I have yet to see the anarchists over here set up more than a dozen well run, free healthcare clinics or effectively lowering cost of living or protesting for keeping public transport lines open etc.
It’s cool that they run a soup kitchen and have the occasional burning of things ritual but it’s the tankies getting shit done.
I wasn’t saying anarchists don’t do anything over here, they do. But it has become a bit of a meme in leftist circles that the anarchist solution to problems either boils down to ‘soup kitchen’ or ‘punch the baddies in the face’ without eye for educating and mobilizing the working class. And while I appreciate their time and effort and their support to whatever we are doing, punching a random nazi politician or burning the umpteenth cop car is not going to get the masses in movement unfortunately. So please anarchist friends, do help us with your tactics but let us do things our way as well lol.
I don’t think a simple google search will be very helpful. Anyone interested, just listen to the recent two seasons of Marx Madness and follow @chunkaluta1973 on “x.”
I’d argue that at the stage we’re at in the west, it’s most important to educate people and combining that with material support networks such as mutual aid groups. Burning cop cars and court houses isn’t really going to achieve much of anything in the grand scheme of things. Without an organized movement, it just ends up being people lashing out in ad hoc fashion. Something along the lines of Rainbow Coalition that Fred Hampton was building would be good to see.
The “burning cop cars and court houses” stuff is kind of the problem though. It’s just mindless adventurism. It’s not actually fighting the system, it’s someone being the hero fighting the system. It’s self-aggrandizing. It doesn’t help any left wing causes really. It either hurts innocent civilians (and turns the public against your cause) or causes the state to crack down harder on your movement. Actual, organised action is what is needed, not adventurism. Though to their credit, I’ve seen plenty of anarchists in the west organise too though.
comrade, i say this with great respect for anarchists, i dont think idealizing adventurism is the best case for ur tendency. these acts can harm innocent bystanders and scares of ppl who would otherwise be ripe for radicalization. anarchists do many other things at a greater frequency than MLs— mutual aid, food share events for homeless ppl, disrupting environment-destroying projects, cop city protests, etc
edit: i think burning cop cars, courthouses, and FOP buildings is cool, but i dont think we should advocate for socialists to do so and get themselves imprisoned or killed
At best, only in the very short term. In the long term, it gives the government more of an excuse to militarize the police, and gets the population on their side. (Most people have a kind of visceral reaction to violence and chaos, which makes them rally around their government when it promises to restore order. This is often true regardless of whether or not they support the government in any other respect. It’s why wars can make unpopular leaders popular).
In general, I think, Marxists shouldn’t promote illegal activity. It gives the Feds reason to crack down on us, and in fact, proposing illegal activity is something Fed infiltrators often do. (Not saying you’re a fed or an infiltrator, but it’s a real police tactic you should be aware of).
And no offense taken about the fed comment lol. I mean, I am a self-identifying anarchist on Lemmygrad. Comes with the territory. But I’m every ML’s favorite kind of anarchist, completely reasonable.
Gateway? Just because some people go from Anarchism to Marxism doesn’t mean it’s a natural pipeline or that most do. Some people go from being a Republican straight to being a Marxist, some people go straight from being a liberal to being a Marxist and some people go from being a left-anarchist to a fascist so anecdotes aren’t really anything.
I’d say it exists and is maintained as a false path more than anything. The capitalists are smart, they know you can’t just keep all the pressure in, some people are going to realize what a bunch of nonsense capitalism is, you have to have relief vales, as long as they flow in directions that can’t threaten things all the better.
False paths such as anarchism are intentionally promoted and allowed more exposure (including positive) than principled Marxism-Leninism in media and elsewhere for a reason and that’s because the ruling class would much rather someone upset with capitalism become an anarchist than a Marxist-Leninist. They’d also much rather they become an MLM Gonzaloist or Trot for that matter as sitting in arm-chairs screaming about theory and revisionism before organizing the 15th split isn’t a threat either.
People are steered towards individualistic ideologies like anarchism to keep them away from Marxism. The leap from anarchism to Marxism is in many ways no greater than the leap from being a social democrat liberal. Both tendencies that emphasize the individual, that see “authoritarianism” as a scary thing and a snarl word to be uttered at states but mostly states the US State Dept and media tells them are the worst.
"When you are an idealist who thinks all hierarchy is bad, and everywhere you look has hierarchy, you start to flatten everything out. Everything is equally bad.
