Comradeship // Freechat

Anarchist who are actively working against the status quo are attacked just as much as any other group seeking to destroy it.

The difference in this context is that anarchism often has a much lower "barrier for entry" than ML thought, and in turn, is far less vilified by our media (it mostly just begins and ends with "anarchy is chaos" and doesn't elaborate. How many anarchist figures can you name who have been vilified by the media?) It exists as a kind of comfortable "testing the waters" space in a lot of the west. A place that someone can claim to be against the system, but not actually do anything about it, because while they identify as an "anarchist," their actual contributions to any movement is wearing a $59.99 punk jacket and going to a RATM concert. Anarchism is easier to fold into capitalism and turn into another commodity. Even Marxist stuff isn't immune to this (just look at Che Guevara shirts) but the capitalist class deem anarchism as ultimately less threatening and easier to manipulate, and so spend far less of their resources trying to destroy it.

There are plenty of properly organised anarchist organisations, just like their are ML ones, who actually require their members to read theory and understand their goals and objectives, but in the west especially, anyone can just call themselves an anarchist without consequence. So for people "experimenting" with left wing thought, it is usually what they trend towards as they don't risk alienating their friends and family, or risking their job in the same way that being an open ML often will in the west.