Gotta keep in mind that many internet Anarchists are angry young people who haven't had much if any connection with Anarchist or other left movements. They still mostly trapped in a world of NATO propaganda and if you uncritically accept everything NATOstan says about communism then internet "No gods no bedtimes" no theory "anarchism" looks reasonable. I'd suggest go dig in to real shit - The old school stuff like Kropotkin, but also look up modern, functioning Anarchist projects. There aren't a lot of big ones but there are lots of places where communities are run on either explicitly Anarchist lines or on lines that meaningfully run parallel to Anarchist thought. Try to look for projects outside of NATOstan and the Anglosphere. Places in the global south seem to be a lot less prone to being infected with NATO brainworms. I wish I had some examples but it's been a while since I've looked it up, but you're looking for coops, community self defense orgs, community infrastructure development, things like that. I'd say look up the Zapatistas as a starting point. Don't worry too much about what the rest of the world calls them, try to dig up their own writings about their project and how it works day to day.
anarchism
Anarchism is a social movement that seeks liberation from oppressive systems of control including but not limited to the state, capitalism, racism, sexism, speciesism, and religion. Anarchists advocate a self-managed, classless, stateless society without borders, bosses, or rulers where everyone takes collective responsibility for the health and prosperity of themselves and the environment.
Theory
Introductory Anarchist Theory
- Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution by Pyotr Kropotkin
- Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman
- Anarchy Works by Peter Genderloos
- Anarchism: A Beginner's Guide by Ruth Kinna
- Anarchism and Its Aspirations by Cindy Milstein
- Anarchy In Action by Colin Ward
- On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky & Nathan Schneider
- Anarchy by Errico Malatesta
Anarcho-Capitalism
Discord Legacy A collaborative doc of books and other materials compiled by the #anarchism channel on the Discord, containing texts and materials for all sorts of tendencies and affinities.
The Theory List :) https://hackmd.io/AJzzPSyIQz-BRxfY3fKBig?view Feel free to make an account and edit to your hearts content, or just DM me your suggestions ^~^ - The_Dawn
Truuuue that makes sense. I did watch a few videos on anarchism that seemed pretty rooted in theory, drawing a lot from Malatesta I believe. But it still didn't really do anything for me, like it feels like I could poke holes in a lot of what was being explained about how it would work. But there's only so much they can explain in 10-20 minute videos.
I'm familiar with the Zapatistas but not much else but they are based af. Or were, I think I read something recently where narcos have started to move in to their territory :/ I'll definitely search and see if I can find out about more projects outside of the west though!
My understanding is that there are a number of radically different ideologies under the Anarchist umbrella. Like you've got chill community building people who have a solid theory of a society without the coercive and violent organs of a state, but you've also got dangerous anti-social edgelords organizing under the eight-fold star of chaos undivided. Both groups get lumped in to Anarchism but idk if it can be said they actually share much in the way of goals and beliefs beyond opposition to states.
And yeah, I understand the Zapatistas are facing serious problems and making changes. There's no end to history, sadly.
Yeah, being a punk I was introduced to (mostly) edgelord/accelerationist "anarchists" lol. There seems to be a fairly active anarchist community where I live; from what I remember it was thriving in the 90's here too. There's a ton of share fairs, FNB, mutual aid groups, etc. During some of the bad first wildfires here a mutual aid network sprang up overnight and it was so so impressive, I helped out a bit with delivering groceries to people without transportation or who were medically vulnerable to the intense smoke. It was very cool; that's some anarchist shit I DO like.
That's cool. When shit popped off in '20 it was very heartening seeing mutual aid systems pop up like mushrooms.
If you want deliberate critique, the list in the sidebar has entries for explicitly anti-ML writings; the post-left (the real kind, not the Twitter kind) section also has some zine-sized critiques of the organizational methods of the "old Left". Also lots of other good stuff to read.
I think part of the reason for a lack of substantive ML critique is that many anarchist currents are organized around creating and advancing a (often quite narrow) political project in the Here and Now, and do not necessarily concern themselves with the dissection of dead leaves. Some of these manifest as gangs, squats, ZADs, insurrectionary movements, FnB, etc. This is not to say that these groups do not or have not Read Theory, but that the digestion and interpretation of Theory is subordinate to the acts of creation and destruction.
It is also important to draw a distinction between Anarchism the Western political philosophy and anarchism the lived practice. Key to small-a anarchism are taking up space and a cognizance of cotemporality. We are Here together Now. Communal farms and living spaces, traditional ecological knowledge, communal child-rearing and education practices, and temporary affinity groups can all demonstrate these ideas. The default Western perspective on the apportionment of space by contract and the linearization and quantification of time mediates the relation of both the individual and the collective to the Here and Now. In this way, the importation of a Marxist or Anarchist body of theory and practice may grind against the principles that guide an existing current. Marxists and Anarchists are perhaps at odds since they disagree about the proper way to exploit the resources of the planet, but they are both bound up fundamentally in production relations.
On this last point, there are some extant sources regarding indigenous critiques of Marxism:
- Red Skin, White Masks
- Indigenous Peoples, Marxism and Late Capitalism
- This also cites an older paper, The Silko Road
- The Silko Road draws on the works of Leslie Marmon Silko
- Some additional commentary on Silko's Almanac of the Dead in the context of 2008
I also found Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination illuminating.
To be pithy about it, Marxist and much of Anarchist thought place Now at the end of a line called History and Here within the long-collapsed walls of dead empires. Lived anarchist practice does not fix Here and Now beyond the immediate.
