It wasnāt a hostile discussion or anything, i didnāt even go full āthe kulaks deserved itā (although the mod that single-handedly banned me did go full āthe kulaks did not deserve itā). I just laid out plainly and calmly that revolutions are inherently authoritarian, that Luxemburg said āthe revolution will be as violent as the ruling class makes it necessaryā and that thereās one Trotzki quote i 100% agree with: āIf the October Revolution hadnāt succeeded, the world would have known a Russian word for fascism 10 years before Mussoliniās March on Romeā. Basically the whole āJakarta Methodā 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 ādisengageā 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, thatās apparently too much for her to handle. No advance warning, no āsis, youāre talking to me as a mod hereā, not even a notification that i got banned.
The best part is that according to screenshots a friend just sent me, sheās now completely going off about āauthoritariansā. The nerve some people have.
Sorry for posting pointless internet drama here, i just needed to vent.
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 āanarchist infiltration zineā never happened. It was proposed and then discarded. Either they didnāt think we were enough of a threat to put the effort into subverting, or they thought they wouldnāt 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 arenāt, but itās a massive narrative in mainly ML circles that us anarchists were just useful idiots, and weāre against leftism as a whole, and weāre easy to infiltrate, and most of us are CIA/FBI plants etc etc, and the only source of this is that one zine, which didnāt actually happen. Continuing to post it and show it without further context just keeps reinforcing that narrative.
Iāll 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 āanarcho-bidenistsā. My instance is one with anarchists, including among admins, and they know that Iām 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, donāt fall for this āthird campistā bullshit that you see some American anarchists go off about so frequently online.
Can you tell me with a straight face that anti-ātankieā hysteria isnāt useful idiocy or that those spaces arenāt frequently brimming with people who fashion themselves anarchists or āālibertarian socialistsāā?
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 itās 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 donāt believe as a whole that disagreement, callout and suspicion of tankies and MLism is something bad or that it benefits the U.S. I donāt 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. Itās not even something āin the pastā, 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 donāt blame anyone who doesnāt.
Also, why do you put libertarian socialists in quotation marks?
NC is weird because he calls himself an anarchist but is invested in Lunaās projects with Ho-Chi-Minh thought. I think he discusses this in some videos but I just canāt be arsed to be interested. He seems okay but thatās 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 āaffiliationā 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 (āOh, but Makhno eventually put down some of the antisemites doing pogroms that he first armed and trained!ā Fuck off.) There were good anarchists in Russia ā some of whom did get caught in the crossfire ā but there were many āanarchistsā 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 latterās efforts to protect the revolution. Are you an ally of attempts to establish a DotP? Cool, I donāt 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, itās a label taken up by useful idiots (including nominal Marxists!) to distinguish themselves from āauthoritarianā socialists who are a red scare boogeyman that only exists in the formerās mind. Itās 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 heās old and done quite enough talking.
You can say whatever you want, Iām not even advising you to stop using the term like with āstatists,ā just explaining my scare quotes. You are whatever you say you are, thatās how names work.
āStatistā 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. āTankieā 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!
Youāre antagonistic as Iām used to when talking in here but youāve at least been more respectful to me than most MLs Iāve talked to here so I wanted to say I appreciate that.
People calling themselves anarchists and then advocating for archism is very common. We just donāt have that big of a theory culture, and when weāre believing in something so against almost all of the hegemonic thoughts implanted in our heads for all of our lives, itās very common to see people who want anarchy but fail to see how some anarchism things could work and propose alternatives that have heirarchy or a state. NonCompete is one of them. Iāve taken to calling them āsomearchistsā just because that is really funny, Iām not sure if thereās a better term.
If youāre interested in an anarchist youtuber, Anark is honestly one of the best, he even has a series directly synthesizing a modern view of anarchism that explains both the collectivist and individualist ideologies, I genuinely believe his videos are worth watching even for MLs because theyāre very well thought out.
https://piped.kavin.rocks/channel/UC1CjJYTUeor8EUFsbgwu5TQ
I fully agree that Vaush is a moron, itās nice that we can agree on that.
It is true that we are a minority, and it is true that in most leftist spaces that arenāt made up of mostly or exclusively us, we arenāt very well tolerated. Even in this left unity instance, most of the members and mods are MLs, the anarchist communities are extremely inactive compared to the rest of the site, almost all of the posts are pro-USSR and pro-China, itās very friendly with an explicitly anti-anarchist lemmygrad, Iāve even found posts of anarchists having to beg to not be disregarded:
https://hexbear.net/post/48138
etc.
Now, I do genuinely believe that no matter how often itās happened and no matter how disregarding online ML communities are of us, to use these events to decide to never ever work with a marxist or even just an ML for any reason is very stupid. We are literally dying right now thanks to climate change, we have likeā¦ a few decades left. If we have a shot it will probably be our only one and if we ruin it because we donāt work together itās going to be one hell of an end story.