If everything is equally bad then you can just criticize whatever is in front of your face and never take a side.
This makes you extremely easy to manipulate by powerful forces that decide what the media topic of the day is. Anarchists are blown around in the wind, ungrounded by anything. The capitalist media simply needs to grab you and point you in a direction to make you their tool."
-Anonymous_Ascendent
In such a trap it’s in some ways harder to get out and become a Marxist-Leninist who supports AES because you’re continuing to accept the propaganda, you’re continuing to deep down like the “free” west more for its emphasis on individual liberty even to the point of harm of the collective and individual over the more “controlling” AES states that emphasize responsibilities, have rules, and yes security against counter-revolution, etc.
You believe as an anarchist that China ran over thousands of people in tanks in 1989 because they’re authoritarians and a government and those two things do bad things and would definitely do that in your mind. You believe as an anarchist that Stalin murdered a billion people because that’s what happens when one person gets such incredible authority over others (and why you’re against it, why you need it to be true to justify your thinking), always a bad thing and soon enough as an anarchist you’re saying despite how much you hate the west, you like their checks and balances and accept they definitely work unlike .
Because the western states are good at appearing to be relatively weak domestically compared to other countries because they’re working behind the scenes with capitalist media to control the populace (whereas China overtly regulates its media which is just another sign of its authoritarianism to these types), because they placate them with higher living conditions built off exploitation, because the current superstructure is theirs (a liberal, capitalist one), because there are no powerful external actors (who having long infiltrated, cultivated people, corrupt officials, ideology, even weapons, along with real time intelligence) who can or would turn a large protest movement or riot into a color revolution that brings down the American government unlike what socialist states face from the west. Or indeed not even bring it down, just do gladio type terrorism shit (as they did in East Germany after the partition). Unthinkable in the US because only the US government does that to its own populace.
To be an anarchist you get to keep believing the State Dept propaganda, you get to keep believing what the nightly news says about far-away countries. You get to keep your liberal friends because you unlike those dirty tankies don’t deny atrocity propaganda. You get to be a liberal but more smug about it, because you’re above other liberals, you want better more, but you get to be snide and join hand in hand with the liberals in attacking Marxists, in attacking the “authoritarians”, attacking Assad, cheering CIA “friendly radicals” who do the west’s work for them in dividing, conquering, and weakening regions, states, etc all with a veneer of anarchism. And on and on. In other words it doesn’t require great sacrifice or change.
And all of that is part of a self-aggrandizing pathology that makes it so attractive in the west. Because you get to be above it all, better than it all, pure, holy, unstained, much as MLM’s who support every revolution but the ones which succeeded are towards their version of Marxism. Part of a larger pathology of the Christian influence and the fetish for humble defeat and martyrdom as being ideals to aspire to.
The hardest part is educating an anarchist out of liberal mentalities about property and “freedom”
Anarchism is a “safe” way to be a leftist, as they don’t need to actually challenge their own liberal brainworms, which is why there are so many anarcho-liberal types who are just liberals wearing a punk jacket. (And I say safe mentally and socially of course. Anarchist comrades put themselves in the line of fire of the state just as much as any ML does.)
Burning things is like masturbation. It feels good to you but it doesn’t achieve anything but a mess for everyone else.
Also it further justifies expansion of the security state, crackdowns, targeting of anyone vaguely anti-capitalist as a terrorist, allows easy infiltration by feds who proceed to commit acts of unpopular violence to tarnish the name of any movement against capitalism, etc.
There is a reason why the feds are okay relegating management of anarchists to the local police. There is a reason why the feds have historically not suppressed anarchists as hard and that is because their acts tend to be either gestures which the ruling class couldn’t care less about (mutual aid, which I am not claiming to be useless but you also can’t claim on its own it’s a threat to the status quo or ruling class) or adventurist violence easily spun for sensation on the nightly news and round condemnation by all ends of the liberal spectrum. That plus as I mentioned, anyone can put on some black clothes, wear some anarchist symbols and then say burn down a library or rob people near a demonstration at gun-point, and it goes on and on. Not that they can’t stage false flags against ML’s, it’s just easier with anarchists as there’s no central authority to at least condemn the acts and state they were not carried out by anyone among them.
I’m not saying any revolution won’t have burning things, I’m just saying you’re not going to set one off by starting with that and expecting it to inspire anything more than at best copycat acts of burning things for personal pleasure and chaos.
