idk how relevant this is, but once on an open forum that had communities for various ideologies (a browser ‘game’ called Nationstates, where players form a nation and pretend to run them) the community I was in had an Anarchist join who wanted to run for our community’s government to ‘dissolve’ it. When we memed them out of the community they complained in all of our related communities about tankies ‘ruining’ everything and being ‘evil authoritarians’, then joined an openly fascist community instead.
Similar happed in the Pagan leftist group I was a part of, the discord was meant to be moderated by multiple leftist ideologies and be non-sectarian. But one of the anarchist mods started banning people for being authoritarians, the Marxist-Leninist mod stopped using the discord, and the anarchists started running wild on anti-authoritarian crusades with highly sectarian rants, calling Marxist-Leninists all of the strawmen and slurs they know. Then, had the audacity to say the discord turned into a toxic cesspool because “tankies ruin everything”.
This also happened when I was one of the leaders of the (now defunct) local communist party. We had a bunch of anarchists join who kept suggesting we ignored both the laws and the hearts and minds of the local population - while the chief of police had been holding speeches at the church he went to, vowing to ‘kill and arrest’ every single one of us for being communists - and engage in illegal activities. Such as assault and battery of our political opponants, vandalism, etc. When we told them that all of that was the stupidest shit a political body could do without the support of the local population - who i’ll remind, were against us - they went on rants about how “tankies ruin everything”, “red fascists just wanna rule everything”, etc. We had to start a wing of the party specifically just for anarchists. But, being theoryless people with no concept of organization and democratic principles beyond the ego, they fizzled out pretty quickly after that. Seeingly the only thing that made them want to join in on our activism, was the chance to be contrarian and hold communists back from being capable of carrying out activism.
It is, truly, the Anarchists who ruin everything.
I had the same experience in my organizing too… they have an obsession with destroying any structures of authority, no matter how democratic, that it ends up dissolving organizations because nothing is left in its wake, and the people who were managing the chaos are too burned out from being called authoritarians and getting yelled at for fixing things, that no one is left. This is why anarchist orgs have a maximum lifetime of ~ 4 years.
I feel that vigilantism too, its so annoying and gets orgs clapped up faster than anything else. Anarchists don’t realize the harm they’re doing because the org ultimately doesn’t matter to them, only the individual. Its telling that the main way to spot an agent provacateur / police infiltration… is if they start acting like an anarchist.
Good article on this related to feminist organizing, the tyranny of structurelessness.
A lot of the anarchists from my party ended up being arrested, going fash, or just vanishing from politics altogether - the last one only became more true after Biden won the election.
One of the Anarchists, who our first chairmen pushed really hard as a replacement for me against the wishes of literally everyone but himself and the anarchist in question, was accused of stalking a woman for blocks while holding a cleaver and shouting inappropriate things, I’m pretty sure they’re in prison now for it too.
It seems, at least to me, that many of the Anarchists who joined our party and demanded we assault our political opponents only wanted violence. They didn’t care about the good we were trying to do for the community, they didn’t care about our goals of expanding class conscienceness, nor did they care about the political process of winning the respect of the local population. They only cared for their selfish goals, which only benefitted them. While the party tried to put together food drives, the anarchists bickered that we weren’t taking the Fascists seriously. But, I fail to see how feeding the local poor isn’t taking the growing tide of Fascism seriously. Starving mouths care not for the hand that beats them, but for the hand that feeds them. The Anarchists suggested we beat them - seeing as many of the worst Fascists around here happen to be on food stamps and struggle to afford to live. We, the Communists, seeking the betterment of the community as a whole, tried to be the hand to feed them. In the end, the Anarchists disrupted our efforts so much that we had to drop the idea entirely and started to minimize our activist efforts, the party died after the first chairmen decided to spread lies about myself and my closest supporters in a move to consolidate more power for the ‘libertarians’ in the party. A party of about 300 people. In a relatively small town. Thats… full of anti-communists.
I’m ranting, but holy heck it seems too often that Anarchists are the biggest threat to leftism. More than liberals, more than fascists. Liberals will oppose us, Fascists will lie about us, but Anarchists will actively disorganize us.
They’ve got better projectors than us, that’s for sure.