It doesnāt change that these things have happened though, and treating them as taboo is just something I donāt agree with.
Anarchists in general donāt have a big problem with the october revolution, but rather with what was done to it by the bolsheviks. That we do see as tyranny and usurpation. Definitely not fascism, thatās a very specific term that I believe we shouldnāt use liberally.
As for the Makhnovists, a lot of the very awful things are disputed since the only accounts of them happening were written by bolsheviks. In general, I donāt really look up to them that much. They were very flawed and committed a lot of mistakes. Particularly, their movement had no theorists at all, so Iāve often heard people say that, more than an anarchist revolution, it was a peasant revolt inspired by anarchist ideals. Hereās a nice and pretty short text about the subject that summarizes my views on them:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kolbj-rn-markusson-to-what-extent-was-makhno-able-to-implement-anarchist-ideals-during-the-russ
Hereās a reply of some of the most common ML talking points about them:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anarcho-on-the-bolshevik-myth
Itās not just them though. Catalonia was just as bad if not worse, Cubaās anarchists, Korean anarchists, Iāve even pointed to a relatively recent example in Greece. You really canāt ignore the history we have between each other, it shouldnāt be dismissed, it shouldnāt be hidden or ignored. If you truly want us to work together we both have to learn from it. We have to try to understand why it happened and make sure it doesnāt end up in the same way.
No anarchist is claiming Marx. Anarchism is very separate from marxism. Some āanarchistsā, mostly vaushites, try to pretend that Marx was on his side, but most of us know he wasnāt. Sometimes people try to bring up that Marx would have probably been against the methods and the results of the bolsheviks, I am not sure to what extent this is true. But thatās not the same as saying āMarx supported anarchismā.
Also again, I mostly agree that we should ally, but an alliance is more than just āwe will help youā. If you donāt plan to consider us when we work together, then we simply have no reason to just do the work for you and gain nothing in exchange. I think thatās just common sense.
Okay, fine, I donāt really see a problem with this. I will say, I donāt view the Zapatistas as anarchists, and I think doing so is disrespectful to them. But I think they do serve to see that some of the things we anarchists are talking about can work and are totally possible.
Also, Chomsky is the worst.
I think weāre just having pointless definition wars with this. When I say statism, I mean a belief in the strategy of a transitional state, not a support of its indefinite existence. Thatās what Iāve always used the term for. I donāt think itās useful to use āstatistā to represent indefinite support of a state becauseā¦ thatās just everyone else. Thatās just every single ideology except radical leftism. But if thatās the way you view the word, I canāt really argue against you, itās just another definition.
Me not trusting in the methods MLs used a hundred years ago does not mean I endorse the US in any way. I think the main problem is when context is deprived of the critiques. When you say things about socialist states that an american senator can parrot word for word (sighā¦ like Vaush). A critique from an anarchist perspective, one that wants the destruction of capitalism and the liberation of the working class, is definitely not something any ruling class, much less the american one, can agree with or spread.
I would say internally there is no ideological, organized anarchist threat to the US (there is no marxist one either), but the group of people who get shit done, who protest the most and organize the most, are always anarchists or organizations mostly consisting of anarchists.
I fully agree with you, the co-opting of anarchism by people who want radical aesthetics but refuse to do any introspection about their imperial core beliefs is a huge problem. It really stems from us not having as big of a theory culture as MLs do. It genuinely sucks (especially because theanarchistlibrary is sooo much easier to navigate than marxists.org lmao) and Vaush has done a lot of harm.
Website isnāt co-operating with me, so you might get spammed, but Iām going to break the reply up to see if that helps:
There was a prick in this thread doing just that
Iām not an especially nice guy in these discussions, at best Iām just the type of stubborn where Iāll be damned if I give you something you can use against me beyond āheās rudeā. I can see how youād get dogpiled because maybe 10% of the things you have said here are astronomically dumb, but if you get better at recognizing this and try to have a personable conversation on c/askchapo or whatever, I think youād have an alright time. Anyway, thanks for trying to be conscientious in that regard.
idc about what you think of particular other anarchists, so we can skip that beyond me also being glad that you disown v**sh. Someone else pointed out something interesting, though.
This one is frustrating and itās emblematic of a persistent issue in your writing. You were not in the gulags. You were not in the Paris commune. You werenāt in the trenches in Vietnam. When I say someone isnāt in a minority by virtue of calling themselves an anarchist online and ābelievingā anarchist things, but many people play at it, what I mean is that you are not, by virtue of those traits, a social minority. You are not being oppressed and the Spanish anarchists would probably spit on most of the people who are on Reddit going "They killed us" like they have any personal connection to who was killed beyond agreeing with them (setting historical distortions aside). You are not them just as Iām not a Soviet or a CPC cadre or a Panther. Weāre just people online and maybe we are involved in organizing, but I sure as shit have never been shot at by a Makhnovist and you sure as shit havenāt been attacked by a PLA soldier.
