• @TeethOrCoat
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    134 years ago

    I think I read your reddit post on this a while back and it was actually the decisive ML hook essay for me. This was back when I had a very unsatisfying feeling about anarchism’s prospects.

    In the back of my mind always loomed a physics question. Can they fulfill the ultimate requirement, when all is said and it is time to win the world for real: F(You) > F(Enemy)? If this requirement is not met, you can have a billion people on your side in the morning and at the end of the day you’ll be rotting beside a billion corpses. All your beautifully written critiques of authority, all your complaining about this and that state department atrocity will have meant nothing.

    These past few days I’ve seen so many sentiments on twitter talking about the US descending into fascism. While the useless libs were attempting to urge people to vote Biden not even considering how nonsensical that notion is in the face of actual fascism, 2 words kept repeating on a loop in my mind: Yes. And?

    I’m sorry to the anarchists complaining about authority, but I don’t want to have endless freedom to “criticize” while the fascists crush my comrades to dust. I want to see Pompeo’s lifeless body hanging like Mussolini, while his skull rots on a spike beside it.

      • @TeethOrCoat
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        84 years ago

        Thanks comrade. This post has to be one of the best pieces I’ve ever seen on the internet and just had to let the author know.

  • Muad'DibberMA
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    4 years ago

    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.

    Haha love the terminator reference.

    • Muad'DibberMA
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      84 years ago

      This is great stuff too:

      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.

      • @TeethOrCoat
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        74 years ago

        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.

  • @Shaggy0291
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    74 years ago

    The use of tanks is a lovely metaphor, but the pedant in me makes me want to point out Che Guevara’s process when it comes to organising a guerrilla insurgency as detailed in his book on guerrilla warfare. The tanks didn’t come until the revolution was on a much more even footing, at a point where you might say the collapse of the Batista regime was already assured as it was. What mattered more than factories for tank treads when the insurgency was still on wobbly ground were cottage tanneries for boot leather and tobacco to keep the freedom fighters in good spirits. Weaponry was all procured off enemy combatants for the initial stint of the revolution and above all else the guerrillas emphasised mobility so as to avoid encirclement by a larger and better equipped force.

    This lack of any committed infrastructure is the single greatest advantage of the guerrilla band, as this deprives the incumbent state of any opportunity for positional warfare where they can bring their greater materiel to bear, while the guerrilla can attack his industrial base with relative impunity. This was something Mao wrote much about as well, and it seems like the Cubans derived their methods largely from his own.

    Of course, the examples I am using is pretty dated at this point. Fidel Castro never had to worry about being identified with FLIR optics or satellite reconnaissance, let alone targeted by drone bombings in the dense wilderness of the Sierra Maestra.