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.
Again, read about the Four Elders, beginning with Zhang Renjie. Staunch anti-communist anarchists that held enough influence inside the KMT to influence Chiang Kai-shek to initiate a purge against communists that killed in a single blow more marxists than in all events of "betrayal" against anarchists together.
Of course you will never hear of this event from an anarchist, since it goes completely against the myth of christian-like martyrdom and persecution they love to surround themselves with.
I feel like the distinction between right-wing and left-wing anarchy should be of some importance?
I genuinely don't see how I have any similarities in ideology to a person who would genocide leftists and communists, as well as establish their friend as a national ruler for 46 years. It seems like the man just said whatever he thought people wanted to hear so he could retain his wealth and power. A politician.
I don't trust someone's ideology immediately after they claim they're a leftist, so I don't expect statcoms to do the same, but y'all clearly see us as an enemy, regardless of our material effects. I don't agree that someone who was given anarchism for fun by their girl and then purged leftists is someone I personally consider an anarchist.
That's like saying I bought one Eminem album and now I'm a Stan. Actions speak louder than words, and arguing that since I'm an anarchist I'd somehow be inclined to do the same as Renjie is potato-brained. Were I to do the same, I could continually call statcoms out for purging Jewish people, though that would be equally in bad faith, as the Red Guard did the vast minority of pogroms compared to the White Army and Ukraine.
I don't think I hear about this from anarchists because they have a better grasp on cause and effect than the people who want to try doing exactly what a failed nation and an authoritarian regime have in the past.
Just because you say you're doing a communism doesn't mean you ever did. Unless communism is "when the government does stuff." This is baby shit, the simplest levels of synthesization that I would expect someone able of comprehending theory to understand, if they graduated high school.
That's a nice rant. It's unfortunate that most of it has little to do with what I was talking about in the first place.
My message is not representing a supposed belief that you, dear out of place anarchist, have some kind of deep and hidden urge to grab a sword and start decapitating communists on the streets in the manner in which Renjie's actions resulted in. The premise of my message, since the beginning, is that anarchists as a whole are very prone to embrace a culture of victimisation while being very much ignorant of their less than innocent history (or at least, the one that carries their label) when it comes to either dealing with other leftists or dealing with the populations that their projects encompassed.
The Shanghai Massacre is far from being the only example that exists of anarchists screwing over other leftists, so if in this case you want to dismiss it as "no real anarchism", there is plenty more for you to choose. The CNT/FAI of Spain, the pride of anarchist history and often characterized as brave soldiers of freedom betrayed by the evil stalinist tankies, is as equally guilty of sectarianist offensives, with the reason of them being "purged" (not by a "statcom" NKVD plot, but by the Spanish Republican faction in general) was for blocking communications between heads of government of the Republic during wartime, effectively yielding territory to fascism because their social revolution against the Republic was more important than halting the nationalist armies. Not enough of a good example? Perhaps you may want to research for yourself who was the responsible for the city of Madrid fall to Franco, and which ones his political sympathies were.
Someone wants to be an anarchist? No problem for me. But the same way it is a duty for MLs to have to do extensive research on Gulags, purges and so on, it is also the duty of anarchists to know about the darker parts of their history the same way they often reprimaind MLs for theirs, and perhaps this way learn how hypocritical the "tankies have always betrayed us" argument really is.
Nice self-aggrandizing and frankly pedantic rant, but I wasn't arguing in favor of "tankies have always betrayed us". If you read what I said you can clearly see that I think the poster in the image is acting like a feckless, unread idiot who at best needs to just keep statcoms at arms length. I don't have issue with taking historical actions of people I aspire to into account, but the way you approach it is like a kindergarten teacher.
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.