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.
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!
You’re antagonistic as I’m used to when talking in here but you’ve at least been more respectful to me than most MLs I’ve 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 don’t have that big of a theory culture, and when we’re believing in something so against almost all of the hegemonic thoughts implanted in our heads for all of our lives, it’s 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. I’ve taken to calling them “somearchists” just because that is really funny, I’m not sure if there’s a better term.
If you’re 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 they’re very well thought out.
https://piped.kavin.rocks/channel/UC1CjJYTUeor8EUFsbgwu5TQ
I fully agree that Vaush is a moron, it’s 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 aren’t made up of mostly or exclusively us, we aren’t 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, it’s very friendly with an explicitly anti-anarchist lemmygrad, I’ve 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 it’s 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 like… a few decades left. If we have a shot it will probably be our only one and if we ruin it because we don’t work together it’s going to be one hell of an end story.
It doesn’t change that these things have happened though, and treating them as taboo is just something I don’t agree with.
Anarchists in general don’t 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, that’s a very specific term that I believe we shouldn’t 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 don’t 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 I’ve often heard people say that, more than an anarchist revolution, it was a peasant revolt inspired by anarchist ideals. Here’s 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
Here’s a reply of some of the most common ML talking points about them:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anarcho-on-the-bolshevik-myth
It’s not just them though. Catalonia was just as bad if not worse, Cuba’s anarchists, Korean anarchists, I’ve even pointed to a relatively recent example in Greece. You really can’t ignore the history we have between each other, it shouldn’t be dismissed, it shouldn’t 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 doesn’t end up in the same way.
No anarchist is claiming Marx. Anarchism is very separate from marxism. Some “anarchists”, mostly vaushites, try to pretend that Marx was on his side, but most of us know he wasn’t. 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 that’s not the same as saying “Marx supported anarchism”.
Also again, I mostly agree that we should ally, but an alliance is more than just “we will help you”. If you don’t 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 that’s just common sense.
Okay, fine, I don’t really see a problem with this. I will say, I don’t 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 we’re 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. That’s what I’ve always used the term for. I don’t think it’s useful to use “statist” to represent indefinite support of a state because… that’s just everyone else. That’s just every single ideology except radical leftism. But if that’s the way you view the word, I can’t really argue against you, it’s 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 (sigh… 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 isn’t co-operating with me, so you might get spammed, but I’m going to break the reply up to see if that helps:
There was a prick in this thread doing just that
I’m not an especially nice guy in these discussions, at best I’m just the type of stubborn where I’ll be damned if I give you something you can use against me beyond “he’s rude”. I can see how you’d 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 you’d 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 it’s emblematic of a persistent issue in your writing. You were not in the gulags. You were not in the Paris commune. You weren’t in the trenches in Vietnam. When I say someone isn’t in a minority by virtue of calling themselves an anarchist online and “believing” 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 I’m not a Soviet or a CPC cadre or a Panther. We’re 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 haven’t 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 it’s 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 doesn’t need to even be true historically because it’s just a fucking vibe and a narrative you’ve bought into with no material connection to the history. It’s all just storytelling.
I mean this not only directed at you but the many “anarchists” 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 don’t think they truly categorically hate anarchism (stay with me, now!). I think any of them who isn’t 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. I’m not saying you should want to be there, but it’s not like they are frothing at the mouth for “anarkiddy” 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 I’m sure the tyranny only happened after, with the ridiculous increase in every metric of human welfare when the country wasn’t actively being invaded by fascists (and, to be fair, at least one mostly-unrelated famine).
Oh, but tell me more about “usurpation”, my friend of revolutionary leftism. Can’t have people trying to “usurp” 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 couldn’t 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 don’t think we can just dismiss them as totally false out of hand.
Interestingly, he did develop “platformism” once he was in exile, which doesn’t 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 I’ve read.
Part 2/2
Again with the “us” 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 don’t 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 isn’t) 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? We’re 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 “Wins for anarchism” or better conditions for the actual human beings whose lives are at stake?
“Oh, but we only want anarchism so it can help people”
Cool, if what helps people is anarchism, then call me Peter Kropotkin, I don’t 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 “I can’t believe it’s not a state!” commune, but really just get obliterated by capitalists exploiting the infighting, then fuck off.
Here’s Michael Parenti saying something that I find relevant
At least we agree here.
You don’t need to endorse the US to be a useful idiot, that’s not really what a useful idiot means to begin with. You can act in the US’s favor while believing you have your own boutique radical ideology, and that’s 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 “anarchists” 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 didn’t take their constitution from your manifesto.
Most people are not ideologically coherent because ideology is downstream of one’s own conditions. You can say “Oh, but I’m critiquing it from an anarchist point of view” and it matters zero fucking percent. Do you know how many smug liberals I’ve seen quote Bakunin’s “The People’s Stick” line? It doesn’t fucking matter that he’s an anarchist and believed himself to be speaking from a certain ideologically coherent position, the takeaway is fundamentally “AES is oppressive and disingenuous huehue 1984” and that’s 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 “left” 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 I’ve ever read.
Even if you quite understandably don’t like me on a personal level and disagree with a lot of what I have to say, I hope there’s something here that you find informative in the way that I intended it to be.