I don't mean to call anyone out - I despise conflict, especially of the sectarian variety.
I wrote the following in response to someone's assertion that all anarchism is, amounts solely to fighting in the streets, but it is a more general response to how I feel about the community in general - vis-a-vis Marxist-Leninists in particular. Since this comm. is fairly quiet, I figured I'd put it here as I spent a lot of time writing it and it would be a shame if no one saw it. 😑
I am becoming more and more convinced that the ML crowds that are the loudest proponents of 'read history' and 'read theory' do absolutely neither.
Anarchism is one of the prestige forms of socialism - it was half of the First International, and, just like Marxism, was disseminated and adopted throughout the world during the 19th and 20th centuries.
- Even during Marx's time, one of the most informative experiences of the era was that of the Paris Commune - heavily contributed to by anarchists.
- The Russian revolution was not undertaken solely by a cadre of intellectual vanguardists - it was facilitated by the formation of the proletariat and peasantry into trade unions, factory committees and worker's soviets - at this time, Lenin et al weren't even in the country due to exile.
- Even Lenin on his deathbed spoke of 'witnessing the resurrection of the tsarist bureaucracy to which the Bolsheviks had only given a Soviet veneer'; after the civil war rejecting the popular demand for socialism via worker-control and disbanding organisations like parties, committees and soviets - not to mention utilising force when necessary such as at Kronstadt. This is not a blunt stab at the Bolsheviks - it is important to note the Marxist Contradiction: That the Bolshevik state was established to achieve socialism and to represent the interests of the proletariat - yet, at the opportunistic post-Civil War moment to do so, they declined, instead favouring the opposite.
- Mao himself read anarchist theory and was inspired by it - beyond being a passing interest as a young man, it likely fed the basis of his later departures from Marxist-Leninism and criticisms of state bureaucracy.
- In Korea, anarchists established the Korean People's Association - an autonomous confederation of 2 million people, operating on a mutual aid based economy.
- It would be folly to discount entirely the efforts of the Spanish anarchists in establishing 'actually existing socialism' in Catalonia and Andalusia - money was abolished, productivity increased, and thousands took up arms in horizontal armies to fight the fascists. Putting aside issues of ideological supremacy, these are real, material impacts that in some cases have lasting effects - even today the municipality of Marinaleda maintains a system of mutual aid, collective ownership and autonomy.
- In Cuba, anarchists lent their support to the revolution wholeheartedly - joining the guerilla groups fighting Batista directly.
- Edit: Of course, how could I forget the Zapatistas? They currently control a sizeable territory in Mexico, and have been directly addressing the needs of their largely rural and underprivileged citizens for over 25 years.
etc.
In many of these cases, anarchists have repeatedly facilitated revolution, and even established instances of real, tangible socialism. That they did not survive suppression and encirclement is not proof of their lack of capacity for success - if such a thing was true, the Soviet Union would never have been established (on the basis of historical revolutionary suppression and exile) nor should there be Marxist-Leninists left now that it has been dismantled.
The assertion that anarchist movements are prone to corruption and co-option by reactionaries is also flawed - the same applies to Marxist-Leninist parties too. There is no shortage of ML parties in various countries extolling reactionary views today, and the conditions that led to the dismantling of the USSR can be seen as exactly this phenomenon - the undermining of public trust in the party by propaganda and the infiltration of the party itself by opportunists and yes-men for the purpose of usurping it.
How can Marxist-Leninists say with confidence that their method is the only scientific application of Marxism; lambasting others for their perceived vulnerabilities to Western capital; when not even their prestige test-case itself was immune? How can we be expected to fall in line with the logic "The Marxist-Leninist state was undermined and dismantled. The solution is Marxist-Leninism."
Finally, why is it that calls for 'Left Unity' apply solely to Marxist-Leninism - that we should overlook our differences in their favour in the interest of the bigger picture, yet you will find nothing in kind from them?
I have spent years carrying water for ML ideologies - for the USSR, for China, etc. - against my personal beliefs and better judgment in the interest of internationalism and anti-imperialism. The least I expect, is to be treated like a communistic equal, fighting in the same struggle.
