We’d have more than two if it hadn’t been for tankies stabbing us in the back. But go, go on, tell me how Makhno was a counter-revolutionary or something. Kulak? Or was it about not being able to tolerate a non-authoritarian alternative.
As to successful tankie revolutions… there’s none. They devolved into either state capitalist tyranny, capitalist tyranny, or straight tyranny. Cuba and Vietnam don’t count they were wars for independence from colonial powers first, communist second in Vietnam’s case and in Cuba’s fourth or fifth or something.
We’d have more than two if it hadn’t been for tankies stabbing us in the back.
This is a phrase that keeps popping up in anarchist spaces but once you look at what it makes reference to it’s… Simply not true? It’s mostly used to refer to the Spanish Civil War, but one only needs to pick up a high school history book to learn that the May Days were a result of the anarchists attempting to antagonize the entirety of the Republican side by hindering war efforts, and not only the PCE or other Soviet-alligned communists, who held a rather small amount of power inside the Republican government.
But go, go on, tell me how Makhno was a counter-revolutionary or something. Kulak? Or was it about not being able to tolerate a non-authoritarian alternative.
If to not be authoritarian is a priority for you, reading Voline’s accounts of his participation in the makhnovist movement should be enough to realize that his project is probably not the one you want to rally behind the most.
Just ignore the Zapatistas who are a current example of anarchism in practice.
And saying the Soviets held little power in the Spanish Republic is just a bald faced lie. The Soviets withheld supplies from non-soviet militias and actively damaged the war effort because they’d rather focus on garnering power than actually fighting fascists.
Just ignore the Zapatistas who are a current example of anarchism in practice.
Their words, not mine. Yes, the Zapatista project has worked at their current scale and is doing well, I have no problems admiting that. That does not mean however that I think their methods would work on a larger scale, especially if they ever became a threat for imperial capitalism to be attacked with military force beyond attempting to contain them inside Chiapas as they have until now. As it happened to the USSR facing invasion during the Russian Civil War, as it happened to Cuba with the Bay of Pigs invasion and as it happened to Vietnam. And the Zapatistas do so too, as they claim that they are not driven by ideological purities and will adopt whatever it is that works for them.
And saying the Soviets held little power in the Spanish Republic is just a bald faced lie.
I said that the PCE and the Soviet-alligned communists had a rather small amount of power within the Republican government, and that is not a lie. The PCE only controlled three ministries within the government during the May Days, which is the event seen as the “betrayal” that led to the anarchists’ demise in Spain.
Soviets withheld supplies from non-soviet militias and actively damaged the war effort because they’d rather focus on garnering power than actually fighting fascists.
It is hard to work with abstract mentions, but I am willing to address this if you use more specific examples of Soviet sabotage of the war effort that I can look at and work with.
You know it’s kinda rich of you to refer to, of all people, Voline. If he was critical of Platformism guess what he had to say about Bolshevism. Even before Trotsky tried to have him killed.
See one factor of Anarchism is that you invariably don’t end up having the same ideas of how to do stuff once the dust has settled and power is secured. Yes, Makhno was quite a bit of a Bonarparte. That doesn’t mean that he would’ve crushed disagreements with tanks, he would’ve taken an offer of “Comrade, we thank you for all you’ve done but you’re a fighter not a politician, here’s a nice Dacha”, and then written his memoirs. Anarchism adapts itself, Anarchists adapt themselves to local circumstances and culture, shaping it as much as the utopia is shaping people. As a gestalt, it is shapeless, therefore, it can succeed: Because it does not need to, must not, fight the people.
…somehow you also ignored the two successful ones. I kinda wonder whether you even know which I’m talking about.
Also, if you bother answering at all I’d like you to give an example of a revolution of yours that didn’t end in tyranny. Shouldn’t actually be that hard for a tankie as you don’t think tyranny is bad, so why not admit it that there’s none?
You know it’s kinda rich of you to refer to, of all people, Voline. If he was critical of Platformism guess what he had to say about Bolshevism. Even before Trotsky tried to have him killed.