I am also obligated to say: Read Desert.
lmao of course I didn't read the side bar. I really appreciate the response, though, ESPECIALLY around introducing indigenous perspectives. I'm just starting to encourage myself to read theory and once I get through all the old shit I really want to focus on indigenous struggle and those in the global south, and ultimately feel that I would align myself most with those ideals. Just good to be well rounded. I also really appreciate talking about the concept of time and the application of these ideologies to it, I definitely want to learn more about that too
"communism doesn't work because communists are doomed to repeat the same exploitative power structures of the capitalist state">
I'd love it if you expanded on this cause i've been on this massively ML dominated space for years and still haven't been convinced that they're not (though i was always an anarchist so that might not matter that much). One of the main function of a state is reproducing it's power, that's why it can't wither away, especially in a world dominated by capitalist mode of production where communist states are forced to develop their productive forces.
"we dont know what an anarchist society will look like we gotta wait til we get there!"
We don't know what a communist society will look like either, mind you, we have blueprints at best. I posted an essay a few weeks ago about revolutionary spain and how anarchists there organized themselves and they definitely were getting there. You can check out Diego Abad de Santilan's writings to see a pretty concrete vision of how they wanted to make things work (though he's somewhat of a pariah cause he joined the revolutionary government, which is, yeah, not very anarchist).
Apart from that Anarchy Works by Peter Gelderloos (it's in the sidebar) is, while a pretty basic, but is another good example that shows why anarchism is anything but idealistic since it shows that the basics of anarchism together or separate were actually laid into praxis tons of times.
One thing to keep in mind tho which i see all the time is that anarchists have a different notion of what a successful revolution is than marxists, since their methods are different and i see this turning into a dick measuring contest still. For anarchists any revolution and any activity that creates stateless bubbles is a success, even if it's crushed in two years. That's why i specifically can't look at the USSR and say it's a success story, because while it existed, the state never withered.
Apart from that, what i think is also a huge and catastrophic misunderstanding is that most MLs still think On Authority is the greatest gotcha ever existed, but in my opinion doesn't do anything apart from conflating authority and force. Anarchists have proven thousands of time since it was written that they are very willing to use force against capitalists and fascists but biting the hand that beats you in itself is not an authoritarian act. What anarchists didn't do is setting up state structures where everyone's every step is monitored and you're encouraged to snitch on your friends and neighbours. Yes, i know we live in a system like that currently as well. That's why i say, from an anarchist standpoint there's no difference.
So yeah two critique's of Engels i've found interesting is this one and this one.
Are we allowed to have discussion on these points in this thread? Because one thing I never understood is the idea that the socialist projects have to wither away so fast, I never got how anyone thought we were at any time in modern history at a point where the coordination created by socialist States could be torn down safely while preserving the gains made.
With the richest countries in the world and many of their colonies, with all the nukes and military one could imagine, breathing down on your doorstep I don't know how it's rational to think that you should then begin tearing down the structures which were then only created out of historical necessity to fight against these very forces. Do Anarchists (capital A) generally believe that the period for communist parties to prove they can transition towards a classless society has passed, and that they've somehow proven they're incapable? Or do they think that the chance hasn't been available yet but that if it was then communists would then prove themselves incapable of transitioning towards communism?
Anarchists generally think that state communist parties (council communists are a different question) are not capable to lead towards a stateless, classless society, since they want to use state power, whose primary functions include reproducing itself. I'm yet to read any convincing account about how, if we got there, Leninists would start to break down the vehicle they used to defeat capitalism and rallied society around.
If you're asking my opinion, i have much of the same scepticism towards communist parties, but not on an equal level, for example i see much more potential in Latin American left/communist movements than in China. What i differ from most anarchists tho is that i'd be very happy to be proven wrong and generally won't advocate for the overthrow of the CCP in the current context.
Doesn't it seem reasonable that the idea of trying to create a classless society would be a task better suited for those who come after us? For example, the promise of socialism is that democracy is then increased to be available to the wider masses of people. Socialist societies have in the past, and even in the modern day, demonstrate that they're able to make huge leaps in social progress that enable more people than ever before be able to participate in the democratic processes of a society. I guess I'm not convinced that the idea that "Leninsts would not break down their own state" is something which is provable, and thus not a useful heuristic for making decisions. So what if "Leninists" aren't capable of the next step in the growth of humanity, it's been shown that they'll give up on their power much more peacefully than societies dominated by the bourgeois class ever will (even and especially communist officials who didn't benefit from the transition to liberal governance). If we're able to save the planetary ecosystem with cybernetic planning, end hunger, guarantee housing and work for those who're able and a good life for those who aren't as the "Leninists" demand; won't we have left our children with far more fertile soil for an anarchist society than if we simply struggle directly for a classeless society today?
I'm yet to read any convincing account about how, if we got there, Leninists would start to break down the vehicle they used to defeat capitalism and rallied society around.
Lenin himself writes extensively on critiquing the existence of the state, so any real leninist would align with this position. Mao himself also was quite anti-state, see the cultural revolution. Both of these incredibly important figures were anti state but saw it as a necessary tool to defend against extreme capitalist agression. there is little doubt in my mind that if capitalism fell, many would start critquing and deconstructing the current power structures.
Many would see it in their best interest too, because every head of Marxism leninism has shouted to the stars about the bureaucratic state apparatus corrupting Socialism and causing capitalist restoration.
