They dislike conversations about operations and planning, and often assume some sort of makeshift improvisation will necessarily work against a larger, better equipped opponents through sheer grit, moxy, and self-righteousness,
This kind of thing just makes it hard for me to believe this person interacts with anarchists in real life. Like yeah, okay, if you hang around teenage anarchists on Twitter you'll see the bottom end of the movement, where there's a lot of fresh energy and a lot of blind naivete.
Most of the rest of the article is on how you need a big enough machine to manage and carry out a successful revolution. I'm not sure any anarchist needs to disagree on that point. I might be willing to concede like Graeber that armed conflict is the one area where anarchist organizational structures don't hold up to their contemporaries, but even that may have changed some with modern conflict like the meme podcast claims. Most of these questions I don't find relevant to my situation, my city, or anyone around me. The tank question is a serious one but you can't pretend that it would make any sense to try to convert the local food/housing horizontal organizing around me, at the behest of everyone involved, to some sort of traditional Marxist party structure, on nothing better than a hunch that that would be more suited to a violent future. Why would we abandon consensus when it works well, and when it gets better with practice? And why would I bother joining the local Trot/ML groups when they are a) all university students while I'm a worker, b) hardly showing up to anything, and c) plagued by power issues like sexual assault scandals that they seem to have no idea how to address other than to cover up and whip the party line on it? ML theory I find very worthwhile for a number of different reasons, but where I am ML practice is a joke.
This sounds ridiculous but in some sense a revolution needs to be inclusive. The more decisions you have to make for other people without their consent, the more you have to ensure someone does something by pointing a gun at them, the more dissent you sow and the harder it is to manage the wave of workers and peasants that don't actually want your revolution, because you're clearly responsible for their deteriorating material conditions. I'm not saying that in a revolutionary situation that's never going to happen, but without at least the influence of the anarchist skepticism of power in a more raw form (and not just capital/empire), I don't have faith that going down a revolutionary road will be any better for most workers than a softer kind of transition.
This kind of thing just makes it hard for me to believe this person interacts with anarchists in real life. Like yeah, okay, if you hang around teenage anarchists on Twitter you'll see the bottom end of the movement, where there's a lot of fresh energy and a lot of blind naivete.
Most of the rest of the article is on how you need a big enough machine to manage and carry out a successful revolution. I'm not sure any anarchist needs to disagree on that point. I might be willing to concede like Graeber that armed conflict is the one area where anarchist organizational structures don't hold up to their contemporaries, but even that may have changed some with modern conflict like the meme podcast claims. Most of these questions I don't find relevant to my situation, my city, or anyone around me. The tank question is a serious one but you can't pretend that it would make any sense to try to convert the local food/housing horizontal organizing around me, at the behest of everyone involved, to some sort of traditional Marxist party structure, on nothing better than a hunch that that would be more suited to a violent future. Why would we abandon consensus when it works well, and when it gets better with practice? And why would I bother joining the local Trot/ML groups when they are a) all university students while I'm a worker, b) hardly showing up to anything, and c) plagued by power issues like sexual assault scandals that they seem to have no idea how to address other than to cover up and whip the party line on it? ML theory I find very worthwhile for a number of different reasons, but where I am ML practice is a joke.
This sounds ridiculous but in some sense a revolution needs to be inclusive. The more decisions you have to make for other people without their consent, the more you have to ensure someone does something by pointing a gun at them, the more dissent you sow and the harder it is to manage the wave of workers and peasants that don't actually want your revolution, because you're clearly responsible for their deteriorating material conditions. I'm not saying that in a revolutionary situation that's never going to happen, but without at least the influence of the anarchist skepticism of power in a more raw form (and not just capital/empire), I don't have faith that going down a revolutionary road will be any better for most workers than a softer kind of transition.