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?
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.
No this is specifically a question about how individual people learn the lore. I’m not asking about history, I’m asking, like, what book are people being recommended that lays out the backstory and gets them up to date? Or is there like a really popular podcast or twitch streamer or something? Do folks like do improv skits of the deep lore at affinity group meetings? Does someone do like 8 hour lore videos on Youtube?
This is an anthropology question. I want to know about the practices and lifeways of a specific cultural group. It’s not “Why do anarchists hate communists”, I know that. It’s “How do individual anarchists in the present day learn about all that?”
A few, animal farm and Homage to Catalonia does a lot of it, though the latter is an essential read once you’re a bit more read up on the SCW.
But mostly, they’ve been told by pretty much everyone that the USSR was evil.
Take a look at this thread.
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I understand the urge to do that, especially because the biggest anarchist social media spaces tend to be very hostile to communists - but I agree with your post. There are a good handful of other posts in here too that don’t immediately draw lines. Probably the best discussion I’ve seen here in a while on this topic. Glad someone with a functioning brain said it so I didn’t have to make a fool of myself.
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’m actually getting to the stage that I am at due to seeing what I sort of dubbed “crisis anarchism”. Basically seeing mutual aid stations prop up during CHAZ in Seattle, and the college Palestine protests. Anarchists can really get things moving in moments of crisis and I think we can learn from that and work with them. Regardless of where I personally stand in my theory and praxis, I look at both Anarchists and Marxists as allies.
Agreed. Organization is great but when shit hits the fan knowing how to build ad-hocracy voltron is wonderful.
I didn’t even know we had that emoji lol.
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.
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.
Word. I’m an anti-state ml or whatever. I don’t consider it a contradiction because a state is a tool, a technology, and a weapon. It’s also a horrific form of violence and often a source of enormously harmful oppression. But, to date, the only weapon that can reliably fight and kill states is another state. For lack of an available alternative state-killing weapon, a state is needed. And I just hope that when we’ve killed all the capitalist states we can engage in what is very literally a disarmament process to disassemble the state as weapon and consign it to the dustbin of history with nukes and other superweapons.
The equivalent tvtropes would be Godzilla Threshold - how bad do things need to get before summoning Godzilla to fight the other Kaiju leads to less overall destruction that not summoning godzilla.
Well said. The real difference is Marxists want the transitional state while anarchists see that transitional state as problematic as well. My clumsy analogy is socdems vs socialists
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.
I largely agree with you. My sticking point is the ‘anarchists want to be liked by liberals’. The anarchists I know acknowledge that working with the commies is how to move forward. At least commies acknowledge the importance of mutual aid and community. Liberals don’t. No one likes a liberal
Literally everyone
literally everyone elseFuck liberals all my homies hate liberals
For sure. And I don’t mean to paint all anarchists with the same brush, since there are genuine anarchists as well as people who use the label anarchist and who even believe themselves to be anarchists, but who I think we would all here would agree are just radlibs at best. But even drawing on my own experience as my leftism developed (which it still is), it wasn’t like a conscious “I want to impress liberals” thought process, but more like wanting people to know that I was aware of the “evils of authoritarianism” and that being a leftist and anticapitalist didn’t require a submission to “authoritarian” doctrine. I imagine I’m not the only one who felt that way, and even though I know better now, I can still see it sometimes in other people who call themselves anarchists, people who correctly recognize liberals as the common enemy of all leftists, but who still are careful to avoid being associated with “tankies.”
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.
Agreed. As a rough and ready analogy it works really well. But take it any further than thay and it’s just silly and useless.
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)
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.
There was no red scare for anarchism
There was, but the black scare about syndicalists and anarchist dynamiters happened half a century earlier. It was a huge part of turn of the century labor struggles in the US.
yeah I suppose it would be better to say “the red scare is more recent, and anarchism has a more accepted culture built around it” (ie punk, see: hot topic joke below)
anarchism hasn’t been a geopolitical threat to
hegemony so the hate machine isn’t spun up.if there were a major anarchist insurgency somewhere relevant or a longstanding thorn in the empire’s paw like Cuba is they’d be more overt in marketing the repression.
the green scare and WTO protests of the 90s definitely targeted anarchists. the ALF and ELF were the FBI’s major concerns of domestic insurrection even while mcveigh and other nazis were bombing federal buildings.
The feds were right. The ecologists were far and away the biggest domestic threat to the regime. If the ecologists had been successful in convincing the public that global warming was a world altering threat the government might have toppled.
yeah they crushed that shit while it was small.
Good post. A agree on mostly finding anarchists in the streets. They seem a lot more willing to put boots on pavement, often alongside well meaning libs, religious groups, and de-politicized people who non-the-less turn up when it counts.
If i’m remembering my history right there were a good number of black scares but they were mostly in the 19th century. After wwi the reds really overshadowed the anarchists and i think they kind of faded as a threat in the face of the ussr as an emerging super power. Sacco and Vazetti are the most famous anarchist martyrs in the us but they were in good company and it was a regretfully large company.
My radicalization started with identifying with anarchism, because I hadn’t yet shed the internalized red scare propaganda
After that I wanted to take leftist unity seriously and started to read Lenin and Mao in good faith, nowadays I claim to be either one based on which would piss off the listener the most (so usually communist, libs aren’t really scared of anarchists where I live)
I’m not sure why but I’ve met several anarchists who hold Mao in high esteem.
Honestly the Cultural Revolution was almost anarchist in nature, and in my personal opinion, the various excesses that occurred were because of not enough wielding of centralized power rather than too much of it
tfw you become a martyr for anarchism and don’t even get merch in Hot Topic
I consider myself to be something of an anarchist, if mostly aspirationally, and I think you’ve crystallized something I’ve had a hard time putting my finger on. All the irl self-described communists I’ve met, or even socialists for that matter, spend a lot more time concerned about theory than actually improving material conditions for those around them.
It’s always the anarchists, even if they don’t actually call themselves that, that are actually doing the thing.
I don’t hate communists, our ultimate goals align, I might disagree with the path to get there at times, but we are aligned on outcomes.
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 :)
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.
74 comments 65 upbears oh no what have i done : (
You created great discussion, is what you did. Good post is good.
well I see more
rather than 
so you’ve done ok I guess
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.
the core contradiction is socialization of centralized production vs. decentralization
https://taiyangyu.medium.com/no-you-cannot-be-an-anarchist-and-a-marxist-4d196640c5d7
Insofar as synthesis is possible, look at Mao with the mass line and so on.
team Jack Ma
Ugh im in here
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.
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.
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!
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.
My two cents? A lot of what they do can have a place, but largely as a way of establishing stopgap solutions or dual power structures where existing government has failed. A foundation to be iterated upon or ultimately obsoleted with something more structured and permanent, not a stable end result in and of itself.
