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.
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.
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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.
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