Do they think the Catalan Anarchists had no bourgeois blood on their hands? Do they think the Makhnovites never executed counterrevolutionaries? Fucking idiots. I preferred it when anarchists actually threw pipe bombs.
Do they think the Catalan Anarchists had no bourgeois blood on their hands? Do they think the Makhnovites never executed counterrevolutionaries? Fucking idiots. I preferred it when anarchists actually threw pipe bombs.
Nonsense, there’s a barrier to entry to being a communist. There’s a massive shortage of us. Not so with anarcho-x kids.
To me this raises a more interesting question. We keep having debates about who and what is a real anarchist Vs a lib who thinks they’re an anarchist. I think the question should be: why do so many Libs find the label anarchist appealing and more palpable than communist?
Because the anarchist symbol is on more merchandise and is represented more in capitalist media as something “cool” and “punk.”
Anarchism is very much marketed as an ideology to be consumed to divert the working class from approaching theorists that revolutionary movements have leaned on to actually overthrow capitalist regimes. This isn’t to say that there aren’t valuable anarchist insights, just that objectively anarchist movements have yet to lead a successful revolution that can sustain itself.
Red scare propaganda obviously. If it’s “common knowledge” “socialism doesn’t work” but you see capitalism sucks you want a third way. That way is to reject all states and authority especially socialist states. A true anarchist distrustful of authority would support socialism as positive step away from capitalism, but many don’t question the authority of the red scarers and thus trust them when they say socialism is even worse.
As I said above, no barrier to entry. You don’t have to read a book. You can deflect away any criticism of the west as “Shur all states are bad!” and then focus all your criticism on AES states while appearing to remain ideologically consistent.
Because it really is appealing at a surface level to a lot of people to declare (in a way that lacks theory) that there should be no rules and that no one should tell them what to do.
*palatable, for clarity
But I feel like Gramsci’s writing on the relative failure of anarchists in Italy has some sort of relevance here.
https://redsails.org/discorso-agli-anarchici/
The most basic and unreflective impulse of social rebellion has a palpable connection to what anarchism is, even if many anarchist activists and theorists are much more sophisticated in their ideology than that might imply to you. Anarchism in a broad sense is also very compatible with the empty, abstract inferences that people raised in liberalism are used to approaching political ideology with. In juvenile anarchists, you can for example see this in the similarity between their “I oppose all states”, even those that are historically progressive, and Ghandi saying “I oppose all violence” even in response to Jews fighting against Nazis!
There’s no barrier to calling yourself anything.
True but you can’t credibly do it for long without being found out. I’m actually Xi Jinping.
It’s just a slow process of revealing that many are not informed enough, and more importantly, that there are legitimate disagreements to be had that have not been addressed enough beyond discourse and ideological struggle. Most theory is a product of certain perspectives examining specific histories in specific places. But everything is always changing and nothing is truly universal. It’s only natural disagreements will be numerous even within perspectives that have similarities. And now days ideology seems reduced down to commodified identities that are developed through outrage and toxic, debatebro discourse so that doesn’t really help either.
If you ask me we need better triangulations and to get more comfortable with pluralistic thinking instead of simply purifying and gatekeeping our ideological group. ML thought deserves to not be reduced to something so static, and it needs more opportunities and creative practitioners for it to become more applicable, and thus more credible in more places. In other words we need reciprocity and continuity with other perspectives as much as we need rigor and integrity within our own methods and ideologies.