im going to scream until she wakes up and asks why. thats how mad i am.
Good point. I’ve been known to scream “Do you want to be pure or do you want to win?” at people and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s due to one of the times I’ve seen this article over the years.
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.