I am not talking about Voline’s personal opinions on neither platformism nor bolshevism, but on his accounts on the makhnovite project. I do not know what is your definition of tyranny since, as you implied, ideas amongst anarchists vary quite a lot. However, if you consider that the actions taken by state socialist projects to ensure their survival are tyrannical, I suppose you would too consider tyrannical the anti-mennonite massacres perpetrated by the black army after Eichenfield, the existence of a 200-men personal bodyguard corps (the Black Sotnya) for Makhno or the closure of the Bolshevik revolutionary committees of Alexandrovsk and Ekaterinoslav and threats of arrest and execution of its members, which ensured that the only speech that enjoyed of freedom in Makhnovia had to be anarchist-alligned. Acceptable? You will say if yes or no. Anti-authoritarian? I’d beg to differ.
…somehow you also ignored the two successful ones. I kinda wonder whether you even know which I’m talking about.
Rojava and the Zapatistas, I presume. The Zapatistas have already declared publicly and explicitly that they are not anarchists and that they reject such label, so there is not much else to say. Rojava on the other side is one project that anarchists in my area began to detract from after they began collaborating with the US army, but even then there exists fair criticism of it and accusations of repressing minorities by closing down Assyrian schools. Don’t misinterpret me: despite its faults I do have a generally positive view on Rojava, but I do not think it is the paragon of non-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian virtue that western anarchists generally set as the bare minimum.
You have not addressed my comments on the anarchist actions in the May Days during the Spanish Civil War, but I will not assume malicious intent from your part.
Also, if you bother answering at all I’d like you to give an example of a revolution of yours that didn’t end in tyranny. Shouldn’t actually be that hard for a tankie as you don’t think tyranny is bad, so why not admit it that there’s none?
I have no bad faith in this discussion, and I would like to ask you to do the same. We do not think that “tyranny is good”: we think that the state is needed for a revolutionary project to survive as much as it is its fate to disappear as class contradictions do too. We are dialectical materialists: even if we wanted for some reason the state to persist, the march of history would do away with it nonetheless, and we would have to accept it.
To answer your question: I am, again, not aware of what do you consider tyranny, but I have found most anarchists to be pretty accepting of Sankara’s Burkina Faso and admit that its pros outweight the cons.
This is getting into the weeds and that’s never good, let’s give a pivot to theory a try.
We do not think that “tyranny is good”: we think that the state is needed for a revolutionary project to survive as much as it is its fate to disappear as class contradictions do too.
The revolutionary idea started in the bourgeois state. How can it not be present under bourgeois rule? The disaffected will be discontent, and they will look to solutions. Some will be impatient actionists and be quickly shored up or be otherwise ineffective, others will eternally look to analysis and be equally ineffective – in the present moment, that is, not necessarily down the line, when their analysis bears fruit. Strings will be picked up, weaved into new tapestries, tricks that once worked to distract people from their nature and self-interest no longer hold any power. The antithesis co-evolves with the thesis and thus does the sublation. (That may not technically be Hegelian dialectics but you get my drift).
There is a way for the powers that be to halt the evolution of revolutionary thought: By imposing tyranny, not to stop disaffection, but to cut off transmission that enables one to think thoughts greater than oneself because one is standing on the shoulders of others, to arrest the antithesis at a stage not able to even properly conceptualise the thesis. But, and here’s the kicker: Capitalism can’t afford to do that, much less liberal capitalist democracies. Tyranny depresses the human spirit, you end up with serfs not able to contribute to capital accumulation as their surplus value addition stagnates, stays at a level fixed to the scraps you feed, mere machines, not creative minds.
That is the ultimate contradiction of capitalism: That it invariably breeds its own antithesis.
Scene change: North Korea. Now I don’t know what you believe happens down there but from what I know ever since Corona hit the country has been on a complete and utter lockdown, people can’t even smuggle drugs and food over the Chinese border, any more. It is tyranny in its final stage as the people choose between starving and being executed for trying to survive. It is the literal death-drive of society, Thanatos become flesh and force. Will the revolution come out of that place? Well, shit’s going to come to a point in one form or another at some soonish point, but it’s not the deliverance we’re speaking about we’re rather talking about mass-psychology driving people to run into machine gun nests in an attempt to rip Kim Jong Un’s head off. Be they successful or not, we either end up with a tyrant without serfs, or serfs with no idea where to go from where they are. At that point any theory you could come up with to explain things will be moot, it’s all pure instinct, raw human nature, all territory, no maps to be seen anywhere.
