Let’s face it. Most people in this country do not really care about economic issues. Politics in this country has always been about social problems while the elites always dealt with their corrupt tax policies behind the scenes, so the average person in America does not understand how their government works on an economic level. I grew up under the regime and the propaganda classes basically said that the government creates a safe environment for businesses da da da, but that’s not what they do. They bail out the corporations of the elites who have purchased their government and then use structural violence of the police and other systems like prices of medicine and food which causes people to die of starvation and of treatable diseases.

Anarchists understand the world in similar ways to comrades. They understand that class struggle results in violence against the workers. However it seems they just don’t care about the economic system or view this as more social. If you listen to them about certain things they aren’t wrong, but their policies would fail because they are not based on economics which is the basis of all politics. We can turn the world into a liberal utopia where drug use and graffiti are everywhere (Which doesn’t sound bad at all.) but then people would starve since the bourgeois class is still able to hoard all the wealth and exploit us all. It seems silly for a leftist movement to continue economic policies that have turned the country into a dystopian hellscape.

It is very likely that people just identify as anarchist to avoid the social stigma and very real danger of being a communist revolutionary in America. Or maybe they really have an opposition to the authoritarianism that would be required to build socialism? The US is a society where police and other authorities have abused the citizenry and the masses for a while, so it is logical to think the cultural bias against police has formed an aversion to any kind of authoritarian ideology. If you live here the police will bully you and mistreat you with any excuse they can. And then they wonder why everyone gives them dirty looks and calls them pigs. Only blue lives matter, reactionaries care about the pork. But regardless when you spend your entire life trying not to get hit with a baton, it is very difficult to imagine a police in a socialist society actually doing their job in a way that doesn’t threaten the average person. While their ideology is flaws and seems to be watered down to the point of being more of a social movement than a political one, it is important to understand why westerners are choosing this, especially middle class ones that do not feel the brutal effects of class struggle.

This is not to say we should just follow anarchists as this is tailism. We must educate these people and show them dialectical materialism. These people cried about Ukraine and believed western propaganda about it being this innocent state, but when you’re following dialectical materialism, there is no room for emotional manipulation by the media to believe whatever the regime wants. We must use communist theory as a tool that we use to clean up misguided ideas or idealism.

  • @cfgaussian
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    1 year ago

    There are some holes in your theory. For one, the bourgeois state and bourgeois academia both play a very large part in encouraging certain preferred strains of leftism over others. The preference for Trotskyism, anarchism, etc. is partly manufactured.

    But even more importantly, the reason so much of the middle class aligns with “radical” ideologies that are in reality non-threatening to the system is because they are themselves to some extent also its beneficiaries. Their material interests align with the preservation of capitalism and imperialism even as they are at the same time victimized by it. They are very afraid of losing what little they have and will defend it at the expense of those below them in the exploitation hierarchy.

    • relay
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      71 year ago

      In the USA everyone is downwardly mobile except for the 1%. Inflation is up for the cost for everything and basic infrastructure is not being maintainted and most are heavily indebted. With the belt and road initiative roping people into a more fair deal of economic trade and the IMF and world bank not wanting to match the deals of China, imperialist superexploitation is going to come to an end. It’s pretty bad for the proles of the imperial core but their only way back to some sort of improvement materially is going to be socialism.

  • relay
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    101 year ago

    Things “anarchists” need to learn is that it is not such a terrible thing for soldiers to kill Nazis. It is “authoritarian” to kill Azov fascists, but the alternative of letting them run freely to commit hate crimes on ethnic minorities is clearly much worse. If at all possible they should be reeducated, but the Ukrainian state was either unable to capture and reeducate them or had no desire to capture and reeducate them.