Basically, bunch of pro-Ukraine, pro-fascism and state dept line loving anarchists attacked an anti-war demonstration with incredibly based anti-imperialist and codepink founder Medea Benjamin.
Comments in the linked subreddit are worth reading for some highlights from the article (Trueanon is hilariously much more principled ML than deprogram sub on most days)
Archived link to article: https://archive.is/aZjzQ
People say anarchists in real life are better, it’s only the online ones who are liberals… nope. These people are total shills for the state department narrative. Totally useful tools against America’s enemies.
This is your brain on only caring about “authoritarianism” without understanding authority and letting the US state dept and bourgeois press (along with compromised anarchist media like your favorite zine courtesy of the FBI) define what authoritarian means and give you the scales of most and least authoritarian governments.
And these people are shocked when we denounce left unity. As if they did not denounce it first with violence against us.
It’s stuff like this that makes me think that anarchists are not leftists.
The Liberals, their white supremacist allies, and their tankiejerker alias always reappropriate any ideologies and slogans for their parasitic agenda and I am sure that actual anarchists are not people who mindlessly tank anyone who oppose Western European diaspora imperialism unlike the internet anarchists.
Where are these “actual anarchists”? Why are they not dealing with these fake anarchists? Unmasking them scoobie-doo style? Humiliating them in public in shouted debate. Shaming them for believing the US state department and not denouncing them for targeting a foreign “authoritarian” government over their own backyard first? Show me a large community of western anarchists, a publication, an online site (or are you saying no anarchists are ever online like ML’s because they’re too busy making weapons in their compound and debating loftily, lol, lmao even) who denounce this shit. I really don’t think you can. Sure, sure I’ll credit you that not all claimed anarchist communities or anarchists online are anarchists, but show me some real ones with some statements strongly contrary to this that aren’t just hand-wringing attempts to avoid being pinned down one way or the other. (Specifically some that are from something more than one person’s random blog/medium account, that have some backing and aren’t filled with seething anarchists calling them a crypto-tankie)
Just because you’ve distributed food besides them doesn’t mean you have proof they don’t want to or aren’t stabbing you in the back marching with liberals and Nazis on the subject of Ukraine and many others like Syria, China, Hong Kong riots, etc.
These are clearly not internet anarchists, they were very real. They went outside. They took the time to organize this and they took real actions, as real as your local food not bombs, as real as meeting up in black bloc to challenge a fascist march. I guess the ones who went to Syria to fight with literal Nazis were just online anarchists too.
And they don’t tank all left protests or movements. They only do so in support of the aesthetic of anarchism. So supporting racist CIA backed and organized kids in Hong Kong against Chinese communist police officers? You bet they do. Supporting the US as the “less authoritarian preferable victor” against Russia because of US propaganda they’ve accepted? You bet. Doesn’t mean they’d support the US rolling tanks into Havana because that goes against the aesthetic but they’re very useful in many ways against actual attempts against AES states, against anti-imperialist actors, in aiding and abetting the US/NATO imperialism machine.
I do not know much about current anarchism, only that there are historical anarchists that oppose Western European states and that ally with USSR.
Granted. I’m not saying all of them ever have been bad. Just that especially in the US and anglosphere in general they have serious issues in the modern day.
Does anybody knows some good sources of where anarchism “went wrong”? I know it could be argued that was always like that but I’m really interested in learning how the currently-prevalent flavor of the West’s extreme “tankie”-dunking, terminally online, utterly unprincipled anarkiddies came about. I have heard from here and there that this is encouraged by the FBI and other such agencies. Not looking for liberal sources.
A certain georgian poet and labor organizer wrote a bit about just that during his youth.
Oh yeah. Good ol’ Joey
What not reading theory does to a mf
Me at the anarchists hate club (I’m very well respected there)
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People say anarchists in real life are better, it’s only the online ones who are liberals
In my experience there are 2 kinds of real-life anarchists.
