MLism is something bad or that it benefits the U.S. I don’t really see how you could expect us not to be wary, given the constant history of hijacking, blackmailing, crushing and undermining by MLs to us. It’s not even something “in the past”, not a lot more than just 10 years ago, greek MLs allied with the cops to stop us. I myself think we are capable of working together but I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t.
Also, why do you put libertarian socialists in quotation marks?
NC is weird because he calls himself an anarchist but is invested in Luna’s projects with Ho-Chi-Minh thought. I think he discusses this in some videos but I just can’t be arsed to be interested. He seems okay but that’s not enough for me to invest time in his lore. V**sh is just a repugnant neoliberal who belongs in a reeducation program or a pit.
Regarding this specific part: Get a grip. Internet anarchists are completely full of shit on this but they just love playing the victim like some internet ML wants them to be put in a gulag. You can see how so many of them are reared as radlibs because they are are so ready to use their “affiliation” to act like a persecuted minority when all they ever did was post on Reddit and have never even met someone who faced this violence. They whine about anarchists who were attacked by Bolsheviks when a huge portion of those anarchists were objectively counterrevolutionaries trying to overturn the October Revolution and generally instigate chaos and violence (“Oh, but Makhno eventually put down some of the antisemites doing pogroms that he first armed and trained!” Fuck off.) There were good anarchists in Russia – some of whom did get caught in the crossfire – but there were many “anarchists” who regarded the gains of the bolsheviks as being incidental to tyranny and treated them as fascists to be fought militarily.
But this is still an excellent display of the very useful idiocy I mean, this politics of being aggrieved because some maniac with a black flag was wounded by the most besieged country on the planet in the latter’s efforts to protect the revolution. Are you an ally of attempts to establish a DotP? Cool, I don’t care what your boutique sect is. Are you not? Then stop trying to claim Marx or pretending that the antagonism is not at all coming from you. Did the Panthers shoot your grandpa? Then
he probably had it comingwe can talk.Because, in addition to polcomp shit, it’s a label taken up by useful idiots (including nominal Marxists!) to distinguish themselves from “authoritarian” socialists who are a red scare boogeyman that only exists in the former’s mind. It’s also taken up by even more detrimental morons like Chomsky. Anarchists can just call themselves anarchists, Zapatistas, Zapatistas (no, they are not anarchists), and Chomsky can take a long nap because he’s old and done quite enough talking.
You can say whatever you want, I’m not even advising you to stop using the term like with “statists,” just explaining my scare quotes. You are whatever you say you are, that’s how names work.
“Statist” pisses me off significantly more because, aside from putting words in my mouth and being used to misrepresent Marx like someone tried to at first in this chain, there are people who actually do support the indefinite existence of a state and those are not the Marxists. “Tankie” at least refers to a real dispute where I am on the side it represents (I hate Khrushchev and wish he was killed in the purges, but he was right with Hungary).
Ah, I almost forgot:
Because there is no anarchist threat to the US. Marxist states have consistently represented an ideological and geopolitical problem for the US for more than a century. The whole purpose of the red scare was to avert solidarity with these states and recognition of their successes, as well as to galvanize support for aggressive measures against them. This has leaked into opposition even to other liberal states that are trying to undo unipolarity (Russia especially). This is kind of the crux of the anarcho-bidenist thing, that scoundrels like V**sh claim a mantle of radical progressivism while parroting State Department talking points against enemies of the US, the biggest one being a Marxist state with substantial (and more conventionally) Marxist allies!