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?
Makhnovschina overperformed in the sense that they employed guerilla warfare with a local force that had the buy-in of locals for essential supplies. They rapidly fell apart outside of their limited territory as they stole from peasants there rather than receiving support. This allowed the Whites to maintain and rebuild their forces in Western Ukraine.
They similarly built up peasant communes that were actually very insular and selfish, pushing an odd version of independence and self-sufficiency that, on one hand, declared no obligation to feed workers in cities (Bolsheviks called this a petty bourgeois aspect of the peasantry) while also being entitled to the products of the city factories, coordinating with Makhnovists to steal equipment. They actually combined these entitlements in their sentiments, declaring that they had no need to pay for equipment they could take when they needed to. This was guaranteed to eventually deplete the areas they controlled of industrial capacity and create a series of endless petty infights.
It was also the major source of contention with Bolsheviks, who began labeling them as “bandits” in their propaganda. Bolsheviks, above all, recognized the necessity of feeding factory workers and ensuring the continued function if factories, hence war communism based on quotas and then taxes. Areas controlled by Makhnovists tended to work directly against this, killing or kicking out the Bolshevik tax man, actually stealing equipment and resources from cities to go support “the commune”. They treated cities like foreign territories, and enemies. This is in addition to going off on their own as small (but many) autonomous groups and declaring truces over, stealing weapons, literally blowing things up, and recreating an oppositional fighting force.
Bolsheviks did make decisive moves to end alliances and implement the red terror against Makhnovists, killing a massive number once Bolsheviks’ power in the region was tentatively solidified. But it’s important to understand that this came from competing interests and actions and waa not some out-of-nowhere betrayal.
I’m sorry like the Bolsheviks or the Whites didn’t steal from peasants? The Bolsheviks and the Whites literally stole people from the villages to fight in their armies under threat. Real you join our battalion or we rape and murder your women while you watch then we kill you type shit. The Black Army was the only actual all-volunteer self defense force.
This is a consequence of top down vs bottom up thinking. Literally see the part of my post about how the second industrial revolution created this mess to begin with. The city model is literally based in expropriation of the country-side from time immemorial and the second industrial revolution only made cities worse and more dependent. The Bolsheviks bathed the country sides with blood, and sure they had to, but lets not pretend there was some grand greater good, it’s because the Bolsheviks had nothing to actually offer the country side. Their political power resided in cities that couldn’t produce their own food. It was the worst political problem they inflicted on themselves and some of the worst Stalinist repression came from the fact that they murdered so many peasants that the countryside was so whittled down the definition of Kulak by the 1930’s became anyone who quite literally owned a butterchurn. That’s frankly embarrassing.
Furthermore lets cut the bullshit okay? This is just devolving into a typical argument cycle and I’m just going to end it here. Whenever this line of argumentation comes up people who cannot understand or admit to the faults of the Bolsheviks (and I’m not saying Makhnovischa was faultless here at all), are all trying really fucking hard not to say “It was OUR PROPERTY.” All you’re arguing about is who rightfully owned those things that the Black Armies took are we not?
We can talk about the negatives of how each army and society conducted itself, but I’m not going to have a typical black-red rules lawyering property dispute with you. It’s pointless, stupid, and unbecoming. Everyone “stole” during that time for whatever definition of “steal” you can think of. I don’t believe in private property. Reds crying “you ‘stole’ my means of war production” is again frankly embarrassing for communists who believe that the proletariat should own the means of production. It relies on an incredibly technical, overly strict and point in time definition of proletarian unique to the political needs of Bolsheviks. Peasants weren’t proletarians to the Bolsheviks because their political power came from cities. Frankly it’s embarrassing that to this day people are caught up in this nonsense given that peasants at the time had like a decade or so of not being literal slaves and most of them were still sharecroppers. Likewise it was literally because the second industrial revolution wasn’t completed in Russia by the time of the Russian revolution and so there was no mechanized agriculture to speak of, which literally turns the assumption that farm workers e.g. peasants aren’t proletarians on its head. It was a unique trick that the Bolsheviks played to get them out of a jam because their own ideology had internal contradictions simply by coincidence of timing. Lenin was smart but he wasn’t clairvoyant and he doubled down on this bullshit. Stalin quadruple downed on it. This is literally one of the reasons for the Sino Soviet split and Mao was fucking right that peasants are proletarians.
I am responding to your point about the Black Army “overperforming”. They did well as a guerilla army with peasant support. They failed utterly when they left areas without peasant support and then instead depended on stealing from the peasants. They had weak to nonexistent supply lines beyond a peasant network in Eastern Ukraine and entirely alienated the cities that capitulated quickly to the Whites and openly accepted the Reds with almost no fighting. These are just the realities of their military successes and failures.
The Bolsheviks did not make their army reliant on the ad hoc theft from peasants. They instituted quotas and taxes to feed the cities and soldiers. Once they adopted a taxation model, conflict with peasants more or less disappeared, they just opposed early war communism’s heavy handedness. The Bolsheviks used proper supply lines and it is unsurprising that they beat The Black Army who constantly formed and dissolved in response to pressures.
