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?
As an ancom couple of maybe trite observations from the POV of modern anarchists rather than rehashing centuries old debates:
Many anarchists are deeply unserious people about actual politics and building a society. The things that many of them like about anarchism are this misleading idea of “no rules”, they are effectively antisocial or better crystalize the meaning anti-society.
There are anarchist tendencies that effectively nurture their preconceived notions about the background unsatisfaction most people have with their lot in life. Tendencies like anarcho-egoists, anprims, etc. that allow people to romanticize their own feelings.
Lastly very few anarchists tend to understand what anarchism is, just like many people fail to understand what communism is. Anarchism in it’s purest form is about finding the fairest way of building a collective society while respecting everyone as individuals. It is philosophically an ideology that is trying to find the philosophical and practical underpinnings of coalescing individualist and collectivist into one comprehensive view in a bottom up fashion. A nice metaphor for this is that in physics many people are trying to unite classical physics with quantum mechanics to create a comprehensive theory of physics, rather than two separate fields of study. Anarchists want their societies to have unconcerned unanimous support of how the society is governed. Anarchists are not willing to compromise a their platforms. So that makes it difficult to work through problems that other political movements can take “shortcuts” in. In short if you think about this through the lens of standard democratic centralism, Anarchists do not accept a rule of simple majority, they will only accept unanimous consent.
Anarchists that do not understand this, typically hate communists reflexively depending on their platform or who they hang out with. Anarchists that do understand this, typically hate communists due to communism’s prescribed nature of the problem and solution coupled with the tendency for socialist societies who attempted to build communism to prioritize their implementation at the cost of everything else, as well as failure of communist countries to truly liberate certain groups and use them as political pawns when its expedient.
I think a lot of this hate comes from the reality of the development of humanity in the 20th century. The second industrial revolution essentially forced all developing countries of the time into societies that were in practice extremely hierarchical, extremely parochial, and extremely focused on extracting production of out of individuals. Anarchists see this as a negative development in both the liberal and socialist worlds, and due to street cred of anarchism as the “no rules” punk philosophy Western anarchists, many of whom that have never known hunger or poverty relative to their global South or Eastern European counter parts, typically see liberals as the less worse choice because capitalist liberalization did allow for more individualism at it’s apex.
Lastly there is a real history of bad blood between the primary standard bearers of socialism in the USSR and anarchists. The bolsheviks regardless of the morality or solidarity of their actions were some of the best political operators of the 20th century. They were able to take a rump committee of a besieged and nascent political movement and transform it into a global political powerhouse. Some of the best political operators in the world worked on Bolshevik standards, Lenin, Stalin, Kim, Tito, Sankara, Mao initially and (I’m gonna get flack for this but it’s fucking true because of what he was able to fucking pull off politically if you actually read history) Ben-Gurion. The problem is bolshevism is ruthless, and it cannot stand competition. It must be the only voice in the room. That’s how it works, that’s why it was effective. And in that efficacy lays the simple fact that Bolsheviks betrayed the largest anarchist organization during the Russian revolution.
Makhnovshchina was the pinnacle of anarchist success on the world stage. Their lands were ruled by their people. They had repelled not only German colonists but the German backed puppet regimes spouting racist and cosplay style Ukrainian Nationalism They fought a multi-front war between the Whites and the Reds. To the point where they beat back the Whites to an unfavorable position in the East and that the Reds were so depleted they had no choice but to ally with Makhno. The Black army over performed as a military force and Makhnovshchina over performed as a society forged in war time, that never had to implement war communism and forced conscription. And for all of this the Bolsheviks rewarded them by baiting them out of position under the guise of being allies, and stabbing them in the back, and liquidating all their hard work. Many bitter anarchists read this history, the success of Marxist-Lenninism as the strangulation of anarchism in its crib.
Makhnovschina overperformed in the sense that they employed guerilla warfare with a local force that had the buy-in of locals for essential supplies. They rapidly fell apart outside of their limited territory as they stole from peasants there rather than receiving support. This allowed the Whites to maintain and rebuild their forces in Western Ukraine.
They similarly built up peasant communes that were actually very insular and selfish, pushing an odd version of independence and self-sufficiency that, on one hand, declared no obligation to feed workers in cities (Bolsheviks called this a petty bourgeois aspect of the peasantry) while also being entitled to the products of the city factories, coordinating with Makhnovists to steal equipment. They actually combined these entitlements in their sentiments, declaring that they had no need to pay for equipment they could take when they needed to. This was guaranteed to eventually deplete the areas they controlled of industrial capacity and create a series of endless petty infights.
It was also the major source of contention with Bolsheviks, who began labeling them as “bandits” in their propaganda. Bolsheviks, above all, recognized the necessity of feeding factory workers and ensuring the continued function if factories, hence war communism based on quotas and then taxes. Areas controlled by Makhnovists tended to work directly against this, killing or kicking out the Bolshevik tax man, actually stealing equipment and resources from cities to go support “the commune”. They treated cities like foreign territories, and enemies. This is in addition to going off on their own as small (but many) autonomous groups and declaring truces over, stealing weapons, literally blowing things up, and recreating an oppositional fighting force.
Bolsheviks did make decisive moves to end alliances and implement the red terror against Makhnovists, killing a massive number once Bolsheviks’ power in the region was tentatively solidified. But it’s important to understand that this came from competing interests and actions and waa not some out-of-nowhere betrayal.
Makhno is a pretty sordid example from a modern perspective (with the abuse he facilitated). It doesn’t seem like the most intelligent shake for anarchism considering the “arming people with little oversight” produced pogroms. Idk, it’s like one of us holding up Gonzalo or one of those. Can I suggest KPAM or something? You still get a stabbed-in-the-back-by-commies narrative.
On the other hand I also wouldn’t hold up Sankara as a shining example because he definitely did some cool things and had some cool ideas, but ultimately he was installed by a non-communist in a military coup and then deposed by the same non-communist in another military coup a few years later.
Very good post. You’ve given me much to think on!
You simply hate to see it
Yeah unfortunately it’s the truth. Ben-Gurion’s guile was the only fucking force keeping the pandora’s box of Revisionist Zionism under lock and fucking key. Ben-Gurion was not a good dude himself, but he played the West well. If Jabotinsky won in the Zionist World Organization, every non-Jew in “Greater Isreal” would have been exterminated by Ariel Sharon by 1970.
Actually I’ll pay him one more complement before my summary execution. His legacy of Labor Zionism is a drain on the American Imperial state and it’s Israeli proxies to this day. While Kibbutz’s have no semblance of real socialist ideals left in them, their extreme political durability and their inhabitants demand for their continued relatively luxurious welfare has been a real drain on the financials of the empire. Isreal is supporting tons of unproductive remote dirt farmer towns, which prevents them from using that money more effectively to further their aims.