Some western folk call themselves anarcho-communist. What does this mean?
An idealist (and scientifically lacking) current in the communist movement. It’s a similar phenomenon to libertarian socialist.
in practicality, nothing.
In my experience (as someone who used to call himself an Ancom, and who likes to spend time in leftist spaces), Ancoms are the kind of people who are open to reading Marxist theory (and might actively do so), but don’t take it to heart and prefer to think of Marxism as a libertarian ideology. They’re essentially just Anarchists who read Marx.
For a less simplistic answer; It seems like Ancoms tend to either continue their journey into Marxism and become MLs, or they continue to listen to Anarchist/Libertarian arguments on the Soviet Union and authority and drift into the postie-sphere. They’re often unafraid to call themselves Marxists, but follow anti-Marxist lines of thought (like thinking “tankies” are bad, thinking China is state capitalist, etc.) which leads them to say things like “as a Marxist” when talking poorly of Socialist attempts. (they also have a weird fascination with saying Engels was the Authoritarian who corrupted Marxist theory.)
There is no unifying theory for Anarcho-Communists, as well. So each Ancom defines it as they wish, this makes it hard to address Ancoms as a cohesive ideology bloc. Though, generally, people become Ancom in the gap between reading ‘The Communist Manifesto’, and getting an understanding of materialist dialectics, wherein shortly afterwards they shift into being Marxist-Leninists (or any other realistic Marxist ideology).
There’s also Ancoms who see Anarcho-Communism as “neither Anarchism, nor Communism”, and utilize it as a synthesis of the two major ideology blocs. These Ancoms would argue correctly that Anarchism’s failed every time it’s been tried, then argue incorrectly that every time Communism’s been tried it turned into an authoritarian hellscape. Thusly, taking the anti-authority of Anarchism, and the materialism of Communism. In my opinion, these are the Ancoms to watch out for, they’re one argument with an ML away from going full post-leftist and will plague communities they’re in with their ‘I’m more Marxist than any of you’ (something I’ve read/heard many Ancoms say) smugness. Though, a lot of the people who end up in this category of Ancom are just very misguided, and a ‘meet you half-way’ approach seems to work well for getting them to accept the whole western propaganda about the USSR isn’t a source thing.
Anarcho-Communism is the kinda ideology that a person could study for years and try to write a case study on, but never find a coherent narrative to write about, because it’s ultimately not an actual ideology.
feels like this is the kind of shit someone would resort to when the glaring contradictions of capitalism are apparent to them but they up to their eyeballs drowining in anti-communist kool aid. because of soviet- and sino-phobia they believe they need to do non-authoritarian socialism mostly because of the hubris of the western white man.
Sadly, many Ancoms become Maoists, which tends to be just a more extreme version of anarcho-communism, at least from whave I’ve seen. Except while they do accept that AES existed in the past, they’re overly-critical or outright hostile to anything the West hates, particularly current AES (indeed, their ideology is based off the idea that AES doesn’t exist and that Mao represented a “rupture” with Marxism-Leninism, hence the title of what they follow being “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism”).
Sorry for the run-on sentences lol
Anarcho-communists / anarcho-syndicalists are social anarchists, as opposed to individualist anarchists, that generally uphold two failed anarchist revolutions, that got a little further than the others because they were willing to adopt communist tactics in some ways: revolutionary Catalonia during the Spanish civil war (although they blame the USSR for its defeat, even tho the USSR provided the only aid to the Spanish republican movement), and the Free territory / Mahknovia. They hold really idealized views about these failed experiments as being “decentralized”, and are able to have a martyr complex about them since they failed. More on the history of those here:
- Did Stalin / the USSR intentionally wreck the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War / Revolutionary Catalonia? , 2
- Did the early USSR repress anarchists? What about Nestor Makhno and the Free territory of Ukraine?
- A brief history of Nestor Makhno.
Ancoms are also against every existing socialist state, that they’d define as state capitalist / authoritarian, including Vietnam, Cuba, USSR, China, etc. Ancoms are very common in the west, because it allows them to remain anti-communist and hold on to their cold-war indoctrination, but still be anti-status-quo, without having to learn about the struggles of actually existing socialist states.
Their favorite works of “theory”, are the conquest of bread (a book written 40 years after the manifesto, that has no materialist analysis or deeper theory than “capitalism bad”, and belongs with the earlier utopian socialist works written in the early 1800s), and Malatesta, bakunin, proudhon, and other anarchists. As collectivists a lot of ancom rhetoric will echo Marxist class struggle, but overall ancoms are opposed to vanguardism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Some more threads on general anarchism vs communism
- What’s the difference in economic structure ( production and distribution) of anarchism, anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, and Marxist communism?
- Parenti on Anarcho-Syndicalism / Worker-Coops.
- TheDashRendar - Where do tanks come from? How anarchists vs marxists wage warfare.
- Comrade Hakim - On the difference betweeen “liberatarian” and “authoritarian” socialism.
- Huey P. Newton on the faults of western anarchism.
Their basically communists but dont want to deal with the long history of anticommunist propaganda
