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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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