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chapotraphouse @hexbear.net
Frank [he/him, he/him] @hexbear.net

How do new Anarchists learn to hate communists and carry the grudge against the USSR?

Edit for clarity: I'm not asking why the Tankie/Anarchist grudge exist. I'm curious about what information sources - mentors, friends, books, TV, cultural osmosis, conveys that information to people. Where do individuals encounter this information and how does it become important to them. It's an anthropology question about a contemporary culture rather than a question about the history of leftism.

I've been thinking about this a bit lately. Newly minted Anarchists have to learn to hate Lenin and Stalin and whoever else they have a grudge against. They have to encounter some materials or teacher who teaches them "Yeah these guys, you have to hate these guys and it has to be super-personal like they kicked your dog. You have to be extremely angry about it and treat anyone who doesn't disavow them as though they're literally going to kill you."

Like there's some process of enculturation there, of being brought in to the culture of anarchism, and there's a process where anarchists learn this thing that all (most?) anarchists know and agree on.

Idk, just anthropology brain anthropologying. Cause like if someone or something didn't teach you this why would you care so much?

196 comments

  • Most Westerners already hate communists and carry the grudge against the USSR. Anarchists don't really deviate too much from some generic Westerner. At best, they uphold people like John Brown or support Spanish syndicalists liquidating the clergy during the Spanish Civil War. But in terms of what faction/state/org to support, I honestly don't see a whole lot of difference between an anarchist and some progressive liberal. Their disagreement comes from tactics and ultimate goal, but they still support and oppose the same people in the end.

    Seriously, what faction do anarchists support that someone who is a member of the US Green Party wouldn't support? Yes, anarchists think voting is cringe, but your average US progressive isn't going to oppose the Zapatistas. If you explain Kronstadt to your average US progressive, how many of them would support Trotsky crushing the rebellion with the Red Army over the striking sailors like the way anarchists do? As far as history is concerned, you could pretty much explain every single disagreement communists and anarchists have to a progressive liberal, and the progressive liberal will almost always side with the anarchist. I honestly can't think of a single instance where the progressive would go, "Okay, you anarkiddies are being cringe. The tankies have a point."

    • It's anecdotal but I have gotten liberals to understand that it was probably a bad idea when the Spanish Republicans started refusing guns/artillery from Stalin. Except I think most anarchists also agree that was probably a bad move.

      If that counts

      • After thinking hard about this, the only thing I could think of that anarchists and communists would agree on is that the Zionist entity needs to be forcefully abolished while US progressives still think a two-state solution is tenable. Anarchists and communists at the very least critically support Hamas while US progressives still think Hamas beheaded imaginary babies.

        There's also cases where all three groups can come to a consensus, and besides the obvious like opposing the NSDAP, white progressives, white anarchists, and white communists butt heads with Black radicals and Pan-africanists. For example, white progressives, white anarchists, and white communists do not support Marcus Garvey while Pan-africanists address him as "the Honorable Marcus Garvey." White progressives, white anarchists, and white communists oppose the Nation of Islam for being a reactionary Black supremacist organization while most Black radicals and Pan-Africanists critically support the NOI as a means in which Black people can be properly organized. In the same way that communists deviate from the status quo more than anarchists, Black radicals deviate from the status quo more than white radicals, and I would argue that their deviation is greater than communists.

        Some of the most anti-anarchist sectarianism I've seen come from Pan-africanists and Black radicals who describe themselves as scientific socialists or Nkrumaist.

  • I'm exhausted but I'll try and take a swing at this, speaking as a long-term ex-anarchist. Note that I can only speak for myself but these are the trends I observed and a lot of this is exactly what I experienced.

    So in transitioning from progressive liberal to the radical left, it's basically a rite of passage to identify all the ills and the egregious excesses of the government and corporations. I think this is not only valid but it's also extremely important.

    The problem that emerges is that anarchists and LibSocs can fall into a trap of universalising this very valid skepticism to expand to all forms of hierarchy that have existed and will ever exist.

    This is going to sound uncharitable but it's really not intended to be this way but I see a deep form of liberal hegemony as being not a positive form of hegemonic ideology but a negative form of it. Let me explain: the USSR established its own cultural hegemony. It was very much a positive cultural hegemony: this is who we are, this is how we act, this is the future we are striving to achieve etc. etc. You absolutely see this in Soviet art and film and propaganda.

    The negative form of cultural hegemony that I understand liberalism to mostly rely upon, especially in a post-Gilded Age era or a neoliberal era or wherever you want to draw that line, is epitomised by Francis Fukuyama's pronouncement about arriving at the end of history; this wasn't a positive proclamation but rather it was a negation of the future, of the need to strive for a better world, of the demand to be better. Instead it was essentially an attack on and an erasure of aspirations.

    This is also seen on a small scale with people demonstrating antipathy towards unionism; "they're all corrupt", "they used to be important in the past but there's no use for unions anymore", "there's no point joining a union because I'll just get fired or management will close this branch down if we all unionise". That sort of thing. It's also seen in the shadow cast by this plethora of pseudo-choice we are offered and, forgive me for invoking Horkheimer & Adorno but, the pseudo-individuality inherent to this developed form of capitalism we exist under. There's no point boycotting because how do you avoid consooming products from one of the two or three oligopolistic companies that have cornered a market? Why bother attempting to divest from BlackRock when they already own everything? Why bother protesting against war when we know the government is going to ignore us and prosecute it anyway? etc.

    So this negative form of ideology or liberal cultural hegemony tends to inculcate the belief in LibSocs and anarchists that the best we can really achieve is abolition of the current state of affairs and not the construction of a positive project to bring about the revolution.

    This is where I take issue with Audre Lorde, or at least the way that people quote her and what this is used in service of. She is absolutely right that you cannot dismantle patriarchy with patriarchy or that white supremacy will not be dismantled by a different form of racial supremacy. I think the distortion of Lorde comes with people thinking that this quote is in service of abstaining from using some of the most valuable tools available to us; you cannot hug the violence out of the bourgeois state no matter how hard you try (just ask the hippies). But at the same time I think we need to be cautious about how far we take this message; people can arrive at pacifism simply because the bourgeois state uses war and violence, if you took this to the the point of absurdity you could imagine people rejecting construction itself or maybe even hammers because infrastructure has been used to enact genocide and land theft and vast exploitation through colonialism and imperialism in so, so many countries. Heck, hammers have been used for DV and assault so you wouldn't want to taint yourself by benefitting directly from that instrument of violence, would you?

    But it's very easy to slip into a reductive or reflexive rejection of things like the state simply because most states have historically been dogshit. If you look exclusively at the west from the advent of feudalism to today, it's basically all of them.

    This is where anarchists tend to develop the basis of a quite bitter ideological distinction from communists, although obviously this varies in degree depending on what sort of anarchist we're talking about here. (I'll try to remember to circle back on this negative urge and how it provides a degree of... I guess ideological comfort or safety for anarchists once I've finished the other parts of this comment.)

    The other factors are a disagreement on the pace of the post-revolution construction period (which likewise comes from the difference between materialists orienting themselves to addressing material conditions and working to resolve contradictions and anarchists who mostly prefer abolition as the means to address these issues) and the other one is that anarchists tend to be exposed to convenient historical narratives that are overly reductive if not downright anaemic.

    So for the pace of the post-revolution construction, most anarchists expect a very swift transitional phase - the abolition of capitalism, often the abolition of markets themselves, prison abolition, and all sorts of other things to establish a more-or-less horizontal or low/zero hierarchy society. Again this depends on the different types of anarchist in question but to put it simply they tend to believe that post-revolution you knock all or most of it down, then establish a government or council of sorts (which again varies) and you call it good.

    So from that perspective, communists get into power and instead of following what anarchists believe to be the correct path, instead communists go completely the wrong way and even start building up more state than existed under the Tsardom, for example. With this in mind I think it's easy enough to understand why they perceive this to be a betrayal of principles and of the revolution.

    The last thing I want to touch on is the historical narratives. Anarchists have a tendency to share a distorted perspective on historical moments; the communists betrayed the anarchists in the Spanish Civil, the Bolsheviks stabbed the Black Army of Makhnovia in the back, occasionally you'll hear discussion of the KPAM likewise being crushed by the Soviets (although not very often tbh).

    All three are actually very complicated topics and there's a lot to cover with them but in broad brushstrokes the narrative is that the communists were the aggressor and that they opted not to leave the anarchists alone to do their thing because they wanted to crush the true revolution. I disagree with this narrative these days, although I didn't always disagree with it.

    There's a really good article by Jones Manoel on this sort of preference for martyrdom-over-statecraft mentality here. While he only discusses western Marxists, it definitely applies to a lot of anarchists and LibSocs. I think that Manoel simply doesn't regard the latter two as worth addressing though.

