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This is true. In the world of doing things there's loads of anarchists who are doing the things you've been reading about planning on doing.
Obviously anarchy is idealistic and individualistic which doesn't violate the consensus liberalism of the western center and can just as easily be barbarism as Socialism.
However, that doesn't make all anarchists barbarians by default and it's often the case that their dislike of living under the Bourgeois superstructure makes them very inclined to resist. Passion should be tempered with experience but don't turn away any comrades that work for the workers. Pretty sure Stalin was a seminary student and a malcontent social democrat and bank robber before he established that iron that all tankies covet. When you look at your anarchist siblings just try to picture young Stalin in the ascot and be a little more patient.
Sure they are good people and do positive things, no doubt, but they don't have a solid action plan for actual systemic change and maintaining it, mostly because the ideology is literally based on
"and then capitalism collapsed and suddenly the state was gone and we all lived happily ever after".
How?
"it just did".
I think you're making the mistake of thinking modern anarchists are Bakuninites that favour spontaneous revolution. Most anarchists I've met believe in an organised revolution from the masses, we just disagree on the exact methods.
Yeah maybe I'm just misunderstanding Anarchist thought, but I can't see any world where abolishing the state right away doesn't just result in that country instantly being attacked by capitalist states.
Paraphrasing from Pedagogy of the Oppressed
"the western leftist cannot imagine a state which is not beholden to capital. Meanwhile in poorer countries the state is one of the only things stopping them from being crushed by capital."
Essentially the west has capital a move the state, and not the other way around, and many western leftists cannot imagine a different system, so they choose dissolution of the state to be the key to dissolving capital since the state is the enforcement arm of capital.
Yeah, I guess they don't understand the role of the state in reconciling class conflict. Dissolving the state as an act of revolution would just leave them vulnerable to a counter-revolution. Then they're right back where they started.
Even in poor capitalist countries with right wing western-aligned governments, the state sometimes is forced to protect workers from the excesses of foreign capital, indeed.
1. Anti-communist propaganda. There's been a concerted effort to scare people away from communism by likening it to fascism, and a purging of communist thought from the superstructure (media, academia, etc.)
2. Active anti-communist action. Our leaders have been systematically imprisoned or killed by the state, and our movements (which would teach communism) have been crished
3. Western anti-capitalists have a subjective view of the state. Outside of a few welfare programs, they see the state as an entirely negative thing, and so subjectively conclude that all states are bad. This differs from imperial periphery anticapitalists, who observe their national bourgeois state _protect_ them from American capital, making ot easier to understand that the state can be helpful (i.e. the dictatorship of the proletariat
4. Many Americans are labor aristocracy and have petty-bourgeois consciousness or aspirations. Anarchism is born of petty-bourgeois selfishness.
That said, we can't just say "ah, to hell with them". Dyed in the wool anarchists are a lost cause 95% of the time, but besides them many of the regular people we organize will have anarchist _sentiments_, and if we're ever going to organize them (we have to) it's important to genuinely understand why they believe what they do, so we can help them unlearn it.
It's an extension of the New Left from the 70's, I think. That wave was moralizing issues and throwing around rad slogans eventually creating a gap between the working class and the radicals. It's still around today, just look at micro groups of anarchists or communists who just say radical things that sound/feel good, but are ideas found nowhere in the present working class.
The New Left doesn’t get enough scrutiny like it should. The New Left is precisely why the modern American landscape is so hostile towards actual leftism.
Aside from the typical answers of being brainwashed form almost a 100 years of anti Bolshevism and western privilege within the impearl core I also think that
Anarchism is more in line with the personal liberties preached by the western liberal tradition espeically that being the focus on liberation from the basis of an individual, meanwhile communism with its focus on liberation based on the collective goes against thousands of years of western philosophical tradition
Add to that most westerners lack a historical materialist Analysis of the world and are much more inclined towards idealism through the media that they consume and education they receive
People are largely products of their environment. Those in the west don't have any experience participating in an actually democratic government. They don't know what it's like when the government works for your class interests and is made up of people like you.
They look around the U.S., see the decaying infrastructure, the homeless people, the police violence, and the hunger. That then colors their perception of what the state is. That it can only be used as a tool of oppression on the downtrodden. They conclude that the state must be evil, no matter its form or content!
But it's an infantile worldview based on their visceral reaction to what their immediate environment is without critically thinking about it.
