https://i.imgur.com/FYeoXx4.png
anti communist propaganda and misinformation about virtually every communist revolutionary leader and movement throughout history has always been one of the most serious impediments to leftist growth in the west. It has created such a deeply ingrained rhetoric that anti communist propaganda has also been actively used by libertarian socialists to coopt movements and take advantage of this deeply ingrained hatred in the west by acting as a surface level alternative. The fact that there is so little pushback against anti communist rhetoric and propaganda among these leftist spaces is telling enough to its usefulness and the rhetoric largely centering around it.
In media you only ever see communism portrayed as the evil Russians that need to be killed and anarchism as the cool defiant and rebellious crowd fighting back against the oppressing government. Its dishonest to dismiss it as nothing important when this continual peddling of misinformation pushed by imperial media at the behest of capitalist interests always finds its way into the left and isn’t only not actually pushed back against, but also actively embraced opportunistically in many cases. I've seen it in many mainstream places including anarchist subs, dsa groups, iron front type antifa groups irl and online, and general "leftist unity" spaces. Its by far the most pervasive narrative on the western left today, and therefor the most harmful.
I'm tired of it being defended, brushed aside, normalized, and rationalized away as just "difference in tendencies", and I find it deeply dishonest to actively enable and not call this out in the name of some presumed "leftist unity". Where is this so called unity exactly? I see only antagonistic and opportunistic use of this anti communism and never any push back against it because its been such a useful rhetoric for this brand of western leftism. How are people still not understanding that this state department pushed rhetoric is an immense impediment towards any large leftist movement?
This is not sectarianism or anti whatever, no one has to be a communist, i have no problem against other tendencies even if we disagree strategically on what the best way forward is. This is just a call for leftists to do better and learn to deprogram themselves and be more critical of their own biases and understand that having grown in a world that has declared war on communism and has engrained in the collective consciousness of the west a deep seethed hatred that they themselves are also exposed and influenced by this. Its everyone's duty on the left to fight back against this petty reactionary rhetoric and get people to stop peddling state department approved narratives.
Communism is kind of the goal whether you are an anarchist or a Leninist.
The issue I see is that people think communist = Stalinist. Even those of us who like Stalin's work wouldn't exactly say we endorse every action the man ever took because we aren't Hegelians.
How do we fight these echoes of the Red Scare? I don't have a single clue. I kind of think we need to build a new tendency that is unqiue to our movement, something international and appropriate for our current age.
Communism will always be just stalinism as long as tankies keep supporting "anti-imperialist" dictators
This kind of hysteria is for the progressive liberals and is unbecoming for a disciplined leftist.
We have Leninists in the public eye now. If you have proof of someone like Brace Belden "supporting “anti-imperialist” dictators" , post it, otherwise, stop swinging at ghosts.
lmao trying to oust completely irredeemable dictators is "liberal hysteria". Are you going to say next that the protesters in thailand are imperialists and the king needs critical support?
Which public Leninist has supported which "irredeemable" dictator?
Do you not post here? We looooooooooove Assad, lukashenko, kim jong un and maduro here
So you are just a liberal hysteric you thinks that critical analysis is the same thing as love and admiration.
Remember kids, we like substantive claims around these parts. We can't prove what this liberal is saying one way or the other. Once again, they are swing at ghosts.
Youre critical analysis is nothing more than admiration you dont think about the actual fucking people having to live in these authoritarian states and every uprising is us backed and insidious
Drawing a line between "Anarchists" and "Communists" is a weird-ass thing to do when the default Anarchist tendency is some flavor of Ancom, and when you insist on doing this it makes it really hard to take your arguments as being in good faith.
Right? The end goal is a stateless, classless society. Anarchists get what they want, Communists get what they want, everyone is happy. We are anti-capitalists and anti-imperialists above all else. Tendency is nothing more than a means to an end, and those means will vary depending on the situation. There is no single correct answer once you expand beyond the community level. Different communities experience different means of oppression, experience different material realities, and face different challenges. They will be forced to take different approaches to overcoming these challenges even if they subscribe to the same theoretical orthodoxy. This is OK. This is cool and good.
