Inhales deeply and remembers the rules about sectarianism on Hexbear
I am a long-term anarchist recently turned ML and one of the things that stuck out to me, when I took a serious historical look at anarchist projects that have existed in the world, was that all of them were fighting to win and in doing so they lost touch with questions of ideological purity like Manoel discusses in this article in favour of doing what was necessary, which was the nail in the coffin for my former beliefs, especially after having read Lenin. It made me realise the necessity of so-called “authoritarian” tools such as apparatuses of state, secret police (heck even police forces more generally), and measures that were expedient such as summary executions, given the state of war and risk of counterrevolution that all revolutions have faced and will face in the future.
Can you talk about where the idea that, idk, Anarchists aren’t allowed to fight against their oppressors comes from? That’s one I’ve really never understood. My conception of Anarchism involves a whole lot of honest to god warfare and it seems like a lot of the twitter Anarchist crowd view any offensive action as unacceptable. It’s something I really struggle to make sense of.
From admittedly limited interactions it seems like a lot of reddit and twitter anarchists are firmly anti-revolutionary, viewing anything like revolutionary violence as oppression and authoritarian and I don’t understand how they came to that view. And my attempts to get some kind of explanation directly have mostly failed. I suspect we’re not using language the same way and I don’t know what questions to ask.
Yeah, there was a phenomenon that existed which (I suspect) has largely morphed into something that goes by a different name these days but when you had these baby radicals coming into anarchist spaces they’d identify with the anti-communist/anti-actually existing socialism paradigm due to the usual suspects of media bias, liberal indoctrination etc. and so a lot of baby radicals would arrive at the anarchist position of reflexive anti-authority, typically via countercultural movements like punk etc. and the “safe” or “default” position was anarchism back then so you’d have a large cohort who would adopt positions of reformist anarchism (which often manifested in expressions of reticence towards revolutionary positions in favour of what a Marxist would consider to be utopianism; the belief that worker co-ops and turning the ideological tide of liberalism and so on would be sufficient to achieve revolution “one day” when the masses have mobilised sufficiently that the state can no longer oppose the grassroots push for full democracy and it will have to relent in the face of popular mobilisation).
This would be rejected by your long-term and hardcore anarchists who saw the necessity of overthrowing the state as an immediate priorty and thus emphasised pushing for revolution but often those anarchists are out in the streets doing direct action and so their voices are very often deprioritised in the online space and they get crowded out by the much-more online “revisionist”-style anarchist voices, or evolutionary-style anarchists is probably a better way to put it.
I feel like these days that cohort of baby leftists find themselves more attracted to the labels of SocDem/DemSoc/“leftist” labels than anarchism, although I dropped out of online anarchist spaces due to major ill health and DV, in between which I lost my faith in anarchism and eventually emerged as an ML so that’s more of a hunch than anything and it could be a product of what baby leftists I personally have been finding myself exposed to due to the circles that I move in more than anything else.
I also think that there’s simply less focus on what is essentially historical materialism and on ideological development with the view to refining the politics of new anarchists compared to what you find with Marxists, whether that happens to be Trotskyists or MLs or Maoists etc. - there seems to be much more focus on ideological alignment within those groups internally whereas with anarchism there’s a lot more of an individualistic approach where people gravitate to pacifist anarchism or vegan anarchism or post-leftism or egoism or whatever flavour they are most attracted to and on top of that because anarchism is generally very anti-hierarchical then there’s less deference to the more senior (and ideologically developed) anarchists. I think in combination this means that, unless you take it upon yourself as an anarchist to do your own ideological refinement and research into history, you probably aren’t going to develop out of that utopianism and reformism into a fully-fledged revolutionary position until you either do the study or you really get engaged in the practical side of organising.
Look, that’s just my personal take and it’s far from being an ethnographic study into the anarchist movement as a whole so take it with a pinch of salt but I hope that it answers your question.
Feel free to ask about anything if you want to know more.
Thank you for taking the time to write it out. It gives me a lot to think about and some leads to pursue. I’ve only just run in to the concept of evolutionary Anarchism and it sounds like something worth looking in to the try to understand where current thought lies.
Oh sorry if I mislead you on this but afaik there’s not really anything in the discourse about “evolutionary” anarchism or “revisionist” anarchism, I was just using the terms that a Marxist would as shorthand to get the general idea across from a Marxist perspective.
