The subject takes pride in not having any relationship with the entire historic concrete movement of the working class socialist and liberation revolutions. They take pride in not having any theoretical or political connection to the revolutions in China, Russia, Korea, Vietnam, Algeria, Mozambique and Angola. They are, instead, proud of the supposed purity that their theory is not contaminated by the hardship of exercising power, by the contradictions of historical processes. Being pure is what provokes this narcissistic orgasm. This purity is what makes them feel superior.

from Western Marxism, the Fetish for Defeat, and Christian Culture by Jones Manoel

Many westerners come to socialism not out of necessity, but out of disillusionment. We are raised with the idea that Liberal Democracy is the best system of political expression humanity has devised. When confronted with the reality of its shortcomings, rather than narrowly discard liberalism or electoralism, the western anti-capitalist tends to draw sweeping conclusions about the inadequacy of all existing systems. Curiously, though it would at first seem that such denunciations are more principled and severe, they are in fact more compatible with existing and widespread beliefs about the supremacy of the western system. That is to say, when a Marxist-Leninist asserts the superiority of existing socialist experiments, they are directly challenging the idea that westerners are at the forefront of political development. By contrast, the assertions from anarchists and social democrats that we need to build a more utopian future out of our current apex are compatible not only with each other, as discussed earlier, but also do not really offend bourgeois society at large. They in fact end up not sounding too different from the arch-imperialist Winston Churchill holding forth on how ours is the worst system, except for all the others which have been tried. Western chauvinists, consciously or unconsciously, struggle with the idea that they should study and humbly take lessons from the imperial periphery. [15] It is much easier for the chauvinist, psychologically, to position oneself as at the very front of a new vanguard.

from Why Marxism?

As with all Western Leftism, it is impprtant to understand that most people who identify with any label probably haven’t even read the basic canon associated with it and are just going off of vibes. And that online Western Leftists also bring with them an insufferable internet debate bro villification culture where they join affinity groups to crap on everyone else (not jist anarchist affinity groups!).

This is how you get very real irl situations like where a self-described “anarchist” calls everyone that criticizes with him a cop but then physically threatens people if they are in any way disruptive. Or where a self-described “anarchist” constantly delays trivial decisions because they aren’t being made “horizontally” enough, i.e. by consensus of every member of the group in 5 hour meetings every day. And why an irl anarchist has to explain the most basic anarchist theory to both of these Kinds of Guy, who are also the most sectarian Kinds of Guy.

So, there is at least one strain of Western “anarchism” that is just selfish people with no interest in theory or history or what anarchism even means but who enjoy the idea of maximizing their own autonomy and aesthetic without thinking about how it impacts others. And these folks will gladly go after anyone they label “authoritarian”, which ends up being anything from a major state bureaucracy to literally having a bed time (like quiet hours at night so they don’t wake others).

There is also a strain of Western “anarchist” that does begin reading, though not very much and from a selective canon. They do not read in a capacity that produces self-criticism or compares perspectives, but instead treat it more like an in-group romantic mythology of valiant political failure. These “anarchists” often become doomers and declare revolution impossible. They are the most guilty of sectarianism, as every single one of their major “histories” is about telling a false story of how everything was going great until “the Marxists” screwed them over, eliding several important details and basically just promoting the most sectarian people of the past to the exclusion of everyone else. IRL these folks are basically indistinguishable from the know-nothings, they engage in the same antics that force anarchists to correct them because they are bring embarrassing and counterproductive. This is because they are only theoretically anarchist, they spend their political time constructing a utopian view and gaining a false sense of their own correctness and run into irl situations where they actually have no idea what they are doing. Most of these people don’t do anything at all irl and along with the know-nothings these are the people who dominate online “anarchist” spaces that are so viscerally, yet ignorantly, sectarian. I think of both of these groups as people that are arrogant, they simply don’t read the basics of what would be needed to form their opinions, and their “tendency”, if you can call it that, never pushes them out of that ignorany comfort zone. It is unsurprising that it is in such solidarity-free contexts that you get fed-like behavior.