    So we've got the martyrdom and purity fetish for the immaculate revolution covered there. Last of all to circle back around to the ideological comfort of the negative, I've seen plenty of anarchists do this and I have definitely been guilty of doing this myself - by not supporting or critically supporting any but the briefest attempts at revolution (and then only maybe 3 or so of those), you can create a rhetorical and ideological detachment from the real world attempts. You don't have to engage or defend anything, you can just reflexively dismiss things as being statist or hierarchical or authoritarian and thus you don't have to grapple with the reality of their circumstances or to consider what would be a better way of resolving the contradictions or moving forwards with the project. "You committed the sin of statism? Then I can wash my hands of you and that's that."

    This is alluring because it's a simple rubric and you don't need to wrestle with the reality of things. To put this into an analogy that's probably more relatable, imagine a Marxist who refuses to engage in the ol' agitate/educate/organise because "liberals are social fascists and counterrevolutionary - I'm not gonna waste my time befriending my enemies!"

    On the face of it, there's nothing false in that statement. But the application of this line of thinking absolves this Marxist from needing to do any of the hard work because they have created a rhetorical and ideological detachment from the most important task that a revolutionary faces and so by abdicating from this duty they never have to put in any effort and they never have to deal with fuckups and failures and addressing their own inadequacies.

    That's a pretty close match to this urge that exists in a lot of anarchists and it's also why they can invest a lot into their grudge against communists, because ultimately the other option is to engage in the hard work of listening and learning and working with/working on the "authoritarians".

    Obviously all of this is my vain attempt at brevity so I didn't cover the broad terrain of different ideology tendencies within anarchism and I'm talking specifically about the anarchists who really bear a grudge against communists. Plenty of anarchists do not begrduge communists and are very willing to work with them and to engage with them (or to roll up their sleeves and engage in the difficult work of educating, agitating, organising as well as grappling with the historical realities fafed by revolutions) so I haven't given consideration to this cohort of anarchists because it's beyond the scope of the question, although if I gave the impression that what I've said is true for all anarchists then that's on me.

    • I think you're on to something with liberalism as negative cultural hegemony. All of this is a good, dense post but that contrast between a culture that envisions a future and a culture that denies a future is going to keep me up nights. Like liberals don't have falgsc, they have the west wing. And fascists don't even have that, all they have is some hazy nostalgia for a fake past.

      • Yeah, I see it as a great foreclosure on the imagination and on the horizon of possibility. Once you look for it in liberalism, you'll start noticing it everywhere.

        I live in a country where it's common for very progressive progressives and radicals to lament that the masses are extremely politically apathetic. Like, the polar opposite of the French who start flipping cars and starting fires in the street because parliament is trying to reduce pensions kinda thing.

        I don't disagree with that take that people are apathetic but I think there's something deeper going on than just some widespread individualistic moral failing. I think that liberalism has been very effective here in creating a cultural belief that it's impossible to make things better and that there's no point fighting for things.

        There's a reason why people identify so strongly with that Churchill quote "Democracy is the worst form of Government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" and it's because they genuinely believe that liberalism is shit but it's the best that things are gonna get. It's like some sort of mass Stockholm syndrome or a political learned helplessness experiment inflicted on the masses.

        You encounter it when organising. People are deeply pessimistic and genuinely hopeless, if you dig under the surface a little bit. Contemporary liberalism requires the erosion of hope so that masses remain passive and they don't organise and fight, so they don't vote en masse outside of the two party system, so they don't start a revolution etc.

        If you want to go deep on this there's a weird sort of dualism in liberals because this hopelessness makes people react by resorting to investing hope in the status quo as a secondary response. This is why people put so much hope in electing Harris but they try to convince people that a third party vote is a waste:

        "We all have to band together and vote for Kamala to stop things from getting worse!!"

        "Cool but what if we all band together and vote for the PSL or the green party and make things better?"

        "Um, no. That will never work."

        I'm sorry, what??

        I think that's why the DNC were so desperate to clip Bernie's wings (outside of the economic reasons to do so); he represented a massive political threat to the DNC because a movement that has mass support where people start making demands means that they can no longer force their agenda on the compliant masses who believe that the only thing they can do is accept the hidden bipartisan consensus on government policy.

        In order to radicalise, I think people in the west generally have to go through a process of losing hope, even that secondary response to hopelessness by investing hope in the status quo, so when they get spat out of liberalism they mostly end up bereft of hope entirely. I'd say for most people that's necessary to negate the indoctrination from liberal hegemony. The problem is when people fail to genuinely create hope for the struggle and for a better world. It's not all anarchists who have this sort of lack of hope, this "don't seize power because you'll only make things worse if you try" kinda attitude because it's pretty endemic in lots of the left more broadly; there are leftcoms and doomer tendencies like with Mark Fisher or Chris Hedges and the people who buy into the anti-USSR paradigm and so on.

        You can ask this type of person what all the failures and inadequacies of something like the Soviet Union were and if you genuinely listen they'll have a laundry list of complaints, which is fine - that's their prerogative. But when you ask them what movement they do find inspiring, which one was better than the USSR they tend to come up with nothing or they'll give you a half-hearted answer like "Burkina Faso led by Thomas Sankara I guess" and if you get them to talk about why they find Burkina Faso's revolution inspiring they tend to give very shallow answers or they'll regress into talking about what could have been. I think this is representative of a deep kind of hopelessness that is really commonplace.

        I'm gonna do some detestable armchair psychologist cultural critic routine here (like I haven't already been doing that lol), so excuse me while I get self-indulgent, but I genuinely think for a lot of people that psychological trauma of losing all hope in politics when they radicalise goes unresolved and so when they are confronted with the invitation to engage in political optimism, they tend react very negatively and viscerally to it because they aren't ready to hope again as the experience of suffering disappointment and losing all hope has been too much for them to deal with and they haven't really completed the cycle of grief that they needed to go through, so it draws out all sorts of hostility and rejection and apathy. I'm not saying that everyone in the radical left must get hyped for the Soviet Union or otherwise they are psychologically broken but to see very brokenhearted people whose politics lacks any genuine hope, I think there's a psychological response going on beneath the surface that drives this.

        So I think that other responses in this thread are right about liberal anti-communist indoctrination but in my opinion there's also deeper psychological reasons for why people adopt this indoctrination and really cling to it, otherwise it would be a simple process of providing counterfactuals that debunk this indoctrination and people would change their minds almost instantly because their position was purely based on false information. But I think we are all aware that it's a much more involved process than simply correcting some falsehoods and this is because there's psychological factors that motivate this belief at play, which is what I've been outlining here.

    • So we've got the martyrdom and purity fetish for the immaculate revolution covered there. Last of all to circle back around to the ideological comfort of the negative, I've seen plenty of anarchists do this and I have definitely been guilty of doing this myself - by not supporting or critically supporting any but the briefest attempts at revolution (and then only maybe 3 or so of those), you can create a rhetorical and ideological detachment from the real world attempts. You don't have to engage or defend anything, you can just reflexively dismiss things as being statist or hierarchical or authoritarian and thus you don't have to grapple with the reality of their circumstances or to consider what would be a better way of resolving the contradictions or moving forwards with the project. "You committed the sin of statism? Then I can wash my hands of you and that's that."

      This is alluring because it's a simple rubric and you don't need to wrestle with the reality of things. To put this into an analogy that's probably more relatable, imagine a Marxist who refuses to engage in the ol' agitate/educate/organise because "liberals are social fascists and counterrevolutionary - I'm not gonna waste my time befriending my enemies!"

      On the face of it, there's nothing false in that statement. But the application of this line of thinking absolves this Marxist from needing to do any of the hard work because they have created a rhetorical and ideological detachment from the most important task that a revolutionary faces and so by abdicating from this duty they never have to put in any effort and they never have to deal with fuckups and failures and addressing their own inadequacies.

      You made an insightful point here, especially in describing the "comfort in the negative." It’s a powerful way to frame something we often see among leftist movements—communists, anarchists, and so on. In each of these groups, the ultimate goal is revolution, but it’s an incredibly challenging task. Achieving it will require facing repeated failures, trying things that might not work, and stepping out of one’s comfort zone. It involves risks, potential ridicule, and, most importantly, a willingness to act even when it’s difficult.

      As you noted, when people detach ideologically from these necessary actions, the movement can turn into a "crabs in a bucket" scenario. Anyone attempting to step up and say, "We need to organize, try new approaches, or take real action," often faces pushback. They’re met with ideological deflections—labelled statist, accused of being bourgeois, criticized for appealing to the proletariat in the wrong way, or dismissed for engaging in electoralism. These buzzwords, tied back to ideology, become tools for avoiding action altogether.

      This resistance often stems from a fear of failure. Being self-critical and confronting one’s own limitations is uncomfortable. So rather than grow through action, some people use the very ideology that promotes change as an excuse to avoid taking the difficult steps required to enact it. Instead of embodying the call to action, they let theoretical adherence to action justify inaction.

  • This post is devoid of dialectics.

    This isn't a one-way "Anarchists learn to hate state communists" relationship, but state communists also learn to hate Anarchists. Their rivalry and history fuels the distrust in one-another.