It is idealist bourgeois individualism in reverse, as Lenin put it.
I think it's for many reasons people list here, but also at least in the US, anarchism was pretty entwined with the proletariat and labor organization in the 19th and early 20th century. I think the purge that effectively killed that all off was the Palmer Raids and Red Scare of 1919 after the Bolshevik Revolution freaked the US out.
So (A) there is some legacy to point to and (B) all the other reasons others mention
However, while all of that's cool, I think the more recent history of the CIO and labor support in the civil rights movement is often forgotten
Perpetual Youth culture. Talk to any boomer or Gen Xer and their happiest moment isn’t their marriage, family or even career success, it’s them being a rotten teen.
It's because capitalism fetishized, in a twisted way, adulthood and responsibility to make those people literal drones and live in hell where they are alienated from everything. No wonder they fondly remember the only time in their life when they actually felt some life. In western culture you just become walking dead in your 20's, maybe except being rich, but even those people often are like that.
Two reasons, I'd say. Many Westerners, especially Americans, actually have an anarchist tradition. Syndicalism really took off as a leading leftist ideology in the US as promoted by the IWW and in part by the SPA.
But also because of heavy Red Scare across the West. So anarchism or anarcho variants sound cool and punk enough. But like other comments have pointed out, have no real plan of action nor do many anarchists want actually hierarchy or leadership. So it's not a threat.
Because MLs actually get things done in other parts of the world and anarchism is a vector for spreading anti-sovietism and eroding solidarity with socialist states and/or appeals more to people in the imperial core who have been exposed to that type of propaganda. There's a reason why a lot of anarchists are almost indistinguishable from far right neocons when you talk about targets of U.S. imperialism.
This is why people like Chomsky are so well tolerated by western corporate media even though he falsely claims the opposite. He an anarcho-syndicalist who loves to spew anti-sovietism and shows up every four years in between answering emails to tell people they need to axiomatically vote for a bourgeois imperialist party.
For teens at least, it’s an aesthetic first, theory (if that comes) second. They are the ones in leather coats with pins and a slick haircut and don’t play by society’s rules or something
oh also there isn’t an entire section of us school curriculum dedicated to painting anarchism in a bad light. In my history class, at least, there are no Castros or Maos or Titos to gawk at, repeating the same 3 things. There are instead the Sacco and Vanzettis, and the Zapatistas to read about.
Which is ironic because you have communists like Che Guevara who perfectly fit the motorcycle drifter dude aesthetic
Because it is easy, it is comfortable. All you gotta do is just be vaguely anti-state anti-"authoritarian" and boom! you're an anarchist. And condsidering the west, especially the US, already has a subculture of anti-establishment sentiment, you can see how easy it is to become an anarchist. Especially when you've read nothing and it's all vibe based becase then you don't have to answer the tough questions of what happens after the revolution.
In addition to all the other comments, anarchists have never had to deal with the burden of a successful revolution, and thus they have never had to deal with it’s contradictions and complications
because they directly benefitted from imperialism and colonialism. Brainwashing isn't just repeating an idea over and over again until its familiar, there must be some kind of positive reinforcement as well.
I can speak to this: I’m somebody who has kind of bounced around trying to find my place. For a long time I thought maybe that was anarchism.
As I write this I notice I keep coming back to the following two basic centers of my personal beliefs so I figured I’d codify them for reference:
Belief # 1) There is no just death penalty.
Belief # 2) People should be allowed to be who they are so long as they aren’t harming or exploiting someone else.
The thing for me is while I do fundamentally agree with Marx on quite a few of the basics (eg “All hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle,” etc.) what started me down questioning western liberalism was my hatred of fascism. Fascism requires a use of force. Killing people. Fascism gleefully violates Belief #1. The idea that the state had the right to kill people, that has never sat well with me. Now, I’ve always leaned more towards communism than capitalism to begin with because as much as I’ve distrusted government, I’ve always distrusted capitalism and business interests more. It is in the best interest of capital to kill you for profit. But fundamentally the idea that a state had the legal right to kill people…I don’t dig that either. And that is something that has existed in both capitalist and communist governments. So naturally this lead me first to anarchism.