To try and explain why these groups can exist, we should ask why they are not taken over by the sentiments of anarchists that do read and understand and why they are not rapidly redirected to other tendencies. The most important differentiators are (1) whether a person does irl orgsnizing and (2) whether a person reads critically and sufficiently.

Re: irl work, anarchists that do irl organizing work are generally not as interested in sectarian infighting, they are trying to increase the capacity of their projects and will work in coalition to do so. They simply do not think of Kronstadt or whatever when it comes time to raise funds for a mutual aid event. They are busy doing anarchist things, not dedicating their political lives to internet rage. And because they prioritize work over pointless sectarianism, they tend to also moderate their stances due to exposure to good peoplr that are MLs or Maoists etc. IRL anarchists are not free of sectarianism, but it is less unrealistic and dominant. So the online “anarchists” that overreoresent sectarian “tendencies” reflect an atomization, they are people who understand politucs as a form of self-discovery and expression and black team vs. red team, which is to say, a fundamentally bourgeois framing cultivated by who controls the online venues and wider cultural hegemony.

Re: reading, to be honest the Western Left is all guilty of this. MFers need to fuckin read holy shit. The number of people who think they have earned the right to explain things to others despite never reading the material? I swear to God this is most self-described commies and anarchists and socialists. And they often whine about it, too, as if they couldn’t possibly take 30 minutes per day out of their internet rage time on their infinte knowledge source device to instead understand the basics of the world-historical project they claim to be forwarding and representing. This is part of the same atomization, though. People in irl orgs often have reading groups and social pressure ensures that some baseline of reading is achieved and this applies to both anarchist and commie formations. Even with that, there is a need to shed liberal ideas around what it takes to have an accurate understanding of something, as Westerners are all taught arrogance and egoism when it comes to politics. Reading properly requires undoing several layers of psychological defenses, of defensiveness itself, of creating spaces where saying, “I don’t know” is fine for new members and where the flipside, of people pretending to kniw while providing the worst takes you’ve ever seen, are overcome by those who develip correct takes and have organized accordingly. Fundamentally, that is also driven by attempting to create good irl organizations. If you spend your time figuring out how to grow and develop your organization, you end up trying to create these spaces and developing each other theoretically. And you also learn that sometimes you need to excise toxic people that are not yet far enough along in their journey to respond to this kind of serious organizing.

I haven’t talked much about theoretical differences or historical grievances, or tge First International, etc because I think this largely misses the reality of what Western Leftists, including the majoriry of sectarian “anarchists” are doing. They are more shibboleths for identities and squabbles, stand-ins for a more basic problem of social organization and socialization itself. They are rarely real theoretical disagreements. It’s nice when they are, don’t discount the value of constructive criticism by comparing to anarchist positions and vice versa, but that is really just plain not what is actually happening 9 times out of 10 that someone online says they love Kropotkin.

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.

So far as the typical American goes, I’m assuming that in a lot of cases they don’t learn to hate the USSR via becoming anarchist, they’ve already internalized the historical grudge beforehand.

My two cents? A lot of what they do can have a place, but largely as a way of establishing stopgap solutions or dual power structures where existing government has failed. A foundation to be iterated upon or ultimately obsoleted with something more structured and permanent, not a stable end result in and of itself.

A big part of it is that it’s more aggrandizing and exhilarating to see yourself or your entity or alignment as “against the whole world”, instead of “positioned in calculated opposition to certain things and somewhat aligned with the rises and falls of many historical formations”, many of which take a whole lot of convincing and nuance because of how many pitfalls they fell for.

Someone really diving into an anarchist identity (not a meaningless liberal one) will either draw on histories of anarchists being suppressed or otherwise at odds with the USSR, or on much more recent queer and punk and insurrectionary authors who are critical of all party formations that seek to contend with governing atop entire countries. The latter will typically identify the CPSU as the most successful (fwiw) of these, and readily associate it with many modern-day communist parties, which they do have more of a direct experience of.