As i said, i'd be very happy to be proven wrong. The thing is that with this method you would have to keep that anti-state ethos up for generations and generations as we see, so there's ample time for there to be sticks put between the gears. A global revolution you wrote about in the other comment would help with that.
whose primary functions include reproducing itself
Mind expanding on that since it seems like in the us its doing a piss poor job of it. In fact I'd say that a capital dominated state wants to do away with itself via privatization.
Engle's makes a pretty convincing argument that the state arose to mediate class conflict in favor of capital and that it cannot be destroyed until that class conflict is resolved.
Take the landlord tenant relationship. In order for this to exist then the landlord must exercise their property right through state mediated violence and the tenant is offered some rudimentary protections. If the state simply no longer recognized the property right of the land lord the state would wither and class conflict would resolve a bit.
Anarchists have proven thousands of time since it was written that they are very willing to use force against capitalists and fascists but biting the hand that beats you in itself is not an authoritarian act.
Ok I can agree there but about counter revolutionaries after the revolution? Do you let them organize and gather support in the name of free expression? Do you engage them only after they start shooting at you?
Another question I have is how do you handle defense of the revolution from outside forces? Sure you could have militias with elected officers and whatnot, but what if part of your anarchist territory does not want to fight to defend the revolution? I could imagine the people further away from the frontlines would be less inclined to go and fight and I'd also imagine drafting people would be too authoritarian for anarchists.
I got in to it with some internet "anarchists" about using force to disarm Nazis and keep them from organizing and arming. I was shocked that they were stridently against any attempt to control Nazis with force until the fash were breaking the door down. I just could not and cannot make sense of extending "live and let live" to fascists whose explicit goal is to kill you and everyone around you. It was an extremely strange, uhh, discussion.
Well if we manage to get there (and it's a long shot now) the main obstacle to anyone who would rather go back to stock trading and widespread destruction of species is that people will see which one works more and if there's a clique of these weirdos first they won't associate with them and second if they infested to a point that they actually mean a threat to the new order, they would just rise up, as it can be seen in South America or Cuba or wherever there is a threat to the system. Anarchism isn't against that.
The other dilemma is a good one and i'm yet to think about it thoroughly, though since it's highly theoretical it's tough to come up with a one size fits all solution. Obviously the main objective would be to avoid conflict. If it's unavoidable (one thing to think about is what outside forces were there in a global anarchist society), i would think that the kind of general solidarity that we see in Bolivia or Venezuela or Cuba would switch on and there wouldn't be a problem about it but i'll think about it (note: this is my subjective opinion about the case you introduced).
That's a whole lot of assumptions that need to be true for something like this to happen. The biggest assumption is that after the anarchist revolution the overwhelming majority of the populace will become ideologically anarchist and will refuse counter revolutionary propaganda and agitation. This has never happened after any revolution in history, in a lot of cases only a few percent of the populace were committed revolutionaries that actually execute the revolution with only the conditional backing of a huge chunk of the populace.
If anarchism can only work if most of the people are anarchists it's not a viable revolutionary ideology IMO.
I read a story ages ago, and the premise was something like Anarchism had mostly taken hold for a long time, but some old hands got word that someone was building a state and went to look in to it. And it talked a bit about the "paradox of tolerance" present in a bunch of anarchists taking it on themselves to raid a nascent state and destroy it violently, what gave them the justification, what if anything they owed the folks in the state. I remember it being an interesting read but can't remember the details. I want to say in the end it turned out that the person organizing the state turned out to be an ai who broke down crying when finally confronted and admitted it didn't want to be building a state but didn't know how else to handle some problem.
(one thing to think about is what outside forces were there in a global anarchist society)
But what of an anarchist society that isn't global? The revolution has to start somewhere, and capitalists would try to crush it before it became worldwide and everyone sees that it is a superior system, yeah? Is this "highly theoretical", or something that every revolution has to have a plan for?
Thank you for the thoughtful response, I look forward to reading your essay I'll definitely try to get to it. I busted out the laptop to give a thoughtful response to you here lol. I apologize for how long it is, like it's ridiculous but I can't help but be long winded.
I guess for some background on where I'm at politically which may not matter but here goes lol: I've read very little theory myself. I think I got more radicalized in a communist direction after I went to college and studied Latin America and learned about colonization, imperialism, and socialist revolutions in different Latin American countries. I also was taught a tiny bit about Marx in college as well when I took some labor history classes. I have done a bit more research on my own about Cuba specifically, and over the years, kinda became more interested in learning about North Korea and wanting to break down internalized American propaganda. So I think my experience in college helped me to favor communism while I never was taught anything about actual anarchism. I'm familiar with some theorists and have done a tiny bit of research about it. I believe mutual aid and any other praxis happening on the ground now is critical and important. I am just starting to try to get myself more serious about reading theory and such, and before I slide more and more towards ML, I am hoping to kinda learn about both at the same time so I can actually decide where I stand politically. I do wanna challenge myself and be as informed as I can about both. I do agree with you for what seems like the dick measuring contest between the two lines of thought lmao. I find it really silly and that’s another reason why I want to learn for myself and probably want to take ideas from both anarchism and communism and apply them to how I think and operate politically. I ultimately wanna study indigenous struggle though and strive towards incorporating that thought first and foremost tho.