    History has more than enough examples of Anarchists being fucked up by state communists, and conversely many examples of Anarchists rebelling against state communists. In turn, both are distrusting and crack down on support for the other.

    If you truly want to engage with anarchists in a constructive fashion, and appreciate the political history of anarchism properly, you have to drop this idea that one side "started it" or one side is "taught" to hate the other. It's clear from this post that you're already arguing from the perspective that one side is irrationally attacking the other, despite doing that yourself.

    There is value and important knowledge from most if not all socialist ideologies, and if anything the synthesis of movements is exactly how history is moved forward and how we impose a new order of resistance against the capitalist class.

  • It's ingrained into every westerner upon birth

    • "Communism = Totalitarianism" is in all Western media beginning with stereotypes in kids' cartoons.

    • I think this is the best, concise answer. To expand, in the States, up until college, we are taught that Stalin and Mao were ruthless authoritarian dictators without any real further explanation. I mean it's the same propaganda as us getting taught that the US won the second world war, the Vietnam war, and the Korean war. We are taught that the cold war war us versus the evil Russian Empire, and so on.

      So I think, depending on how someone is radicalized, they can go to the far left, skipping some crucial steps along the way, and adopt the anarchist aesthetic while still suffering from the colloquial "liberal brainworms". I've read a bit of anarchist theory after hitting my foundational goal with Marxist theory, and outside of the tenets of mutual aid, self association, and body autonomy, anarchist theory refers to any ruler as a Statist and Authoritarian. I know authoritarian doesn't really have any real meaning anymore since any person that is the leader of a country, or any group that rules a country is de facto authoritarian and totalitarian. It just comes with the package and is an easy way of painting any ruler with a broad stroke(cult of personality, filthy rich, brutal tyrant that doesn't care about the working poor, etc). I've seen some text refer to someone like Stalin as a Statist, but that's just a anarchist term that means "guy in charge", but I've seen several instances online where a reddit anarchist might use it as an insult, and with my reading I never took it to mean that. It's just a term that suggests that this person rules a state. In this sense, saying "an authoritarian state" becomes redundant, further removing any meaning from the word.

      Below is my own personal reflections. I'm still learning.

      I'm actually currently "in my anarchist era" because I float a bit between Marxism and Anarchism as I try to further ground myself in my own understanding, but also as pointless as it may seem, I'm still very sympathetic to the concepts of Leftist Unity(I for sure still suffer from a bit of idealism, I'm fully aware of this). But anecdotally I think I'm a bit of "special snowflake" since I've read Marxist literature first before my initial visit to anarchist theory. I'm gonna stand with any ML struggle and any Anarchist struggle because I think it's the right thing to do. But at the end of the day, I think the hate from anarchist just comes from younger kids that are new and just haven't read the theory. They should also read Marxist theory too imo. Same goes for Marxist reading Anarchist theory. I don't think we all have to agree on it but I think understanding where one-another is coming from will go along way in the near and further future for organizing and agitating.

      Sorry if this deviated too far from the discussion

      • Hey, look - i've said this before and i'll keep saying it - as global warming and the collapse of the us empire continue i believe that conditions will favor anarchist praxis of mutual aid and the devouring of the state from within. It doesn't seem like a revolution of any form of proletariat is in the cards in the west and i think we badly need to build a synthesis suited for the 20th century. With nation states and the global economy poised to collapse communal anarchist theory is going to be important.

        We need people who can speak to both theories. You're doing important work.

  • I think AssortedBiscuits answered your question in the first couple sentences of their comment:

    Most Westerners already hate communists and carry the grudge against the USSR. Anarchists don't really deviate too much from some generic Westerner.

    It's really not any deeper than that. There's no need or reason to single out anarchists from any other average westerner when analyzing the source of animosity for the USSR because the answer is going to be the same whether you're talking about chuds, liberals, or anarchists. Even the non-western anarchists who hold a grudge against the USSR, the answer is probably still the same just because of the prevalence of western cultural hegemony all over the world. In your edit, you specify:

    I'm curious about what information sources - mentors, friends, books, TV, cultural osmosis, conveys that information to people. Where do individuals encounter this information and how does it become important to them.

    But the answer to that is the same information sources you yourself were probably exposed to early on. It's all the same shit we're steeped in, the ubiquity of anti-communism throughout western culture. Animal Farm and 1984 were required reading for me in junior high and high school respectively. The class discussions around these books were centered around teaching us that the USSR was corrupt, oppressive, and that these communist ideals that may sound like good ideas will always and invariably lead to "authoritarianism" and "totalitarian dictatorships" like the Soviet Union. Everyone absorbs that shit young, even the people who might later go on to question the truth of what they were taught, like anarchists.

    You say

    Newly minted Anarchists have to learn to hate Lenin and Stalin and whoever else they have a grudge against.

    But no they don't. Not as newly-minted anarchists anyway. That brainworm software was already installed long ago before they became anarchists. A major part of becoming a leftist is going through a process of uninstalling all that brainworm malware. Anarchists who still hate the Soviet Union are people who have been successful at uninstalling much of the brainworm malware, it's just that they haven't completed the process by uninstalling the anti-Soviet or anti-"tankie" worms... yet. And I say all this as someone who long considered themself an anarchist.

    • great analogy, usually im "eh" when people compare brains to computers but in this case it works because western cultural hegemony really is like a despicable adware program that is very difficult to uninstall.

      • I was a little reluctant to even use the software analogy because I tend to have the same reaction to it. But I think the problem there for me anyway is that the bazingabrain (lol at your username in this context) dipshits who loved using it so much not only made it cliche but failed to understand it was an analogy and took it as literally true, which is fucking absurd. In this case, I figured it was fitting enough that I could get away with using it.

    • From an anarchist perspective, the state is the problem. From an anarchist perspective, every state ends in some type of abuse towards citizens. The Soviet Union was a collection of states. I don't disagree with you, but I think there's also a theory reason. Keep up the good fight

      • This is an important point and the most genuine argument topic between anarchists and communists imo.

        The thing to understand here is that a worker state was never really included in the Marxist definition of communism. Marx, Engels, Lenin, all very clearly oppose the existence of the state and believe that the final liberation of humanity will require its long term dissolution. Socialism, as the premature stage of communism, requires a state as a means of establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.

        Being against the state is not incompatible with being a communist, on the contrary it is necessary for socialism to progress and evolve. But it is purely utopian to believe that you can have socialism without a worker state, when classes are still an existing thing. Just look at the past century to see the relentless effort of the bourgeoisie to regain control. Do you really think you have a chance against that without a means of their oppression?

        That, I believe, is the major ideological difference we have with anarchists, the rest is purely a result of anticommunist propaganda.

      • You're right, there is definitely theory reasons too, but I think that's more general to states as a concept and doesn't do much to explain the specific grudge against the USSR or why there seems to be hatred for it that goes beyond states in general. There's historical reasons for that specific hate of course, which other comments covered better than I could, but I answered the way I did because of Frank's (OP's) edit about sources of information.

        I think there's still another aspect for the specific anti-Soviet sentiment that has to do with many anarchists wanting to differentiate themselves from MLs or "tankies." Since we all agree we're on the left, there's a desire for a lot of anarchists to draw a clear distinction between themselves and those they perceive as adversaries or enemies, and strong disapproval with the USSR is a pretty obvious way to do that. I suspect part of that may in some cases come from a kind of "I'm one of the good ones" or "pick me" attitude, since they can say to liberals "yes, I am a radical leftist, but I'm not like those bad authoritarian tankies that we all know are the bad guys!" But the need to do even that I think has a lot to do with the general anti-communist milieu, that "malware" we're all indoctrinated with by default.

    • That's my thinking as well. Western leftists identify as anarchists far more than they identify as Marxists whereas in the global south the reverse is true. This gives the impression anarchism is fundamentally opposed to Marxism to the point of taking the side of the US over AES, but that's actually just the same background level of racist, liberal brainrot that westerners share in general.

    • Newly minted Anarchists have to learn to hate Lenin and Stalin and whoever else they have a grudge against.

      But no they don't. Not as newly-minted anarchists anyway.

      I think one does have to, to a degree, because you may have to conform with anarchists who believe this in order to work with them. Like how I have to keep my respect for Stalin close to my chest if I'm organizing with Trots. And if there's no one to organize with other than anarchists, Trots, and a spectrum of socdems, then... that's just what it's like here, lol (hyperbolic)

  • Go browse /r/196 for 30 minutes. It might not answer your question, but it will probably teach you a lot about where online western leftists that call themselves anarchists are at.

    E: I'll elaborate so that this doesn't come across as vague sectarianism. A lot of this is just kids transmitting vague vibes to other kids who are just learning that there's this entire world of politics that isn't just libs vs chuds. For the most part, it's scary, and if they belong to any marginalized groups at all, they probably really really want to avoid anything remotely fascist. Therefore it doesn't take long at all for them to encounter the logic that goes something like

    "Marxist-leninists are just as problematic as fascists because Lenin and Stalin did x thing to y minority"

    Can they afford to be skeptical of that? Can they afford to go have a serious look to dispel the lie there, when in their minds, going into ML communities is essentially the same as going to a fascist community?