One kind is unprincipled, unstudied, usually very young, very ‘punk’ and just defines itself as anarchist, because they don’t like being told what to do and gommunism 1 trillion dead. At best they just go to fascist rallies and fight with the chuds and police. Often these are the ones hell-bent on fighting other leftists and think littering, spraying, being drunk and overly sexual are some kind of revolutinary praxis. They have no clue about labour, don’t engage with unions, etc. You literally can’t work with these people, because they don’t really do any actual work. They’re dogmatic, anti-communist and contrarian as fuck for the sake of it and probably the people in OP.
Then there’s the second kind. They tend to be older, often much better read and tend to have a concept of labour and class struggle. They sometimes form their own ‘revolutionary’ unions, organize soup kitchens and similar direct action. These are the ones you can and should work with on a practical level.
Related to the second kind, there are a decent number of them in the IWW from my experience.
Old anarchists often turn into communalists
Originally I was simply going to ignore this topic as it was too depressing (and I was too tired). After I went to sleep I had a dream(!) partly about it, and my response to the thread was — if I may say so myself — surprisingly good.
true anti-imperialism must oppose every imperialism, not just that of the United States.
To paraphrase what I wrote in my dream:
The Western left needs to get over the fact that this isn’t the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The United States attacked Iraq with the goals of destabilizing its currency, eliminating its products from the market, and preventing a challenge to U.S. hegemony. The Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine was the inevitable consequence of the U.S.’s neoimperialist expansion in the East; economically Ukraine is of little importance to Russia. It is of strategic importance to the U.S.
These two are not the same thing.
Another way of expressing this is there is a primary imperialist power, a primary contradiction like a vampire on the global south and global proletariat at large and that simply is not Russia. It is the US/NATO/EU/Eyes group with the US strongly at the helm (to the point of grievously wounding German industry by blowing up pipelines and them quietly taking it in silence).
This is the result of historical events and forces building up over centuries of time. The US invaded Europe in WW2 and saved the capitalists in western Europe from being liberated by the Soviet troops, they bailed out Britain in WW2 too. The European capitalists had no choice but to cede their power to the US as their new defender and military overseer. But their power in the relationship has been waning (it was really over the moment the US occupied Europe after WW2 in the pretext of defending it against Soviet invasion, a country is not free that is occupied by thousands of heavily armed troops from a foreign nation), their colonial grip was weakened, the US has drained them, subordinated them, had Gladio, has infiltrated them at the highest levels, has probable dirt and blackmail on most of their leadership, spies on them extensively without punishment or hope of escape, can de-facto cripple them at will, has the lion’s-share of military equipment, budget, etc. They are now junior partners, vassals really in this relationship.
The US thus took over centuries of building of European hegemony, colonialism (later neo-colonialism) over Africa, Middle East, etc from Europe. Not only that, the US pumped their culture into Europe, they convinced their peoples they are really as one with the US liberal project, that the US is their project and they the US project. Hollywood is a machine for this purpose but they also through the CIA paid writers, journalists, various forms of culture and manipulated things to bind these people to the US and its dominance.
Thus, if the US were to be mortally wounded tomorrow, it would not be simple for Russia to step into the US’s shoes and just become an imperialist power in the same weight-range in boxing terms. Because Europe would not be able to go along with it, because Europe has turned over the keys already to the US. Russia might like to do this, they are a capitalist power and aspire to be greater but the material and historical realities bind them from it. They bind us to a multi-polar world emerging from the collapse of NATO/US hegemony.
Thus from the perspective of all who want to smash the current order, Russia’s victory (or at least the US and Ukrainian defeat and humiliation and Russia being allowed to ease pressure off itself a little) is a positive for anti-imperialism. It results in acceleration of de-dollarization, it accelerates in the shackles loosening on Africa, even on South America.
It is much like arranging for an internal coup in a country, a mafia, any kind of organization, deposing the stable, well-liked, powerful grip, intelligent leader in favor and with the assistance of the brash upstart disliked by many elements inside with less friends and more enemies. It is a recipe for fragmentation, factions, strife, weakness, more struggle, etc.
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