Without some rhyme or reason, some justification among the masses violence and acts of fire and terror don’t do anything but harden a lot of ordinary citizens who are frightened of you and your movement and push them into the arms of state repression to make it safe so they can thoughtlessly go about their lives again. There’s a difference between say the type of things the Black Panthers did which wasn’t actually just going around doming cops or other acts of adventurism for fun but standing as a line together against the violence of the state, threatening the ability to engage in retribution or hit back but couching it in discipline and a knowledge they couldn’t be too easily drawn into just fighting and burning and alienating communities from them.
Because if burning shit is what you’re after, you’ll attract hoodlums, you’ll attract criminals who want to use violence and chaos as a smokescreen to commit crimes under, you’ll attract people who will harm those in your very movement, who will attack marginalized communities without thought because the car of a local black resident burns just as well as a cop car.
Proud commie that might be cool in certain ways checking in. Black bloc tends to be a mix of anarchists and commies.
Anyways anarchists are usually my comrades. There’s just one particular subset that really, really suck, and are really more just angry liberals than anarchists. They are very loud, though.
Yeah I get what you mean, where I live you only have a racist electoral “communist” party, and a bunch of trots orgs, so I totally get why MLs aren’t the ones getting things done. But I also think that right now, being a principled ML puts you at odd with everything, so there’s no room for a decent ML party.
Imo the west will burn to ashes before meeting the conditions for a revolution so I guess anarchists are doing the job by burning stuff /s
Being a principled ML in the USA also gets you on a watchlist and raided by cops if you’re amassing enough power to do something. I don’t think anarchist orgs have had the same level of state scrutiny, but I don’t mean to say anarchists have had it easy. I work with a mostly anarchist org (Food not Bombs) and we get citations from cops nearly every week.
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I have yet to see the anarchists over here set up more than a dozen well run, free healthcare clinics or effectively lowering cost of living or protesting for keeping public transport lines open etc.
It’s cool that they run a soup kitchen and have the occasional burning of things ritual but it’s the tankies getting shit done.
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Well that’s good then innit
I wasn’t saying anarchists don’t do anything over here, they do. But it has become a bit of a meme in leftist circles that the anarchist solution to problems either boils down to ‘soup kitchen’ or ‘punch the baddies in the face’ without eye for educating and mobilizing the working class. And while I appreciate their time and effort and their support to whatever we are doing, punching a random nazi politician or burning the umpteenth cop car is not going to get the masses in movement unfortunately. So please anarchist friends, do help us with your tactics but let us do things our way as well lol.
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I don’t think a simple google search will be very helpful. Anyone interested, just listen to the recent two seasons of Marx Madness and follow @chunkaluta1973 on “x.”
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All that comes up for me is a painting called chunka-ah-luta.
I’d argue that at the stage we’re at in the west, it’s most important to educate people and combining that with material support networks such as mutual aid groups. Burning cop cars and court houses isn’t really going to achieve much of anything in the grand scheme of things. Without an organized movement, it just ends up being people lashing out in ad hoc fashion. Something along the lines of Rainbow Coalition that Fred Hampton was building would be good to see.
The “burning cop cars and court houses” stuff is kind of the problem though. It’s just mindless adventurism. It’s not actually fighting the system, it’s someone being the hero fighting the system. It’s self-aggrandizing. It doesn’t help any left wing causes really. It either hurts innocent civilians (and turns the public against your cause) or causes the state to crack down harder on your movement. Actual, organised action is what is needed, not adventurism. Though to their credit, I’ve seen plenty of anarchists in the west organise too though.
absolutely
The angry, feeling leftist in me loves the sound of adventurism.
The critical, thinking leftist in me knows better than to let that comrade out.
Dialetics
comrade, i say this with great respect for anarchists, i dont think idealizing adventurism is the best case for ur tendency. these acts can harm innocent bystanders and scares of ppl who would otherwise be ripe for radicalization. anarchists do many other things at a greater frequency than MLs— mutual aid, food share events for homeless ppl, disrupting environment-destroying projects, cop city protests, etc
edit: i think burning cop cars, courthouses, and FOP buildings is cool, but i dont think we should advocate for socialists to do so and get themselves imprisoned or killed
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That’s not the example I’d have chosen honestly; more the mutual aid networks for example
I’d still categorize burning police stations as harm reduction.