(As an armchair radical) What isn't good is this bullshit where armchair radicals and back seat revolutionaries gatekeep the mechanisms by which revolution must take, and discard all deviations as reactionary. A lot of this is due to ignorance, but these antagonisms are easily turned into a negative feedback loop. We should avoid feeding into them.
Call out the obvious wreckers, but when you decide to take a swing at them, either do your homework and calmly present a compelling case, or chill out for a moment. The worst thing you can do is cut corners and provide a lazy argument. This only causes people to circle their wagons and drive the wedge deeper.
The other thing we should avoid is conflating awful social media celebrities with movements. "Communism" and "Anarchism" are both incredibly diverse revolutionary movements with hundreds of years behind them and dozens of subtendencies, and to reduce either to the dimwitted takes of some vain clout-chasing dweebs on the Internet is negligent reductionism. Ignore the dumbasses and their unthinking followers. Remember that corporate social media is a counter-insurgency tool and does its best to promote misleadership. Don't take that anger out on people who are desperately looking for answers in the midst of the crisis of capitalism. Use it productively to steer people towards productive endeavours.
I dont know why its so hard to just accept the very real ingrained anti communism that exists among many anarchists. I'm not talking about the intrinsic ideology, i'm talking about the very real distinction made among many leftists themselves. Go to any anarchist space and see how much anti communist propaganda is really regurgitated openly. I see it all the time, i dont know how you can even claim there's no "line" to be drawn. I used to loosely define myself as an anarchist because it was the most mainstream sort of ideology that opposed capitalism that i was exposed to growing up among skater and rock band culture, and anything related to communism was just extremely sparse to ever be exposed to in the same way. When I go back to these anarchist spaces now the discourse when it comes to anything communist related is just extremely bad and demeaning, and it has to change. Its a feature of ingrained programing, and it manifest itself in libertarian socialist spaces and tendencies because its what most people are largely exposed to because the rhetoric of "the government is corrupt and bad" is an easy enough thing for people to understand and build their ideologies around.
ok but "anti communism" manifest itself as a very specific thing. When we talk about it does it pertain to anarchists or more specifically to specific socialist states, socialist projects, and socialist leaders throughout history? Do anarchists get vilified the way communists do in media and in popular culture and throughout the history of the west? its dishonest to act as if "anti communism" has always been some sort of large prevailing rhetoric that applies to everything the same way. Obviously i'm talking about the specifics of the propaganda that exists in these spaces against what they view as "not real leftists". I'm not excluding anyone from anything, this just seems like dishonest semantics. idk why yall acting like you have no idea what i'm talking about
"Do anarchists get vilified the way communists do in media and in popular culture"
Yes. The average person's idea of a Anarchist is a person that wants a mad max style hellscape. Anarchists are associated with bombs and terrorism.
yes but im not saying "anarchists are anti communists", i'm saying anti communist rhetoric, such as anti ml, anti china, anti ussr, anti dprk, anti cuba, anti venezuela, anti marxist, etc. is prevailing anti communist ideology among libertarian socialist spaces, and often beyond just disagreement and instead just plain peddling of propaganda and misinformation.
Go to any anarchist space and see how much anti communist propaganda is really regurgitated openly.
I've honestly never seen this. I believe you if you say you have; I've certainly never been a part of skater culture, I don't know what they get up to. But I have seen MLs pull a No True Scottsman on every Communist tendency that isn't theirs, so naturally I expect that you're talking about this thing, which I've seen before, rather than the one I haven't.
I've seen it. Even in official moderation, for example sidebar of /r/completeanarchy literally states communists are pro hierarchy and any defence of that is apologia. They also state "Promoting "Left Unity" is also considered apologia." so their position is essentially incompatible with literally every single person that uses ChapoChat and believes in the goals we have here. Almost every single day in that space there's some uncomfortable anti-communist content and it's deeply worry how much of it is being pushed. What's important to understand here that a lot of the time they're just conflating tankie and communist as exactly the same thing, they're against hierarchy, they're against any kind of socialist state, period, and therefore consider communists themselves to be the enemy if any person believes in a transitionary state.