That is what happens when you try to arrest the revolution by imposing doctrine.
All Anarchism is necessarily gradualist, and not because we didn’t prefer things to go faster: But because we understand that you cannot create the ultimate socio-psychological form of Anarchism – everyone being bright eyed and bushy-tailed, for lack of more precise language, constantly reinforcing that in their neighbours by acts of understanding and kindness – by imposing strictures. People, first individually then as smaller groups then larger groups, have to understand that that’s what they want, that it’s a possibility, that it’s their birthright, and develop the skills to foster it. “Do or else” doesn’t stand a chance. Even less “thou shalt say to others: Do or else”.
So excuse me if I’m not particularly impressed by tales of past or present-day Anarchist projects falling short of perfection (and yes the Zapatists are Anarchists from a western analytical lens which they don’t share or at least give special status to, hence their non-identification): We’re not yet there. Those places happened because the right people fought straight tyranny at the right moment and gave people hope and a vision – but imperfect people. Who listen to what the revolutionaries have to say because they’re meeting you on eye level, without grand illusions of having the answer to everything. They tell you about equality of the sexes, you tell them about the tree spirit. Both learn. This is how societies progress.
In other places we don’t have straight-up tyranny. We can talk, we can exchange, we can be creative and race shoulder to shoulder, if not even a bit ahead of the thesis, in theory and praxis. And that’s all that’s necessary, that’s all it’s about. To quote Kerry Thornley: “Universal Enlightenment a prerequisite to abolition of the State, after which the State will inevitably vanish. Or – that failing – nobody will give a damn”.
And now comes the question: Would you rather bide your time in a non-ideal but definitely liveable liberal democracy, or pedal backwards, either participating in or overseeing the suffering of your compatriots? Be one of the actionists? Oh and have some maths proving I’m right not just on the political, sociological, or even psychological level, but the physical. Among other things trying to engineer the “perfect system for humanity” you run into the problem that you can’t be a good regulator of a system without being a model of said system, and modelling everything germane is infeasible. Universe isn’t large enough to contain the computer necessary. Presuming you know the ultimate face of the revolution, that you won’t have to co-create it with everyone, that there is nothing more for you to learn, is sheer hubris.
I did not send my first message to attempt to “convert” you or anyone into another ideology. My intentions were simple: to disprove the popular claim of MLs “betraying” revolutions by taking a closer look at the events that it refers to, and to show that past anarchist projects are equally guilty of engaging in authoritarianism once they see themselves out of idealist theory and into the field where they have to survive: all of it by taking a closer look at history. And, if not to actually manage to convince anyone about it, at least to encourage people lurking here to take a deep dive into the history of their own movement, something that we “tankies” are already forced to do because of constant confrontation but that anarchists usually don’t have to, being instead able to rejoice in a romantisized and adequately simplified version of the past, not having to worry about anyone ever bringing up the “dark” bits of their history.
You are welcome to attempt discussing it or (although I doubt it) agreeing with it. Yes, we could instead talk about the theory attempting to change each other’s minds in vain about either anarchism or marxism-leninism, but with due respect, that’s outside the scope of my initial intentions, and nonetheless I do not think that neither you nor I have any intent of perpetuating this discussion into eternity. And even if I wanted, attempting to discuss some subjects such as North Korea would eventually get me banned from this sever and have my comments deleted per this site’s rules.
If you wish to add anything else about our initial topic, you are welcome to do so and I will listen and respond adequately. If not… I’d say it’s been a pleasure talking. You are a well read person, I will give you that.
And even if I wanted, attempting to discuss some subjects such as North Korea would eventually get me banned from this sever and have my comments deleted per this site’s rules.
How would you analyse NK if it didn’t have hammers and sickles1 painted all over it? If instead it featured a swastika? A cat’s paw? The Klingon emblem? Keep all facts on the grounds the same, look at “the purpose of a system is what it does”, only switch symbols around. Maybe then you’ll understand why other people’s neck hairs stand on edge.
1 and brushes, a nice addition I have to admit though the graphic design is atrocious.