To give my thoughts on the quotes I provided, and explain my thoughts on consensus after engaging in it: I think what bothers me about those phrases is that often, I don't see the explanations go much further than that, and I kinda find them contradictory. Like, okay, so on one hand anarchists believe that society and the way that humans cooperate together is fluid and constantly changing, and so that plays into why we don't know what anarchism will look like. There is a base structure that's been thought out as to how consensus and horizontal decision making can work now, during, and after the revolution, but that can and will change so the "end goal" is unknowable. What I find contradictory is that fluidity and evolution is being applied to anarchism, but not to communist revolution. A communist state doesn't seem to operate the way that a capitalist state does, so why is it that we can't evolve that state structure, and keep changing it, where the anarchist structure of consensus that was created is afforded that freedom? We are always learning from our mistakes, and from Lenin to Mao to Castro, no revolution has looked exactly the same and as far as I know, they try to look at the errors made and try to apply what works to their version of communism and discard what didn't work in prior revolutions.
Another point that has probably been addressed in anarchist literature: When anarchism is talked about, it seems that it is portrayed as immune from hierarchy and certain people gaining more clout/influence/social capital, whatever it might be called. At one point, I worked at a job that based all of it's decision making around consensus and a horizontal workplace. All positions were paid the same and every decision in the agency was discussed in individual department meetings, then consensus from that group was brought to the larger agency wide meeting where those thoughts/proposals were again decided through consensus. For a long time, anyone and everyone was able to join those larger agency wide meetings and participate. The workplace engaged in this type of decision making for probably close to 50 years.
There were many things that ended up happening that I felt replicated social hierarchy and what made it feel like not truly consensus decision making. Even when taught how the consensus model worked and when people were encouraged to participate, there are many people who did not engage. That could be due to apathy, anxiety, feeling that their voice would not echo as loudly as others, etc. So, people who felt more confident, were better at public speaking, or had more knowledge about the process and the work were often the most influential in the group. Sure, we would come to consensus, but there were many people who just kinda went with the flow, even if they didn’t necessarily agree with whatever decisions were made just because they didn’t care enough to participate or any of the other above reasons. The “social capital” piece also felt very inequitable; if someone came to the meeting with a personal request, or any kind of proposal and they were very well known, charismatic, well likes etc etc, they would often get the most feedback, more people would participate and they would also get decisions that would work in their favor. At the same time, other people who did not enjoy those qualities might not get equal treatment. The inequity was not a conscious choice but that was just the nature of the group. So through this, the very hierarchies that anarchism wants to abolish seem to replicate themselves. There are people who hold knowledge who try to raise the consciousness of others, there are delegates and representatives for group decision making, the charisma and ability to make social connections influences the direction of the groups. Now, I recognize that there are failsafes in place that could probably discourage these problems, and this was not called anarchism in name, so I do see how it’s different but the way the discussions were structured were the exact same way as our local anarchist collective structured them, so I feel like it’s an apt anecdote. Considering all that, it makes me feel like criticisms lobbed towards communism for its faults are also faults that exist in the anarchist system, and that anarchy can just as easily replicate systems of inequality.
ANYWAY thank you for coming to my ted talk I’m so sorry for the length lol if you stuck around this long I’m stoked to hear your thoughts on this.
Thanks for your response! I'm gonna do a brief response to each topics:
First: I support your method in engaging in both side's theory, that's the way to do it imo, so good on you for that! I'm not against marxist criticism if it's informed by the knowledge of anarchist theory (lots of the shitthrowing around marxism and anarchism comes from people not engaging with source material from the other side only criticism of said source material which i try to avoid, that's why i read marxist literature as well).
Second: What you say is true, there's a lot of anarchists (especially on the internet) who are applying this double standard (they generally come from a place that the two ideologies can't be synthesised at all) but there are some who think there can be a synthesis between the two ideologies, apart from the essay about Spain i would also suggest Daniel Guerin's For a Libertarian Communism (and Guerin in general, i think he's pretty underrated) to see where it could end up. Hell i've even read texts praising Tito on The Anarchist Library.
Third: You're right, informal reproduction of social hierarchy is a problem that anarchists are grappling with, since some people will be more confident and less anxious in these situations. I'm not that well versed on the theory on that but one essay i found helpful is this one. Apart from that what i can advise you is to, if you are in a situation like that is to ask the people organising, what they will do in order to avoid this happening, like, will the people who seem more withdrawn given a platform deliberately? Will the people who tend to get asked everything willingly step back? I think this is an important problem to grapple with especially in the mentally gripping system we live in, but also i think that there could be (and maybe there are i just don't know about them) methods to reverse it.
This is a valuable insight.
Formal power discrepancies do not spring into being out of nowhere; it usually emerges organically from informal power discrepancies. The main focus of anarchists has been to decry the formal sort, but they are largely silent or inept or even complicit when it comes to the informal sort.
Any anarchist praxis, which does not include mechanisms of preventing or narrowing informal power gaps, is going to be crucially deficient.
The EZLN does not identify with the western political paradigm and thus they are not anarchist and they openly reject the label, but they are radical and they are opposed to MLism, not in an absolute opposition sort of way but in a strongly critical sort of way.
Subcommandante Marcos has written criticisms of MLism and similar stuff. One of his big communiques in this respect is the unequivocal I Shit On All the Revolutionary Vanguards of this Planet which is a response to criticisms leveled against the EZLN.
For something a bit more dry and measured is Listen, Marxist! by Murray Bookchin, who is a contentious figure in anarchism as he too doesn't truly fit within anarchism as he broke with it later in his life, although this piece was written prior to this development in his politics so I'd say it's a decent example of an anarchist counter-argument to what MLs argue for.
For a longer-form defense of the anarchist position in a more general sense, one that addresses ML criticisms without necessarily responding directly to them, is Anarchy Works by Peter Gelderloos. It's not really something that attempts to deconstruct the ML position but I think that it will still be valuable in challenging your beliefs.
