Great essay comrade, the tank metaphor is a great way to debunk the anarchist line of “smol weapons good, big weapons bad” / highly localized struggle thing.
Sometimes I’ll put it as , “how many battalions did anarchists field against the nazis in WW2?” A real organized resistance, needs a command structure, tanks, an intelligence service, an air force, etc. Huey Newton in his debunking of anarchism said we need to be more organized than our enemies if we hope to win.
This section of yours was really good:
Tank production is a requisite revolutionary function in order to defeat an organized enemy wielding tanks themselves, but anarchists refuse to learn the lesson. Anarchists take a romanticized idea that willpower alone will somehow overturn a better equipped opponent, but Marxist-Leninists take no such fanciful liberties in our planning. And this is what is involved in “winning a revolution” — one that looks like a war — is an operational plan —necessarily involving tanks — which is needed to ultimately secure the objectives that will lead to a victory. This is where the Soviet mass produced T-34s and KV-1s can correctly be attributed as the tanks that did the most to bring about the downfall of Hitler, while anarchist tank production has never yielded any similar successes. The Soviets still have claim on some of the most effective tanks still used in the world today.
Indeed, this is where anarchism fails, despite creative attempts, and has always failed — most evidently in 1930’s Spain, but the failure in thinking continues onward to this day, is in providing the larger plans and organization, and in failing to produce tanks. And it isn’t merely an issue of having tanks, but concentrating them as well — as many historians will tell you, the French had better tanks, and a better army than the Germans in 1940, but lost, badly, because the Germans concentrated their forces and moved quickly, while the French spread their forces and moved slowly.
And this is where I’m going to drop the hammer for what few anarchists actually managed to slog their way to the end of this essay. If the preceding explanations did not make it clear, let’s be forthcoming and blunt. Anarchism is outdated and irrelevant, already, it’s just a matter of the last remaining anarchists (existing overwhelmingly in the West, being predominantly white, and largely from the middle classes) to acknowledge it, but have yet to do so. If you were to add up all the anarchists in all the world (throw in all the leftcoms too!), they would still be outnumbered by the number of Marxist-Leninists in the province of Kerala, India, alone (thanks to Vijay Prashad for that tidbit). They have yet to recognize they are in the most racist, and philosophically backwards nations on the planet, and those reactionary influences have shaped and defined their worldview. They don’t realize that nearly all of the information they consume comes from the bourgeoisie, and somehow they cannot figure out why they keep ending up fighting on the same team as the Empire (Hong Kong, Ukraine, Korea, Syria, etc — it’s amazing how they always manage to end up on the exact same team as American business interests).
There is a reason that all the revolutions in the poorest and most oppressed places on the planet, still today, practice Marxism-Leninism and not Anarchism. It isn’t because they aren’t aware of anarchism — this dismissals of the Global South as not being just as politically aware as Western anarchists is backwards and chauvinist. Anarchists are not important, at all in the real world of today, and themselves need to find reason to dismiss or even dehumanize the vast numbers of Marxist-Leninist around the globe (especially in the Global South), to validate their already dead philosophy. Anarchists think that they are “eliminating the divides” by having no clear ideology or philosophy to construct society or plan, and that in eliminating those divides, they have better united us. But in all reality, those material divides are deep, and in failing to address them in same the way ML(M) philosophies do, they leave the contradictions unresolved and exploitable to the detriment of the revolution. In conclusion, anarchists need to find their lack of tanks to be more disconcerting.
this dismissals of the Global South as not being just as politically aware as Western anarchists is backwards and chauvinist
Painfully true and I applaud the prescience of @DashRendar@lemmygrad.ml for this. This is how they go right along spreading the imperialists’ propaganda even after it was revealed that the GS countries overwhelmingly stood on PRC’s side when it came to XJ and HK.
Great essay comrade, the tank metaphor is a great way to debunk the anarchist line of “smol weapons good, big weapons bad” / highly localized struggle thing.
Sometimes I’ll put it as , “how many battalions did anarchists field against the nazis in WW2?” A real organized resistance, needs a command structure, tanks, an intelligence service, an air force, etc. Huey Newton in his debunking of anarchism said we need to be more organized than our enemies if we hope to win.
This section of yours was really good:
Haha love the terminator reference.
This is great stuff too:
Painfully true and I applaud the prescience of @DashRendar@lemmygrad.ml for this. This is how they go right along spreading the imperialists’ propaganda even after it was revealed that the GS countries overwhelmingly stood on PRC’s side when it came to XJ and HK.