Afaik there really isn’t even a term or a conceptual framework within anarchist discourse for this cohort that we’ve been discussing and I think that speaks to the lack of ideological rigour within anarchism, in the sense that different interpretations of anarchist praxis aren’t neatly categorised and defined by their “program” in the way that Marxism has done.
To illustrate the point, I could make a particular argument and you would be able to accuse me of Kautskyism or utopianism, for example, and you’d invoke all of the Marxist critiques of that position by resting on the work of earlier theorist by labelling my position but that is something which I never really saw much of within intra-anarchist discourse and I suspect that it doesn’t really exist aside from what has been imported into anarcho-communism, and even then anarcho-communists can be quite eclectic in how they engage with Marxist theory and what they decide to adopt.
I think that’s probably why you haven’t been able to get a solid response to your question from anarchists - I suspect that there really isn’t even that much in the way of a conceptual framework to identify that trend, let alone to speak about it in any detail, unless you happen to find yourself talking to an anarchist theorist who is occupied with critiquing different schools of anarchist thought.
To some extent, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: an unbridgeable divide deals with that issue, or perhaps with its early roots. When I was more involved in anarchist spaces in the early 2000s, people knew about this article, and generally considered lifestyle anarchists to be wankers. But since the rise of social media, it seems like a kind of lifestyle anarchism has become the dominant tendency, with people rejecting not only hierarchical power relations, but any kind of organization that might have any hierarchical structure, like the federations traditionally endorsed by anarchists. And rejecting all authority, even Bakunin’s “authority of the bootmaker” (i.e., expertise).
It’s a very bad state of affairs, and I think it comes about partly because baby anarchists today learn from word of mouth rather than from books or textfiles, and in particular, from baby anarchists who hardly know more than they do but have social media followings. Kids these days, is what I’m saying. They need to get off of my our lawn.
I think that lifestylists, or at least lifestylism, still copped a lot of flak when I was an anarchist. I still fondly remember my days quoting that Bakunin passage at the lifestylists lol.
Obviously I’m much more sympathetic towards platformism and libertarian municipalism and the like, even today, but it’s sad to hear that lifestylism has become the predominant trend in (online) anarchism although I can understand its allure; you don’t need to worry about organising or even reading literature or any of the hard work really because you can just reject that out of hand and focus on doing what feels right for you.
Inhales deeply and remembers the rules about sectarianism on Hexbear
I am a long-term anarchist recently turned ML and one of the things that stuck out to me, when I took a serious historical look at anarchist projects that have existed in the world, was that all of them were fighting to win and in doing so they lost touch with questions of ideological purity like Manoel discusses in this article in favour of doing what was necessary, which was the nail in the coffin for my former beliefs, especially after having read Lenin. It made me realise the necessity of so-called “authoritarian” tools such as apparatuses of state, secret police (heck even police forces more generally), and measures that were expedient such as summary executions, given the state of war and risk of counterrevolution that all revolutions have faced and will face in the future.
Can you talk about where the idea that, idk, Anarchists aren’t allowed to fight against their oppressors comes from? That’s one I’ve really never understood. My conception of Anarchism involves a whole lot of honest to god warfare and it seems like a lot of the twitter Anarchist crowd view any offensive action as unacceptable. It’s something I really struggle to make sense of.
From admittedly limited interactions it seems like a lot of reddit and twitter anarchists are firmly anti-revolutionary, viewing anything like revolutionary violence as oppression and authoritarian and I don’t understand how they came to that view. And my attempts to get some kind of explanation directly have mostly failed. I suspect we’re not using language the same way and I don’t know what questions to ask.
Yeah, there was a phenomenon that existed which (I suspect) has largely morphed into something that goes by a different name these days but when you had these baby radicals coming into anarchist spaces they’d identify with the anti-communist/anti-actually existing socialism paradigm due to the usual suspects of media bias, liberal indoctrination etc. and so a lot of baby radicals would arrive at the anarchist position of reflexive anti-authority, typically via countercultural movements like punk etc. and the “safe” or “default” position was anarchism back then so you’d have a large cohort who would adopt positions of reformist anarchism (which often manifested in expressions of reticence towards revolutionary positions in favour of what a Marxist would consider to be utopianism; the belief that worker co-ops and turning the ideological tide of liberalism and so on would be sufficient to achieve revolution “one day” when the masses have mobilised sufficiently that the state can no longer oppose the grassroots push for full democracy and it will have to relent in the face of popular mobilisation).