True enough
At best, only in the very short term. In the long term, it gives the government more of an excuse to militarize the police, and gets the population on their side. (Most people have a kind of visceral reaction to violence and chaos, which makes them rally around their government when it promises to restore order. This is often true regardless of whether or not they support the government in any other respect. It’s why wars can make unpopular leaders popular).
In general, I think, Marxists shouldn’t promote illegal activity. It gives the Feds reason to crack down on us, and in fact, proposing illegal activity is something Fed infiltrators often do. (Not saying you’re a fed or an infiltrator, but it’s a real police tactic you should be aware of).
It was kind of a shitpost comment.
And no offense taken about the fed comment lol. I mean, I am a self-identifying anarchist on Lemmygrad. Comes with the territory. But I’m every ML’s favorite kind of anarchist, completely reasonable.
Ah, makes sense. (Apparently I’m every anarchist’s favorite kind of ML: overly earnest and unable to discern basic shitposting, lol)
Ah yes, my brethren.
Lmao, burning shit doesn’t matter. Our job is to educate the working class about communism.
it does matter if it hinders the police, etc.
with that said, adventurism without organization is just going to get you arrested
True. I think that’s something most Marxists and anarchists can agree on.
I think there’s been some sort of mistake, I’d rather be assigned to work in the coal mines.
It’s also a LOT more socially acceptable to be an anarchist in the West than a communist, so it’s a vital gateway to left-wing thought.
Gateway? Just because some people go from Anarchism to Marxism doesn’t mean it’s a natural pipeline or that most do. Some people go from being a Republican straight to being a Marxist, some people go straight from being a liberal to being a Marxist and some people go from being a left-anarchist to a fascist so anecdotes aren’t really anything.
I’d say it exists and is maintained as a false path more than anything. The capitalists are smart, they know you can’t just keep all the pressure in, some people are going to realize what a bunch of nonsense capitalism is, you have to have relief vales, as long as they flow in directions that can’t threaten things all the better.
False paths such as anarchism are intentionally promoted and allowed more exposure (including positive) than principled Marxism-Leninism in media and elsewhere for a reason and that’s because the ruling class would much rather someone upset with capitalism become an anarchist than a Marxist-Leninist. They’d also much rather they become an MLM Gonzaloist or Trot for that matter as sitting in arm-chairs screaming about theory and revisionism before organizing the 15th split isn’t a threat either.
People are steered towards individualistic ideologies like anarchism to keep them away from Marxism. The leap from anarchism to Marxism is in many ways no greater than the leap from being a social democrat liberal. Both tendencies that emphasize the individual, that see “authoritarianism” as a scary thing and a snarl word to be uttered at states but mostly states the US State Dept and media tells them are the worst.
In such a trap it’s in some ways harder to get out and become a Marxist-Leninist who supports AES because you’re continuing to accept the propaganda, you’re continuing to deep down like the “free” west more for its emphasis on individual liberty even to the point of harm of the collective and individual over the more “controlling” AES states that emphasize responsibilities, have rules, and yes security against counter-revolution, etc.
You believe as an anarchist that China ran over thousands of people in tanks in 1989 because they’re authoritarians and a government and those two things do bad things and would definitely do that in your mind. You believe as an anarchist that Stalin murdered a billion people because that’s what happens when one person gets such incredible authority over others (and why you’re against it, why you need it to be true to justify your thinking), always a bad thing and soon enough as an anarchist you’re saying despite how much you hate the west, you like their checks and balances and accept they definitely work unlike .
Because the western states are good at appearing to be relatively weak domestically compared to other countries because they’re working behind the scenes with capitalist media to control the populace (whereas China overtly regulates its media which is just another sign of its authoritarianism to these types), because they placate them with higher living conditions built off exploitation, because the current superstructure is theirs (a liberal, capitalist one), because there are no powerful external actors (who having long infiltrated, cultivated people, corrupt officials, ideology, even weapons, along with real time intelligence) who can or would turn a large protest movement or riot into a color revolution that brings down the American government unlike what socialist states face from the west. Or indeed not even bring it down, just do gladio type terrorism shit (as they did in East Germany after the partition). Unthinkable in the US because only the US government does that to its own populace.