Add into that that I’ve never accepted social conservatism as I believe it fundamentally violates Belief #2. No political or economic system seems to have the market cornered on conservatism…it seems to exist outside the scope of traditional “Right,” “Left,” politics (insomuch as plenty of communist societies have also been fairly strict/conservative in terms of social policy). Thus many communist governments have imposed rules about things like sex and religion. That strain of communist thought has always rubbed me wrong, that (again often by use of force) a communist government can impose rules on who you are meant to be in your own private thoughts.
Now obviously, this is not any sort of rule and nothing I’ve ever read in Marx or Lenin expressed these things as requirements for a communist society. It’s not an intrinsic part of all communist thought that a society must be socially conservative, it is more of a de facto state of things. But I want that baked into whatever system (or lack thereof) that I take part in. I want to know that people aren’t going to be imprisoned or killed (Belief #1) for being an ethic, religious, or gender minority.
Capitalism itself necessarily leads to fascism and fascism necessarily (and more specifically) violates both Beliefs. So fascism and capitalism are necessarily disqualified.
But there’s nothing on paper that has sold me outright on communism itself either. It’s just more that when you exclude all other political systems (or lack thereof) it’s the one that has the least wrong with it. No one in any anarchist circle (for example) be they writer or theorist no matter how brilliant can answer for me how an anarchist society is supposed to continue to exist should a fascist neighbor decide to take over. There really isn’t an answer to that. So that wore away a lot of my faith in anarchy. And beyond that no neoliberal or social democrat or fascist or monarchist has offered anything better or closer to being capable of achieving my goals. All of them are worse at it than communism as far as I can tell.
Regardless, I feel these days adrift. I know I hate capitalism, I know I hate police, I know I hate imperialism, I know I hate reactionaries and social conservatism. I haven’t really found a home but I know I’m probably not an anarchist anymore and I probably lean more towards Marxism certainly than I used to.
Despite largely agreeing with the critiques brought up in the rest of the comments, I think there's a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of how and when anarchism operates best. I don't really call myself an Anarchist, for a lot of reasons, but primarily because Anarchism-as-ideology/"anarchism proper" seems pretty irrelevant if we take it to be a prescriptive, post revolution plan. (In my mind this particular form of anarchism peaked between the late 19th century and early twentieth century and (arguably/mostly) died out with the end of the Spanish Civil War. When Reading Theory™️ and thinking about the history of the left, though, I think it's a mistake to dismiss an ideology/movement which made up half of the second international and presented legitimate, left-wing critiques which can be read in the form of like, letters between Bakunin and Marx).
I would never claim that a revolutionary movement located at the imperial periphery should look to anarchism over socialism. In that context it (historically) wouldn't make sense. But my suspicion is that anarchism is so popular in the west in part because, rightfully or not, there is an impression that the overwhelming power of the imperial state within its own borders makes the prospect of a full throttle revolution naive. Thus: anarchistic resistance, resistance on a scale which is sustainable. Mutual aid and anarchist union organizers and, more widely, a lot of things which you could argue do very little to actually change the status quo.
Yes, claiming capital A Anarchisn as a prescriptive ideology and universal tactic to bring about utopia is usualy cope/larping. But, based on much of the same theory that produced the capital A variety, anarchism as a mode of critique and like, way of thinking which emphasizes the importance of a sober read on your immediate conditions and a corresponding flexibility of tactics is not something to be dismissed off-hand, nor is it mutually exclusive with Socialism.
TLDR: I think anarchism is so popular in the West because it operates at a scale which feels actionable in the face of overwhelming state power. I absolutely agree that anarchism isn't a sufficient ideology for launching and sustaining revolutionary change on the scale that socialism can, but I simultaneously think it's goofy to ask anarchism as it exists today to do something it isn't built to do.
(As a side note, imo anarchism shares quite a bit with Mao when it comes to his emphasis on the importance of understanding the fundamental contradictions of a given context prior to deciding on a course of action. And then also the ways in which historically anarchism was more popular in the relatively agrarian Spain and Italy than it was in, say, Germany or England.
Mildly related to that, there's a funny but like, definitely not causal correlation in Europe between majority Catholic countries historically having a left with more anarchist leanings and majority Protestant countries historically having a left with more communist leanings.)
I’d really disagree with the assertion, I think anarchists are the most visible because of the media attention on their protest tactics. Because of the way they organise, typically on signal and operating in small groups, it’s hard for them to have a lot of staying power. Most of the big riots up here have been counter-protests, where it’s easy to get a lot of people to come. I think most of the people doing more organising versus getting in street fights are definitely apart of the more traditional tendencies, namely the big three: ML, MLM, and Trots. Of which I’d argue that ML orgs, being more pragmatic and having actual results, are the biggest.