Instead, our communities are filled with Marxist-Leninists quotebombing dissenters with Lenin and stamping on anarchists at every possible opportunity - only occasionally moderating themselves with a token "I have many anarchist friends, but..." or "I support left unity, but..."
Put aside your wretched egos for once in your lives. Consider the fundamentals of our theory and praxis - that material conditions around the world and throughout history are not uniform. There may indeed be cases where Marxist-Leninism is the most effective - I claim that in earnest.
Will you be able to acknowledge the possibility of cases where anarchism is the most viable? Especially when anarchism spans such a range of approaches and theories - from syndicalism to mutualism to synthesism.
You need to be aware, that for many people, the barrier to the adoption of Marxist-Leninism is not simply the influence of Western propaganda, or the the lack of 'reading theory' - it is our diametric opposition to hierarchy in any form. That does not preclude our contributions to your causes - it means that they are done voluntarily.
The truest demonstration of Left Unity for me, will be when I don't feel like an outsider, as a communist within the communist community.
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Mass line would improve on this issue no? I think it's important to note that almost no MLs are anti-maoism, in fact most are explicitly Maoist but only where appropriate. Lots of Maoist theory is specifically built for the political and geographical location it was formed in however I don't know any MLs that are explicitly against improvements in party organisation and method of collaborating with the masses that he brought to the table. ML +M(Where appropriate) seems to be where every ML is these days, most just say ML because for convenience.
Mass Line as it is formulated is mostly just a long workaround to the inherent problems of leadership and concentrated authority. It has potential... but why not just do away with the bourgeois concept of "leadership" entirely, spread out roles amongst as many people as possible, and elevate every revolutionary to the point where there is no in-group or out-group at all?
The tendency of a centralized party structure with no checks on it is to become absolutist and contrarian, to harbor patterns of abuse, and to eliminate dissenters.
Mostly because we believe you need it right now in order to be able to respond to capitalist aggression effectively. They (the capitalists) use the people against us and if that takes hold it results in disaster, not to mention that events occur that are sudden and complex which a small leadership group may be capable of learning all the information about in a short space of time in order to respond to it that the larger bulk of society won't be able to learn about and come to an agreement on fast enough for the response to be adequate.
The solution is to involve as much of society as humanly possible in the party while having a structure and pathway within the party. Embed it into everything and anything. If society and the party merge then ultimately when hierarchy is no longer needed to oppose the capitalist aggression then struggle will break out within society to eliminate the remaining new socialist hierarchy. I think that if our struggle in capitalist hegemony can be considered to be class-struggle against class hierarchy, I believe the struggle within socialist hegemony (after capitalism is gone) will be the new hierarchy of leadership and led. This will then give way to elimination of leadership.
I don't think you can do this now. An adequate and fast concentration of forces is required that requires people dedicated to the task of making those decisions as a full-time responsibility. In essence the situation is un-ideal and requires an un-ideal solution that must later be struggled against after securing victory against the current contradiction. Mass line and integration of the party into all areas of society is at least going to mitigate the worst of evils of state, because through this what you are doing is merging the people and the state.
The problem you have here is that in order to achieve our goals this is a necessary aspect of revolution and defending the revolution. No matter what happens, no matter what kind of revolution we have, this is a power that will be used and is a power that must continue to be used until reactionary forces no longer exist. I don't mean this in the sense of murdering reactionaries of course, although that will occur, but even in the sense of elimination through re-education, it is something that must continue to exist until capitalism is gone. How do you propose to check this while also recognising that it MUST continue to be a power used while capitalist forces seek to destroy our gains? If we over-check it then we kneecap our ability to stop reactionary forces destroying our project through a 5th column or through the national-bourgeoisie whereas if we under-check it then it gets wielded as a weapon to destroy us if reactionaries ever take over leadership in the project.
That's a good recap on things but there are a few things i would point out.
You say that a central leadership is needed to quickly manouvre against capitalist aggression, but are there any cases there apart from warfare where you have to be that quick that the decisions can't travel up to the main governing body in like i don't know, a week or even way faster with today's tech? And even if we're talking about warfare, you can do what the iroquis did: the main governing body makes the decisions about it but the smaller units can put in a veto in it. The Ukrainian's anarchists strategic mastermind was Makhno but all his tactical decisions had to go through a column and that didn't bother thm as much as the fact that they were fighting with stones basically. Guerilla warfare also is stronger if it's not revolving around one central leadership but is a network of multiple coordinated groups. This is just an example, i'm not trying to disprove you btw just to show that there were other successful models.