Lmao damn the name of that communique is fire. Yeah from my understanding the Zapatistas were very strongly vocal about it being an indigenous movement right?
Thanks for the recommendations I appreciate it
Check out the work of Wayne Price. Pick whatever seems interesting https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/wayne-price
Oooo thank you!
This is somewhat related to the thread as this guy critiques Marxism a lot on his channel, what are Hexbear anarchist thoughts on this guy: https://www.youtube.com/@Anark/videos
He seems at first glance more coherent than most Internet Anarchists I've encountered, is he a good source on anarchist theory?
Not a big fan of his overarching narrative, especially in matters of history.
He lavishes glowing praise on anything anarchist in a way that is entirely blinkered to the realities and is without critical analysis. For example, he will extol the virtues of the economy of the Spanish Republic but he refuses to actually engage in the (scanty) historical scholarship and acknowledge that there were critical flaws within the Spanish Republic and clear problems especially especially to do with labour discipline, or he will deny the Eichenfeld massacre.
He's extremely dogmatic.
I have had very productive discussions with anarchists about these sorts of matters. If you can acknowledge that an anarchist revolution is going to have excesses and that, historically, excesses have occurred and that they need to be learned from in order to mitigate the risk of them happening in the future then we're going to get along just fine.
If you look me dead in the eye and deny the Eichenfeld massacre or claim that valid criticisms of Makhno's personal conduct as de facto leader of the Makhnovshchina that came directly from a member of the Military Revolutionary Council are merely Bolshevik propaganda, without actually having done any research into these things, then we are not going to get along.
In my experience, Anark falls into the latter category. He is not a person I would be comfortable with even back when I was an anarchist.
You say you were an anarchist, do you mind sharing why you stopped aligning yourself with it (assuming that's how you'd describe it)
Sure.
I was an anarchist for a long time, gradually developed into an AnCom with more learning, and then eventually I sat down and genuinely engaged with what Lenin argued rather than just believing the received wisdom about why Lenin was a bogeyman.
My experiences with organising set me on the path towards becoming an ML long before I ever realised it and long before I actually read Lenin on his own terms.
I spent a long time in a sort of purgatory of radical politics, stuck in limbo where the way that I understood and conceptualised politics was crumbling away but I wasn't ready to admit it to myself that I was misled. It was actually really agonising to go through that. Sorta like being in a long-term relationship where you grow apart very gradually but you don't really notice it until there's an inciting incident and suddenly you review everything and you're like "Shit. This isn't working anymore. I don't know who you are, I don't even know who I am outside of this relationship, but I know that this relationship isn't gonna make it." I spent quite a while quizzing anarchists that I had contact with about certain things and this became apparent to me about matters of strategy and organising and broader stuff like economics and foreign policy and geopolitics. Deep down I was desperately hoping that my political realisation was actually just because of some fault in my own personal political development as an anarchist rather than it being about anarchism and that by talking it through with someone who was more knowledgeable than me it would rescue me from the political-existential crisis I was experiencing, that all I needed to do was to read more or adjust my perspective and it would all go away. Unfortunately this didn't pan out for me the way I wanted.
The next thing was, after realising that I was operating under false apprehensions in matters of politics, was to set about assessing history from a clear perspective to see if I felt that the narrative that I had adopted aligned with the objective facts and historical scholarship. This was difficult and it took a long time, and in some respects there are still things that I haven't arrived at a conclusion on because I need to do more reading but I'm okay about withholding judgment until I know enough to have a good understanding of things.
Unfortunately this is where it really fell apart for me. I learned more about anarchist movements and just the general history surrounding anarchist revolutions. In the two big historical examples of anarchism, there were strikingly authoritarian measures that were taken, and not by accident or by some quirk of history. I knew that anarchists would denounce these things if they had occurred under a different system with different leadership but I was interested to see how anarchists related to these things and responded to them. I saw a lot of denialism, reflexive dismissal (e.g. "that's just Bolshevik propaganda" when it was clearly not the case), and a surprising amount of excusing, deep skepticism, and that lack of curiosity that you get from people who genuinely don't care about a topic.
I honestly felt pretty betrayed, both by the very skewed narratives I was given about history and by a lack of principles or concern about authoritarianism within historical examples of anarchism.
In learning more about this stuff I also started seeing that over time the anarchist revolutions often tended to develop in a way that paralleled ML states due to facing essentially the same threats, the same contradictions, and the same material conditions. I stopped treating different revolutions as if it were team sports and I started to understand them on their own terms by developing a solid foundation of what was going on at the time and how they responded to their particular circumstances.
By this point I came to the conclusion that a revolution is never going to truly be complete as long as capitalism still exists, and as long as that's the case then there will necessarily be "authoritarian" measures needed to defend and deepen the revolution. In some respects I already knew this but it really crystallised in my mind because I spent time grappling with this idea. This in turn made me realise that I was much more aligned to the idea of a transitional phase of socialism than I thought. These days it's my honest opinion that if you really hash it out with principled anarchists most of them will agree that the day after the revolution you won't be able to achieve the anarchist end-goal but instead there will need to be a period of construction (and that's without even discussing the necessity of defending the revolution from internal and external threats). So my hot take is that one of the primary points of disagreement between anarchists and MLs is not about the necessity for a transitional stage but rather how long that transitional period will/should last.