    Naturally, it doesn't take much convincing, your buddies who are also just very young and naive tell you who they don't trust and you take their word for it because it's just a dangerous environment everywhere, in general. Why trust anyone?

    I still recommend you take a look and browse some comment sections for any post that's remotely political. Keep in mind they're all very young, many are queer, and they're very nervous. It's sad because it obviously would be better if they understood that the 'tankies' they talk about want to protect them just as much as even the most ideologically pure anarchist. But they're not ready to take our word for it for some understandable reasons and some very bad ones too.

    • Oof. Those poor kids on 196 are liberals. Just normal, everyday liberals. I thought it was a leftist sub.

      • Yeah, which maybe doesn't answer your question since you're asking about actual Anarchists as opposed to NATO larpers. Still, I don't think it's too unlikely that many of these people will grow out of the liberalism and start organizing with other Anarchists who know what they're doing.

  • There was no red scare for anarchism, so it's much easier to go from liberal -> anarchist than it is to go liberal -> communist. If you take the former route, the propaganda around communism never truly fads. Also doesn't help that anarchists are typically the most active block of organizers/protestors/activists in the states. Communist orgs a lot of the time are just glorified book clubs, if you want to feed people, build bus benches, do a coat drive, counter-protest police, or whatever else, the people who are often at the forefront of this are anarchists. There is absolutely an image of the "academic communist" too concerned this theory specifics and sectarian lines to do any real action. This stereotype is rooted in some level of truth. I became disillusioned with anarchism, remaining steadfast that a vanguard party is key to true revolutionary change, yet in my own circles and among those I organize with, the communists in that camp simply do not organize, they do not. If you need advice on what book to read? They are the people to go to. If you need advice on mobilizing your neighborhood? You go to the anarchists. When I speak with communists I'm met with defeatism and often, an inflated sense of self-superiority. What is theory without practice? and to the anarchists: What is practice without theory?

    It wasn't always this way, and it doesn't have to be this way. In the States there's no doubt that our synthesis of theory and material conditions will be a blend of both camps.

  • They arrive as radicalized liberals who already "know" how bad communism is, and anarchism seems to offer a kind of 3rd way (enlightened centrism?) that rejects the apparatus of the state. After that, they either don't think much more about it and just get to work, or they read a bunch of history and grind that axe. Or they change their mind :)

  • 74 comments 65 upbears oh no what have i done : (

  • The subject takes pride in not having any relationship with the entire historic concrete movement of the working class socialist and liberation revolutions. They take pride in not having any theoretical or political connection to the revolutions in China, Russia, Korea, Vietnam, Algeria, Mozambique and Angola. They are, instead, proud of the supposed purity that their theory is not contaminated by the hardship of exercising power, by the contradictions of historical processes. Being pure is what provokes this narcissistic orgasm. This purity is what makes them feel superior.

    from Western Marxism, the Fetish for Defeat, and Christian Culture by Jones Manoel

    Many westerners come to socialism not out of necessity, but out of disillusionment. We are raised with the idea that Liberal Democracy is the best system of political expression humanity has devised. When confronted with the reality of its shortcomings, rather than narrowly discard liberalism or electoralism, the western anti-capitalist tends to draw sweeping conclusions about the inadequacy of all existing systems. Curiously, though it would at first seem that such denunciations are more principled and severe, they are in fact more compatible with existing and widespread beliefs about the supremacy of the western system. That is to say, when a Marxist-Leninist asserts the superiority of existing socialist experiments, they are directly challenging the idea that westerners are at the forefront of political development. By contrast, the assertions from anarchists and social democrats that we need to build a more utopian future out of our current apex are compatible not only with each other, as discussed earlier, but also do not really offend bourgeois society at large. They in fact end up not sounding too different from the arch-imperialist Winston Churchill holding forth on how ours is the worst system, except for all the others which have been tried. Western chauvinists, consciously or unconsciously, struggle with the idea that they should study and humbly take lessons from the imperial periphery. [15] It is much easier for the chauvinist, psychologically, to position oneself as at the very front of a new vanguard.

    from Why Marxism?

  • As a gentle bit of self-crit, here is a Hexbear Search of "anarchist" comments sorted by controversial. This was from before the downvote was removed, so it's mostly ancient history. In all of our defense, I see this pattern in every leftist space. It's in the air. There is a tacit enmity between the two camps that goes all the way back to Marx and Bakunin, reinforced by a long sorrowful history of mutual bloodshed. We pass on this trauma one microaggression at a time. It becomes learned behavior.

    This clash is inevitable, because both camps represent a Thesis-Antithesis that needs to work itself into a Synthesis. Anarchists work from the bottom-up carefully because they are concerned with maintaining legitimacy in a context of many different/opposing interests. Leninists work from the top-down to (cross-)organize into large political blocks because they are concerned with effectiveness in a context of countering other large politically organized blocks. To a Leninist Anarchist spaces look chaotic and slow, while to an Anarchist Leninist spaces look stifling and coercive. We need both; effectiveness without legitimacy destroys itself, and legitimacy without effectiveness goes nowhere. The path towards that Synthesis starts with burying hatchets. A lot of our bad blood comes from conflicts that no longer exist in living memory and are not worth fighting over today.

  • I think most self identified anarchist these days don't arrive at anarchism because of some deep introspective journey. They leap into it based on inherent biases against ML states. They learn all about the evils of capitalism and decided to be against it but still believe all the bullshit about the USSR and China. I don't think it's people being educated or pushed to be anti-communist more not being pushed to actually study communism and look at AES critically through it's own lense. In which case they are going to default the cultural western view of seeing them as totalitarian and therefore evil. They just sort of default to it as it feels right.

  • My experience has been with comrades who were good organizers but never really well read. They eventually decide to make an effort and go onto Reddit to find what theory they should be reading if they're an anarchist. (Reversing the order of operations in my opinion). They get really into reading about heroic historical figures and their context-specofic grudges from a hundred years ago and fail to really see the bigger picture as a result.

  • Westerners: “I get to claim to be radical and against everything I don’t like and still not have an actually defend any flawed history? Great!”

    • Yeah, I'd definitely say part of it for me was the unchecked assumption that "those" revolutionaries messed it up because they were cruel or stupid. As much as I looked up to the things they'd done, I looked down on them for their lack of "purity" and lack of democracy.

      For me it took genuinely reflecting on my western chauvanistic attitudes, and meeting real communists in Cuba and having a legitimate conversation with them. Once I'd found out what a communist in an existing communist country was like, I'd realized they had the same drive as me, and were far more effective than me!

  • As an ancom couple of maybe trite observations from the POV of modern anarchists rather than rehashing centuries old debates:

    Many anarchists are deeply unserious people about actual politics and building a society. The things that many of them like about anarchism are this misleading idea of "no rules", they are effectively antisocial or better crystalize the meaning anti-society.

    There are anarchist tendencies that effectively nurture their preconceived notions about the background unsatisfaction most people have with their lot in life. Tendencies like anarcho-egoists, anprims, etc. that allow people to romanticize their own feelings.

    Lastly very few anarchists tend to understand what anarchism is, just like many people fail to understand what communism is. Anarchism in it's purest form is about finding the fairest way of building a collective society while respecting everyone as individuals. It is philosophically an ideology that is trying to find the philosophical and practical underpinnings of coalescing individualist and collectivist into one comprehensive view in a bottom up fashion. A nice metaphor for this is that in physics many people are trying to unite classical physics with quantum mechanics to create a comprehensive theory of physics, rather than two separate fields of study. Anarchists want their societies to have unconcerned unanimous support of how the society is governed. Anarchists are not willing to compromise a their platforms. So that makes it difficult to work through problems that other political movements can take "shortcuts" in. In short if you think about this through the lens of standard democratic centralism, Anarchists do not accept a rule of simple majority, they will only accept unanimous consent.

    Anarchists that do not understand this, typically hate communists reflexively depending on their platform or who they hang out with. Anarchists that do understand this, typically hate communists due to communism's prescribed nature of the problem and solution coupled with the tendency for socialist societies who attempted to build communism to prioritize their implementation at the cost of everything else, as well as failure of communist countries to truly liberate certain groups and use them as political pawns when its expedient.

    I think a lot of this hate comes from the reality of the development of humanity in the 20th century. The second industrial revolution essentially forced all developing countries of the time into societies that were in practice extremely hierarchical, extremely parochial, and extremely focused on extracting production of out of individuals. Anarchists see this as a negative development in both the liberal and socialist worlds, and due to street cred of anarchism as the "no rules" punk philosophy Western anarchists, many of whom that have never known hunger or poverty relative to their global South or Eastern European counter parts, typically see liberals as the less worse choice because capitalist liberalization did allow for more individualism at it's apex.