They arrive as radicalized liberals who already “know” how bad communism is, and anarchism seems to offer a kind of 3rd way (enlightened centrism?) that rejects the apparatus of the state. After that, they either don’t think much more about it and just get to work, or they read a bunch of history and grind that axe. Or they change their mind :)

Disclaimer: This does not apply to all or even most anarchists, and may apply to, like, 5, because it’s my personal impression from a handful of miserable encounters.

As a USSR-specific example, since that’s what you’re asking for, there are some anarchists who are evidently taught that Nestor Makhno was a brave resistance fighter rather than a negligent armer of pogroms and leader of aremoved gang (though probably not personal participant, he just let his men do it). Having this image of a champion of freedom and then hearing how he was militarily crushed by the Bolsheviks, naturally they will resent the USSR as counter-revolutionary. Spain is obviously another example, where the SU’s role gets contorted from “didn’t help the anarchists as much as it could have” to “personally killed anarchists in parallel to the Francoists killing anarchists”

Edit: Down in the thread there’s some direct evidence of the romantic tragedy of Makhno being played out yet again.

I don’t think that’s most of them, but I think a lot of them have these kinds of stories in mind that lead them to deciding the tankies are evil. Honestly with new anarchists who do this shit, it comes off to me as a way to become a political minority, to be involved in a grand historical struggle against the “statists” who always kill anarchists like you (now that you’ve become and anarchist). Like, in liberal society and not incorrectly, there’s a solemnity with which Jewish identities are treated because, in large part, of their ancestral connection to the Holocaust. I have talked to some anarchists that really come across as wanting to opt in to having ancestral oppression like that even if they’re as white as untrod snow, and this is a way to do it. I have seriously seen some unironically talk about how Stalin killed “us” as though stanning Makhno or whoever retroactively makes them actually part of that group.

Reread the disclaimer.

Why hasn’t anarchism been done already (on a large scale)? “It would have, but the tankies keep subverting revolutions and doing states, and they give a bad name to leftists which turns people away from anarchism,” is a pretty convenient answer to that. Plus, by distancing themselves from us and from past revolutions, they can try to pass themselves off as “one of the good ones” while preserving an image of how they want things to be without having to defend any messiness of actually getting there. It’s much simpler to write off projects entirely as not being genuine attempts because the bad people took charge than to actually study them and confront the complex problems they faced.

There was no red scare for anarchism, so it’s much easier to go from liberal -> anarchist than it is to go liberal -> communist. If you take the former route, the propaganda around communism never truly fads. Also doesn’t help that anarchists are typically the most active block of organizers/protestors/activists in the states. Communist orgs a lot of the time are just glorified book clubs, if you want to feed people, build bus benches, do a coat drive, counter-protest police, or whatever else, the people who are often at the forefront of this are anarchists. There is absolutely an image of the “academic communist” too concerned this theory specifics and sectarian lines to do any real action. This stereotype is rooted in some level of truth. I became disillusioned with anarchism, remaining steadfast that a vanguard party is key to true revolutionary change, yet in my own circles and among those I organize with, the communists in that camp simply do not organize, they do not. If you need advice on what book to read? They are the people to go to. If you need advice on mobilizing your neighborhood? You go to the anarchists. When I speak with communists I’m met with defeatism and often, an inflated sense of self-superiority. What is theory without practice? and to the anarchists: What is practice without theory?

It wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t have to be this way. In the States there’s no doubt that our synthesis of theory and material conditions will be a blend of both camps.

FBI heavily supported sectarian anarchism in the 1960s

74 comments 65 upbears oh no what have i done : (

As an ancom couple of maybe trite observations from the POV of modern anarchists rather than rehashing centuries old debates:

Many anarchists are deeply unserious people about actual politics and building a society. The things that many of them like about anarchism are this misleading idea of “no rules”, they are effectively antisocial or better crystalize the meaning anti-society.

There are anarchist tendencies that effectively nurture their preconceived notions about the background unsatisfaction most people have with their lot in life. Tendencies like anarcho-egoists, anprims, etc. that allow people to romanticize their own feelings.

