reading the list of ideologies "harmful to the global south" and comparing it to the ideologies that the global south has tried and gotten results from and drawing no conclusions
reading the list of ideologies "harmful to the global south" and comparing it to the ideologies that the global south has tried and gotten results from and drawing no conclusions
damn shame what internet """anarchists""" do to the good name of cool irl anarchists
irl anarchists don't agree with MLs either. People on this site love adding "internet" or "online" before "anarchist" to excuse blatant sectarianism
I know, I'm talking specifically about making fuckin polandball tierlists about it
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it's more my experience that anarchists I've met who avoid the internet just don't care about the debates at all. They don't tend to agree with Marxists, but also don't think the debate is very important
This has been my experience as well. Most of them (us) just aren't all that interested in having the theory debate most of the time. I have strong principled commitments to anarchism, and some theory disagreements with MLs, but I can and do work with MLs in the real world. The world we live in is so far away from the one where those theory disagreements will practically matter that they might as well not exist.
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Yeah, I think all of that is right. There's so far to go before we even start to approach that problem, though, that sectarianism at this point seems ridiculous. If and when we get to the point of revolution, it will become a live question. Until then, though, we effectively all want the same thing.
It may not even be too intense of a question depending on how power is gained and when. I personally see China's development as a synthesis of anarchist elements during the cultural revolution and more traditional ML party structure. China's urban/rural divide represent different land management systems for instance as well. Cuban syndicalists/unions also frequently collaborate with the state in a similar way.
In those situations though the primary enemy was imperialism. Depending on how things go in the west, the anarchist/ML divide may not even be an issue, or it won't manifest that way. That's what I've always imagined, that the situation of an earnest socialist insurgency in the west would be such a drastically different situation that what we have now that there's probably going to be full volumes of new theory that have to be written.
That's a better way to put it, and I agree. I think sometimes people imagine that revolution in (say) the US would just look like the October Revolution come again. It won't. Our material conditions are vastly different, and the theory, tactics, concerns, and problems will be vastly different as well. There's certainly no need to do the enemy's work for him and reproduce the problems of the past before we even get to that juncture, and things may be so different we never need get there at all.
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Maybe where you're at is where they are logging on from? If MLs can make common cause with Islamicists for the sake of anticolonial struggle, anarchists should be able to tolerate MLs for the purpose of opposing their much more present common enemy. The basis of "big tent" theory is that groups should mutually tolerate each other, and groups that cannot do not receive the same protections. Your argument is essentially "all real anarchists are hopelessly sectarian, so speaking as though the non-sectarian ones are the preferable ones is itself sectarian". If you were right -- and you demonstrably aren't -- all you'd be arguing for is that anarchists cannot function in a big tent.
CC: @kleeon@hexbear.net
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That's plainly not what we're talking about here, again see my example of MLs and Islamicists.
Ones that have their heads screwed on tight enough to not be fixated on talking bullshit about other countries when their own is a neoliberal hellscape. We criticize China all the time, and there are weird cases of softballing like with revisionism in Yugoslavia, but I think that's just because so few people care to investigate it in one direction or another.
In one case anarchists failed to organize in a way that didn't cause them to produce more fascist militants than they killed, and in the other they just failed to organize period. If you're holding up Makhno as the highest aspiration of big tent initiatives, I'd suggest retirement.
Sure, but that's because the socdems want to defend capitalism and the anarchists (the ones who fall under the aegis, anyway) don't.
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I am begging you to think about this dialectically. Obviously, I am not saying "Islamists are good friends to Marxists". Generally, I would hold the opposite to be true. That having been said, we can see today in Palestine and sometimes other places that MLs and Islamists can work together quite well when they have a common enemy that they oppose more than each other. Even in the best of circumstances, it is a partnership that will end in bloodshed as they turn on each other following the hypothetical defeat of their colonial oppressors, but for a stretch of time it works quite well.
Exactly this is what I am saying of the anarchists and Marxists in, for example, America. Perhaps it will come to an end that one or the other won't like, but if an anarchist thinks it is more worth it to fight muh tankies than to join hands with them to fight fascists, they are smoking crack.
Rojava is worth mentioning but Zapatistas, in the main, aren't anarchists and vociferously object to such a label.
Part of the issue here is the simple inadequacy of anarchism with large-scale organizing and its natural opposition to compromise. What do you expect the PRC to do that would allow a show-and-tell anarchist to feel satisfied? To have a little commune or syndicate? But then mustn't such an entity be beholden to laws at a higher level, in both a theoretical and practical sense, to not just be a liability to the state and a cult-in-the-waiting? Doesn't sound very horizontal to me!
Of course, what I would consider a serious anarchist is someone who supports the revolution that feeds the children while pushing in the direction of horizontality, and by such a definition surely they should be happy with the implementation of, for example, the Tae-an farming system in the DPRK. But one who it more interested in spreading a religion of anarchism, to whom feeding the children with any verticality involved is an insidious deception, the fact that those collectives still must answer to the state means that any virtue they have is farcical.
Your sectarianism is my tolerance paradox, I guess, and it's indeed part of the insidiousness of capital that it's quite willing to compromise when it needs to.
"Socdem" is a difficult term to use the way you've expressed it because the term has a long and varied history with many offshoots in usage. The way that HB usually phrases it is that the people you just identified are in large part actually demsoc, and I think that phrasing is fair. One could also argue that the true dividing line is if the so-called demsoc believes revolution isn't the best strategy, or would actually oppose revolution should it appear seriously viable, with the uprising already underway.
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There are plenty of MLs in the IWW comrade, this isn't even close to an accurate take. Touch grass.