Honestly with what I know and what I've been through, I feel like I'm sort of a corrosive influence on anarchists and I legitimately shy away from discussions of politics, history, and theory with anarchists (especially in real life) because I don't want to inflict the same sort of awful experience I went through on them and I don't have the capacity to provide an anarchist with much support in a sorta pastoral care fashion; I don't want to just smash someone's worldview and be like "Seeya later, nerd!" to leave them to pick up the pieces. In part this is because people can bounce to very weird places when their prior political beliefs implode and I don't want to see someone go from the radical left to an ugly political orientation, because then everyone loses, but also because I don't want to be responsible for someone going through a crisis that may really fuck up their relationships and their personal life. At worst, wrecking someone's deeply-held politics can push them over the edge and I really don't want to be the catalyst for that because I don't think I'd be able to live with myself if I knew that I had caused this.
Damn, I'm sorry that it was such an emotional experience for you but overall it sounds like it was for the best and it seems like not many people can commit to a paradigm shift like that, I feel like that takes a lot of fortitude.
I have very strong convictions but I find that I'm always willing to be challenged or have my mind changed...it's just not often that someone comes across with any argument convincing enough. So I have no idea if I would react so strongly to having my worldview shaken like that. I've almost always been the most radical person in the room when it comes to my friend groups (lol) but I guess it sounds like that sense of betrayal may have been what caused that to be so painful? I've never joined any sort of political group so I wonder if really being surrounded by a lot of "like minded" people would influence that.
I was an edgelord in highschool, I was on 4chan before the pedophilia truly took over, said racist jokes, all that dumb shit. Took an African American film class and from then on I really pushed myself HARD to undo a lot of what I thought I knew, took years and maybe put me in a position to feel alienated from most of the people I grew up with but I don't regret it
Oh, also, that part about both Anarchists and Communists having the same idea about a transitional period - that definitely seems to be the case, in my opinion at least. Like there is the anarchist concept of councils and federations and such, and then "what will an anarchist society look like", as far as I've seen, is answered with "well it's going to evolve organically. Could look the same, could look different". So wouldn't that initial decision making structure be considered transitional?
Another thing that I find interesting is that vanguards are met with disdain, but in building an anarchist society there are going to be people who are more educated in anarchist principles who will need to share those principles and concepts with other people who have never been exposed before. This could be more organic than explicit by modeling instead of educating per se, but couldn't that be construed as a sort of Vanguard movement? And having delegates sent to communicate with the entire federation on behalf of their community, is that not something that already mimics the structure if the state but just much more democratic?
Damn, I'm sorry that it was such an emotional experience for you but overall it sounds like it was for the best and it seems like not many people can commit to a paradigm shift like that, I feel like that takes a lot of fortitude.
It's all good. That's just how things turned out for me I guess.
I think what sucked about it was that I had committed myself to anarchism quite seriously and then to look back on all the time and effort that I put into it later only to realise I hadn't fully figured out what I was doing and that a lot of my efforts were wasted... That's a difficult thing to come to terms with.
So wouldn't that initial decision making structure be considered transitional?
Without strawmanning anarchism, I do genuinely believe that this is true. I think for me, what is really important is putting in serious work to figure out how this transitional period should be structured.
Imo there are a lot of conditions that are necessary before a radical left revolution can kick off – America has to be sufficiently distracted or weakened at the time, there needs to be mass mobilisation, the organisations leading it must be well-connected to the broader community, (not to go all Great Man Theory but) there needs to be leaders who have the right combination of characteristics to spearhead or shepherd the revolution, enough international support is crucial etc. etc. What this means in my perspective is that revolutionary moments are actually quite rare, and it's rarer still to have enough of the right conditions that the countervailing conditions are mitigated and that the revolution manages to successfully take root.
It's a bit like the societies that have managed to develop the ability to control fire but which haven't yet developed the ability to create fire themselves – they have to wait for lightning to strike in the right place or for the very rare physical or chemical reactions that create combustion spontaneously, this has to happen nearby enough that it gets discovered by someone, the weather has to be sufficiently mild that the fire doesn't get extinguished, there has to be enough suitable combustible material nearby to feed the fire, there needs to be a way to transport the fire, and the fire has to be contained enough that it doesn't cause a wildfire that threatens to destroy the village.
This happens, of course, but the chances of having all the right conditions and the right luck are very rare so you need to make sure that everyone knows how to identify a fire, how to tend it and manage it properly, and that everything is in place to take advantage of the next time a fire starts nearby. One unlucky patch of rain or a heavy gust of wind at the wrong moment and that rare chance of capturing fire vanishes and it could be months or even years before the next opportunity presents itself.
In that overextended metaphor, once the fire has successfully been brought back to the village I think it's too much of a gamble to take the attitude of being like "We'll figure out the next steps once we get there" because it's too rare and too important to risk fumbling the ball. You want to have a fire pit already built, you want some kindling or wood ready to go long before you need it, you want contingency plans in place to ensure that if the weather turns bad that there's ways of keeping the fire going. Of course there's no way to predict everything that might happen and there's going to be some degree of figuring it out as you go but the less you leave up to chance, the more likely you're going to be successful in your endeavours.
Or maybe it's like a speedrun of a game which relies upon a random glitch that only occurs rarely - you don't want to have the attitude that you'll figure out the next steps of how to finish the game when you encounter that glitch. You want to know exactly what you're doing so that when the glitch happens you can take full advantage of it to maximise your chances of breaking the speed record.
You don't want to find yourself as the dog who finally catches the car, y'know?
Which leads me on to the next part...