Lastly very few anarchists tend to understand what anarchism is, just like many people fail to understand what communism is. Anarchism in it’s purest form is about finding the fairest way of building a collective society while respecting everyone as individuals. It is philosophically an ideology that is trying to find the philosophical and practical underpinnings of coalescing individualist and collectivist into one comprehensive view in a bottom up fashion. A nice metaphor for this is that in physics many people are trying to unite classical physics with quantum mechanics to create a comprehensive theory of physics, rather than two separate fields of study. Anarchists want their societies to have unconcerned unanimous support of how the society is governed. Anarchists are not willing to compromise a their platforms. So that makes it difficult to work through problems that other political movements can take “shortcuts” in. In short if you think about this through the lens of standard democratic centralism, Anarchists do not accept a rule of simple majority, they will only accept unanimous consent.

Anarchists that do not understand this, typically hate communists reflexively depending on their platform or who they hang out with. Anarchists that do understand this, typically hate communists due to communism’s prescribed nature of the problem and solution coupled with the tendency for socialist societies who attempted to build communism to prioritize their implementation at the cost of everything else, as well as failure of communist countries to truly liberate certain groups and use them as political pawns when its expedient.

I think a lot of this hate comes from the reality of the development of humanity in the 20th century. The second industrial revolution essentially forced all developing countries of the time into societies that were in practice extremely hierarchical, extremely parochial, and extremely focused on extracting production of out of individuals. Anarchists see this as a negative development in both the liberal and socialist worlds, and due to street cred of anarchism as the “no rules” punk philosophy Western anarchists, many of whom that have never known hunger or poverty relative to their global South or Eastern European counter parts, typically see liberals as the less worse choice because capitalist liberalization did allow for more individualism at it’s apex.

Lastly there is a real history of bad blood between the primary standard bearers of socialism in the USSR and anarchists. The bolsheviks regardless of the morality or solidarity of their actions were some of the best political operators of the 20th century. They were able to take a rump committee of a besieged and nascent political movement and transform it into a global political powerhouse. Some of the best political operators in the world worked on Bolshevik standards, Lenin, Stalin, Kim, Tito, Sankara, Mao initially and (I’m gonna get flack for this but it’s fucking true because of what he was able to fucking pull off politically if you actually read history) Ben-Gurion. The problem is bolshevism is ruthless, and it cannot stand competition. It must be the only voice in the room. That’s how it works, that’s why it was effective. And in that efficacy lays the simple fact that Bolsheviks betrayed the largest anarchist organization during the Russian revolution.

Makhnovshchina was the pinnacle of anarchist success on the world stage. Their lands were ruled by their people. They had repelled not only German colonists but the German backed puppet regimes spouting racist and cosplay style Ukrainian Nationalism They fought a multi-front war between the Whites and the Reds. To the point where they beat back the Whites to an unfavorable position in the East and that the Reds were so depleted they had no choice but to ally with Makhno. The Black army over performed as a military force and Makhnovshchina over performed as a society forged in war time, that never had to implement war communism and forced conscription. And for all of this the Bolsheviks rewarded them by baiting them out of position under the guise of being allies, and stabbing them in the back, and liquidating all their hard work. Many bitter anarchists read this history, the success of Marxist-Lenninism as the strangulation of anarchism in its crib.

As a gentle bit of self-crit, here is a Hexbear Search of “anarchist” comments sorted by controversial. This was from before the downvote was removed, so it’s mostly ancient history. In all of our defense, I see this pattern in every leftist space. It’s in the air. There is a tacit enmity between the two camps that goes all the way back to Marx and Bakunin, reinforced by a long sorrowful history of mutual bloodshed. We pass on this trauma one microaggression at a time. It becomes learned behavior.