Also the thing with being top heavy is that a party can paint a crosshair on a leader which the reactionary forces will absolutely happy to target at, why do you think it's rather a strength and not a weakness? For example if this wasn't the problem in Burkina Faso, than what? (Note: I know jack shit about Burkina Faso apart from that France killed Sankara and from that point the ervolution was basically over)
The thing with this is that as anarchists movements are bottom-top structured there's less chance of infiltration because the project starts when people are on board with it and this is a very important point. You said that the mass line is about putting the party in every people's lives so the party basically becomes society, that is a valid way, but for anarchists it is the other way around, it's about building society first then comes the "party" It's safe too because if there are reactionary elements in the society, it's society that expulses them, not a secret police - however there's bigger flexibility in anarchist movements because you don't have to fall in line to be a part of society until you're not straight up destructive.
As for over and underchecking, most anarchist/ic projects' structure makes it really difficult to hijack them. Administrative positions are rotational, for example. Thing is that they are structured in a way that if someone clearly tries to distract a project than it's easier to get rid of them than for them to exert real power over the movement.
I am really bad at writing long rants btw
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I mean i was specifically talking about direct warfare, which fortunately isn't happening in any of these countries because i consider that to be the kind of thing that needs quick decisions.
But it's good that you mention Cuba, because it's clearly different from the others and is one of the ML projects that has close to unilateral support from society, which is key if you are fighting a political war that's going on against these countries. To me i think this is the reason they're dealing with the pressure better than others and why the empire can't get a grip on them. Bolivia is similar, because before Evo in El Alto there was already a tremendous effort in grassroots organizing that just went on without representation and then became a basis of his coming to power.
The thing with the Uighurs is that while these attacks might have been influenced by the US (and most probably were), this thing goes way back before the us even thought about Xinjiang, things probably went awry when China and the USSR were having a feud over the control of the territory without any care about the people's wellbeing, so the US could tamper because there was a societal tension they could organize a terror cell behind. And while i still don't agree with how they handle the case i would argue that they don't fall under the category i mentioned because they already had their revolution. So what i want to say is, that yes, the Uighur problem can't be solved with anarcjistic methods because for that the Chinese power structure would have to be torn down and rebuilt from the bottom up which they in their position can't afford and it's completely okay. I mean it's not okay, but it's understandable that they went that way and i think there's no turning back at their point, so good luck for them.
What i was saying was more about future projects: A 5th column is much harder to create if there is a unified society that can block these attempts at their roots aka making sure that the tensions can't be created or artificially exaggerated. That's pretty much the case in Bolivia, the movement is much more independent there from MAS than it seems, early on there were huge protests against Evo in El Alto because they tried to privatize the water service, but the people living there didn't like the idea. It wasn't privatized in the end. And as we saw last year even this way they can be very easily mobilized.
And of course there's the problem of dealing with domestic capitalists that you mentioned but it's not at all against anarchist theory to take drastic measures against people who are openly trying to destroy the revolution which is for some reason a common misconception about them.
This sounds more like received dogma than anything.
Don't you think that each person having a stake in how it's done, a feeling of self-ownership, would induce people to resist capitalist methods? Why is having one small group of people that has stratified power over others ("leadership") better than having many small groups of people with a united cause?
An in-group of a party leadership structure is extremely prone to groupthink and to missing things that "flatter" organizational structures would catch. More minds thinking about a problem means better answers. Subordinate minds don't produce answers as well as autonomous minds do. A party leadership is also a huge target for capitalist forces: if they know who your leader is, they can incapacitate you easily by striking at, threatening, or negotiating separately with the leader. It's no coincidence that both cops and military intelligence are obsessed with "finding out who's in charge" or "who the leader is". Ultimately, aggregating all roles of power into one "leadership" category is risky, and is counter-productive to revolutionary pursuits IMO.