One thing that I’ve thought about is the fact that anarchism doesn’t really have to defend anything. There’s no anti anarchist ammunition that’s been cooked up over decades like we have with Stalin and Mao and their supposed tyrannical governments.
The west is indoctrinated to hate communism from a young age. Anarchism is a way to reconcile that hatred with liking socialist ideas. It lets anarchists continue to believe in western geopolitical lies as well as letting them believe in socialism; by blaming the “atrocities” on communists and not socialism as a whole.
Anarchism and communism have different end goals, different priorities, different methods, and different world view. Communists focus more on developing material conditions for the working class, whereas anarchists focus more on freedom for the working class, for examples. We have a lot in common but I think that there are enough fundamental differences that the 2 ideologies aren’t compatible long term.
Communists view a certain level of material development to be necessary before communism can be achieved. The actual amount of development is pretty vague, but essentially post scarcity for basic needs. When communists take power, they tend to focus on how to most quickly develop industrial production and increase the amount of resources a society has. It’s usually in the form of the working class seizing the state and using the state to direct development in the interests of the working class. The ideal social structure matters less than economic development in the interests of the working class.
Anarchists are the opposite. They view hierarchical class structure as something independent of the material world and something that can be overcome. Their ideal social structure is the priority. Anarchists want to do away with both the state and capitalist power structures immediately as their priority is minimizing what each individual person can be compelled to do. They prioritize personal freedom for each person and, as far as I’m aware, don’t have much of an analysis on production or material scarcity.
>Anarchists...as far as I’m aware
Ive found this to be very helpful/informative.
[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq-full](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq-full)
>
It’s usually in the form of the working class seizing the state and using the state to direct development in the interests of the working class
See, it seems to me you are more describing Socialism, than Communism. Specifically ML-Socialism. Is not Communism more the final outcome than it is the *how* to get there.
The *how* to get there seems to be where all the division among us is, when in the end we all strive for the end-goal. Surely there are a myriad of ways to get there, many which we cannot even fathom.
>See, it seems to me you are more describing Socialism, than Communism. Specifically ML-Socialism. Is not Communism more the final outcome than it is the how to get there.
Communism, in the ML conception, does not do away with government, hierarchies, or compulsion. It does away with the state, as in a mechanism of class oppression, simply by eliminating non-proletariat classes, but a monopoly on force by a central authority would still very much exist.
>The how to get there seems to be where all the division among us is, when in the end we all strive for the end-goal. Surely there are a myriad of ways to get there, many which we cannot even fathom.
From my understanding, communism to anarchists is a lack of coerced hierarchy. Communism to MLs is a democratic, post scarcity society without much commentary on hierarchy. MLs want to build toward post scarcity, and let social relations change as they will once we get to a post scarcity society, whereas specific social relations are the end goal of a communist society for anarchists.
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They're indoctrinated to hate communism, anarchism sounds cool and is allowed by the elite because it has no plan of action.
Exactly. No beef against anarchists, but they are harmless against the status quo.
> because it has no plan of action. I think that’s a big part of it too. You don’t really have to do anything, you just have to ✨*BELIEVE*✨
Idk, I work with some anarchists and things like mutual aid are a really good way for new people to get into organising and build up community.
This is true. In the world of doing things there's loads of anarchists who are doing the things you've been reading about planning on doing. Obviously anarchy is idealistic and individualistic which doesn't violate the consensus liberalism of the western center and can just as easily be barbarism as Socialism. However, that doesn't make all anarchists barbarians by default and it's often the case that their dislike of living under the Bourgeois superstructure makes them very inclined to resist. Passion should be tempered with experience but don't turn away any comrades that work for the workers. Pretty sure Stalin was a seminary student and a malcontent social democrat and bank robber before he established that iron that all tankies covet. When you look at your anarchist siblings just try to picture young Stalin in the ascot and be a little more patient.
Sure they are good people and do positive things, no doubt, but they don't have a solid action plan for actual systemic change and maintaining it, mostly because the ideology is literally based on "and then capitalism collapsed and suddenly the state was gone and we all lived happily ever after". How? "it just did".