How would you analyse NK if it didn’t have hammers and sickles painted all over it?
I just… Told you I won’t. Not here, at least. Just by being here I am already dancing on the knife’s edge and, as this server very clearly states, authoritarian behaviour a bannable offense. I came here limiting myself to talk about history because I am not interested in breaking this place’s rules. If you still insist in hearing what I have to say you are more than welcome to send me a private message.
You pretty much already gave the answer: Your interpretation wouldn’t change, or at least you can’t imagine it would.
The homework I’ll leave you then, is simple: Analyse Singapore as-is, but with hammer and sickle symbolism and rhetoric. Compare it to your analysis of NK, and see whether any inconsistencies arise.
We’d have more than two if it hadn’t been for tankies stabbing us in the back. But go, go on, tell me how Makhno was a counter-revolutionary or something. Kulak? Or was it about not being able to tolerate a non-authoritarian alternative.
As to successful tankie revolutions… there’s none. They devolved into either state capitalist tyranny, capitalist tyranny, or straight tyranny. Cuba and Vietnam don’t count they were wars for independence from colonial powers first, communist second in Vietnam’s case and in Cuba’s fourth or fifth or something.
This is a phrase that keeps popping up in anarchist spaces but once you look at what it makes reference to it’s… Simply not true? It’s mostly used to refer to the Spanish Civil War, but one only needs to pick up a high school history book to learn that the May Days were a result of the anarchists attempting to antagonize the entirety of the Republican side by hindering war efforts, and not only the PCE or other Soviet-alligned communists, who held a rather small amount of power inside the Republican government.
If to not be authoritarian is a priority for you, reading Voline’s accounts of his participation in the makhnovist movement should be enough to realize that his project is probably not the one you want to rally behind the most.
Just ignore the Zapatistas who are a current example of anarchism in practice.
And saying the Soviets held little power in the Spanish Republic is just a bald faced lie. The Soviets withheld supplies from non-soviet militias and actively damaged the war effort because they’d rather focus on garnering power than actually fighting fascists.
Their words, not mine. Yes, the Zapatista project has worked at their current scale and is doing well, I have no problems admiting that. That does not mean however that I think their methods would work on a larger scale, especially if they ever became a threat for imperial capitalism to be attacked with military force beyond attempting to contain them inside Chiapas as they have until now. As it happened to the USSR facing invasion during the Russian Civil War, as it happened to Cuba with the Bay of Pigs invasion and as it happened to Vietnam. And the Zapatistas do so too, as they claim that they are not driven by ideological purities and will adopt whatever it is that works for them.
I said that the PCE and the Soviet-alligned communists had a rather small amount of power within the Republican government, and that is not a lie. The PCE only controlled three ministries within the government during the May Days, which is the event seen as the “betrayal” that led to the anarchists’ demise in Spain.
It is hard to work with abstract mentions, but I am willing to address this if you use more specific examples of Soviet sabotage of the war effort that I can look at and work with.
Edit: formatting.
You know it’s kinda rich of you to refer to, of all people, Voline. If he was critical of Platformism guess what he had to say about Bolshevism. Even before Trotsky tried to have him killed.
See one factor of Anarchism is that you invariably don’t end up having the same ideas of how to do stuff once the dust has settled and power is secured. Yes, Makhno was quite a bit of a Bonarparte. That doesn’t mean that he would’ve crushed disagreements with tanks, he would’ve taken an offer of “Comrade, we thank you for all you’ve done but you’re a fighter not a politician, here’s a nice Dacha”, and then written his memoirs. Anarchism adapts itself, Anarchists adapt themselves to local circumstances and culture, shaping it as much as the utopia is shaping people. As a gestalt, it is shapeless, therefore, it can succeed: Because it does not need to, must not, fight the people.
…somehow you also ignored the two successful ones. I kinda wonder whether you even know which I’m talking about.
Also, if you bother answering at all I’d like you to give an example of a revolution of yours that didn’t end in tyranny. Shouldn’t actually be that hard for a tankie as you don’t think tyranny is bad, so why not admit it that there’s none?