Again, this sounds dogmatic. What guarantees that after defending a hierarchy this whole time, that we'll shift gears and dismantle it? Habits matter; culture matters; behavioral inertia matters, just as much for organizations as for individuals. You have to have some consistency of your ends with your means. If you predict that something is going to happen beyond your lifetime, and you don't do anything to set it in motion or at least parallel it in some form, then you might as well admit to yourself that it is never going to happen; it is utopian, deus-ex-machina, wishful thinking for there to be a discontinuity sometime in the future. That's basically saying "I'm not going to do anything to solve this, I'm going to leave it all to future generations of revolutionaries". And no wonder revolutionary progress gets stalled. You need the sprouts of what you look forward to, or else it will never be harvested.
Consider modern warfare, especially what the US has engaged in. No centralized armed force has been able to fight the US and win. It's guerrilla warfare, not command-and-control, that has stymied the ability of the US to conquer. Whether it's the Internet or a slime mold or a combat force, the decentralized model is far more resilient and adaptable than the centralized one.
I think what you're trying to say is that "during a combat situation, we need one person (or a few people) in strategic control", and I agree, but that's not what "general leadership" means I just don't think that role should persist outside the scope of combat. Algonquian peoples, Nahuatl peoples, and colonial-age pirates all knew this, and had separate and limited domains for their war leaders. There are many ways to be a contributor or an expert at something; "leadership" means that one person (or one chain of command) does all these roles. And that's too much to ask for one person/CoC. It's much more efficient, and avoids the bottleneck and assassination problems if you distribute the roles. E.g. your dominant economic planner, your battle captain, your political theorist, and your highest council of dispute resolution are all different people, and none of these quantifiably have power over another.
No. I do not. For the reasons outlined in this post giving examples of those methods: https://hexbear.net/post/48138/comment/441948
Your conception of what "capitalist methods" are needs to broaden to include far more complex and nuanced attack methods that you are currently imagining. Good old community spirit doesn't overcome racial prejudices when people's families are being cut into pieces in the streets by religious zealots that are being associated with a minority race.
Historical materialism does. Contradiction gives rise to struggle. If a contradiction exists then struggle to eliminate it occurs. This occurred with tribes, it occurred with slavery, it occurred with monarchies, it occurred with mercantilism, it is occurring now with class struggle under capitalism, and it will occur in the socialist phase of our societal development. You can call that dogmatic but there is not a single example to refute it. You're imagining something occurring without any evidence or historical basis for it. This argument boils down to "What if your imperfect society creates conditions the make it impossible to achieve our perfect society?" and it is very odd because conditions currently exist that make it impossible to achieve the perfect society we all want anyway. We simply can't jump from where we are to the perfect communist utopia we all agree that we want. There must be a step between. Yes that step will not be perfect. It will however still be better than it currently is.
You are in persistent combat forever until all the capitalist countries are gone. "Peace" only exists in that there is not an ongoing actual battle with people shooting bullets at each other but that by no means means maneuvers and strategies to bring about the elimination your entire society are not occurring at all times. Just because the shooting has stopped does not mean they aren't implementing an active ongoing strategy to destroy you that requires an active and ongoing response from people with the fulltime responsibility to perform that role. The problem however is that the response required is not as simple as shooting back or moving some tanks, complex attack exists at a societal and cultural level.
Tribes still exist. Slavery definitely still exists, with more people enslaved than ever before. Monarchies still exist, and far from dying out, de facto monarchies have popped into existence frequently enough. Feudalism and mercantilism didn't vanish, so much as they made the small evolution to capitalism to stabilize themselves while keeping their characteristic traits of economic domination by a minority. The above are all parts of a genetic lineage of "the predatory phase of human history". Communism necessarily needs to escape that whole branch, not to continue along it, and reach the separate branch that contains primitive communism. You can't say that just because there's a contradiction that it will necessarily result in progress, that it won't be resolved by a status that is stable yet results in untold amounts of human misery.