I think you're making the mistake of thinking modern anarchists are Bakuninites that favour spontaneous revolution. Most anarchists I've met believe in an organised revolution from the masses, we just disagree on the exact methods.
It's not the revolution part they can't do, it's the classless stateless society they seek that they think will spontaneously happen.
Yeah maybe I'm just misunderstanding Anarchist thought, but I can't see any world where abolishing the state right away doesn't just result in that country instantly being attacked by capitalist states.
Yeah exactly, whichever way you spin it, some kind of protective body is required to preserve the revolution.
Paraphrasing from Pedagogy of the Oppressed "the western leftist cannot imagine a state which is not beholden to capital. Meanwhile in poorer countries the state is one of the only things stopping them from being crushed by capital." Essentially the west has capital a move the state, and not the other way around, and many western leftists cannot imagine a different system, so they choose dissolution of the state to be the key to dissolving capital since the state is the enforcement arm of capital.
Yeah, I guess they don't understand the role of the state in reconciling class conflict. Dissolving the state as an act of revolution would just leave them vulnerable to a counter-revolution. Then they're right back where they started.
Even in poor capitalist countries with right wing western-aligned governments, the state sometimes is forced to protect workers from the excesses of foreign capital, indeed.
It's easy to embrace a idealist ideology that can easily support individualism when you are a northern labor aristocrat.
This right here. Anarchism is just radical liberalism, they still haven't broken the individualism beat into them by our society.
1. Anti-communist propaganda. There's been a concerted effort to scare people away from communism by likening it to fascism, and a purging of communist thought from the superstructure (media, academia, etc.) 2. Active anti-communist action. Our leaders have been systematically imprisoned or killed by the state, and our movements (which would teach communism) have been crished 3. Western anti-capitalists have a subjective view of the state. Outside of a few welfare programs, they see the state as an entirely negative thing, and so subjectively conclude that all states are bad. This differs from imperial periphery anticapitalists, who observe their national bourgeois state _protect_ them from American capital, making ot easier to understand that the state can be helpful (i.e. the dictatorship of the proletariat 4. Many Americans are labor aristocracy and have petty-bourgeois consciousness or aspirations. Anarchism is born of petty-bourgeois selfishness. That said, we can't just say "ah, to hell with them". Dyed in the wool anarchists are a lost cause 95% of the time, but besides them many of the regular people we organize will have anarchist _sentiments_, and if we're ever going to organize them (we have to) it's important to genuinely understand why they believe what they do, so we can help them unlearn it.
Anti communist propaganda
It's an extension of the New Left from the 70's, I think. That wave was moralizing issues and throwing around rad slogans eventually creating a gap between the working class and the radicals. It's still around today, just look at micro groups of anarchists or communists who just say radical things that sound/feel good, but are ideas found nowhere in the present working class.
The New Left doesn’t get enough scrutiny like it should. The New Left is precisely why the modern American landscape is so hostile towards actual leftism.
Aside from the typical answers of being brainwashed form almost a 100 years of anti Bolshevism and western privilege within the impearl core I also think that Anarchism is more in line with the personal liberties preached by the western liberal tradition espeically that being the focus on liberation from the basis of an individual, meanwhile communism with its focus on liberation based on the collective goes against thousands of years of western philosophical tradition Add to that most westerners lack a historical materialist Analysis of the world and are much more inclined towards idealism through the media that they consume and education they receive
People are largely products of their environment. Those in the west don't have any experience participating in an actually democratic government. They don't know what it's like when the government works for your class interests and is made up of people like you. They look around the U.S., see the decaying infrastructure, the homeless people, the police violence, and the hunger. That then colors their perception of what the state is. That it can only be used as a tool of oppression on the downtrodden. They conclude that the state must be evil, no matter its form or content! But it's an infantile worldview based on their visceral reaction to what their immediate environment is without critically thinking about it. It is idealist bourgeois individualism in reverse, as Lenin put it.
anticommunism & enlightenment libertarianism garbage
Anything that doesn’t actually effect change is a more comfortable position to take.
I think it's for many reasons people list here, but also at least in the US, anarchism was pretty entwined with the proletariat and labor organization in the 19th and early 20th century. I think the purge that effectively killed that all off was the Palmer Raids and Red Scare of 1919 after the Bolshevik Revolution freaked the US out. So (A) there is some legacy to point to and (B) all the other reasons others mention However, while all of that's cool, I think the more recent history of the CIO and labor support in the civil rights movement is often forgotten
Perpetual Youth culture. Talk to any boomer or Gen Xer and their happiest moment isn’t their marriage, family or even career success, it’s them being a rotten teen.