I am not talking about Voline’s personal opinions on neither platformism nor bolshevism, but on his accounts on the makhnovite project. I do not know what is your definition of tyranny since, as you implied, ideas amongst anarchists vary quite a lot. However, if you consider that the actions taken by state socialist projects to ensure their survival are tyrannical, I suppose you would too consider tyrannical the anti-mennonite massacres perpetrated by the black army after Eichenfield, the existence of a 200-men personal bodyguard corps (the Black Sotnya) for Makhno or the closure of the Bolshevik revolutionary committees of Alexandrovsk and Ekaterinoslav and threats of arrest and execution of its members, which ensured that the only speech that enjoyed of freedom in Makhnovia had to be anarchist-alligned. Acceptable? You will say if yes or no. Anti-authoritarian? I’d beg to differ.
Rojava and the Zapatistas, I presume. The Zapatistas have already declared publicly and explicitly that they are not anarchists and that they reject such label, so there is not much else to say. Rojava on the other side is one project that anarchists in my area began to detract from after they began collaborating with the US army, but even then there exists fair criticism of it and accusations of repressing minorities by closing down Assyrian schools. Don’t misinterpret me: despite its faults I do have a generally positive view on Rojava, but I do not think it is the paragon of non-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian virtue that western anarchists generally set as the bare minimum.
You have not addressed my comments on the anarchist actions in the May Days during the Spanish Civil War, but I will not assume malicious intent from your part.
I have no bad faith in this discussion, and I would like to ask you to do the same. We do not think that “tyranny is good”: we think that the state is needed for a revolutionary project to survive as much as it is its fate to disappear as class contradictions do too. We are dialectical materialists: even if we wanted for some reason the state to persist, the march of history would do away with it nonetheless, and we would have to accept it.
To answer your question: I am, again, not aware of what do you consider tyranny, but I have found most anarchists to be pretty accepting of Sankara’s Burkina Faso and admit that its pros outweight the cons.
Edit: grammar.
This is getting into the weeds and that’s never good, let’s give a pivot to theory a try.
The revolutionary idea started in the bourgeois state. How can it not be present under bourgeois rule? The disaffected will be discontent, and they will look to solutions. Some will be impatient actionists and be quickly shored up or be otherwise ineffective, others will eternally look to analysis and be equally ineffective – in the present moment, that is, not necessarily down the line, when their analysis bears fruit. Strings will be picked up, weaved into new tapestries, tricks that once worked to distract people from their nature and self-interest no longer hold any power. The antithesis co-evolves with the thesis and thus does the sublation. (That may not technically be Hegelian dialectics but you get my drift).
There is a way for the powers that be to halt the evolution of revolutionary thought: By imposing tyranny, not to stop disaffection, but to cut off transmission that enables one to think thoughts greater than oneself because one is standing on the shoulders of others, to arrest the antithesis at a stage not able to even properly conceptualise the thesis. But, and here’s the kicker: Capitalism can’t afford to do that, much less liberal capitalist democracies. Tyranny depresses the human spirit, you end up with serfs not able to contribute to capital accumulation as their surplus value addition stagnates, stays at a level fixed to the scraps you feed, mere machines, not creative minds.
That is the ultimate contradiction of capitalism: That it invariably breeds its own antithesis.
Scene change: North Korea. Now I don’t know what you believe happens down there but from what I know ever since Corona hit the country has been on a complete and utter lockdown, people can’t even smuggle drugs and food over the Chinese border, any more. It is tyranny in its final stage as the people choose between starving and being executed for trying to survive. It is the literal death-drive of society, Thanatos become flesh and force. Will the revolution come out of that place? Well, shit’s going to come to a point in one form or another at some soonish point, but it’s not the deliverance we’re speaking about we’re rather talking about mass-psychology driving people to run into machine gun nests in an attempt to rip Kim Jong Un’s head off. Be they successful or not, we either end up with a tyrant without serfs, or serfs with no idea where to go from where they are. At that point any theory you could come up with to explain things will be moot, it’s all pure instinct, raw human nature, all territory, no maps to be seen anywhere.
That is what happens when you try to arrest the revolution by imposing doctrine.