    Lastly there is a real history of bad blood between the primary standard bearers of socialism in the USSR and anarchists. The bolsheviks regardless of the morality or solidarity of their actions were some of the best political operators of the 20th century. They were able to take a rump committee of a besieged and nascent political movement and transform it into a global political powerhouse. Some of the best political operators in the world worked on Bolshevik standards, Lenin, Stalin, Kim, Tito, Sankara, Mao initially and (I'm gonna get flack for this but it's fucking true because of what he was able to fucking pull off politically if you actually read history) Ben-Gurion. The problem is bolshevism is ruthless, and it cannot stand competition. It must be the only voice in the room. That's how it works, that's why it was effective. And in that efficacy lays the simple fact that Bolsheviks betrayed the largest anarchist organization during the Russian revolution.

    Makhnovshchina was the pinnacle of anarchist success on the world stage. Their lands were ruled by their people. They had repelled not only German colonists but the German backed puppet regimes spouting racist and cosplay style Ukrainian Nationalism They fought a multi-front war between the Whites and the Reds. To the point where they beat back the Whites to an unfavorable position in the East and that the Reds were so depleted they had no choice but to ally with Makhno. The Black army over performed as a military force and Makhnovshchina over performed as a society forged in war time, that never had to implement war communism and forced conscription. And for all of this the Bolsheviks rewarded them by baiting them out of position under the guise of being allies, and stabbing them in the back, and liquidating all their hard work. Many bitter anarchists read this history, the success of Marxist-Lenninism as the strangulation of anarchism in its crib.

    • Very good post. You've given me much to think on!

    • Makhno is a pretty sordid example from a modern perspective (with the abuse he facilitated). It doesn't seem like the most intelligent shake for anarchism considering the "arming people with little oversight" produced pogroms. Idk, it's like one of us holding up Gonzalo or one of those. Can I suggest KPAM or something? You still get a stabbed-in-the-back-by-commies narrative.

      On the other hand I also wouldn't hold up Sankara as a shining example because he definitely did some cool things and had some cool ideas, but ultimately he was installed by a non-communist in a military coup and then deposed by the same non-communist in another military coup a few years later.

    • Makhnovschina overperformed in the sense that they employed guerilla warfare with a local force that had the buy-in of locals for essential supplies. They rapidly fell apart outside of their limited territory as they stole from peasants there rather than receiving support. This allowed the Whites to maintain and rebuild their forces in Western Ukraine.

      They similarly built up peasant communes that were actually very insular and selfish, pushing an odd version of independence and self-sufficiency that, on one hand, declared no obligation to feed workers in cities (Bolsheviks called this a petty bourgeois aspect of the peasantry) while also being entitled to the products of the city factories, coordinating with Makhnovists to steal equipment. They actually combined these entitlements in their sentiments, declaring that they had no need to pay for equipment they could take when they needed to. This was guaranteed to eventually deplete the areas they controlled of industrial capacity and create a series of endless petty infights.

      It was also the major source of contention with Bolsheviks, who began labeling them as "bandits" in their propaganda. Bolsheviks, above all, recognized the necessity of feeding factory workers and ensuring the continued function if factories, hence war communism based on quotas and then taxes. Areas controlled by Makhnovists tended to work directly against this, killing or kicking out the Bolshevik tax man, actually stealing equipment and resources from cities to go support "the commune". They treated cities like foreign territories, and enemies. This is in addition to going off on their own as small (but many) autonomous groups and declaring truces over, stealing weapons, literally blowing things up, and recreating an oppositional fighting force.

      Bolsheviks did make decisive moves to end alliances and implement the red terror against Makhnovists, killing a massive number once Bolsheviks' power in the region was tentatively solidified. But it's important to understand that this came from competing interests and actions and waa not some out-of-nowhere betrayal.

      • Makhnovschina overperformed in the sense that they employed guerilla warfare with a local force that had the buy-in of locals for essential supplies. They rapidly fell apart outside of their limited territory as they stole from peasants there rather than receiving support. This allowed the Whites to maintain and rebuild their forces in Western Ukraine.

        I'm sorry like the Bolsheviks or the Whites didn't steal from peasants? The Bolsheviks and the Whites literally stole people from the villages to fight in their armies under threat. Real you join our battalion or we rape and murder your women while you watch then we kill you type shit. The Black Army was the only actual all-volunteer self defense force.

        They similarly built up peasant communes that were actually very insular and selfish, pushing an odd version of independence and self-sufficiency that, on one hand, declared no obligation to feed workers in cities (Bolsheviks called this a petty bourgeois aspect of the peasantry) while also being entitled to the products of the city factories, coordinating with Makhnovists to steal equipment. They actually combined these entitlements in their sentiments, declaring that they had no need to pay for equipment they could take when they needed to. This was guaranteed to eventually deplete the areas they controlled of industrial capacity and create a series of endless petty infights.

        It was also the major source of contention with Bolsheviks, who began labeling them as “bandits” in their propaganda. Bolsheviks, above all, recognized the necessity of feeding factory workers and ensuring the continued function if factories, hence war communism based on quotas and then taxes. Areas controlled by Makhnovists tended to work directly against this, killing or kicking out the Bolshevik tax man, actually stealing equipment and resources from cities to go support “the commune”. They treated cities like foreign territories, and enemies. This is in addition to going off on their own as small (but many) autonomous groups and declaring truces over, stealing weapons, literally blowing things up, and recreating an oppositional fighting force.

        This is a consequence of top down vs bottom up thinking. Literally see the part of my post about how the second industrial revolution created this mess to begin with. The city model is literally based in expropriation of the country-side from time immemorial and the second industrial revolution only made cities worse and more dependent. The Bolsheviks bathed the country sides with blood, and sure they had to, but lets not pretend there was some grand greater good, it's because the Bolsheviks had nothing to actually offer the country side. Their political power resided in cities that couldn't produce their own food. It was the worst political problem they inflicted on themselves and some of the worst Stalinist repression came from the fact that they murdered so many peasants that the countryside was so whittled down the definition of Kulak by the 1930's became anyone who quite literally owned a butterchurn. That's frankly embarrassing.

        Furthermore lets cut the bullshit okay? This is just devolving into a typical argument cycle and I'm just going to end it here. Whenever this line of argumentation comes up people who cannot understand or admit to the faults of the Bolsheviks (and I'm not saying Makhnovischa was faultless here at all), are all trying really fucking hard not to say "It was OUR PROPERTY." All you're arguing about is who rightfully owned those things that the Black Armies took are we not?

        We can talk about the negatives of how each army and society conducted itself, but I'm not going to have a typical black-red rules lawyering property dispute with you. It's pointless, stupid, and unbecoming. Everyone "stole" during that time for whatever definition of "steal" you can think of. I don't believe in private property. Reds crying "you 'stole' my means of war production" is again frankly embarrassing for communists who believe that the proletariat should own the means of production. It relies on an incredibly technical, overly strict and point in time definition of proletarian unique to the political needs of Bolsheviks. Peasants weren't proletarians to the Bolsheviks because their political power came from cities. Frankly it's embarrassing that to this day people are caught up in this nonsense given that peasants at the time had like a decade or so of not being literal slaves and most of them were still sharecroppers. Likewise it was literally because the second industrial revolution wasn't completed in Russia by the time of the Russian revolution and so there was no mechanized agriculture to speak of, which literally turns the assumption that farm workers e.g. peasants aren't proletarians on its head. It was a unique trick that the Bolsheviks played to get them out of a jam because their own ideology had internal contradictions simply by coincidence of timing. Lenin was smart but he wasn't clairvoyant and he doubled down on this bullshit. Stalin quadruple downed on it. This is literally one of the reasons for the Sino Soviet split and Mao was fucking right that peasants are proletarians.

    • Ben-Gurion

      You simply hate to see it

  • i would guess it stems from the desire to rebel against the authority and perceiving the state as unjust, they (correctly) see the capitalist government unjustly enforcing the law on them, and see the communists as doing something similar but under the banner of the hammer and sickle.

    i was listening to Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House on the spanish civil war episode, where he talks about how the anarchist ideology came from some russian noble who went to the serfs villages and rebelled against the royalty (iirc) - i guess it would make sense to the anarchist that they see communists as something akin to royalty in regards of the structures of authority.

    it makes sense to me i guess, i think about all the media produce with marvel superheros and stuff - so i presume the anarchists see all forms of authority as bad, and see sides as good and bad as oppose to people acting in material interests. especially when the authority in america like the police fuck with people so badly it polarises people to be staunch anti structure framework kind of mindset

  • So far as the typical American goes, I'm assuming that in a lot of cases they don't learn to hate the USSR via becoming anarchist, they've already internalized the historical grudge beforehand.

  • Why hasn't anarchism been done already (on a large scale)? "It would have, but the tankies keep subverting revolutions and doing states, and they give a bad name to leftists which turns people away from anarchism," is a pretty convenient answer to that. Plus, by distancing themselves from us and from past revolutions, they can try to pass themselves off as "one of the good ones" while preserving an image of how they want things to be without having to defend any messiness of actually getting there. It's much simpler to write off projects entirely as not being genuine attempts because the bad people took charge than to actually study them and confront the complex problems they faced.

