I posted that one comment from another thread on lemmygrad on the reddit thread, an analysis of why China is socialist. I’ll put it in the comments.
I posted that one comment from another thread on lemmygrad on the reddit thread, an analysis of why China is socialist. I’ll put it in the comments.
So? It was the point of my first comment nonetheless. That you had to come and for some reason reply to it “not all anarchists are like that, I am one of the good ones” changes neither the fact that the anarchist movement is characterized by a general lack of knowledge of its own history, not my opinion of them for it. And as cherry on top, anarchist incompetence collaborated in plunging my country into fascism for 40 years as mentioned above, so excuse me for not having the same good opinion about anarchism that you have about us.
I’m trying to communicate that there are anarchist groups that do not have the same issues, as they are constantly working with MLs in the area, and have generally acted as their armed guards, in the sense that they protect unarmed leftists during collective action. This is local to me. I’m really just trying to show that anarchists can be good and helpful, just not ones like this. I’m also unable to find a source on the “fact” that the anarchist movement is characterized by a lack of knowledge of its history.
I’m sorry for coming off so argumentative, but I think I got frustrated from the lack of willingness to educate the infighters without condescension. I have had discussions easily aligning such people with a greater vanguard in the past, so I really don’t understand where the deep seated resentment with anarchochuds comes from. (Though I do not discount your localized historical reasons)
Am I appreciably more receptive than the average anarchist people talk to online? In that case, I can definitely understand the vitriol, as I imagine arguing with someone over whose side killed the most people could be quite annoying.
If not, I think y’all are obviously very reactionary in your own right, as I’ve definitely seen many of you argue in far ruder ways than I, with even less knowledge or willingness to research topics.
Of course there will be some anarchists, even groups, that can be helpful. But if you stop zooming in these groups, the big picture does not show a good image.
To both of these I can answer at the same time. You don’t need a peer-reviewed study published at Nature to know that grass is green and the sky is blue. Check out all the replies to my first comment and you will notice that anarchists not knowing about their own history is an observation that can be confirmed by most MLs who had the little pleasure of interacting with the average anarchist through the span of years, if not decades. But that is not where the resentment comes from most of the time: the resentment comes from anarchists overall not only refusing to show support for most acts of antiimperialism, which nowadays supposes the major front against capitalism in a unipolar world, but also to choose instead to condemn them using mostly arguments held by liberal mass media and the Department of State of the US, effectively telling the opponents of the empire to go screw themselves because they don’t fit the criteria for what they deem an acceptable (read: stateless) form of liberation.
That, paired with a constant condemnation of ML projects under historical lies (again, the “tankie betrayal”), makes it so dealing with anarchists is an incredibly tedious task, and most times useless too. Do you know how frustrating it is to see anarchists romantizicing and idealizing a project they only know about through reading Orwell, having barely 1/4 of the knowledge about it that teenagers where you live have through actually having to study it in high school?
There is only as much time you can stand the treatment of anarchists that I described above before sending left unity to hell and just addressing these peoples telling them to go and burn in a pit of cobras (in my case, it took a decade). I have been in a couple of “left unity” places myself, and every. Single. Time. The whole thing broke apart because of anarchist refusal to even tolerate marxist presence. An anarchist tradition, I guess.