You probably are a member of some oppressed group because most leftists are, but you are not oppressed by the dang tankies, and itās unlikely you are oppressed as an anarchist at all (though some are), so not making even a hint of a distinction between yourself and those historical and current people comes off as a childish roleplay and highlights how the whole thing doesnāt need to even be true historically because itās just a fucking vibe and a narrative youāve bought into with no material connection to the history. Itās all just storytelling.
I mean this not only directed at you but the many āanarchistsā who are frankly much worse about this than you.
The interesting thing about lemmygrad is that it absolutely despises the cultural trend of anarchism and the people who were fighting with Lenin, etc., but I donāt think they truly categorically hate anarchism (stay with me, now!). I think any of them who isnāt a total crank would recognize that Sholem Schwarzbard is a hero and a badass, for example, and obviously the Paris Commune was quasi-anarchist and they quite like that. Iām not saying you should want to be there, but itās not like they are frothing at the mouth for āanarkiddyā blood. Mainly I think they are just sick of red scare shit and really spurious accusations. Speaking of which . . .
The October Revolution was the Bolshevik revolution, so I must assume you mean the February Revolution, in which case every single person who has the opinion you wrote was/is a useful idiot. Who is the tyrant, the liberal government that got into power on the basis that it would stop Russian participation in the pointless, imperialist First World War, or the Bolsheviks who then took power and brought Russia out of the war? Oh, but Iām sure the tyranny only happened after, with the ridiculous increase in every metric of human welfare when the country wasnāt actively being invaded by fascists (and, to be fair, at least one mostly-unrelated famine).
Oh, but tell me more about āusurpationā, my friend of revolutionary leftism. Canāt have people trying to āusurpā liberal governments. If your anarchism has you caping for Alexander motherfucking Kerensky, you should ask yourself where your supposedly radical, anti-capitalist ideology is really leading you.
Not true! My accusation against Makhno was 100% what he admitted to while he was defending himself when he lived in exile in France. He couldnāt spend every waking hour alienating other anarchists and trying to save the lives of fascists, so he filled most of it with other types of squabbling in his shitty newspaper.
The Bolsheviks had much, much harsher things to say about him and I have no interest in discussing those claims with you or really anyone, though I donāt think we can just dismiss them as totally false out of hand.
Interestingly, he did develop āplatformismā once he was in exile, which doesnāt contradict what you say but suggests that he had some realization that what you said was true and a problem. Perhaps in some respects he did learn from his failures, though it seems he mostly doubled down from what Iāve read.
Part 2/2
Again with the āusā business. Neither of us were in Korea, comrade. You were not personally aggrieved by this, your identifying with it is a matter of your personal psychology.
Do you want to just relitigate all this shit? I think this website has a monthly debate on Catalonia (use the search function), but I struggle to imagine that in Cuba or Korea it was all that different from the people crying for Makhno, just more counterrevolutionaries and maniacs causing problems and probably also some good anarchists and honest rubes getting caught in the crossfire. If you do want to relitigate it, whatever, I will humor you, but first I want to propose a more useful direction:
Ideology is not religion, you donāt get to just put up a flag and make demands, your input is fundamentally the same as that of any other person in a proletarian democracy. Now, this may look like a denial (aside from that it already isnāt) but I want you to consider this: What do you want?
Do you want the people to eat? Do you want them clothed and housed? Do you want hospitals and schools? Protection from hate crimes? Maybe some roads and railways?
Wonderful! So do they and so do MLs, let us work to make that happen.
Do you want an unaccountable death squad armed to the teeth so you can run around shooting people at your own discretion? Weāre going to have a problem.
What gets you a seat at the table is not opposition but freestanding competence (see Tito, despite all of his failures and revision). Opposition correctly gets you liquidated.
Do you want āWins for anarchismā or better conditions for the actual human beings whose lives are at stake?
āOh, but we only want anarchism so it can help peopleā
Cool, if what helps people is anarchism, then call me Peter Kropotkin, I donāt give a shit! What matters is that the revolution is protected and lives are improved.
If you think the revolution is better protected by causing more pointless fighting to paint the flag black so you can run your āI canāt believe itās not a state!ā commune, but really just get obliterated by capitalists exploiting the infighting, then fuck off.
Hereās Michael Parenti saying something that I find relevant
At least we agree here.