This clash is inevitable, because both camps represent a Thesis-Antithesis that needs to work itself into a Synthesis. Anarchists work from the bottom-up carefully because they are concerned with maintaining legitimacy in a context of many different/opposing interests. Leninists work from the top-down to (cross-)organize into large political blocks because they are concerned with effectiveness in a context of countering other large politically organized blocks. To a Leninist Anarchist spaces look chaotic and slow, while to an Anarchist Leninist spaces look stifling and coercive. We need both; effectiveness without legitimacy destroys itself, and legitimacy without effectiveness goes nowhere. The path towards that Synthesis starts with burying hatchets. A lot of our bad blood comes from conflicts that no longer exist in living memory and are not worth fighting over today.

I’m exhausted but I’ll try and take a swing at this, speaking as a long-term ex-anarchist. Note that I can only speak for myself but these are the trends I observed and a lot of this is exactly what I experienced.

So in transitioning from progressive liberal to the radical left, it’s basically a rite of passage to identify all the ills and the egregious excesses of the government and corporations. I think this is not only valid but it’s also extremely important.

The problem that emerges is that anarchists and LibSocs can fall into a trap of universalising this very valid skepticism to expand to all forms of hierarchy that have existed and will ever exist.

This is going to sound uncharitable but it’s really not intended to be this way but I see a deep form of liberal hegemony as being not a positive form of hegemonic ideology but a negative form of it. Let me explain: the USSR established its own cultural hegemony. It was very much a positive cultural hegemony: this is who we are, this is how we act, this is the future we are striving to achieve etc. etc. You absolutely see this in Soviet art and film and propaganda.

The negative form of cultural hegemony that I understand liberalism to mostly rely upon, especially in a post-Gilded Age era or a neoliberal era or wherever you want to draw that line, is epitomised by Francis Fukuyama’s pronouncement about arriving at the end of history; this wasn’t a positive proclamation but rather it was a negation of the future, of the need to strive for a better world, of the demand to be better. Instead it was essentially an attack on and an erasure of aspirations.

This is also seen on a small scale with people demonstrating antipathy towards unionism; “they’re all corrupt”, “they used to be important in the past but there’s no use for unions anymore”, “there’s no point joining a union because I’ll just get fired or management will close this branch down if we all unionise”. That sort of thing. It’s also seen in the shadow cast by this plethora of pseudo-choice we are offered and, forgive me for invoking Horkheimer & Adorno but, the pseudo-individuality inherent to this developed form of capitalism we exist under. There’s no point boycotting because how do you avoid consooming products from one of the two or three oligopolistic companies that have cornered a market? Why bother attempting to divest from BlackRock when they already own everything? Why bother protesting against war when we know the government is going to ignore us and prosecute it anyway? etc.

So this negative form of ideology or liberal cultural hegemony tends to inculcate the belief in LibSocs and anarchists that the best we can really achieve is abolition of the current state of affairs and not the construction of a positive project to bring about the revolution.

This is where I take issue with Audre Lorde, or at least the way that people quote her and what this is used in service of. She is absolutely right that you cannot dismantle patriarchy with patriarchy or that white supremacy will not be dismantled by a different form of racial supremacy. I think the distortion of Lorde comes with people thinking that this quote is in service of abstaining from using some of the most valuable tools available to us; you cannot hug the violence out of the bourgeois state no matter how hard you try (just ask the hippies). But at the same time I think we need to be cautious about how far we take this message; people can arrive at pacifism simply because the bourgeois state uses war and violence, if you took this to the the point of absurdity you could imagine people rejecting construction itself or maybe even hammers because infrastructure has been used to enact genocide and land theft and vast exploitation through colonialism and imperialism in so, so many countries. Heck, hammers have been used for DV and assault so you wouldn’t want to taint yourself by benefitting directly from that instrument of violence, would you?

But it’s very easy to slip into a reductive or reflexive rejection of things like the state simply because most states have historically been dogshit. If you look exclusively at the west from the advent of feudalism to today, it’s basically all of them.

This is where anarchists tend to develop the basis of a quite bitter ideological distinction from communists, although obviously this varies in degree depending on what sort of anarchist we’re talking about here. (I’ll try to remember to circle back on this negative urge and how it provides a degree of… I guess ideological comfort or safety for anarchists once I’ve finished the other parts of this comment.)

