I’m currently writing a piece on what marxist-leninists believe and why anarchism fails and I’m delving into the purity test of revolutions extensively.
From my observation anarchists and other libleft types measure the success of a revolution by its purity, i.e. its adherence to socialist principles. Socialism is about doing good, not bad, and so a revolution must be good at heart. You can’t kill people, that’s bad (except in select cases I suppose, I certainly can’t pretend anarchists don’t want to kill fascists or counter-revolutionaries). You can’t be a one-party state, that’s bad. You can be utterly destroyed and massacred after two months, like the Paris Commune, and still be successful, because you were pure – i.e. you were good. While the French army was assembling troops and marching to Paris, the Communards (which I still support critically of course and don’t revel in their massacre) were hoping other cities would join them in the revolution. They were renaming the streets – or so I’ve been told – while they should have been organising an army of their own (there were 2 million people living in Paris!). They did burn debt bonds almost as soon as they seized the city, so that was objectively based, but ultimately they all perished for it. A week before the army marched in on the city, they were destroying the Colonne Vendôme, a meaningless symbol of a bygone war (the monument was erected by Napoleon in 1810 and he died 11 years later, while the commune was in 1871).
An ex-anarchist friend (now super based ML) told me that to an anarchist, basically everything that is good is anarchism and everything that is bad is not. You can never be wrong with such standards.
But of course they conveniently ignore that the anarchists in Spain (which are often expanded to cover all Republican troops, when in reality they were far from the absolute majority) executed priests and other people they considered counter-revolutionary. As there is no prison in anarchism, because that is authoritarian and so it’s bad, you either exile people for their transgressions or execute them.
Remember the words of Stalin: the cornerstone of marxism is class, and the cornerstone of anarchism is the individual. We cannot have anything in common because fundamentally we are different. I take issue with the opening argument in the article:
The only way to achieve revolution is to put aside our differences and unite together as leftists and then after we overthrow capitalism we can then debate on what form of government to replace it with
I don’t know who’s supposed to be saying this, but this is idealism. We cannot have unity with anarchists as our class analysis leads us to different conclusions and puts us at odds with the individualist analysis of anarchism. If we win the fight against the reaction, then we will have to fight against the anarchists right after that.
The only way to achieve revolution is to put aside our differences and unite together as leftists and then after we overthrow capitalism we can then debate on what form of government to replace it with
I used to be of this opinion. I came to it originally as an Anarcho-Communist right after coming from Anarcho-Capitalism, but I posed it as “put aside our differences and unite together as anarchists” and implied that ancaps and ancoms could work together against “statism”. Then, after joining a community that was pointedly about left unity, it became the sentiment written in the article. It’s really all about trying to be a ‘centrist’ on the left, trying to make those who understand the differences between the authoritarian and the anarchist feel in the wrong for insisting that Marxism and Anarchism are entirely incompatible. The people who tend to say this, in my experience, also tend to use the term “democratic socialist” to describe their ideology group.
I’m currently writing a piece on what marxist-leninists believe and why anarchism fails and I’m delving into the purity test of revolutions extensively.
From my observation anarchists and other libleft types measure the success of a revolution by its purity, i.e. its adherence to socialist principles. Socialism is about doing good, not bad, and so a revolution must be good at heart. You can’t kill people, that’s bad (except in select cases I suppose, I certainly can’t pretend anarchists don’t want to kill fascists or counter-revolutionaries). You can’t be a one-party state, that’s bad. You can be utterly destroyed and massacred after two months, like the Paris Commune, and still be successful, because you were pure – i.e. you were good. While the French army was assembling troops and marching to Paris, the Communards (which I still support critically of course and don’t revel in their massacre) were hoping other cities would join them in the revolution. They were renaming the streets – or so I’ve been told – while they should have been organising an army of their own (there were 2 million people living in Paris!). They did burn debt bonds almost as soon as they seized the city, so that was objectively based, but ultimately they all perished for it. A week before the army marched in on the city, they were destroying the Colonne Vendôme, a meaningless symbol of a bygone war (the monument was erected by Napoleon in 1810 and he died 11 years later, while the commune was in 1871).
An ex-anarchist friend (now super based ML) told me that to an anarchist, basically everything that is good is anarchism and everything that is bad is not. You can never be wrong with such standards.
But of course they conveniently ignore that the anarchists in Spain (which are often expanded to cover all Republican troops, when in reality they were far from the absolute majority) executed priests and other people they considered counter-revolutionary. As there is no prison in anarchism, because that is authoritarian and so it’s bad, you either exile people for their transgressions or execute them.
Remember the words of Stalin: the cornerstone of marxism is class, and the cornerstone of anarchism is the individual. We cannot have anything in common because fundamentally we are different. I take issue with the opening argument in the article:
I don’t know who’s supposed to be saying this, but this is idealism. We cannot have unity with anarchists as our class analysis leads us to different conclusions and puts us at odds with the individualist analysis of anarchism. If we win the fight against the reaction, then we will have to fight against the anarchists right after that.
I used to be of this opinion. I came to it originally as an Anarcho-Communist right after coming from Anarcho-Capitalism, but I posed it as “put aside our differences and unite together as anarchists” and implied that ancaps and ancoms could work together against “statism”. Then, after joining a community that was pointedly about left unity, it became the sentiment written in the article. It’s really all about trying to be a ‘centrist’ on the left, trying to make those who understand the differences between the authoritarian and the anarchist feel in the wrong for insisting that Marxism and Anarchism are entirely incompatible. The people who tend to say this, in my experience, also tend to use the term “democratic socialist” to describe their ideology group.