It is definitely a serious thing to be concerned about.
What's important to note here is that I have only seen this in ONLINE anarchist spaces. I have literally never seen it from an anarchist in public that actually does praxis, the one time I saw someone remotely insinuate anything negative like that other more experienced people slapped the remark down. This is an online propaganda. The fear is that it could be limiting actual organising activity if socialists are involved by people that have been sucked into this stuff online not going to them. And by people generally building weird and distorted views.
I mostly just see people make the exact opposite claim, calling all existing socialist states and all communist leaders and revolutions and current communist parties and movements as "not real leftists" or "not real communists". its a brand of western leftism that's much more prevailing than arguments among marxists or other communist tendencies about specific strategies and ideologies.
I have seen both. I have seen self-styled MLs smugly claim that ML-led revolutions were the only successful revolutionary projects ever. I have seen self-styled Anarchists discount all the victories won by Communists as "not real socialism." Primarily, I find these self-assigned labels to be practically meaningless. Your revolutionary tendency is defined much more by your actions than your words, and for the most part, words are the only things the morons saying these things have. I might be most strongly influenced by the writings of MLs, but as long as I am sitting here shitposting on the internet instead of organizing my neighbouring tenants into a vanguard party, I am not an ML. I am a shitposter.
This shit is incredibly stupid. If you are an ML/MLM, one of the first things you should understand is the dialectical relationship between theory and practice. Practice informs theory, which in turn serves practice. This is straight from Mao. This includes Anarchist practice. As long as Anarchist practice is taking place, it will remain a source of empirical knowledge which should continue to inform us as we continue to develop our understanding of revolutionary theory. Regardless of your opinion on the viability of Anarchism in a vacuum, it is undeniably anti-capitalist practice, and thus something to be engaged with and learned from. The tendency to disregard the revolutionary struggles of Anarchism is closed-minded and self-defeating, and the retort that "If Anarchism were so successful, name one Anarchist state." is incredibly stupid.
On the other hand (in my humble opinion), a lot of self-styled Anarchists take anti-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian tendencies to an extremely reductionist and harmful place. A good Anarchist should naturally be suspicious of any hierarchical structure, but hierarchy is an inevitable result of our material reality. The aim shouldn't be to claim that anything with hierarchy in it is bad. Rather, the aim should be to cultivate a deep understanding of how hierarchy influences and corrupts our social structures. You will find hierarchy everywhere. You will find hierarchy in an Anarchist book club where the attendees hold shared respect for their well-read and insightful comrades. The point is to identify harmful hierarchies and take action to eliminate their influence - but this may require force (authoritarianism), and it may require organization (which brings inherit hierarchy with it). A good Anarchist will understand all of this inherently and deal with the trade-offs intelligently, but there are a lot of self-styled Anarchists who assume the position that any hierarchy must be destroyed.
I just don’t understand online anarchism. I haven’t read Kropotkin (but then again, neither do online anarchists), but I have a hard time understanding the objections to "tankies."
Lenin’s conception of a “state” is easy to understand. It’s “an apparatus for the suppression of one economic class by another.” Revise that to socio-economic class if you like, but the the basic idea is that the Bourgeoisie control the state and use it to perpetuate the impoverishment and disenfranchisement of the proletariat. They won’t give this up willingly, so the workers must create for themselves their own (parallel, and then replacement) state that suppresses the the bourgeoisie at the behest of the proletariat. As the bourgeoisie cease to exist, the need for a state decreases, and it will wither and die on its own.
Criticize the actual Soviet siege government all you want, but where is the anarchist disagreement with Lenin? If they want to actually suppress the bourgeoisie, and have some organization to do so, that’s a state. Do they not want to do this? Should billionaires just keep all they own in anarchist society? Online it seems like it never goes any deeper than “all states bad.”
