Anarcho-communists / anarcho-syndicalists are social anarchists, as opposed to individualist anarchists, that generally uphold two failed anarchist revolutions, that got a little further than the others because they were willing to adopt communist tactics in some ways: revolutionary Catalonia during the Spanish civil war (although they blame the USSR for its defeat, even tho the USSR provided the only aid to the Spanish republican movement), and the Free territory / Mahknovia. They hold really idealized views about these failed experiments as being “decentralized”, and are able to have a martyr complex about them since they failed. More on the history of those here:
Ancoms are also against every existing socialist state, that they’d define as state capitalist / authoritarian, including Vietnam, Cuba, USSR, China, etc. Ancoms are very common in the west, because it allows them to remain anti-communist and hold on to their cold-war indoctrination, but still be anti-status-quo, without having to learn about the struggles of actually existing socialist states.
Their favorite works of “theory”, are the conquest of bread (a book written 40 years after the manifesto, that has no materialist analysis or deeper theory than “capitalism bad”, and belongs with the earlier utopian socialist works written in the early 1800s), and Malatesta, bakunin, proudhon, and other anarchists. As collectivists a lot of ancom rhetoric will echo Marxist class struggle, but overall ancoms are opposed to vanguardism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Some more threads on general anarchism vs communism
Anarcho-communists / anarcho-syndicalists are social anarchists, as opposed to individualist anarchists, that generally uphold two failed anarchist revolutions, that got a little further than the others because they were willing to adopt communist tactics in some ways: revolutionary Catalonia during the Spanish civil war (although they blame the USSR for its defeat, even tho the USSR provided the only aid to the Spanish republican movement), and the Free territory / Mahknovia. They hold really idealized views about these failed experiments as being “decentralized”, and are able to have a martyr complex about them since they failed. More on the history of those here:
Ancoms are also against every existing socialist state, that they’d define as state capitalist / authoritarian, including Vietnam, Cuba, USSR, China, etc. Ancoms are very common in the west, because it allows them to remain anti-communist and hold on to their cold-war indoctrination, but still be anti-status-quo, without having to learn about the struggles of actually existing socialist states.
Their favorite works of “theory”, are the conquest of bread (a book written 40 years after the manifesto, that has no materialist analysis or deeper theory than “capitalism bad”, and belongs with the earlier utopian socialist works written in the early 1800s), and Malatesta, bakunin, proudhon, and other anarchists. As collectivists a lot of ancom rhetoric will echo Marxist class struggle, but overall ancoms are opposed to vanguardism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Some more threads on general anarchism vs communism