  • Disclaimer: This does not apply to all or even most anarchists, and may apply to, like, 5, because it's my personal impression from a handful of miserable encounters.

    As a USSR-specific example, since that's what you're asking for, there are some anarchists who are evidently taught that Nestor Makhno was a brave resistance fighter rather than a negligent armer of pogroms and leader of aremoved gang (though probably not personal participant, he just let his men do it). Having this image of a champion of freedom and then hearing how he was militarily crushed by the Bolsheviks, naturally they will resent the USSR as counter-revolutionary. Spain is obviously another example, where the SU's role gets contorted from "didn't help the anarchists as much as it could have" to "personally killed anarchists in parallel to the Francoists killing anarchists"

    Edit: Down in the thread there's some direct evidence of the romantic tragedy of Makhno being played out yet again.

    I don't think that's most of them, but I think a lot of them have these kinds of stories in mind that lead them to deciding the tankies are evil. Honestly with new anarchists who do this shit, it comes off to me as a way to become a political minority, to be involved in a grand historical struggle against the "statists" who always kill anarchists like you (now that you've become and anarchist). Like, in liberal society and not incorrectly, there's a solemnity with which Jewish identities are treated because, in large part, of their ancestral connection to the Holocaust. I have talked to some anarchists that really come across as wanting to opt in to having ancestral oppression like that even if they're as white as untrod snow, and this is a way to do it. I have seriously seen some unironically talk about how Stalin killed "us" as though stanning Makhno or whoever retroactively makes them actually part of that group.

    Reread the disclaimer.

  • New anarchists are brought up in lib society, with its attendant hatred of the USSR. They'd have to go quite far out of their way to give MLs a fair shake.

  • FBI heavily supported sectarian anarchism in the 1960s

  • Everybody is taught that communism is bad and should be hated. It's not how they learn to hate commies, it should be asked how they learn not to. Lots of anarchists I've met like to talk about "authoritarianism" and "totalitarianism." Two made-up words created to sound like scary descriptors of evil foreigners. Any definition of those two words is either vague enough to describe any form of state ever, or so precisely crafted to only fit the description of one country, that it is functionally meaningless. I did read about the person who popularised "authoritarianism" receiving CIA funding, but I've lost the bookmarks sadly, so now it's just a kooky conspiracy theory.

    Lots of people realise the system is fucked and there is a need for something radical. They will start out by calling themselves something like "social democrats" or "leftist liberals", which allows them to be very smug online. From this point on many will at some point realise that their ascribed ideology is still just the status quo. This motivates a curiosity, which most often results in them encountering work by a CIA asset. This work prompts a change.
    This change tends to move towards "anarchism" (actually liberalism). These people then decide to call themselves anarchists, which allows them to be smug online, while still supporting the status quo. Other people become trots, so they can be smug in bookstores while supporting the status quo. Other people become left-coms so they can be smug in an armchair and angry online and do nothing to change the status quo.

    Other people get their ideology from memes. Cultural hegemony goes brrr. People are taught commies are bad, but also make memes about shit being fucked. This leads to CIA assets making memes, which makes some people reconsider their ideology. Many of these people end up becoming something like "social democrats" or "leftist liberals", which allows them to be very smug online. From this point on many will at some point realise that their ascribed ideology is still just the status quo. They see more memes. They "change" their ideology (still posting things online) to being "anarchists" (liberals posting things online supporting the status quo.) This allows them to be smug online. Other people become trots, so they can be smug in bookstores while supporting the status quo. Other people become left-coms so they can be smug in an armchair and angry online and do nothing to change the status quo.

    edit: Added a paragraph and made it a bit more tongue-in-cheek

  • As with all Western Leftism, it is impprtant to understand that most people who identify with any label probably haven't even read the basic canon associated with it and are just going off of vibes. And that online Western Leftists also bring with them an insufferable internet debate bro villification culture where they join affinity groups to crap on everyone else (not jist anarchist affinity groups!).

    This is how you get very real irl situations like where a self-described "anarchist" calls everyone that criticizes with him a cop but then physically threatens people if they are in any way disruptive. Or where a self-described "anarchist" constantly delays trivial decisions because they aren't being made "horizontally" enough, i.e. by consensus of every member of the group in 5 hour meetings every day. And why an irl anarchist has to explain the most basic anarchist theory to both of these Kinds of Guy, who are also the most sectarian Kinds of Guy.

    So, there is at least one strain of Western "anarchism" that is just selfish people with no interest in theory or history or what anarchism even means but who enjoy the idea of maximizing their own autonomy and aesthetic without thinking about how it impacts others. And these folks will gladly go after anyone they label "authoritarian", which ends up being anything from a major state bureaucracy to literally having a bed time (like quiet hours at night so they don't wake others).

    There is also a strain of Western "anarchist" that does begin reading, though not very much and from a selective canon. They do not read in a capacity that produces self-criticism or compares perspectives, but instead treat it more like an in-group romantic mythology of valiant political failure. These "anarchists" often become doomers and declare revolution impossible. They are the most guilty of sectarianism, as every single one of their major "histories" is about telling a false story of how everything was going great until "the Marxists" screwed them over, eliding several important details and basically just promoting the most sectarian people of the past to the exclusion of everyone else. IRL these folks are basically indistinguishable from the know-nothings, they engage in the same antics that force anarchists to correct them because they are bring embarrassing and counterproductive. This is because they are only theoretically anarchist, they spend their political time constructing a utopian view and gaining a false sense of their own correctness and run into irl situations where they actually have no idea what they are doing. Most of these people don't do anything at all irl and along with the know-nothings these are the people who dominate online "anarchist" spaces that are so viscerally, yet ignorantly, sectarian. I think of both of these groups as people that are arrogant, they simply don't read the basics of what would be needed to form their opinions, and their "tendency", if you can call it that, never pushes them out of that ignorany comfort zone. It is unsurprising that it is in such solidarity-free contexts that you get fed-like behavior.

    To try and explain why these groups can exist, we should ask why they are not taken over by the sentiments of anarchists that do read and understand and why they are not rapidly redirected to other tendencies. The most important differentiators are (1) whether a person does irl orgsnizing and (2) whether a person reads critically and sufficiently.

    Re: irl work, anarchists that do irl organizing work are generally not as interested in sectarian infighting, they are trying to increase the capacity of their projects and will work in coalition to do so. They simply do not think of Kronstadt or whatever when it comes time to raise funds for a mutual aid event. They are busy doing anarchist things, not dedicating their political lives to internet rage. And because they prioritize work over pointless sectarianism, they tend to also moderate their stances due to exposure to good peoplr that are MLs or Maoists etc. IRL anarchists are not free of sectarianism, but it is less unrealistic and dominant. So the online "anarchists" that overreoresent sectarian "tendencies" reflect an atomization, they are people who understand politucs as a form of self-discovery and expression and black team vs. red team, which is to say, a fundamentally bourgeois framing cultivated by who controls the online venues and wider cultural hegemony.

    Re: reading, to be honest the Western Left is all guilty of this. MFers need to fuckin read holy shit. The number of people who think they have earned the right to explain things to others despite never reading the material? I swear to God this is most self-described commies and anarchists and socialists. And they often whine about it, too, as if they couldn't possibly take 30 minutes per day out of their internet rage time on their infinte knowledge source device to instead understand the basics of the world-historical project they claim to be forwarding and representing. This is part of the same atomization, though. People in irl orgs often have reading groups and social pressure ensures that some baseline of reading is achieved and this applies to both anarchist and commie formations. Even with that, there is a need to shed liberal ideas around what it takes to have an accurate understanding of something, as Westerners are all taught arrogance and egoism when it comes to politics. Reading properly requires undoing several layers of psychological defenses, of defensiveness itself, of creating spaces where saying, "I don't know" is fine for new members and where the flipside, of people pretending to kniw while providing the worst takes you've ever seen, are overcome by those who develip correct takes and have organized accordingly. Fundamentally, that is also driven by attempting to create good irl organizations. If you spend your time figuring out how to grow and develop your organization, you end up trying to create these spaces and developing each other theoretically. And you also learn that sometimes you need to excise toxic people that are not yet far enough along in their journey to respond to this kind of serious organizing.

    I haven't talked much about theoretical differences or historical grievances, or tge First International, etc because I think this largely misses the reality of what Western Leftists, including the majoriry of sectarian "anarchists" are doing. They are more shibboleths for identities and squabbles, stand-ins for a more basic problem of social organization and socialization itself. They are rarely real theoretical disagreements. It's nice when they are, don't discount the value of constructive criticism by comparing to anarchist positions and vice versa, but that is really just plain not what is actually happening 9 times out of 10 that someone online says they love Kropotkin.

  • I wouldn’t say anarchists are a monolith in this regard. There are multiple networks which have some overlap, but aren’t necessarily the same. Like someone who gets radicalized on Reddit is going to be different from someone who gets radicalized because their sister volunteered for Food Not Bombs a lot. But both may have read the bread book.