If it’s just “I don’t like democratic centralism, I think control should be more horizontalist” then fine, I’m not sure I disagree, but that’s no reason for the ridiculous infighting.
I'm more or less an ML-Luxemburgist type- but I'll try to give a sympathetic view of the anarchists.
The difference is, very broadly and partially, that Leninists want to take over the state institutions in some recognisable form, while anarchists want to destroy them in their entirety and build them from scratch (the idea being these institutions are designed for class oppression and aren't fit for purpose.) The monopoly of force is a state argument is not a central critique of the state but a description of it in Anarchist writings. Anarchist government seeks to put that directly into democratic hands, meaning the use of force must be collectively re-legitimised in that immediate moment, rather than by the state institutions that are under prole control as in a Leninist framework.
tl:dr It's not that it must be horizontal, it must also be immediate, democratic, and provisional.
I don't call myself a communist that often, but I'm a definite anti-anticommunist.
I came to this website as a free agent with an open mind. I like to dip my toes in everything, a little ML, a little anarchist, and a little succdem (oh the horrors).
If there's anything offputting about Communism/ML, it's its adherents. No sense of humor, intolerant, incredibly tribal, and ruthlessly toxic. And the manipulating and brigading of social media. They just don't play nice or fair.
Hey, thanks for that I've been wondering why people used different abbreviations, but now I realize they are Social Democrat and Democratic Socialist and not both the same thanks to your post :)
If you guys are mad about getting banned all the time maybe you could form a vanguard party and...never mind.
I'd like to point out that it's the MLs who are accused of having no sense of humor, unlike the super cool anarchists
Yes, you are, and a great writer.
But some of these other cats... I go through some China threads and it's like, "I want nothing to do with some of these people."
Aw :3
Maybe my great writing can help you figure out China a little better
Only time I see MLs here being like that is when people parrot CIA talking points or whatever you wanna call it
sounds just like "i won't vote for bernie because his voters are mean" stfu lib
Yeah, a normal empathic response would be, "Wow, sorry you feel that way, I know some MLs can get pretty passionate and upset because they feel it's an uphill battle against Western propaganda, but I'm sure if you stick around and see that not all of us are like that, I think you'll eventually come around."
But you did the most predictable thing and basically confirmed what I was saying.
If there’s anything offputting about Communism/ML, it’s its adherents. No sense of humor, intolerant, incredibly tribal, and ruthlessly toxic
come in here calling all MLs intolerant, humorless, and toxic and expect a fucking welcoming committee? get fucked
Hey look, it's someone else who thinks that online "leftist" spaces are even remotely indicative of how people in real life who want to build communism (whether the anarchist or ML or Maoist flavors, etc etc). This is not a "serious problem" outside of online spaces, and when bad takes come up IRL they are handled way better, and don't devolve into screaming matches and name calling, and is normally something people correct when called out on
I mean people are also just less directly antagonistic in person. I've gone to protests and events and meetings with people who i've then seen post really cringy shit online. Not sure how the two are distinct, and i'm not sure literally throwing the entirety of online discourse on every platform and the large prevailing ideology in these spaces as "not real life" is conducive towards anything useful. People harbor different anti communist ideology, both online and irl and it would be nice if this changed among western leftists. not sure how this is a controversial thing to say.
Sorry, let me pull back on my snarkiness, that's not helping at all here. The part that made me want to reply was this-
" i have no problem against other tendencies even if we disagree strategically on what the best way forward is"
The point I was trying to make is in my experience this is exactly what happens, in real life, especially when you start looking at mutual aid groups or pro-union orgs, etc (I think protests or other looser movements get a mix bag of people).
And as those people build connections, and doubly so if these groups are reading theory and discussing/challenging each other, reactionary sentiments drop away, the intensity of wanting your hyper specific tendency to be the "winning" one falls away, and you wind up engaging in praxis that in theory is building that communism everyone is seeking.
Do I still need to deprogram people or help newbies see things in a different way? Sure! But have I've never had a "Stalin wasn't a real communist" or "anarkiddies are all CIA libs" conversation with anyone who actually stuck with the praxis, you know?
