Skip Navigation
Comradeship // Freechat @lemmygrad.ml
CPCsStrongestWumao @lemmygrad.ml

I've noticed something about anarchists that i find pretty funny: they'll praise marxist revolutions and revolutionaries AS LONG AS they dont actually succeed.

You'll see anarchists praising Rosa Luxemburg, who if they had actually read her writings -- they would see that she was very clearly one of the "authoritarian" socialists that they rail against so much.

You see them praise the Black Panthers, who were supported financially by the DPRK and aligned themselves with the Juche ideology of Kim Il Sung.

They even praise Thomas Sankara, who purged anarchists and arrested syndicalists.

If these people had succeeded, i have no doubt in my mind that anarchists would call them "tankies," they would call their experiments "capitalism with a red flag." And I also have no doubt in my mind that if the October Revolution, Chinese Revolution had been crushed, they would hail Lenin and Mao as proletarian heroes.

29 comments

  • It is easy to support failed attempts because then they can imagine that this time those folks would have done things "perfectly" or in other words, the way the person imagining it would have done things. Without any of the messy details of having to work in the real world with real conditions.

  • They're pretty much more liberal ultras. They bang on about this wonderful utopia and tear down any attempts at socialist revolution or maintaining a workers state. And not only that, but they don't put in the needed work into building towards revolution or increasing class consciousness among the working class. They're entirely fine trying to build cooperative farms or doing performative mutual aid.

  • Most self professed leftists don't actually have a plan for what happens if they get the revolution they want. I guess they think the point of the ideology is just killing people and burning shit, not creating a better society.

  • Yeah, Anarchists don't seem to actually want to succeed in anything. They just want to perpetually feel superior about their morals as well as comfortable that nothing will ever change. They want to be cool, contrarian good guys, imagining a world that will only ever exist in books and stories.

    • That's why my anarchist phase was short-lived. I was reading about anarchism and I found out that many of them don't even expect that the revolution will succeed. It's just a desperate moral opposition to the status quo without any serious intention to change the material reality.

      Not a great strategy to make the world a better place lol

      • I'm very much the same. Had a short anarchist phase, don't entirely disagree with a lot of the worldview, but feel the situation is too desperate to rely on fantastical situations when there's already existing theory on how to fix the world.

  • Aside from the what it is to be said by the already recomended text on western marxism and christianity by Jones Manoel on RedSails, which I find very fitting here, I have found out by experience that anarchists usually have a very strong tendency to romanticize the act of revolution in general, of sublevation to overthrow the existing hierarchies, and very little focus on what comes after, which is the organization of the new society that is to come.

    Chances are that this lack of focus is the result of the development of an anarchist's conceptualization of a post-capitalist society falling an overwhelming majority of times in one of two fields: either authoritarianism (most of us have witnessed an anarchist accidentally developing the idea of vanguards in their search to defend their revolutions) or the most bizarre and impractical modes of production and self-defense that could be concieved, such as the idea that medicines and other highly complex products could ever be produced by individual people as a form of pastime.

    This is, overall, too much hassle for the average western anarchist, who doesn't find the need to concern themselves with that simply because, for them, anarchism is just an aesthetic used as a form of expressing one's identity and individuality, and not as a project to work towards.

    Edit: Grammar.

  • Why put the Black Panthers in here? 🤨

    The Black Panther platform, as I understand it, was:

    • We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
    • We want full employment for our people.
    • We want an end to the robbery by the Capitalists of our Black Community.
    • We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
    • We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present day society.
    • We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
    • We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.
    • We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
    • We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black Communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
    • We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.

    The Juche platform is:

    • We must give our all in the struggle to unify the entire society with the revolutionary ideology of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung.
    • We must honor the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung with all our loyalty.
    • We must make absolute the authority of the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung.
    • We must make the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung's revolutionary ideology our faith and make his instructions our creed.
    • We must adhere strictly to the principle of unconditional obedience in carrying out the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung's instructions.
    • We must strengthen the entire party's ideology and willpower and revolutionary unity, centering on the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung.
    • We must learn from the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung and adopt the communist look, revolutionary work methods and people-oriented work style.
    • We must value the political life we were given by the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung, and loyally repay his great political trust and thoughtfulness with heightened political awareness and skill.
    • We must establish strong organizational regulations so that the entire party, nation and military move as one under the one and only leadership of the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung.
    • We must pass down the great achievement of the revolution by the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung from generation to generation, inheriting and completing it to the end.
29 comments