On the internet I don’t see too many Anarchists give arguments past “communism doesn’t work because communists are doomed to repeat the same exploitative power structures of the capitalist state” and “we dont know what an anarchist society will look like we gotta wait til we get there!” Which like…is not convincing to me at all. I’ve engaged in what was supposed to be consensus based decision making systems and there were a ton of flaws, though that’s purely anecdotal.
So, I’d really like to have some suggestions on what to read that you think might really challenge where I stand/take anarchism more seriously. It might take me 5 years to get to them bc executive dysfunction but I really want to see if my mind can be changed on if it would be a better system from the get go than communism.
I think it would be super interesting to hear from anyone who shifted into anarchism from Marxism on why it made more sense to you
Not a big fan of his overarching narrative, especially in matters of history.
He lavishes glowing praise on anything anarchist in a way that is entirely blinkered to the realities and is without critical analysis. For example, he will extol the virtues of the economy of the Spanish Republic but he refuses to actually engage in the (scanty) historical scholarship and acknowledge that there were critical flaws within the Spanish Republic and clear problems especially especially to do with labour discipline, or he will deny the Eichenfeld massacre.
He’s extremely dogmatic.
I have had very productive discussions with anarchists about these sorts of matters. If you can acknowledge that an anarchist revolution is going to have excesses and that, historically, excesses have occurred and that they need to be learned from in order to mitigate the risk of them happening in the future then we’re going to get along just fine.
If you look me dead in the eye and deny the Eichenfeld massacre or claim that valid criticisms of Makhno’s personal conduct as de facto leader of the Makhnovshchina that came directly from a member of the Military Revolutionary Council are merely Bolshevik propaganda, without actually having done any research into these things, then we are not going to get along.
In my experience, Anark falls into the latter category. He is not a person I would be comfortable with even back when I was an anarchist.
You say you were an anarchist, do you mind sharing why you stopped aligning yourself with it (assuming that’s how you’d describe it)
Sure.
I was an anarchist for a long time, gradually developed into an AnCom with more learning, and then eventually I sat down and genuinely engaged with what Lenin argued rather than just believing the received wisdom about why Lenin was a bogeyman.
My experiences with organising set me on the path towards becoming an ML long before I ever realised it and long before I actually read Lenin on his own terms.
I spent a long time in a sort of purgatory of radical politics, stuck in limbo where the way that I understood and conceptualised politics was crumbling away but I wasn’t ready to admit it to myself that I was misled. It was actually really agonising to go through that. Sorta like being in a long-term relationship where you grow apart very gradually but you don’t really notice it until there’s an inciting incident and suddenly you review everything and you’re like “Shit. This isn’t working anymore. I don’t know who you are, I don’t even know who I am outside of this relationship, but I know that this relationship isn’t gonna make it.” I spent quite a while quizzing anarchists that I had contact with about certain things and this became apparent to me about matters of strategy and organising and broader stuff like economics and foreign policy and geopolitics. Deep down I was desperately hoping that my political realisation was actually just because of some fault in my own personal political development as an anarchist rather than it being about anarchism and that by talking it through with someone who was more knowledgeable than me it would rescue me from the political-existential crisis I was experiencing, that all I needed to do was to read more or adjust my perspective and it would all go away. Unfortunately this didn’t pan out for me the way I wanted.
The next thing was, after realising that I was operating under false apprehensions in matters of politics, was to set about assessing history from a clear perspective to see if I felt that the narrative that I had adopted aligned with the objective facts and historical scholarship. This was difficult and it took a long time, and in some respects there are still things that I haven’t arrived at a conclusion on because I need to do more reading but I’m okay about withholding judgment until I know enough to have a good understanding of things.
Unfortunately this is where it really fell apart for me. I learned more about anarchist movements and just the general history surrounding anarchist revolutions. In the two big historical examples of anarchism, there were strikingly authoritarian measures that were taken, and not by accident or by some quirk of history. I knew that anarchists would denounce these things if they had occurred under a different system with different leadership but I was interested to see how anarchists related to these things and responded to them. I saw a lot of denialism, reflexive dismissal (e.g. “that’s just Bolshevik propaganda” when it was clearly not the case), and a surprising amount of excusing, deep skepticism, and that lack of curiosity that you get from people who genuinely don’t care about a topic.
I honestly felt pretty betrayed, both by the very skewed narratives I was given about history and by a lack of principles or concern about authoritarianism within historical examples of anarchism.
In learning more about this stuff I also started seeing that over time the anarchist revolutions often tended to develop in a way that paralleled ML states due to facing essentially the same threats, the same contradictions, and the same material conditions. I stopped treating different revolutions as if it were team sports and I started to understand them on their own terms by developing a solid foundation of what was going on at the time and how they responded to their particular circumstances.