This could be more organic than explicit by modeling instead of educating per se, but couldn't that be construed as a sort of Vanguard movement?
You've hit the nail on the head here.
I refer to these as vulgar vanguards. Maybe that's a bit uncharitable of me but it's not intended to be a term of derision. There's plenty of vulgar materialism that you can find outside of Marxist discourse and it's an established term so I think vulgar vanguard is pretty apt. It's also a recognition that MLs don't have a monopoly on these ideas and that other political orientations can come across these ideas or the practice independently.
A vanguard is just the most ideologically advanced group of people who help shape the beliefs and the groundswell of political action of the masses. Anarchism has plenty of examples of vanguards – Durruti, Malatesta, Makhno and the Revolutionary Military Council (with figures like Volin) and Belash, and Kim Chwa-chin. (Obviously these are mostly just names-dropping the leaders but I'm not going to bore you by listing out every deputy or lieutenant or whatever for each of these movements but I'm sure we all agree that these leaders all had a group of their most trusted allies who were extremely committed and ideologically advanced that helped direct their movements.)
I've seen plenty of de facto vanguards emerge in anarchist orgs and history also proves this to be true in larger movements. I'd much rather have an explicit structure with defined roles and rights and responsibilities, with mechanisms to deal with problems that will inevitably occur, than I would to have something that sprouts up organically where there is no room for democratic processes and accountability and that kinda stuff. It's much easier to get someone out of a role if the role is official, it has clear delimitations on power, and there are mechanisms for recall and elections and managing corruption and misconduct than it is trying to do this when a person just occupies a role naturally because the organisation is so horizontal that it doesn't engage in articulating a power structure.
Unfortunately vanguard is often used as a boogeyman term. I'm very open to hearing critiques of vanguardism but if the criticism is that it's elitists or that it is a betrayal of radical politics then I'm not buying it. Your average mom and pop aren't going to be the most theoretically or politically advanced in a revolution but that's okay – it's better to acknowledge this and to find ways to mitigate these contradictions than it is to expect that they are suddenly going to become deeply political and that they're going to be willing and able to become the next Peter Arshinov.
That's a bit like expecting everyone to become their own physician. A few people might actually do it, some people are going to be able to do it, but it's unfair and self-defeating to operate on the assumption that everyone has the means to become a doctor. In the matter of boots it's okay to defer to the authority of a bootmaker, y'know?
Honestly it's another thing where if I was more malicious and more interested in drama farming or getting some epic screenshots or clips, I do think I'd be able to steer a discussion with most anarchists into getting them to describe a vanguard in their own terms and to get them to express support for them except without naming it as a vanguard directly. But that's not a productive way of building a movement or raising consciousness, that's just a way of creating a circlejerk where one side can feel smugly superior to the other – it's Vaush-tier bullshit.
I think a lot of these differences and perceived differences tend to work themselves out through praxis anyway and my understanding is that history vindicates this position; I'm not interested in proving to everyone that I was right or getting others to concede to me that they had it wrong. I just want to see a better future and to contribute to that however I can, factionalism and ego be damned.
EXTREMELY GOOD POST
good post
idk, looking at beehives and termite mounds I was never able to pick out which one of them was the General Secretary
were you?
the queen
The queen bee doesn't exactly do any coordination and planning tho.
That said it's a pretty nonsense analogy in the first place, people aren't insects.
Nah, queens in eusocial insects don't control the hive. Afaik in honey bees the girls decide things in a weird communal democratish way, and ants make decisions using pretty strict behavioral rules. I've read several entomologists say calling them queens was a mistake and creates an incorrect impression about their role. They're much more at the mercy of the hive than the other way around.
Eusocial insects are hard to map on to human behavior, though. Like bees do seem to have something that roughly maps to democracy, but ants and termites seem to be essentially machines that operate on strict behavioral rules.
You don't really need to read something as specific as anarchist theory to challenge a bias towards Leninism.
If Leninism itself leaves comparatively too much to be desired, or plenty of other strategies have something sufficiently desirable that Leninism lacks, that's enough to challenge Leninism.
Anarchism is a very specific strategy, centered on prefiguration, as well as effective and horizontal power building that developed in Europe in response to an increasingly industrial society. But of course, plenty of effective and horizontal power building movements arose in response to different conditions and weren't anarchist. The Zapatistas are explicitly anti-anarchist (though another commenter in this thread you were interacting with seems to be implying that they self-identify as anarchists and it's the rest of the world that refuses to acknowledge them as such???), and are an anti-colonial movement centered around a national identity of being colonized.
What distinguishes anarchism is that, because it is in response to industrial society, it developed strategies specific to a structural analysis befitting industrial society. Even if nothing about anarchism turned out to be compelling to you, there would still be plenty of room to challenge Leninism. The organic centralists of the ICP have plenty to say about Leninism, as do councilists, and all of these theories share with anarchism all kinds of desirable things that Leninism lacks.
But that said, a pretty comprehensive reading to get an idea at least for what contemporary organizational dualists are up to these days is Turning the Tide which was published May of last year.
As for why it shifted to anarchism, so for background, it was for a while just sort of sympathetic to both historical materialist-style communist strategies (what you call 'Marxism,' henceforth 'histcom') and anarchist strategies. Namely, a lot of left-communist doctrines and anarchist doctrines had a great deal of predictive and explanatory power, and seemed to provide a plausible way to combat the ubiquity of domination (especially the domination of nonhumans, which was of particular interest to it). So it was never a Leninist histcom, but it was pretty sympathetic to histcom approaches.