I'm not imagining something, you are projecting and doing an inversion. This discussion is about the validity of ML as a political strategy to achieve communism, and the concept of a dictatorship "of the proletariat" that ends itself of its own accord. Neither of these have come to pass. ML regimes have made notable progress, but there is nothing to suggest that they ended up on a course to end capitalism globally; they have invariably all stalled out. Dictatorships don't just voluntarily cede power, there is not a single case you can name when that has happened. It doesn't matter how saintly your dictator is, they are still human, they are still subject to the availability bias, and this will inevitably result in people close to them being structurally favored in society (stratified).
Maybe if there was a recent real-world example of exactly the situation you are suggesting, let's say, a socialist polity that's under attack by Western-backed religious fundamentalists and also by ethno-imperialists. Maybe their military command doesn't extend beyond the armed forces at all; maybe they even have a military that requires you to learn decolonial and feminist perspectives, and has further institutional protections to prevent the military from perpetuating a hypermasculinized culture of violence. I can't quite put my finger on it. Can you name an example of this?
Fuck me. Not as a global system of organising society. How can I have a conversation with you about this topic if you're not going to engage it from a basic ground in socialist theory? Both anarchist and ml theory all holds its roots in marx's work, you can't ignore historical materialism or make arguments that make claims that completely disregard all the points of historical materialism. Do you understand the concept? Have you actually read the foundation works of everything all of our theory and movements have built off of for the last 250 years? Their piecemeal existence is a part of the structure of capitalism today. Not the basis of the organisation of society.
You absolutely can't make that assessment because the conditions for it to come to pass, which have been repeatedly stated for the last 250 years, have not occurred. It will not come to pass until capitalism is gone. It will not come to pass until socialism is the basis of organisation of society. That is not the case. We live in a capitalist organised world. This only confirms my belief that you haven't actually read any of theory at all, you're making arguments that claim things haven't happened that nobody has said should have happened, literally nobody claimed these things would occur under the conditions that we live in. The ONLY time that the state will begin to fade away it is no longer required in order to protect the dictatorship of the proletariat -- it exists to protect the dictatorship of the proletariat from capitalist attack, it will begin to fade when that threat no longer exists because we will restructure resources that are will be wasted defending us from... Nothing. Those conditions and ONLY those conditions have ever been the claim of Marx and everyone ever since him. Please read the theory properly. Nobody has made any claim that it would happen while capitalism is still the method of organising society in the world.
Did you just completely ignore the comment I linked to and told you to read?
Lmao at 150-year-old theory being the foundation and sine qua non of all socialist/communist projects going back 250 years. This is what dogma does to your brain. Just accept the text harder, if you don't see how it has all the answers then you're just not believing in it enough. You treat Marx's work like fundies treat the Bible.
If your understanding of communism was strong enough to hold up to criticisn, you could explain it in a way that makes sense, and wouldn't have to throw "that's not what I meant, read all this one guy's stuff".
Marxist historical analysis is a way of explaining general changes ex post facto. It doesn't "predict" things the way scientific theories do.
It sounds like you're saying that we can't fully do away with earlier stages (tribes, feudalism) until we finally achieve the last stage of development. Just a couple more lifetimes, keep the faith.
Wow TIL states have never faded away in the past 10,000 years of human existence. I was really hoping for a counterexample that disproves the assertion there, but I guess there is none.
You mean the one I quoted? Answer the question instead of trying to change the subject.
Is there a socialist-ecologist-feminist polity out there, maybe somewhere in western Asia, with an updated strategy on countering the pitfalls of "leadership", or isn't there?
Look, I'm not going to read this after reading the first sentence. I'm not going to continue a discussion with someone that wants to be hostile, aggressive or insult the other side in every single comment. It's not a good faith exchange and this is supposed to be a unity website, rethink that.
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This is an interesting thought and now that you mention it I think it's why Mao got a lot of influence from anarchists too. The very nature of Maoism and protracted people's war relies heavily on the support of local populations which relies heavily on leveraging relationships in exactly the manner you're describing.
This obviously falls apart when you replace the mountains and farmland for very urban settings though.
Community operated internet is probably the correct pathway towards making a modern Maoist movement work against more modern militaries because you can't just broadcast a radio station like older guerillas used to do in order to put out propaganda. Building internet networks and communications for local communities would allow you to also put propaganda up that would be harder to track down. I imagine these days if you broadcasted a radio station it wouldn't be very long before the exact location is tracked and a drone hits it.
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