This is the second part to this post. You’ll likely need to read that for this to make sense.

Also, this post has anarchist apologia-adjacent rhetoric in it. You have been warned.

We are not comfortable. Many of us are more comfortable than the rest of the world, yes, but many more are not. The millions of people in US prisons exploited for slave labor are not comfortable. The desperately struggling black and brown communities in this country are not comfortable. We should at least be able to reach these people, but we have failed to. Why? I suggest a lack of empathy, and self introspection.

The United States socialist has become something of a disciple, a religious acolyte. Instead of seeing Marxism as a discipline to explain and understand this society of class conflict, they see it as a magic power they can channel with the pureness and devotion of their faith. And so, they begin to believe that the emotions of themselves and those around them ceases to matter, that they are surrounded by nonbelievers and heretics, and so any concerns or opposition to what they suggest is merely the baseless protests of the unclean.

This is a deeply maladjusted and flawed view of Marxism. And, more importantly, it completely stops the prospective revolutionary from truly organizing. When we assume that those who disagree with us are baselessly evil, or reactionary, or assume they are merely immature or idiotic, we completely cut ourselves off from an important line of questioning that is ultimately essential to socialism in the United States.

The average conversation between any two socialists in the United States has been reduced to a religious argument. When disagreement reaches a heated point, instead of acknowledging each other as simply needing a break or being overwhelmed, both treat the other as an enemy. To display this, I shall dissect the supposed greatest enemy of the United States socialist: the anarchist.

The anarchist is a person of great disdain to many socialists. Someone moralistically driven to dismiss tools necessary for the liberation of the proletariat. And this can certainly be true. But what many socialists and Marxists fail to even inspect is why the United States proletariat is so often drawn to anarchism. Instead of taking these people as coming from a legitimate perspective, these socialists simply assume that anarchism is the ideology of the privileged, or the labor aristocracy. But this doesn’t make any sense.

Merely being class conscious or aware of one’s oppression doesn’t automatically grant someone the ability to understand the true nature of class or class conflict, and especially does not grant an understanding of the best way to fight that conflict. The inverse is true, as well. In a vacuum, someone more isolated from the reality of class conflict would not necessarily automatically choose an ideology that is sub-optimal for fighting that class conflict. The decision becomes a purely abstract one.

In both situations, a dedicated anarchist is capable of being a dedicated anarchist without the influence of western propaganda.

So, we are left with only one recourse- Attempting to find out what the reason for that is. When we finally let ourselves ask this question, instead of constantly closing ourselves off to others because of a moralistic, vulgar perspective to Marxism, we can begin to inspect the material conditions of the United States proletariat from a different perspective, and start finding explanations for our lack of traction.

The United States itself, as part of it’s material conditions, has been a horrifyingly repressive and disgusting country, which has been unabashedly on the side of the bourgeoisie for most of history. We know this much, it is true of many capitalist countries. But the United States went much, much further, strictly controlling the lives of the proletariat with laws that enforced homophobia, prohibition, the moralistic Christianity of the region. Social control by the state is not merely a background, ambient crime of capitalism for the United States proletariat: It is an ancestral trauma that hangs over us to the present day. It is easy to see that this explains the popularity of anarchism among the United States socialists (I am aware of how ironic this is, given the United States supposed dedication to “freedom”).

We must keep in this in mind when engaging with the proletariat here. We cannot simply dismiss concerns of social control with accusations of propaganda and conspiracy, because the hyper-reactionary, socially controlling forces of the United States have used the exact same argument every time a new social movement has appeared (and, yes, this is true of some other western countries, but those countries have their own conditions that must be individually examined ).

So, this exercise in analyzing the United States anarchist, not from a moralistic, religiously ”Marxist” perspective, but from the perspective of actual history, has given us important insight about building socialism in the United States. We can’t just tell the proletariat that we aren’t going to oppress them, or that we are on their side while naively dismissing their concerns every time it is brought up. This is what the United States does to it’s own civilians. No, we need to prove that we are on their side by actually siding with the United States proletariat in this still ongoing element of the class war, and actively fight against the currently present forms of social control in the United States.

And, even more potently, it gives us a weapon to use against the hyper-reactionary, socially controlling elements. We can now understand that this is exactly what hyper-conservative elements have been exploiting, twisting the proletariat’s desire for freedom from social control against itself, trying to convince the proletariat that returning once again to control is social freedom. Once we begin to truly and consciously side with the United States proletariat on this, beyond simply doing so because “we’re leftists”, we will be able to turn this around on the reactionary elements. The proletariat will always side with us once they realize we are actually acting in their interests, a much more convincing and relatable reason to side with us than the reactionary’s false promises. For this reason, the queer struggle, the struggle of all racial minorities, and the struggle of all the people who have been oppressed by this nation’s extreme social control, should be prioritized and heavily focused upon by any socialists here. Not only are these people the ones to see the horror of capitalism in this country most directly, they are also the people most harmed by the United States’ social control, and therefore directly represent the United States proletariat’s efforts against social control.

But, this was merely an experiment. Hopefully, it should display the utility of examining the possible motivations and reasoning of those we disagree with. That is the purpose of this community, and I hope that we can do much more, together.

TL;DR: sectarianism bad, fatalism bad, black panthers good