Edit for clarity: I’m not asking why the Tankie/Anarchist grudge exist. I’m curious about what information sources - mentors, friends, books, TV, cultural osmosis, conveys that information to people. Where do individuals encounter this information and how does it become important to them. It’s an anthropology question about a contemporary culture rather than a question about the history of leftism.
I’ve been thinking about this a bit lately. Newly minted Anarchists have to learn to hate Lenin and Stalin and whoever else they have a grudge against. They have to encounter some materials or teacher who teaches them “Yeah these guys, you have to hate these guys and it has to be super-personal like they kicked your dog. 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.”
Like there’s some process of enculturation there, of being brought in to the culture of anarchism, and there’s a process where anarchists learn this thing that all (most?) anarchists know and agree on.
Idk, just anthropology brain anthropologying. Cause like if someone or something didn’t teach you this why would you care so much?
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
You can’t think if any others? Not one?
Everything else you said I addressed in my statement. Refer back to it.
Which socialist projects do you hold in higher regard?
In fairness, the USSR was the first Marxist experiment. There were other socialist experiments before that, most important to us being the Paris Commune.
Most of them. Different criticisms, but generally; most of them.
China hasn’t counted for decades; opposing America is not a defining component of socialism. It’s just a generally cool thing to do.
But my primary concern is not states and authorities; they dont generally interest me.
Also, surely you don’t hold the pogrom-loving Makhno’s territories in higher regard, do you?
Okay, why do you hold, for example, Vietnam in higher regard than the USSR? Why do you consider Angola to be better than the USSR? Why the early PRC over the USSR?