To be an anarchist you get to keep believing the State Dept propaganda, you get to keep believing what the nightly news says about far-away countries. You get to keep your liberal friends because you unlike those dirty tankies don’t deny atrocity propaganda. You get to be a liberal but more smug about it, because you’re above other liberals, you want better more, but you get to be snide and join hand in hand with the liberals in attacking Marxists, in attacking the “authoritarians”, attacking Assad, cheering CIA “friendly radicals” who do the west’s work for them in dividing, conquering, and weakening regions, states, etc all with a veneer of anarchism. And on and on. In other words it doesn’t require great sacrifice or change.
And all of that is part of a self-aggrandizing pathology that makes it so attractive in the west. Because you get to be above it all, better than it all, pure, holy, unstained, much as MLM’s who support every revolution but the ones which succeeded are towards their version of Marxism. Part of a larger pathology of the Christian influence and the fetish for humble defeat and martyrdom as being ideals to aspire to.
The hardest part is educating an anarchist out of liberal mentalities about property and “freedom”
Anarchism is a “safe” way to be a leftist, as they don’t need to actually challenge their own liberal brainworms, which is why there are so many anarcho-liberal types who are just liberals wearing a punk jacket. (And I say safe mentally and socially of course. Anarchist comrades put themselves in the line of fire of the state just as much as any ML does.)
Burning things is like masturbation. It feels good to you but it doesn’t achieve anything but a mess for everyone else.
Also it further justifies expansion of the security state, crackdowns, targeting of anyone vaguely anti-capitalist as a terrorist, allows easy infiltration by feds who proceed to commit acts of unpopular violence to tarnish the name of any movement against capitalism, etc.
There is a reason why the feds are okay relegating management of anarchists to the local police. There is a reason why the feds have historically not suppressed anarchists as hard and that is because their acts tend to be either gestures which the ruling class couldn’t care less about (mutual aid, which I am not claiming to be useless but you also can’t claim on its own it’s a threat to the status quo or ruling class) or adventurist violence easily spun for sensation on the nightly news and round condemnation by all ends of the liberal spectrum. That plus as I mentioned, anyone can put on some black clothes, wear some anarchist symbols and then say burn down a library or rob people near a demonstration at gun-point, and it goes on and on. Not that they can’t stage false flags against ML’s, it’s just easier with anarchists as there’s no central authority to at least condemn the acts and state they were not carried out by anyone among them.
I’m not saying any revolution won’t have burning things, I’m just saying you’re not going to set one off by starting with that and expecting it to inspire anything more than at best copycat acts of burning things for personal pleasure and chaos.
Without some rhyme or reason, some justification among the masses violence and acts of fire and terror don’t do anything but harden a lot of ordinary citizens who are frightened of you and your movement and push them into the arms of state repression to make it safe so they can thoughtlessly go about their lives again. There’s a difference between say the type of things the Black Panthers did which wasn’t actually just going around doming cops or other acts of adventurism for fun but standing as a line together against the violence of the state, threatening the ability to engage in retribution or hit back but couching it in discipline and a knowledge they couldn’t be too easily drawn into just fighting and burning and alienating communities from them.
Because if burning shit is what you’re after, you’ll attract hoodlums, you’ll attract criminals who want to use violence and chaos as a smokescreen to commit crimes under, you’ll attract people who will harm those in your very movement, who will attack marginalized communities without thought because the car of a local black resident burns just as well as a cop car.
I’m not sure if this is a joke or not.
Proud commie that might be cool in certain ways checking in. Black bloc tends to be a mix of anarchists and commies.
Anyways anarchists are usually my comrades. There’s just one particular subset that really, really suck, and are really more just angry liberals than anarchists. They are very loud, though.
Yeah I get what you mean, where I live you only have a racist electoral “communist” party, and a bunch of trots orgs, so I totally get why MLs aren’t the ones getting things done. But I also think that right now, being a principled ML puts you at odd with everything, so there’s no room for a decent ML party.
Imo the west will burn to ashes before meeting the conditions for a revolution so I guess anarchists are doing the job by burning stuff /s
Being a principled ML in the USA also gets you on a watchlist and raided by cops if you’re amassing enough power to do something. I don’t think anarchist orgs have had the same level of state scrutiny, but I don’t mean to say anarchists have had it easy. I work with a mostly anarchist org (Food not Bombs) and we get citations from cops nearly every week.
IIRC the feds have had a harder time dealing with anarchist orgs because they’re more decentralized and harder to infiltrate from the top down.
the fact this is downvoted while a meme that explicitly just dunks on anarchists without any real critique to it is just sad
Like polish anarchists doing exactly one burning since 1989: they burned a Soviet consulate in 1991.