- cross-posted to:
- longform@lemmygrad.ml
- cross-posted to:
- longform@lemmygrad.ml
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Anarchists and M-Ls in the West have the exact same number of tanks and the capacity to produce them: absolutely none. Unless there's a significant number of secret Revolutionary Leftists seeded throughout the armored divisions of the US and its allies, or some massive underground network of tank factories somewhere, this is just making noise.
If you can convince me on how we can a parade of tanks going down the streets of Montreal before the climate apocalypse consumes us all, I'll call myself a tankie, but I'm just not seeing it.
some massive underground network of tank factories somewhere
🤫 You can't tell them about the People's Subterranean Republic yet ffs, they're not ready
Ideally the conflict of open battle won't actually start occurring until after the people have those means through worker councils and the radical membership of unions being willing to seize them. Open warfare in the form described in this article won't occur until long after many factories that are capable of such production have been taken.
Just look at previous revolutions. The civil war doesn't occur until a little while after the initial revolutionary-moment. It is in that revolutionary moment when the state is undergoing crisis that the proletariat suddenly finds themselves in control of the means.
That moment was the moment "all power to the soviets" was declared in Russia. The real open conflict follows the moment that provides the means. Everything up to that point is resistance, movement-building, growth and building the apparatus of dual-power to be capable of making that seizure when the time comes.
Well, sometimes when a Mommy Tank and a Daddy Tank love each other very much, or get caught up in a moment, or sometimes it’s a Deuce and a Half or a Technical...
This was pointlessly condescending. Also no leftists in the west has a single tank (or comparable military arsenal). Get off the computer, hug an anarchist, shut up about this bullshit "tank-mindset" and organize for your local union or help in a refugee camp. This is online posturing in it's most pure form.
ML's can be really condescending which when I was a "lib left" I would turn away.
Obviously this is going to ruffle feathers and be considered "condescending", that's kinda the point I guess and there's clear frustration being communicated by the author. That doesn't mean it's not interesting reading, so i'd hope people can at least read the full thing and engage it in good faith. It is a bit of a meandering rant in how it's written tho.
Also keep in mind words and meaning are weird. I know a bunch of people who call themselves "anarchists" but if you get down to what they want and how it should be done they're just MLs who acknowledge they're living in the empire and right now can't do much more than agitate and build local networks, they work on an ML model (even if they don't know it or use those words).
The way the word anarchy/anarchism is used in that article might not be how you have it in your head. From the context of that article I would actually agree that yes, in that sense, "anarchism" as a large organized force is basically only left in bourgeois western nations and not relevant anymore. That's one point that I feel is often weirdly ignored, the overwhelming rest of the world, especially the working-class, revolutionary global south also operates from this point of view and doesn't consider anarchism relevant. Words matter here too, it's not that "anarchism" is "bad" in that context, it's that that's not how they choose to operate because to them it doesn't work or not efficiently enough.
That's basically where i'm at. I don't dislike anarchism, this isn't about taste or preference. Obviously I love all my comrades, I don't really care what word they use to describe their positions, I care about their actual positions. I feel fucking stupid using words like anarchist or ML as silly little pins that I choose like it's a fucking ice-cream flavour. I'm sure I can re-imagine what the word anarchism could mean to me, but that's pointless. Anarchism as it's defined in its own theory and as it's practiced (and has been practiced) seems to not be relevant anymore except in mostly white, middle-class western nations. At the end of the day whatever my feelings are on it, i'm going to trust the judgment of the global south and the enormous masses of people who managed to fight their revolutions and are building socialism, and go with what makes the most sense and works.
I really wish this topic was more detached from aesthetic and "personal taste", detached from a real or imaginary sense of belonging to a "group" or identity. I don't feel angry or annoyed or attacked when someone talks about tankies, MLs or whatever, because I don't even think they're talking about me, it's not a defining characteristic of my existence, or a hobby. It's like saying "are you a cool heliocentrist or a dumb geocentrist?", i'm sorry what? How is that in any way a "group" or an identity to be associated with? It's a specific theory, I don't have a "personal" say in which one is cool or not, I just try to get informed and figure out which one is the most correct and useful in reaching solutions. Saying "geocentrism doesn't seem to reach working solutions and be a useful theoretical tool anymore, in fact most of the science community has now updated their theoretical models to heliocentrism" isn't somehow "condescending" to geocentrism.
It weirds me the fuck out that in the west we've managed to embed those words so deeply into a vocabulary of individual perception, emotions or aesthetic, as if they constitute identity categories and not theoretical models and strategies.
Sorry that was probably a mostly incoherent rant.
I enjoyed your rant. I feel like this ice cream flavourish over-identification with what amounts to little more than floating signifiers - and the reflexive defensiveness of what is perceived to be 'your team' - is a phenomenon of consumer culture so deeply ingrained in subjects of the imperial core, it is the single greatest obstacle to material change.
The article literally says that lol
Well, in order to get tanks, you need … a tank factory. Yes, this is the answer to where tanks come from.
How do we resolve internal conflicts and disputes? Do we simply vote on it? Everyone? Constantly, while also trying to fight?
Yes, voting. Yes, everyone. No, inbetween the fighting, there's enough time to do democracy.
I liked this article, but I do feel like the author wrote against (or for, in a way) the mythical online anarchists to a fault. Most people, I presume, would accept historical pirates as anarchist ideologues - declaring themselves to be Free of The Empire and all that good stuff - yet (and you won't learn this by reading Engels or Lenin) they were indeed capable in a fight, able to cooperatively steer/control a ship on the high seas in and out of battle. They simply voted for their captains and their first mates and they acted accordingly when they felt the personal in hierarchical power betrayed the crew. Again, for the tankies in the back (and possibly misguided baby-anarkiddies), anarchism isn't about the abolition of all hierarchy, it is about the dismantling of all unjust hierarchies.
To claim that you need tanks to fight tanks sounds inherently sensible on the surface, but it is blind to the fact that any modern day conflict of revolutionary scale will be inherently asymmetrical - and you really don't need tanks (or rather; you won't have this luxury) in asymmetrical warfare; a rc quadcopter with an ied payload may be both more effective and more efficient, as demonstrated in Syria for example.
When you are more concerned with planning to guillotine/gulag/purge individuals once you have the chance, when you are most concerned with how you might best instrumentalize the labouring classes and squash internal dissent in you purest of pure vanguard - you aren't liberating anyone; you're simply dreaming of becoming the oppressor. Now, I'm not saying that ML doesn't have anything more to offer - but it seems those are the aspects western MLs are most concerned with, which honestly worries me.
Yes, voting.
Well, sometimes. There are a wide variety of group decision making tools and methods and voting is just one of them. Everything else you said I agree with.
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.