    • yeah my experience has been that anarchists online and anarchists working at the food bank might as well be two separate ideologies. The organized anarchists on the ground, at least in the US where I've been, are gonna be a lot more idiosyncratic in what makes them an anarchist. I've known a lot of self-described anarchists who, when pressed, will admit they're some type of Christian nationalist. I've known anarchists who are UFO cultists. I've known a bunch whose primary political animus was ending vaccinations and promoting alternative medicine.

      And yet none of that mattered when it came to handing out food together, or helping raise money for the shelter, or helping out migrant families. The common denominator ends up being the desire to build a better world out of mutual interests, with our collective powers. I would take a thousand real life anarchist comrades who might have odd beliefs about crystals or UFOs over a single internet forum anarchist whose every post contains the word "tankie."

  • I guess same way people screeching anarkiddies while not having read any theory ever

  • Probably because most western socialists come to leftist politics not through on-the-ground organizing, but rather, some dissatisfaction with their own society that leads them to seek alternatives. The first place to seek alternatives is going to be looking to the past or reading theorists, and then it depends on a lot of factors on who they'll sympathize with. It's often just aesthetics because I've organized with both Marxist and anarchist organizations and there's not a whole lot of difference when you're actually outdoors.

    Also there's a long history of western states using Trotskyism as a cudgel against leftist organizing. It's cooked into the standard education now that Trotsky was supposed to be party secretary after Lenin, but Stalin betrayed them all. That's the standard understanding of how things went, so that takes a lot of time to disentangle. The primary operating mode of the western mind is an imperialist xenophobia and depending on how they get over that will say how their political outlook may shake out

    Also I can't stress enough how much of simply an aesthetic it is, at least in the west. It doesn't matter. Unless you live in like...Greece or the Philippines or somewhere in rural Colombia, there aren't warring factions of Marxists and anarchists. The only sectarian conflict I've ever seen in person were when cops were involved, like the "Maoist" groups that would overturn tables at Food not Bombs or show up at PSL events to call the organizers a bunch of crackers.

    On the ground you gotta understand how little of this actually matters. There simply isn't major conflict. Anarchist and Marxist groups cooperate all the time. They might have disagreements on how to do stuff or what symbols to use, but it basically never matters. The closest thing to a sectarian conflict that I can remember among the groups I roll with is around 2021 some of the anarchists I knew wanted to boycott the covid vaccine. But they ended up getting it anyway so who cares

  • I think it’s a couple of things

    Western chauvinism inculcates “those are bad countries doing bad things in a bad system” which takes a lot to unlearn.

    Authority can and always is abused for corruption and has been abused for corruption in communist systems, which in part justifies the charge that any system with structural authority will be abused for corruption.

    Angst vibes lead to a “fuck every system” attitude.

    By standing against all authority structures that actually exist or have existed, they are immune to criticisms based on reality, so I think to a degree it’s a stand you take when you want to take a stand but don’t want to accept that reality is always flawed.

    Communist states are often militaristic which sits uncomfortably close to nationalism.

  • https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2021/10/15/cointelpro-fbi-anarchism-disrupt-left/

    Thr answer is always CIA

  • Anarchist here. You don't get taught to hate MLs, you just get exposed to a lot of MLs making aggressive and ill-informed arguments against anarchism and it gets on your nerves.

    I don't hate Lenin either, even though his writing is full of the same sort of thing, and I don't particularly disagree with him about much. I think tankie vs anarchist is mostly a disagreement about definitions tbh.

  • Probably in the minority with this one, my "grudge" originates from reading this: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq-full#toc562

    And while it's much more toned down since then, it is still present as what you describe as "You have to be extremely angry about it and treat anyone who doesn't disavow them as though they're literally going to kill you." - which from my perspective is more like that the leaders of the USSR tended to resort to abuse of power in order to hold power and MLs are very vehement about the fact that these were no big deals or even were completely necessary to keep the project going, while, coming from anarchist circles, from my perspective these events change the nature of the project itself. This is mostly why i can relate to trots more - they are not afraid to call out what they perceive as self-serving use of power as mistakes, or even crimes.

  • TIL a lot of people have a hate boner for anarchists.... Wow

    • Yeah the bad blood is real, but also almost entirely vibes based. Like for most people, the worst red-black conflict they've faced is probably a shitty roommate or someone they hated at an org.

      That's why I'm so curious. Somehow both tendencies have carried this grudge for well over a century across cultures, languages, economic systems, technological paradigms. That is soem fascinating culture.

      Hexbear probably wasn't the right place to ask bc I think it's a pretty solidly ml stronghold at this point despite a nominal anti-sectarian rule. Like trots and leftcoms aren't going to have a good time and, ask we've seen in the thread, there's a lot of bad blood with anarchists. Which sucks. Someone else was saying we need a red/black synthesis and I agree. Excluding the hyper-individualists who I wouldn't even consider political due to their extremist anti-community stance, i think we reallty, really need each other very badly right now and this cultural baggage of animosity that isn't really materialist anymore is an obstacle.

      I'm thinking some of the animosity may be that online anarchists may not represent tendencies on the ground. Like I see a lot of hyper-individualists who call themselves anarchists but really seem to be anti-culture, anti-community extremists, but I don't see a lot of the food not bombs, community defenders, kitchen witch, or community garden anarchists i've met out in the streets. The difference is striking. Idk if it's just me and whom I'm encountering or if it's a bigger thing, but my experience with anarchists out doing stuff is very different from my experience with reddit, twitter, or bsky anarchists.

  • As an anarchist, how it went for me:

    Read history. Have intimate relationships with at least two tankies (all my relationships end badly, so its a sure way to build a grudge).

    Marx was cool though (sometimes), and I've got some ml comrades who are doing pretty much the right thing, and most importantly: I'd rather be murdered by my hot problematic ex in a few years than some shitty nazi tomorrow. So if there are firing squads for the anarchists, my last wish is that one of my exes do mine, please.

    If I get my way, you guys can run the trains.

    If none of this makes sense, read some less myopic history. The USSR was unquestionably better than the czarist regime, by a lot, and it was the worst most reactionary group of communists kind of giving communism a bad name by being generally shitty about being bare minimum decent¹. Also the bolsheviks killing all the other communists, not just the anarchists. Yes they moved Russia, technologically, farther in their short life than basically any civilization in history, but they did it by shitting on the core ideas of communism for some peripheral crap Marx said was 'probably a thing you need sometjing like to get there, I think'. There's an opportunity cost thing, and I'll give them more understanding, but they do not get a full pass for bad behavior just because they were communist. What's the incident where the term 'tankie' was born? Remember that one?

    Yes they were better than the other world powers, but by as little as they could get away with while still calling themselves communist, like they relished the misery, fetishized the sacrifices, and frequently missed the god damn point. They ruled for a people they weren't willing to trust or like, a lesson robespierre had already fucking taught us, and that poisoned the idea of communism, or at least the word, for a lot of people. Thats why I still have to call myself an anarchist instead of an anarcho-communist if I want to turn libs.

    ¹which, yes, set the entire rest of the world against them. They had a few teeeensy difficulties. They still used it as a license to be otherwise just as awful as everyone else, and handled their problems in utterly deplorable ways.

    • What's the incident where the term 'tankie' was born? Remember that one?

      Yes, we remember the incidents in which the USSR prevented Hungary and Czechoslovakia from becoming what eastern Europe has become now (after passing through a crisis that killed millions)

      I can't imagine how after the liberalisation of eastern Europe in the 90s, anarchists will look at it and say "yeah, thank god the USSR didn't roll in the tanks this time".

      • May I help your imagination?

        I often wonder what would have happened if various nations in the Eastern Bloc had been designated as buffer states, and allowed multi-party democracy, woth just pro-capitalist parties being suppressed. Including assassinating the occasional fascist that popped up in the big-tent movement. But "every possible party except mine is a pro-capitalist party" is not a useful or serious position.

        I wonder what would have happened if RIAU and other groups holding territory against the Bolsheviks in the early USSR would have been truced with in order for them to dedicate their war efforts against the invading imperialist powers, and then granted special autonomous/devolution zones.

        I wonder what would have happened if some of the demands of the striking sailors at Kronstadt, like plurality in the workers' councils, were granted- whether having the experience of 5000 socialist soldiers instead of having their blood being shed would have influenced the Winter War or even the Eastern Front of WW2 as a whole.

        I also wonder about the missed opportunities from the party officials and public figures killed in the Great Purge, but that extends far beyond anarchists. With the degree to which the USSR was fighting itself for its first 2 decades especially, it's easy to wonder whether it could have avoided the political dilution and degeneration of the second half of the twentieth century.

      • They were fucking socialists. They came in with paratroopers and tanks to kill socialists. It was not a lib revolution, I dont have a problem with dead CIA puppet libs, this was socialists who wanted autonomy. This is why a lot of anarchists can't stand tankies.