This is ahistorical, The Black Army also used coercion, but they did so ad hoc rather than to establish a stsnding army, famously using the misleading term, “voluntary mobilization” to declare the age range of able-bodied men that could not refuse service when called upon. Towards the end of their project, when such mobilizations were needed, trust and support from the peasants began breaking down because of this and related attempts at control.
That is not about bottom-up vs. top-down thinking at all, it is about class and subclass interests. A commune expropriating from starving city workers is not “bottom up”, it is actually a fairly authoritarian theft carried out using relative material wealth and self-sufficiency. And it would have led to a self-destructice system, it was a key weakness predicated on a romantic chauvinism, of serving the people from whom they largely emerged and found support and then needing a left-sounding way to justiy the mistreatment of workers.
The city model has always depended on agriculture but the extent to which it involved expropriation is something that has varied substantially historically. There is a degree to which Western chauvinist just-so stories try to generalize the violences of Western Europe as all-encompassing truths, missing the variety of humsn organization that has occurred under similar circumstance. Ironically, the observation I hust shared is common among anarchist historians and anthropologists.
Yes, city workers were dependent on food from peasants. And Makhnovschina’s strategy was to hang them out to dry, to have their communes become theoretically insular and autonomous. But of course this was contradicted by the necessity of their frequent thefts from the cities. It was a romanticization, not a full reality. The peasants were also dependent on the cities for industrial goods and weaponry, they just wouldn’t die of starvation and malnutrition as quickly as the city workers. They would have been overrun by the White Army in a few years without an industrial base.
There was, of course, a grand greater good of feeding industrial workers and soldiers, securing an industrial base to fight off the rest of Europe, and the continued functioning of society in general past short-sighted views of a non-sustainable commune.
Actually I was speaking of the material reasons the Black Army had military successes in some ways and not others and how they did not find a realistic synthesis of peasant and worker interests and that this led to a direct conflict with Bolsheviks for material reasons, not just old stories about theoretical disputes and the various other romantic mythologies of “backstabbing”, which is what ignorany online “anarchists” obssess over.
To be honest, I think I was very clear on that.
If the topic is sectarian “anarchism” you should expect to hear critiques of sectarian “anarchism”. Endlessly rehashing a false understanding of Marxist “betrayals” is a fundamental element of sectarian “anarchism”.
How many of these peasants were voluntarily taxed vs how many of them were taxed at the head of a bayonette? How was that bayonette any different than the one weilded by Tsar Nicholas II? Was it because it was Red?
There is very little difference between ad hoc theft and taxation in a civil war.
I think I was fairly clear in the fact that I was expressing a feeling that anarchists feel. A lot of the feelings you express regardless if you admit to them or not, are from a point of view that does not have a clear moral superiority. My attempt here is to stop the engagement of apologetics and counter arguments. There is not point to any of this but to learn from the mistakes of Bolsheviks and Anarchists and that includes to admitting to them and not apologizing for them. My attempt at comparing Bolsheviks to Anarchists is an attempt to point out that mistakes are made on both sides. If you’re attempting to explain away my answer to the OP question, you’re barking up the wrong tree. I literally do not want to have a typical red black fight over ancient history that we’ both should be better than defending as if they were our favorite sports team.
If we want to talk about the feelings of online bolsheviks, very often they say things like this:
The problem with these things is that these are not moral absolute fact, they are by and large apologetic, that seek to explain away horror rather than admit to the mistakes of horror. Sometimes there is no “right” or “moral” way out of a problem and that’s life, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t admit it, and it also doesn’t mean that in those moments we should abdicate making tough decisions, but those decisions should always clearly bear the weight of our sins.
If you hurt innocent people it doesn’t matter how valiant your ends are, you have still sinned. Consistent open acknowledgement and remorse for those actions is the path to absolution. Arguing it away as the greater good is simply hardening yourself to commit graver and graver injustices without recognizance or penance.
That is ultimately the core problem of Bolshevism from an anarchist perspective. When against the wall, they make tough decisions, and then they hide the bodies. That is the last tool in a toolbox of ruthless efficiency. That is what makes the definition of a kulak go from a landlord with sharecroppers to the owner of a butter churn.
Makhno wasn’t an angel. As a sister thread points out he had a lot of shitty sexual proclivities, he treated women as objects and I agree with you that voluntarism when the chips were down often was cajoled in reality. A lot of these comparisons must be relative to the context under which they happened. We’ll be here all day with endless exclaimers, we have to approximate. The Reds cajoled a lot more and a lot worse, but that’s not the point.
ML’s and MLM’s treat Lenin and Mao as gods. Like Makhno they were men. Like Makhno they were very flawed men, you cannot be a perfect person at that level. Like Makhno were men who were intelligent, and did good things. Like Makhno they also committed great evils both personal and systemic. However you do not get this honesty from MLs or MLMs. Often you cannot even get MLs and MLMs to the same table.
I agree anarchists are annoying, they often hold the position of arguing from absolute morality having done nothing, they certainly haven’t created a large global society. But for all their wishy washyness and their annoyingness, they do have a point. We should be honest about the human costs of civilization and production, who bears them, and how we can make that process as fair as humanly possible. Otherwise it’s very easy to go from landlord to guy with a butter churn.