As a retired anarchist, I think anarchists can come from different routes.
This is just purely from my experience and is also not exhaustive. One notable path, talked about in If We Burn, is the punk scene and the hooligans. Lots of anarchists seem to come out of the punk scene, especially in the US since we don’t really have hooligans. Although I have several anarchist friends who were little street criminals in their youth, petty things.
Some, I think, start thinking politically through an academic or purely theoretical side but without an understanding of political history. Purely theoretical idealism and uncritical consumption of anti-Communist propaganda, leads them to reject actual, successful movements for the sake of the ideal as the highest and only goal. This type of value formation is also famously understood, since Nietzsche, to lead to nihilism—which we also see in anarchist circles.
I think many mean well but they are confused, uneducated, or too invested to admit they were wrong. I’m of the latter path, I started thinking politically once I was in university due to some personal things that happened, but was really just a crescendo for my whole life up to that point. I was involved in a lot of things and did community organizing but it took me a long time to understand I was mistaken in how to carry out political work. Through actually studying political history and ML theory, I was able to have a better understanding than I did when it was just rejected a priori by my circles. Now I can see I was wrong and the Marxist-Leninist line is correct. And there are a lot of anarchists that can learn and improve if they can approach the material with an open and critical mind. I still feel a lot of sympathy for them because of the time I spent in those circles and now I feel like so many are really lost.
To be fair though, I was initially at the very start thinking in a ML way before I was pulled into anarchist thinking, but my experience encountering parties was so cringe and terrible that it made me think it wasn’t the correct path. I also tried the trot ISO but they had some really colorblind, dumbass racial theory that just instantly pushed me away. They all felt really White and uncomfortable. Then I got into anarchist circles and it all didn’t quite work politically but things felt way better somehow, especially the discussions around race and there were more PoC. Now that I’m thinking more in line with ML, I still sometimes think I should give parties another try or something but, damn, many parties in the US are lame or feds or both. I’m really involved in my Union so I just treat that as the political work I’m doing because I’m not sure if I’ll even find a party in the US I’m comfortable with. I was never an internet anarchist, which are somehow lightyears worse than actual anarchists, but I am kinda an internet ML I guess.
As a retired anarchist, I think anarchists can come from different routes.
This is just purely from my experience and is also not exhaustive. One notable path, talked about in If We Burn, is the punk scene and the hooligans. Lots of anarchists seem to come out of the punk scene, especially in the US since we don’t really have hooligans. Although I have several anarchist friends who were little street criminals in their youth, petty things.
Some, I think, start thinking politically through an academic or purely theoretical side but without an understanding of political history. Purely theoretical idealism and uncritical consumption of anti-Communist propaganda, leads them to reject actual, successful movements for the sake of the ideal as the highest and only goal. This type of value formation is also famously understood, since Nietzsche, to lead to nihilism—which we also see in anarchist circles.
I think many mean well but they are confused, uneducated, or too invested to admit they were wrong. I’m of the latter path, I started thinking politically once I was in university due to some personal things that happened, but was really just a crescendo for my whole life up to that point. I was involved in a lot of things and did community organizing but it took me a long time to understand I was mistaken in how to carry out political work. Through actually studying political history and ML theory, I was able to have a better understanding than I did when it was just rejected a priori by my circles. Now I can see I was wrong and the Marxist-Leninist line is correct. And there are a lot of anarchists that can learn and improve if they can approach the material with an open and critical mind. I still feel a lot of sympathy for them because of the time I spent in those circles and now I feel like so many are really lost.
To be fair though, I was initially at the very start thinking in a ML way before I was pulled into anarchist thinking, but my experience encountering parties was so cringe and terrible that it made me think it wasn’t the correct path. I also tried the trot ISO but they had some really colorblind, dumbass racial theory that just instantly pushed me away. They all felt really White and uncomfortable. Then I got into anarchist circles and it all didn’t quite work politically but things felt way better somehow, especially the discussions around race and there were more PoC. Now that I’m thinking more in line with ML, I still sometimes think I should give parties another try or something but, damn, many parties in the US are lame or feds or both. I’m really involved in my Union so I just treat that as the political work I’m doing because I’m not sure if I’ll even find a party in the US I’m comfortable with. I was never an internet anarchist, which are somehow lightyears worse than actual anarchists, but I am kinda an internet ML I guess.