You donāt need to endorse the US to be a useful idiot, thatās not really what a useful idiot means to begin with. You can act in the USās favor while believing you have your own boutique radical ideology, and thatās much more what being a useful idiot is, and encouraging people to, for example, hate the PRC is a perfect example. Look at any of the threads on this shitty network of websites where the liberals are louder and you will see in their discussions of any AES project the āanarchistsā and neoliberals arguing side by side without even batting an eye at this fact. Neoliberals are happy to co-opt anarchist attacks on AES because, even from the most charitable view, anarchism still poses no immediate threat to them while Marxism does. Not internally, as you seem to think I meant, but externally. Internally, what I am speaking of is having solidarity with those foreign socialists and encouraging solidarity with them even with whatever our personal misgivings may be, because they are enemies of the global hegemon and represent a historically progressive force, even if they didnāt take their constitution from your manifesto.
Most people are not ideologically coherent because ideology is downstream of oneās own conditions. You can say āOh, but Iām critiquing it from an anarchist point of viewā and it matters zero fucking percent. Do you know how many smug liberals Iāve seen quote Bakuninās āThe Peopleās Stickā line? It doesnāt fucking matter that heās an anarchist and believed himself to be speaking from a certain ideologically coherent position, the takeaway is fundamentally āAES is oppressive and disingenuous huehue 1984ā and thatās all there is for the vast majority of people who encounter such things. Radlibs particularly have mastered the art of attacking Marxism from both the āleftā and the right at their leisure.
Some more discussion on a similar topic that rambles even more than I do but is still one of the most insightful essays Iāve ever read.
Even if you quite understandably donāt like me on a personal level and disagree with a lot of what I have to say, I hope thereās something here that you find informative in the way that I intended it to be.
Our posts are getting longer and longer, and more and more unrelated to this thread. Would you be interested in having this conversation in DMs maybe?
1/2
I assume you mean the person who posted āMarx against the stateā? I assume what they were trying to do is to say that he wouldnāt have been in favour of the methods of the bolsheviks, not that he simply would have fully agreed with anarchists. I donāt know, I havenāt read that essay, Iām not very interested in it. I genuinely think anarchism and marxism are very separate. I concede this person is wrong and shouldnāt be trying to do that.
Youāre genuinely one of the calmest and most reasonable people Iāve argued with on this site. At least despite everything it seems like we are having a fruitful conversation and even reaching agreements on some parts. The worst thing youāve said is āget a gripā which is really nothing. I have to remark that I appreciate it because every other time I try to reach out and show my perspective to online ML places I just get viciously mocked, belittled and talked down to in an extremely smug way. Honestly I think the reason Iām not getting dogpiled is that weāre very deep into the reply thread and people donāt bother reading it.
Itās very rare that anarchists and MLs treat each other as equals in an online conversation, I do agree that sometimes anarchists are the ones at fault in this, but it sucks that itās hard for me to reach out and have like, you know, an actual exchange where Iām not being belittled every two sentences. And donāt let me even get started on Discord, oh my god itās a million times worse.
I mean minority in the objective sense, as in, weāre a lot less than you all in virtually all spaces that arenāt anarchist focused or anarchist exclusive. And that does lead to us being considered less, treated as less important and disregarded. I illustrated this with an example, even in this instance which makes a point about unity and anti-sectarianism, an anarchist felt the need to make a post basically begging to not be disregarded and demeaned because everyone was doing it anyway.
I agree that this is nowhere near the things that historically happened, itās an online forum, and in my experience with real life MLs theyāre a lot better. I mean, I did make a point that using these events to refuse working with other leftists is very dumb. I just donāt think we should go to the other extreme and completely disregard them either. Once again itās important to understand why it happened and reach an agreement. If you stick to your guts and just keep believing that the anarchists weāre talking about were all maniacs and bandits and didnāt do anything good and none of their actions were justified and the crushing was a 100% the right thing to do, then of course anarchists arenāt going to listen to you. We definitely are guilty of idealizing Makhnovshchina and excusing or ignoring the very awful things and grave mistakes they did, but itās not like MLs are any better. Itās more of a general problem of worshipping the past instead of focusing on the present, in my opinion.
I havenāt dug as deep into lemmygrad as I have into hexbear, but every time Iāve visited and read on what its members think about anarchism itās been something extremely hostile and insulting, and everytime an anarchist has decided to come reply to them, I see them get dogpiled and replied to in the usual leninist extreme smug by two, three, sometimes four people. I donāt think it matters if you think theyāre wrong or said something āastronomically dumbā, the bullying is something I just donāt support. Bully liberals, if you really want to bully people online.
Anyway my point is that despite hexbear being āstrictly left unityā they have zero issues federating, supporting and endorsing lemmygrad which is very hostile to anarchists. There is no anarchist Lemmy instance, but I can only hope that if it forms, the same accomodations are given to them - seeing what they think of and post about Raddle, I doubt it though.