This would be rejected by your long-term and hardcore anarchists who saw the necessity of overthrowing the state as an immediate priorty and thus emphasised pushing for revolution but often those anarchists are out in the streets doing direct action and so their voices are very often deprioritised in the online space and they get crowded out by the much-more online “revisionist”-style anarchist voices, or evolutionary-style anarchists is probably a better way to put it.
I feel like these days that cohort of baby leftists find themselves more attracted to the labels of SocDem/DemSoc/“leftist” labels than anarchism, although I dropped out of online anarchist spaces due to major ill health and DV, in between which I lost my faith in anarchism and eventually emerged as an ML so that’s more of a hunch than anything and it could be a product of what baby leftists I personally have been finding myself exposed to due to the circles that I move in more than anything else.
I also think that there’s simply less focus on what is essentially historical materialism and on ideological development with the view to refining the politics of new anarchists compared to what you find with Marxists, whether that happens to be Trotskyists or MLs or Maoists etc. - there seems to be much more focus on ideological alignment within those groups internally whereas with anarchism there’s a lot more of an individualistic approach where people gravitate to pacifist anarchism or vegan anarchism or post-leftism or egoism or whatever flavour they are most attracted to and on top of that because anarchism is generally very anti-hierarchical then there’s less deference to the more senior (and ideologically developed) anarchists. I think in combination this means that, unless you take it upon yourself as an anarchist to do your own ideological refinement and research into history, you probably aren’t going to develop out of that utopianism and reformism into a fully-fledged revolutionary position until you either do the study or you really get engaged in the practical side of organising.
Look, that’s just my personal take and it’s far from being an ethnographic study into the anarchist movement as a whole so take it with a pinch of salt but I hope that it answers your question.
Feel free to ask about anything if you want to know more.
Thank you for taking the time to write it out. It gives me a lot to think about and some leads to pursue. I’ve only just run in to the concept of evolutionary Anarchism and it sounds like something worth looking in to the try to understand where current thought lies.
Oh sorry if I mislead you on this but afaik there’s not really anything in the discourse about “evolutionary” anarchism or “revisionist” anarchism, I was just using the terms that a Marxist would as shorthand to get the general idea across from a Marxist perspective.
Afaik there really isn’t even a term or a conceptual framework within anarchist discourse for this cohort that we’ve been discussing and I think that speaks to the lack of ideological rigour within anarchism, in the sense that different interpretations of anarchist praxis aren’t neatly categorised and defined by their “program” in the way that Marxism has done.
To illustrate the point, I could make a particular argument and you would be able to accuse me of Kautskyism or utopianism, for example, and you’d invoke all of the Marxist critiques of that position by resting on the work of earlier theorist by labelling my position but that is something which I never really saw much of within intra-anarchist discourse and I suspect that it doesn’t really exist aside from what has been imported into anarcho-communism, and even then anarcho-communists can be quite eclectic in how they engage with Marxist theory and what they decide to adopt.
I think that’s probably why you haven’t been able to get a solid response to your question from anarchists - I suspect that there really isn’t even that much in the way of a conceptual framework to identify that trend, let alone to speak about it in any detail, unless you happen to find yourself talking to an anarchist theorist who is occupied with critiquing different schools of anarchist thought.
To some extent, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: an unbridgeable divide deals with that issue, or perhaps with its early roots. When I was more involved in anarchist spaces in the early 2000s, people knew about this article, and generally considered lifestyle anarchists to be wankers. But since the rise of social media, it seems like a kind of lifestyle anarchism has become the dominant tendency, with people rejecting not only hierarchical power relations, but any kind of organization that might have any hierarchical structure, like the federations traditionally endorsed by anarchists. And rejecting all authority, even Bakunin’s “authority of the bootmaker” (i.e., expertise).
It’s a very bad state of affairs, and I think it comes about partly because baby anarchists today learn from word of mouth rather than from books or textfiles, and in particular, from baby anarchists who hardly know more than they do but have social media followings. Kids these days, is what I’m saying. They need to get off of
myour lawn.I think that lifestylists, or at least lifestylism, still copped a lot of flak when I was an anarchist. I still fondly remember my days quoting that Bakunin passage at the lifestylists lol.
Obviously I’m much more sympathetic towards platformism and libertarian municipalism and the like, even today, but it’s sad to hear that lifestylism has become the predominant trend in (online) anarchism although I can understand its allure; you don’t need to worry about organising or even reading literature or any of the hard work really because you can just reject that out of hand and focus on doing what feels right for you.