Damn, I’m sorry that it was such an emotional experience for you but overall it sounds like it was for the best and it seems like not many people can commit to a paradigm shift like that, I feel like that takes a lot of fortitude.

It’s all good. That’s just how things turned out for me I guess.

I think what sucked about it was that I had committed myself to anarchism quite seriously and then to look back on all the time and effort that I put into it later only to realise I hadn’t fully figured out what I was doing and that a lot of my efforts were wasted… That’s a difficult thing to come to terms with.

So wouldn’t that initial decision making structure be considered transitional?

Without strawmanning anarchism, I do genuinely believe that this is true. I think for me, what is really important is putting in serious work to figure out how this transitional period should be structured.

Imo there are a lot of conditions that are necessary before a radical left revolution can kick off – America has to be sufficiently distracted or weakened at the time, there needs to be mass mobilisation, the organisations leading it must be well-connected to the broader community, (not to go all Great Man Theory but) there needs to be leaders who have the right combination of characteristics to spearhead or shepherd the revolution, enough international support is crucial etc. etc. What this means in my perspective is that revolutionary moments are actually quite rare, and it’s rarer still to have enough of the right conditions that the countervailing conditions are mitigated and that the revolution manages to successfully take root.

It’s a bit like the societies that have managed to develop the ability to control fire but which haven’t yet developed the ability to create fire themselves – they have to wait for lightning to strike in the right place or for the very rare physical or chemical reactions that create combustion spontaneously, this has to happen nearby enough that it gets discovered by someone, the weather has to be sufficiently mild that the fire doesn’t get extinguished, there has to be enough suitable combustible material nearby to feed the fire, there needs to be a way to transport the fire, and the fire has to be contained enough that it doesn’t cause a wildfire that threatens to destroy the village.

This happens, of course, but the chances of having all the right conditions and the right luck are very rare so you need to make sure that everyone knows how to identify a fire, how to tend it and manage it properly, and that everything is in place to take advantage of the next time a fire starts nearby. One unlucky patch of rain or a heavy gust of wind at the wrong moment and that rare chance of capturing fire vanishes and it could be months or even years before the next opportunity presents itself.

In that overextended metaphor, once the fire has successfully been brought back to the village I think it’s too much of a gamble to take the attitude of being like “We’ll figure out the next steps once we get there” because it’s too rare and too important to risk fumbling the ball. You want to have a fire pit already built, you want some kindling or wood ready to go long before you need it, you want contingency plans in place to ensure that if the weather turns bad that there’s ways of keeping the fire going. Of course there’s no way to predict everything that might happen and there’s going to be some degree of figuring it out as you go but the less you leave up to chance, the more likely you’re going to be successful in your endeavours.

Or maybe it’s like a speedrun of a game which relies upon a random glitch that only occurs rarely - you don’t want to have the attitude that you’ll figure out the next steps of how to finish the game when you encounter that glitch. You want to know exactly what you’re doing so that when the glitch happens you can take full advantage of it to maximise your chances of breaking the speed record.

You don’t want to find yourself as the dog who finally catches the car, y’know?

Which leads me on to the next part…

This could be more organic than explicit by modeling instead of educating per se, but couldn’t that be construed as a sort of Vanguard movement?

You’ve hit the nail on the head here.

I refer to these as vulgar vanguards. Maybe that’s a bit uncharitable of me but it’s not intended to be a term of derision. There’s plenty of vulgar materialism that you can find outside of Marxist discourse and it’s an established term so I think vulgar vanguard is pretty apt. It’s also a recognition that MLs don’t have a monopoly on these ideas and that other political orientations can come across these ideas or the practice independently.

A vanguard is just the most ideologically advanced group of people who help shape the beliefs and the groundswell of political action of the masses. Anarchism has plenty of examples of vanguards – Durruti, Malatesta, Makhno and the Revolutionary Military Council (with figures like Volin) and Belash, and Kim Chwa-chin. (Obviously these are mostly just names-dropping the leaders but I’m not going to bore you by listing out every deputy or lieutenant or whatever for each of these movements but I’m sure we all agree that these leaders all had a group of their most trusted allies who were extremely committed and ideologically advanced that helped direct their movements.)

I’ve seen plenty of de facto vanguards emerge in anarchist orgs and history also proves this to be true in larger movements. I’d much rather have an explicit structure with defined roles and rights and responsibilities, with mechanisms to deal with problems that will inevitably occur, than I would to have something that sprouts up organically where there is no room for democratic processes and accountability and that kinda stuff. It’s much easier to get someone out of a role if the role is official, it has clear delimitations on power, and there are mechanisms for recall and elections and managing corruption and misconduct than it is trying to do this when a person just occupies a role naturally because the organisation is so horizontal that it doesn’t engage in articulating a power structure.

Unfortunately vanguard is often used as a boogeyman term. I’m very open to hearing critiques of vanguardism but if the criticism is that it’s elitists or that it is a betrayal of radical politics then I’m not buying it. Your average mom and pop aren’t going to be the most theoretically or politically advanced in a revolution but that’s okay – it’s better to acknowledge this and to find ways to mitigate these contradictions than it is to expect that they are suddenly going to become deeply political and that they’re going to be willing and able to become the next Peter Arshinov.

That’s a bit like expecting everyone to become their own physician. A few people might actually do it, some people are going to be able to do it, but it’s unfair and self-defeating to operate on the assumption that everyone has the means to become a doctor. In the matter of boots it’s okay to defer to the authority of a bootmaker, y’know?

Honestly it’s another thing where if I was more malicious and more interested in drama farming or getting some epic screenshots or clips, I do think I’d be able to steer a discussion with most anarchists into getting them to describe a vanguard in their own terms and to get them to express support for them except without naming it as a vanguard directly. But that’s not a productive way of building a movement or raising consciousness, that’s just a way of creating a circlejerk where one side can feel smugly superior to the other – it’s Vaush-tier bullshit.

I think a lot of these differences and perceived differences tend to work themselves out through praxis anyway and my understanding is that history vindicates this position; I’m not interested in proving to everyone that I was right or getting others to concede to me that they had it wrong. I just want to see a better future and to contribute to that however I can, factionalism and ego be damned.