All Anarchism is necessarily gradualist, and not because we didn’t prefer things to go faster: But because we understand that you cannot create the ultimate socio-psychological form of Anarchism – everyone being bright eyed and bushy-tailed, for lack of more precise language, constantly reinforcing that in their neighbours by acts of understanding and kindness – by imposing strictures. People, first individually then as smaller groups then larger groups, have to understand that that’s what they want, that it’s a possibility, that it’s their birthright, and develop the skills to foster it. “Do or else” doesn’t stand a chance. Even less “thou shalt say to others: Do or else”.
So excuse me if I’m not particularly impressed by tales of past or present-day Anarchist projects falling short of perfection (and yes the Zapatists are Anarchists from a western analytical lens which they don’t share or at least give special status to, hence their non-identification): We’re not yet there. Those places happened because the right people fought straight tyranny at the right moment and gave people hope and a vision – but imperfect people. Who listen to what the revolutionaries have to say because they’re meeting you on eye level, without grand illusions of having the answer to everything. They tell you about equality of the sexes, you tell them about the tree spirit. Both learn. This is how societies progress.
In other places we don’t have straight-up tyranny. We can talk, we can exchange, we can be creative and race shoulder to shoulder, if not even a bit ahead of the thesis, in theory and praxis. And that’s all that’s necessary, that’s all it’s about. To quote Kerry Thornley: “Universal Enlightenment a prerequisite to abolition of the State, after which the State will inevitably vanish. Or – that failing – nobody will give a damn”.
And now comes the question: Would you rather bide your time in a non-ideal but definitely liveable liberal democracy, or pedal backwards, either participating in or overseeing the suffering of your compatriots? Be one of the actionists? Oh and have some maths proving I’m right not just on the political, sociological, or even psychological level, but the physical. Among other things trying to engineer the “perfect system for humanity” you run into the problem that you can’t be a good regulator of a system without being a model of said system, and modelling everything germane is infeasible. Universe isn’t large enough to contain the computer necessary. Presuming you know the ultimate face of the revolution, that you won’t have to co-create it with everyone, that there is nothing more for you to learn, is sheer hubris.
I did not send my first message to attempt to “convert” you or anyone into another ideology. My intentions were simple: to disprove the popular claim of MLs “betraying” revolutions by taking a closer look at the events that it refers to, and to show that past anarchist projects are equally guilty of engaging in authoritarianism once they see themselves out of idealist theory and into the field where they have to survive: all of it by taking a closer look at history. And, if not to actually manage to convince anyone about it, at least to encourage people lurking here to take a deep dive into the history of their own movement, something that we “tankies” are already forced to do because of constant confrontation but that anarchists usually don’t have to, being instead able to rejoice in a romantisized and adequately simplified version of the past, not having to worry about anyone ever bringing up the “dark” bits of their history.
You are welcome to attempt discussing it or (although I doubt it) agreeing with it. Yes, we could instead talk about the theory attempting to change each other’s minds in vain about either anarchism or marxism-leninism, but with due respect, that’s outside the scope of my initial intentions, and nonetheless I do not think that neither you nor I have any intent of perpetuating this discussion into eternity. And even if I wanted, attempting to discuss some subjects such as North Korea would eventually get me banned from this sever and have my comments deleted per this site’s rules.
If you wish to add anything else about our initial topic, you are welcome to do so and I will listen and respond adequately. If not… I’d say it’s been a pleasure talking. You are a well read person, I will give you that.
How would you analyse NK if it didn’t have hammers and sickles1 painted all over it? If instead it featured a swastika? A cat’s paw? The Klingon emblem? Keep all facts on the grounds the same, look at “the purpose of a system is what it does”, only switch symbols around. Maybe then you’ll understand why other people’s neck hairs stand on edge.
1 and brushes, a nice addition I have to admit though the graphic design is atrocious.
I just… Told you I won’t. Not here, at least. Just by being here I am already dancing on the knife’s edge and, as this server very clearly states, authoritarian behaviour a bannable offense. I came here limiting myself to talk about history because I am not interested in breaking this place’s rules. If you still insist in hearing what I have to say you are more than welcome to send me a private message.
You pretty much already gave the answer: Your interpretation wouldn’t change, or at least you can’t imagine it would.
The homework I’ll leave you then, is simple: Analyse Singapore as-is, but with hammer and sickle symbolism and rhetoric. Compare it to your analysis of NK, and see whether any inconsistencies arise.