The best way to create actual left unity and resolve the issue you're talking about is to get people to log off and do shit, imo. You forget real quick about what happened in Catalonia or whatever when you're actually engaged in shit. Idk I'm rambling now
lol i was really expecting the response to this post to be more like "yeah there's a lot of reactionary elements among a lot of western leftists and we all need to do better to promote more self criticism" or something idk why ppl find this controversial
Yes I agree with that. All i'm saying is that anti communist rhetoric has been hugely prevailing in the west and idk why all leftists assume it hasn't also affected them too. When you're out doing things it absolutely goes away, but it really doesn't mean people still can't harbor anti communist ideologies. I just find a reluctance to engage honestly with this as a real problem among the western left as something that can have serious consequences down the road.
So, you're definitely right about anti-communist rhetoric on lefty spaces on reddit, but I've seen more anti-anarchism stuff on here so I guess ymmv.
i didnt even mean to create drama lol i wasnt even expecting people to actually be offended or something. literally just saying a lot of people in like dsa and anarchist spaces (broadly libertarian socialists) dont engage honestly with countering their own propagandizing which leads to large infighting and damages the overall leftist movement. how is that even controversial to say?? not saying anything about specific tendencies, just the general prevailing rhetoric
thesis: communism = no food
antithesis: capitalism = eat boot
synthesis: communism = no boot
In media you only ever see communism portrayed as the evil Russians that need to be killed and anarchism as the cool defiant and rebellious crowd fighting back against the oppressing government.
Off the top of my head, I can never remember seeing this. Anarchists are always displayed as crazy, violent, or insane.
How is that bullshit? Its literally how its always portraited in movies, tv, games, books, its always been presented in the mainstream in an intrinsically different way than communism has.
I'm talking about the portrayal of anarchism itself in mainstream media and culture. I was constantly exposed to at least surface level anarchism among skater and underground rock scenes while growing up. It was a prevailing positive rhetoric of the ideology if not overly distilled, but there's a distinct difference in how western society portrays anarchism vs communism. I only ever saw communism as the bad guys you kill in video games. The deep anti communist rhetoric prevailing in the west always set up this situation and created a culture where "anarchism" becomes an easily accessible counter culture ideology and rhetoric for people to get into and get more familiarized and learned with.
Talk to me when some mainstream film shows anarchism as an actually socialist anti-hierarchical ideology that doesnt want fucking Mad max.
I don't watch films, but Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines has an entire faction of vampires literally called Anarchs. Now, capitalism and anti-capitalism are kind of irrelevant to vampires in that setting (since their system is more feudal) but they're definitely portrayed as a functional group of people without authority over one another and in opposition to the "standard" feudal system vampires use. They're also pretty uncritically treated as the "good guys" of the story, and the only people not trying to fuck you over as the main character.
I'm sure I could come up with more examples, but that one was easy off the top of my head.
please quote anywhere in this thread that i am "crying" or "moving the goalposts" you fucking clown
So ... just showing anarchism in action doesn't count, they've gotta break the 4th wall and say, "This is anarchism, these people would be doing xyz if they existed in your time and place in the real world."
Gotcha. Well, I see you've intentionally set the bar such that no media ever has or ever will clear it. Have fun with that, I guess.
Yes it is portrayed as that in some media, tho is it among actual counter culture? Not at all. Also do i seriously have to explain the difference between one thing being portrayed as "juvenile" and the other as a murderous fascist ideology that evil people who want to take over the world espouse? fps shooters literally get boiled down to "murder the evil commies" like all the fucking time. how the hell do you equate that to anarchism being seen as "immature"
They do just not in the same way communism has been largely presented. Anarchism has never been vilified the same way communism has. Its ridiculous we actually have to argue about this.
Underground rock and skater scenes =/= mainstream media
its literally mainstream counter culture, who isn't exposed to it growing up that gravitates towards that? and it makes its way into mainstream media too
there wouldn't be a mass propaganda campaign against it if it was ineffective. anarchists should recognize this simple fucking fact.