The other factors are a disagreement on the pace of the post-revolution construction period (which likewise comes from the difference between materialists orienting themselves to addressing material conditions and working to resolve contradictions and anarchists who mostly prefer abolition as the means to address these issues) and the other one is that anarchists tend to be exposed to convenient historical narratives that are overly reductive if not downright anaemic.

So for the pace of the post-revolution construction, most anarchists expect a very swift transitional phase - the abolition of capitalism, often the abolition of markets themselves, prison abolition, and all sorts of other things to establish a more-or-less horizontal or low/zero hierarchy society. Again this depends on the different types of anarchist in question but to put it simply they tend to believe that post-revolution you knock all or most of it down, then establish a government or council of sorts (which again varies) and you call it good.

So from that perspective, communists get into power and instead of following what anarchists believe to be the correct path, instead communists go completely the wrong way and even start building up more state than existed under the Tsardom, for example. With this in mind I think it’s easy enough to understand why they perceive this to be a betrayal of principles and of the revolution.

The last thing I want to touch on is the historical narratives. Anarchists have a tendency to share a distorted perspective on historical moments; the communists betrayed the anarchists in the Spanish Civil, the Bolsheviks stabbed the Black Army of Makhnovia in the back, occasionally you’ll hear discussion of the KPAM likewise being crushed by the Soviets (although not very often tbh).

All three are actually very complicated topics and there’s a lot to cover with them but in broad brushstrokes the narrative is that the communists were the aggressor and that they opted not to leave the anarchists alone to do their thing because they wanted to crush the true revolution. I disagree with this narrative these days, although I didn’t always disagree with it.

There’s a really good article by Jones Manoel on this sort of preference for martyrdom-over-statecraft mentality here. While he only discusses western Marxists, it definitely applies to a lot of anarchists and LibSocs. I think that Manoel simply doesn’t regard the latter two as worth addressing though.

So we’ve got the martyrdom and purity fetish for the immaculate revolution covered there. Last of all to circle back around to the ideological comfort of the negative, I’ve seen plenty of anarchists do this and I have definitely been guilty of doing this myself - by not supporting or critically supporting any but the briefest attempts at revolution (and then only maybe 3 or so of those), you can create a rhetorical and ideological detachment from the real world attempts. You don’t have to engage or defend anything, you can just reflexively dismiss things as being statist or hierarchical or authoritarian and thus you don’t have to grapple with the reality of their circumstances or to consider what would be a better way of resolving the contradictions or moving forwards with the project. “You committed the sin of statism? Then I can wash my hands of you and that’s that.”

This is alluring because it’s a simple rubric and you don’t need to wrestle with the reality of things. To put this into an analogy that’s probably more relatable, imagine a Marxist who refuses to engage in the ol’ agitate/educate/organise because “liberals are social fascists and counterrevolutionary - I’m not gonna waste my time befriending my enemies!”

On the face of it, there’s nothing false in that statement. But the application of this line of thinking absolves this Marxist from needing to do any of the hard work because they have created a rhetorical and ideological detachment from the most important task that a revolutionary faces and so by abdicating from this duty they never have to put in any effort and they never have to deal with fuckups and failures and addressing their own inadequacies.

That’s a pretty close match to this urge that exists in a lot of anarchists and it’s also why they can invest a lot into their grudge against communists, because ultimately the other option is to engage in the hard work of listening and learning and working with/working on the “authoritarians”.

Obviously all of this is my vain attempt at brevity so I didn’t cover the broad terrain of different ideology tendencies within anarchism and I’m talking specifically about the anarchists who really bear a grudge against communists. Plenty of anarchists do not begrduge communists and are very willing to work with them and to engage with them (or to roll up their sleeves and engage in the difficult work of educating, agitating, organising as well as grappling with the historical realities fafed by revolutions) so I haven’t given consideration to this cohort of anarchists because it’s beyond the scope of the question, although if I gave the impression that what I’ve said is true for all anarchists then that’s on me.