Two things make histcom approaches extremely unappealing. First, histcom texts and discussions are extremely unconducive to filling in holes in their structural analysis. Be honest, how much success have you had explaining suicidism to a group of Leninists who've never heard of it? How much success would you expect if you did this: Go from Leninist group to Leninist group. They aren't antecedently anti-psychiatry. Make them listen to mad people about why therapy and psychiatry must be smashed at all costs.
it can tell you from experience that your success rate will be very low. Leftcoms have this problem to a great extent too. This is a problem. At the pro-Hamas actions where it is, a Leninist group that hates queer people keeps trying to infiltrate the actions and capture members, the majority of whom turn out to be queer or queer allies. That is truly how far behind their structural analysis is, putting aside the fact that they're a well-known abusive cult here. This is not cherry-picking, it is par for the course for large Leninist groups with local chapters everywhere to have no cognizance of anti-queer violence, sanism, suicidism, speciesism, no conception of what heteropatriarchal slurs are, no willingness to understand the transmisogyny of punitive degendering, just a total lack of analysis of our objective or subjective conditions.
Second, histcom texts and discussions are extremely incapable of recognizing abuse, or even conceiving of what abuse even is, and it's often downplayed! Abuse is, to be clear, a huge issue in anarchist spaces, especially Food Not Bombs chapters. It's not specific to any tendency. But after starting a pro-survivorship specific organization nearly a decade ago, what it's found is that anarchists have the tools to unlearn abuse and learn what abuse is. To recognize that abuse is ubiquitous, that we are all born fascists and colonists and must unlearn that violence, that to address abuse is to assume it will occur and to study, analyze, and plan accordingly.
Histcoms, and especially Leninists, are not in a similar position. And this seems to be a phenomenon that owes itself to the origin of both traditions. Where anarchists are incredibly willing to recognize Bakunin's treatment of his Jewish comrades and the incredible trauma and pain that must have caused, histcoms are generally extremely unwilling to admit to Marx and Engels's pattern of forming abusive relationships with those more vulnerable than them and forcing them into isolation. Or, they're unwilling to really put themselves in the uncomfortable position of really sitting with Lenin's choice to harbor Bauman after Bauman drove a woman to suicide by abusing her over a long period of time. To really sit and internalize what she must have felt, what she would have felt knowing Lenin upheld Bauman to the point that he is today memorialized with a statue while she is forgotten, having gotten to achieve nothing.
it thinks it understands why Leninists and mainstream Leninist texts so frequently do this. This denial is a way of maintaining social strength. If you admit to atrocities, it makes your ideology less appealing. But it sees it differently. If you are willing to sit with the atrocities and the pain of your ideology, and really grapple with the mistakes in analysis and action that made those atrocities possible, then you're willing to do the work to ensure you don't immediately drive off victim-survivors. Abuse denialism doesn't wave a red flag with a yellow hammer and sickle, it just raises a red flag. One that says "you'll be victimized here too."
Addressing abuse among revolutionaries is such a pressing issue, and over and over histcoms (including some leftcoms!) glorify their favorite figures, deny the historical record when it says these people are abusers, even to victim-survivors. How could anyone reasonably conclude that a tendency that consistently does that over and over could ever be the right path forward?
Abuse among anarchists is just as ubiquitous, but if you talk to an anarchist about power dynamics as being central to abuse, they won't hazily quote Engels's "On Authority" at you and say the concept of 'power' is reductive or whatever. They'll understand. And they'll genuinely improve and do better next time when figuring out who to deplatform and who to empower. They'll recognize anti-survivorship, they'll recognize when some org refuses to center a victim and is kicking out an abuser for appearances without actually listening to what the victim wants or needs for their safety. Anarchism just has a better fucking track record at being a bulwark against chauvinism and abuse.
it was never really sympathetic to Leninism in particular, but it was sympathetic to other histcom tendencies, and to some extent it still is. But a lot of love's been lost from these experiences, and hopefully that answers your question of how it shifted from histcom-leaning to anarchist-committed.
But as it said above, if you don't find anarchism convincing, it would far sooner you gain an interest in the ICP than sticking with Leninism.
Hey, sorry to respond so late to this! I appreciate your detailed response a lot, will give me a lot to think about. I don't know that it sits right with me to say that an anarchist would "do better" when it comes to recognizing abusive patterns of behavior cuz that seeks to be a broad generalization but I have not ran in explicitly anarchist or ML spaces Irl so maybe it's more likely than with MLs in general. I am also surprised/not surprised to hear about the lack of self critique in actual active leninist groups. People here seem to be able to, for the most part, reckon with the fact that there are problems and issues with lenin/marx/Stalin etc. But maybe, being pretty new to studying this stuff, there is more apologia going on than I recognize. When I have some time I'll look at the links it included. Thanks! (I've never used it/it's pronouns so I hope "it included" is correct instead of "you included")
Read Listen Marxist by Bookchin.
It's pretty good. It's a history book.
The take-home point is that the Bolsheviks crushed their opponents including the Russian working class.
If you want a comprehensive resource then An Anarchist FAQ has an entire section dedicated to state socialism https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/sectionH.html.
Some your questions are answered there like:
- H.1.4 Do anarchists have "absolutely no idea" of what to put in place of the state?
- H.3.7 What is wrong with the Marxist theory of the state?
And if you want some more examples of an anarchist society then Section I is dedicated to that.
Although It is worth noting that there are a lot of different anarchists and the FAQ does not speak for all of them. I just think it manages to get the basics across very well.
Sweet thank you!