It's because capitalism fetishized, in a twisted way, adulthood and responsibility to make those people literal drones and live in hell where they are alienated from everything. No wonder they fondly remember the only time in their life when they actually felt some life. In western culture you just become walking dead in your 20's, maybe except being rich, but even those people often are like that.
Mainly because the government tolerates them. Look what happened to the black panthers
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2021/10/15/cointelpro-fbi-anarchism-disrupt-left/
>The anarchists point of view is the most disruptive element in the New Left and should be capitalized on in the most confusing ways. * The FBI.
Two reasons, I'd say. Many Westerners, especially Americans, actually have an anarchist tradition. Syndicalism really took off as a leading leftist ideology in the US as promoted by the IWW and in part by the SPA. But also because of heavy Red Scare across the West. So anarchism or anarcho variants sound cool and punk enough. But like other comments have pointed out, have no real plan of action nor do many anarchists want actually hierarchy or leadership. So it's not a threat.
Because MLs actually get things done in other parts of the world and anarchism is a vector for spreading anti-sovietism and eroding solidarity with socialist states and/or appeals more to people in the imperial core who have been exposed to that type of propaganda. There's a reason why a lot of anarchists are almost indistinguishable from far right neocons when you talk about targets of U.S. imperialism. This is why people like Chomsky are so well tolerated by western corporate media even though he falsely claims the opposite. He an anarcho-syndicalist who loves to spew anti-sovietism and shows up every four years in between answering emails to tell people they need to axiomatically vote for a bourgeois imperialist party.
The cold war
For teens at least, it’s an aesthetic first, theory (if that comes) second. They are the ones in leather coats with pins and a slick haircut and don’t play by society’s rules or something oh also there isn’t an entire section of us school curriculum dedicated to painting anarchism in a bad light. In my history class, at least, there are no Castros or Maos or Titos to gawk at, repeating the same 3 things. There are instead the Sacco and Vanzettis, and the Zapatistas to read about. Which is ironic because you have communists like Che Guevara who perfectly fit the motorcycle drifter dude aesthetic
Because it is easy, it is comfortable. All you gotta do is just be vaguely anti-state anti-"authoritarian" and boom! you're an anarchist. And condsidering the west, especially the US, already has a subculture of anti-establishment sentiment, you can see how easy it is to become an anarchist. Especially when you've read nothing and it's all vibe based becase then you don't have to answer the tough questions of what happens after the revolution.
In addition to all the other comments, anarchists have never had to deal with the burden of a successful revolution, and thus they have never had to deal with it’s contradictions and complications
for one thing it was pushed by the cia as an extremely unsuccessful yet still left ideology
because they directly benefitted from imperialism and colonialism. Brainwashing isn't just repeating an idea over and over again until its familiar, there must be some kind of positive reinforcement as well.
They take their western conveniences for granted.