By this point I came to the conclusion that a revolution is never going to truly be complete as long as capitalism still exists, and as long as that’s the case then there will necessarily be “authoritarian” measures needed to defend and deepen the revolution. In some respects I already knew this but it really crystallised in my mind because I spent time grappling with this idea. This in turn made me realise that I was much more aligned to the idea of a transitional phase of socialism than I thought. These days it’s my honest opinion that if you really hash it out with principled anarchists most of them will agree that the day after the revolution you won’t be able to achieve the anarchist end-goal but instead there will need to be a period of construction (and that’s without even discussing the necessity of defending the revolution from internal and external threats). So my hot take is that one of the primary points of disagreement between anarchists and MLs is not about the necessity for a transitional stage but rather how long that transitional period will/should last.
Honestly with what I know and what I’ve been through, I feel like I’m sort of a corrosive influence on anarchists and I legitimately shy away from discussions of politics, history, and theory with anarchists (especially in real life) because I don’t want to inflict the same sort of awful experience I went through on them and I don’t have the capacity to provide an anarchist with much support in a sorta pastoral care fashion; I don’t want to just smash someone’s worldview and be like “Seeya later, nerd!” to leave them to pick up the pieces. In part this is because people can bounce to very weird places when their prior political beliefs implode and I don’t want to see someone go from the radical left to an ugly political orientation, because then everyone loses, but also because I don’t want to be responsible for someone going through a crisis that may really fuck up their relationships and their personal life. At worst, wrecking someone’s deeply-held politics can push them over the edge and I really don’t want to be the catalyst for that because I don’t think I’d be able to live with myself if I knew that I had caused this.
good post
Damn, I’m sorry that it was such an emotional experience for you but overall it sounds like it was for the best and it seems like not many people can commit to a paradigm shift like that, I feel like that takes a lot of fortitude.
I have very strong convictions but I find that I’m always willing to be challenged or have my mind changed…it’s just not often that someone comes across with any argument convincing enough. So I have no idea if I would react so strongly to having my worldview shaken like that. I’ve almost always been the most radical person in the room when it comes to my friend groups (lol) but I guess it sounds like that sense of betrayal may have been what caused that to be so painful? I’ve never joined any sort of political group so I wonder if really being surrounded by a lot of “like minded” people would influence that.
I was an edgelord in highschool, I was on 4chan before the pedophilia truly took over, said racist jokes, all that dumb shit. Took an African American film class and from then on I really pushed myself HARD to undo a lot of what I thought I knew, took years and maybe put me in a position to feel alienated from most of the people I grew up with but I don’t regret it
Oh, also, that part about both Anarchists and Communists having the same idea about a transitional period - that definitely seems to be the case, in my opinion at least. Like there is the anarchist concept of councils and federations and such, and then “what will an anarchist society look like”, as far as I’ve seen, is answered with “well it’s going to evolve organically. Could look the same, could look different”. So wouldn’t that initial decision making structure be considered transitional?
Another thing that I find interesting is that vanguards are met with disdain, but in building an anarchist society there are going to be people who are more educated in anarchist principles who will need to share those principles and concepts with other people who have never been exposed before. This could be more organic than explicit by modeling instead of educating per se, but couldn’t that be construed as a sort of Vanguard movement? And having delegates sent to communicate with the entire federation on behalf of their community, is that not something that already mimics the structure if the state but just much more democratic?
It’s all good. That’s just how things turned out for me I guess.
I think what sucked about it was that I had committed myself to anarchism quite seriously and then to look back on all the time and effort that I put into it later only to realise I hadn’t fully figured out what I was doing and that a lot of my efforts were wasted… That’s a difficult thing to come to terms with.
Without strawmanning anarchism, I do genuinely believe that this is true. I think for me, what is really important is putting in serious work to figure out how this transitional period should be structured.
Imo there are a lot of conditions that are necessary before a radical left revolution can kick off – America has to be sufficiently distracted or weakened at the time, there needs to be mass mobilisation, the organisations leading it must be well-connected to the broader community, (not to go all Great Man Theory but) there needs to be leaders who have the right combination of characteristics to spearhead or shepherd the revolution, enough international support is crucial etc. etc. What this means in my perspective is that revolutionary moments are actually quite rare, and it’s rarer still to have enough of the right conditions that the countervailing conditions are mitigated and that the revolution manages to successfully take root.
It’s a bit like the societies that have managed to develop the ability to control fire but which haven’t yet developed the ability to create fire themselves – they have to wait for lightning to strike in the right place or for the very rare physical or chemical reactions that create combustion spontaneously, this has to happen nearby enough that it gets discovered by someone, the weather has to be sufficiently mild that the fire doesn’t get extinguished, there has to be enough suitable combustible material nearby to feed the fire, there needs to be a way to transport the fire, and the fire has to be contained enough that it doesn’t cause a wildfire that threatens to destroy the village.