        Edit: List the things the USSR did wrong. It existed for seventy years and covered eleven time zones, so there's no way, even if they were the best ever, that its gonna be a short list. If it is a short list, consider that you might be rationalizing and covering up and lying to cover the fuckups of an empire thats been dead probably longer than you've been alive, and most of the pieces have been to war with other pieces since. Why? Its dead and gone, you sound like how libs sound after throwing an election. Let's do a post mortem so we can do better next time, let's dig deep into the fuckups and fucking learn from fucking history. There were cool parts too! And let's learn from those too! But you can't take either in isolation, that's not honest, and its not useful.

    • and it was the worst most reactionary group of communists kind of giving communism a bad name by being generally shitty about being bare minimum decent¹

      I think you are extremely not aware of their achievements, or are undervaluing things such as guaranteed housing (I want to reiterate this point - it means that the state does not just up and torture and kill people by forcing them onto the streets - this is something that nobody seems to pay much attention to, including anarchists, for whatever reason), guaranteed healthcare (meaning that people are not tortured by being declined a basic need in this regard, either), the sort of women's rights that we take for granted today (including criminalisation of marital SA - first in the world).
      I am sorry, but in what world is that 'the most reactionary group of communists', and how is this 'the bare minimum'? This is massive.

      Also the bolsheviks killing all the other communists, not just the anarchists

      I'm not sure what groups are you referring to.

      Yes they were better than the other world powers, but by as little as they could get away with

      This is just straight up false. Their internal achievements were massive. Internationally, they supported basically every anti-colonial liberation movement in the world (which, for example, is a huge contrast between them and the PRC). They were not under any obligation to do the good that they did in that regard.

      like they relished the misery, fetishized the sacrifices, and frequently missed the god damn point

      I'm sorry, but this is just obvious unsubstantiated fantasy. I am saying this as a person who both has put effort into investigating the USSR, and who has easy access to people who lived and worked in the USSR and who knows what those people think on the matter.

    • So like what books were you reading? Did you have like a mentor who recommended literature or a reading list? Did any stand out as particular favorites?

    • which, yes, set the entire rest of the world against them. They had a few teeeensy difficulties. They still used it as a license to be otherwise just as awful as everyone else, and handled their problems in utterly deplorable ways.

      To be absolutely clear, the poor and lackluster decisions and retreats from "pure" Marxism and Leninism were by far the result of material conditions over a personal desire for power. The USSR was the world's first socialist experiment and thus went on to make mistakes which would be corrected by later socialist experiments which would survive the 90s, but many of those things were forced by the invasion of 14 imperialist powers and the genocidal war campaign of the Nazis shortly after.

      The history of Marxism (from the Marxist perspective) can be seen as legitimately taking the most successful form of liberatory thought and action in the modern day and trying to make it continually work in the cruel world we're born into. It's not perfect, but it's been shown to work on a scale larger than any other strain of thought, and socialist revolutions have fed more children who'd gone hungry before than anything else prior or after.

      For more context in this worldview, I highly recommend Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti and Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo

  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronstadt_rebellion

    None of the Kronstadt rebellion's demands were met.[205] The Bolsheviks did not restore freedom of speech and assembly. They did not release socialist and anarchist political prisoners. Rival left-wing groups were suppressed rather than brought into coalition governance. The Bolsheviks did not adopt worker council autonomy ("free soviets") and did not entertain direct, democratic soldier election of military officials. Old directors and specialists continued to run the factories instead of the workers. State farms remained in place. Wage labor remained unchanged.[206] Avrich described the aftermath as such: "As in all failed revolts in authoritarian regimes, the rebels realized the opposite of their aims: harsher dictatorship, less popular self-government."[207]

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Goldman

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Disillusionment_in_Russia

    Goldman described the rebellion as the "final wrench. I saw before me the Bolshevik State, formidable, crushing every constructive revolutionary effort, suppressing, debasing, and disintegrating everything".[1]

    • Having read My Disillusionment with Russia after learning how genocidal the war against the Soviets was and how stretched thin all aspects of society were due to the breakdown of economy, Emma Goldman unfortunately comes off as an extremely embarrassing American who can't stop expecting everything to revolve around her. It also goes unmentioned in her account how many of the anarchist cells that were being "purged" were openly destroying and murdering the emerging Soviet state, this would be unacceptable anywhere and especially because this emerging Soviet state was exactly what was needed to end the economic crisis.

      The conditions the Soviets made their revolution under was harsh and unfortunately necessitated the decisions made later on, but they should be critiqued with the context in mind or else we're failing to learn from their successes and failures. When we apply our own context and preconceived notions onto a revolution which happened over a hundred years ago we are unable to take anything meaningful away except the most basic and propagandistic things.

    • Sure, but how do people learn about those things, and how do they learn to assign importance and significance to these historical events? What's the process by which people become part of the culture and learn that these events are an extremely important part of who they and their comrades are, something that defines their relationship to the world?

      Like, you don't come in to Hexbear knowing Maoist Standard English. You pick it up a bit at a time. You work out what it means from the context of the jokes. People recommend books or articles and you see the origin of the Maoist Standard English jokes in some of those works. You riff with friends to come up with new ways to use MSE or develop new terms.

      It's all a process of culture, where you learn about the culture through immersion, direct teaching, observation, personal study and research, and play.

    • Kronstadt has a false mythology and this was quickly picked up by Western anarchists who were beginning to create a mythological canon of one-directional oppression by and the necessity of division from what they termed Marxists. The Soviet Archives dispute the narratives sold and resold, with the most important being that Kronstadt's uprising was coordinated by new recruits from Eastern Ukraine, not those who had previously been key to revolution in Kronstadt. And, as in Eastern Ukraine - sometimes Makhnovschina - they started much of the infifhting and agitation against Bolsheviks, started campaigns to remove them from all soviets, created self-serving structures to isolate their islands of production from everyone else, and created self-serving organizational positions that even oppressed those sailors thst had been part of revolution there.

  • An interesting connection that I've observed over and over again to the point that it's practically a law in my head, is how many of these newly minted anticommunist "anarchists" also end up being anti-black or more accurately anti-black radical politics, the same phenomenon emerges subtly among many academic western Marxians and more obviously with the whole maga"communist" conservative subculture

    Historically, anti-communism and anti-blackness have been inseparable and the anxiety is obvious, westerners fear communism will lead to minorities escaping their subordinate positions and inflicting some nebulous horror upon them, this anxiety is so baked into American consciousness that you had Trump accuse Kamala Harris (neoliberal par excellence) of being a communist, anyone with sense understood that as being an expression of both anticommunism and more prominently anti-blackness

    My theory (which is largely lifted from Professor Gerald Horn) is that anti-communism in the west is directly proportional with anti-blackness and explains the savage irrational anti-left hatred that you observe among so many newly minted so-called radicals, the state and it's various intelligence orgs supply the mental and intellectual architecture of anticommunism while anti-blackness supplies the emotional fuel that sustains that state effort

  • https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2021/10/15/cointelpro-fbi-anarchism-disrupt-left/

  • anarchists have a rich oral tradition that stretches back thousands of years

  • I am an anarchist - anarchists (as far as a monolithic ‘anarchists’ exists) do not hate communists. Anarchists are likely to disagree with some aspects of Marxist-Leninist ideology - they may even hate some aspects of it. But they do not hate communists - many of them would even identify as communists. Essentially all anarchists and communists share the same common end goal - a moneyless, classless, stateless society. Anarchists and MLs disagree on the implementation details - the best way to reach our goal.

    The question as to why an anarchist would come to be in opposition to the ML approach for implementing communism - it’s not really about an “information source”, it’s just application of ideology. It would require the creation of a hierarchy. If the anarchist believes that hierarchy to be unjustified, then they will oppose it.

    I couldn’t really point to any sort of individual source for my ideology. I came to realise over time that the one common thread that exists for all forms of oppression is power over others - wherever one group has held power over another group, oppression has occurred. If we want to prevent oppression, the answer emerges: get rid of as many imbalances of power as possible.

    An anarchist knows that the risk of having a transitional state is that those empowered by the state will abuse that power to betray the people and the revolution. How likely that risk is, and whether it’s viable (or even possible) to achieve communism without a transitional state is the most important aspect which will define how (un)willing the anarchist would be to work with marxist-leninists.

    Hope this helps, happy to answer any other questions you have about anarchism.

  • A big part of it is that it's more aggrandizing and exhilarating to see yourself or your entity or alignment as "against the whole world", instead of "positioned in calculated opposition to certain things and somewhat aligned with the rises and falls of many historical formations", many of which take a whole lot of convincing and nuance because of how many pitfalls they fell for.

    Someone really diving into an anarchist identity (not a meaningless liberal one) will either draw on histories of anarchists being suppressed or otherwise at odds with the USSR, or on much more recent queer and punk and insurrectionary authors who are critical of all party formations that seek to contend with governing atop entire countries. The latter will typically identify the CPSU as the most successful (fwiw) of these, and readily associate it with many modern-day communist parties, which they do have more of a direct experience of.

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