Also this is neither here nor there but I noticed how much the Bakunin/Krotopkin VS Marx/Lenin shit is played up in online discourse. When I actually read their discussions recently they just talked about how they are unequivocally allies against capitalism and need to protect each other. I mean maybe I haven't read enough.
:left-unity-3:
EDIT:
"How glad I am to see you, Vladimir Ilyich! You and I have different views. We have different points of view about a whole series of problems, both as far as the execution and organisation is concerned, but our goals are the same and what you and your comrades are doing in the name of communism, pleases me very much and makes my already ageing heart happy. But now you are making life hard for the cooperatives and I am in favour of tcooperatives!"
"But we are also in favour of them!", Vladimir Ilyich exclaimed loudly, "only we are opposed to cooperatives behind which kulaks, big landowners, merchants and private capital hide. We only want to tear off the mask of these pseudo-cooperatives and give the opportunity to big layers of the population to participate in a real cooperatives!"
"I do not want to dispute that," Kropotkin replied, "and where that is the case it obviously needs to be combated by all means, just as lies and mystification need to be combated everywhere. We do not need veils, we have to uncover every lie without mercy, but there in Dmitrov I have seen that more than once members of the cooperative are being persecuted who have nothing in common with those you were talking about a minute ago, and that is because the local authorities - who were perhaps the revolutionaries of yesterday - just like all other authorities have become bureaucratised, have been transformed into officials who wish to do with their subordinates whatever they want, and who think that the whole population is subordinate to them."
"We are always and everywhere against officialdom," Vladimir Ilyich said. "We are against bureaucrats and against bureaucracy, and we have to eradicate this ageing mess completely if it grows up in our new society; but surely you understand, Pyotr Alexeyevich, that it is very difficult to change people, since the most inaccessible fortress is surely - as Marx used to say - the human skull! We take all kinds of measures in order to be able to face this struggle, and life itself obviously teaches us a lot. Our lack of culture, our illiteracy, our backwardness are of course noticeable, but nobody can blame us, as a party, as a state power, for all that is going wrong in the institutions of power and much less for what happens far away somewhere in the countryside, at great distance from the centre of the country."
"Of course, that is no consolation for all those who are exposed to the exertion of power of that backward kind of authority," P.A. Kropotkin exclaimed, "and that authority in itself is already a terrible poison for anyone who exercises it."
"But there is nothing we can do about that," Vladimir Ilyich added, "you cannot make a revolution with velvet gloves. We know very well that we have made a great many mistakes and that we will make a great number of mistakes; everything that can be corrected we correct; we admit our mistakes and often our greatest stupidities. Despite all mistakes we are carrying our socialist revolution to a successful end. But please do help us, share all of the mistakes that you see with us, and rest assured that every one of us will look at it with the greatest attention."
"Neither me, nor anyone else," Kropotkin said, "will refuse to help you and your comrades wherever that is possible... We will tell you about all the mistakes that are happening, which cause loud groans in many places..."
"No groans, but screams from resisting counterrevolutionaries, whom we are and remain utterly opposed to..."
"Now you are saying that we cannot do without authority," thus Pyotr Alexeyevich started to theorise, "but in my opinion it is possible... You should see how such an anti-authoritarian beginning flares up. In England for example - I was just informed about this - dockworkers in one of the ports have established a wonderful, completely free cooperative, where workers of all other factories come and go. The cooperative movement is important to a great extent, yes, it is of the essence..."
Just pick out any sentence here, they are obviously comrades who disagreed. Also Krotopkins optimism about England has not exactly aged well lol. Lenin is right. But Krotopkin is a good grandpa
I think we need some sort of new synthesis. We need to discard the tendencies of old and create our own theory that is founded in the material conditions of the present. That said I feel like anarchism is an evergreen term for the goal we all seek. That is a classless stateless society. Should we not then realign around that label? If communism has been so poisoned in western spaces shouldn't we maneuver around that and use whatever labels and words we have at our disposal to advance our goals?
I don't think it's that simple, and anarchists VS reds today are still a valid philosophical distinction. The US isn't the whole world either, this distinction has importance in other countries e.g Vietnam. But speaking to the US specifically, there's no reason these two groups can't unite.
Also this is neither here nor there but I noticed how much the Bakunin/Krotopkin VS Marx/Lenin shit is played up in online discourse. When I actually read their discussions recently they just talked about how they are unequivocally allies against capitalism and need to protect each other. I mean maybe I haven't read enough.
:left-unity-3:
EDIT:
Just pick out any sentence here, they are obviously comrades who disagreed. Also Krotopkins optimism about England has not exactly aged well lol. Lenin is right. But Krotopkin is a good grandpa
:lenin-shining: :kropotkin-shining: :left-unity-2:
:left-unity-2:
I think we need some sort of new synthesis. We need to discard the tendencies of old and create our own theory that is founded in the material conditions of the present. That said I feel like anarchism is an evergreen term for the goal we all seek. That is a classless stateless society. Should we not then realign around that label? If communism has been so poisoned in western spaces shouldn't we maneuver around that and use whatever labels and words we have at our disposal to advance our goals?
I think all these old terms have a lot of baggage
I don't think it's that simple, and anarchists VS reds today are still a valid philosophical distinction. The US isn't the whole world either, this distinction has importance in other countries e.g Vietnam. But speaking to the US specifically, there's no reason these two groups can't unite.
You're definitely right, I was pretty drunk and just typing stream of consciousness at the point yesterday.