This happens, of course, but the chances of having all the right conditions and the right luck are very rare so you need to make sure that everyone knows how to identify a fire, how to tend it and manage it properly, and that everything is in place to take advantage of the next time a fire starts nearby. One unlucky patch of rain or a heavy gust of wind at the wrong moment and that rare chance of capturing fire vanishes and it could be months or even years before the next opportunity presents itself.
In that overextended metaphor, once the fire has successfully been brought back to the village I think it’s too much of a gamble to take the attitude of being like “We’ll figure out the next steps once we get there” because it’s too rare and too important to risk fumbling the ball. You want to have a fire pit already built, you want some kindling or wood ready to go long before you need it, you want contingency plans in place to ensure that if the weather turns bad that there’s ways of keeping the fire going. Of course there’s no way to predict everything that might happen and there’s going to be some degree of figuring it out as you go but the less you leave up to chance, the more likely you’re going to be successful in your endeavours.
Or maybe it’s like a speedrun of a game which relies upon a random glitch that only occurs rarely - you don’t want to have the attitude that you’ll figure out the next steps of how to finish the game when you encounter that glitch. You want to know exactly what you’re doing so that when the glitch happens you can take full advantage of it to maximise your chances of breaking the speed record.
You don’t want to find yourself as the dog who finally catches the car, y’know?
Which leads me on to the next part…
You’ve hit the nail on the head here.
I refer to these as vulgar vanguards. Maybe that’s a bit uncharitable of me but it’s not intended to be a term of derision. There’s plenty of vulgar materialism that you can find outside of Marxist discourse and it’s an established term so I think vulgar vanguard is pretty apt. It’s also a recognition that MLs don’t have a monopoly on these ideas and that other political orientations can come across these ideas or the practice independently.
A vanguard is just the most ideologically advanced group of people who help shape the beliefs and the groundswell of political action of the masses. Anarchism has plenty of examples of vanguards – Durruti, Malatesta, Makhno and the Revolutionary Military Council (with figures like Volin) and Belash, and Kim Chwa-chin. (Obviously these are mostly just names-dropping the leaders but I’m not going to bore you by listing out every deputy or lieutenant or whatever for each of these movements but I’m sure we all agree that these leaders all had a group of their most trusted allies who were extremely committed and ideologically advanced that helped direct their movements.)
I’ve seen plenty of de facto vanguards emerge in anarchist orgs and history also proves this to be true in larger movements. I’d much rather have an explicit structure with defined roles and rights and responsibilities, with mechanisms to deal with problems that will inevitably occur, than I would to have something that sprouts up organically where there is no room for democratic processes and accountability and that kinda stuff. It’s much easier to get someone out of a role if the role is official, it has clear delimitations on power, and there are mechanisms for recall and elections and managing corruption and misconduct than it is trying to do this when a person just occupies a role naturally because the organisation is so horizontal that it doesn’t engage in articulating a power structure.
Unfortunately vanguard is often used as a boogeyman term. I’m very open to hearing critiques of vanguardism but if the criticism is that it’s elitists or that it is a betrayal of radical politics then I’m not buying it. Your average mom and pop aren’t going to be the most theoretically or politically advanced in a revolution but that’s okay – it’s better to acknowledge this and to find ways to mitigate these contradictions than it is to expect that they are suddenly going to become deeply political and that they’re going to be willing and able to become the next Peter Arshinov.
That’s a bit like expecting everyone to become their own physician. A few people might actually do it, some people are going to be able to do it, but it’s unfair and self-defeating to operate on the assumption that everyone has the means to become a doctor. In the matter of boots it’s okay to defer to the authority of a bootmaker, y’know?
Honestly it’s another thing where if I was more malicious and more interested in drama farming or getting some epic screenshots or clips, I do think I’d be able to steer a discussion with most anarchists into getting them to describe a vanguard in their own terms and to get them to express support for them except without naming it as a vanguard directly. But that’s not a productive way of building a movement or raising consciousness, that’s just a way of creating a circlejerk where one side can feel smugly superior to the other – it’s Vaush-tier bullshit.
I think a lot of these differences and perceived differences tend to work themselves out through praxis anyway and my understanding is that history vindicates this position; I’m not interested in proving to everyone that I was right or getting others to concede to me that they had it wrong. I just want to see a better future and to contribute to that however I can, factionalism and ego be damned.
EXTREMELY GOOD POST
Ah well it feels like I’m on the right track with my misgivings about it but I feel similarly in that I am more concerned about a better future as well, and both probably have very important contributions for the revolution that could complement eachother. I hope when shit REALLY starts to go down that differences fall to the wayside, anyway