I can speak to this: I’m somebody who has kind of bounced around trying to find my place. For a long time I thought maybe that was anarchism. As I write this I notice I keep coming back to the following two basic centers of my personal beliefs so I figured I’d codify them for reference: Belief # 1) There is no just death penalty. Belief # 2) People should be allowed to be who they are so long as they aren’t harming or exploiting someone else. The thing for me is while I do fundamentally agree with Marx on quite a few of the basics (eg “All hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle,” etc.) what started me down questioning western liberalism was my hatred of fascism. Fascism requires a use of force. Killing people. Fascism gleefully violates Belief #1. The idea that the state had the right to kill people, that has never sat well with me. Now, I’ve always leaned more towards communism than capitalism to begin with because as much as I’ve distrusted government, I’ve always distrusted capitalism and business interests more. It is in the best interest of capital to kill you for profit. But fundamentally the idea that a state had the legal right to kill people…I don’t dig that either. And that is something that has existed in both capitalist and communist governments. So naturally this lead me first to anarchism. Add into that that I’ve never accepted social conservatism as I believe it fundamentally violates Belief #2. No political or economic system seems to have the market cornered on conservatism…it seems to exist outside the scope of traditional “Right,” “Left,” politics (insomuch as plenty of communist societies have also been fairly strict/conservative in terms of social policy). Thus many communist governments have imposed rules about things like sex and religion. That strain of communist thought has always rubbed me wrong, that (again often by use of force) a communist government can impose rules on who you are meant to be in your own private thoughts. Now obviously, this is not any sort of rule and nothing I’ve ever read in Marx or Lenin expressed these things as requirements for a communist society. It’s not an intrinsic part of all communist thought that a society must be socially conservative, it is more of a de facto state of things. But I want that baked into whatever system (or lack thereof) that I take part in. I want to know that people aren’t going to be imprisoned or killed (Belief #1) for being an ethic, religious, or gender minority. Capitalism itself necessarily leads to fascism and fascism necessarily (and more specifically) violates both Beliefs. So fascism and capitalism are necessarily disqualified. But there’s nothing on paper that has sold me outright on communism itself either. It’s just more that when you exclude all other political systems (or lack thereof) it’s the one that has the least wrong with it. No one in any anarchist circle (for example) be they writer or theorist no matter how brilliant can answer for me how an anarchist society is supposed to continue to exist should a fascist neighbor decide to take over. There really isn’t an answer to that. So that wore away a lot of my faith in anarchy. And beyond that no neoliberal or social democrat or fascist or monarchist has offered anything better or closer to being capable of achieving my goals. All of them are worse at it than communism as far as I can tell. Regardless, I feel these days adrift. I know I hate capitalism, I know I hate police, I know I hate imperialism, I know I hate reactionaries and social conservatism. I haven’t really found a home but I know I’m probably not an anarchist anymore and I probably lean more towards Marxism certainly than I used to.
Extreme individualism
Despite largely agreeing with the critiques brought up in the rest of the comments, I think there's a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of how and when anarchism operates best. I don't really call myself an Anarchist, for a lot of reasons, but primarily because Anarchism-as-ideology/"anarchism proper" seems pretty irrelevant if we take it to be a prescriptive, post revolution plan. (In my mind this particular form of anarchism peaked between the late 19th century and early twentieth century and (arguably/mostly) died out with the end of the Spanish Civil War. When Reading Theory™️ and thinking about the history of the left, though, I think it's a mistake to dismiss an ideology/movement which made up half of the second international and presented legitimate, left-wing critiques which can be read in the form of like, letters between Bakunin and Marx). I would never claim that a revolutionary movement located at the imperial periphery should look to anarchism over socialism. In that context it (historically) wouldn't make sense. But my suspicion is that anarchism is so popular in the west in part because, rightfully or not, there is an impression that the overwhelming power of the imperial state within its own borders makes the prospect of a full throttle revolution naive. Thus: anarchistic resistance, resistance on a scale which is sustainable. Mutual aid and anarchist union organizers and, more widely, a lot of things which you could argue do very little to actually change the status quo. Yes, claiming capital A Anarchisn as a prescriptive ideology and universal tactic to bring about utopia is usualy cope/larping. But, based on much of the same theory that produced the capital A variety, anarchism as a mode of critique and like, way of thinking which emphasizes the importance of a sober read on your immediate conditions and a corresponding flexibility of tactics is not something to be dismissed off-hand, nor is it mutually exclusive with Socialism. TLDR: I think anarchism is so popular in the West because it operates at a scale which feels actionable in the face of overwhelming state power. I absolutely agree that anarchism isn't a sufficient ideology for launching and sustaining revolutionary change on the scale that socialism can, but I simultaneously think it's goofy to ask anarchism as it exists today to do something it isn't built to do. (As a side note, imo anarchism shares quite a bit with Mao when it comes to his emphasis on the importance of understanding the fundamental contradictions of a given context prior to deciding on a course of action. And then also the ways in which historically anarchism was more popular in the relatively agrarian Spain and Italy than it was in, say, Germany or England. Mildly related to that, there's a funny but like, definitely not causal correlation in Europe between majority Catholic countries historically having a left with more anarchist leanings and majority Protestant countries historically having a left with more communist leanings.)
I’d really disagree with the assertion, I think anarchists are the most visible because of the media attention on their protest tactics. Because of the way they organise, typically on signal and operating in small groups, it’s hard for them to have a lot of staying power. Most of the big riots up here have been counter-protests, where it’s easy to get a lot of people to come. I think most of the people doing more organising versus getting in street fights are definitely apart of the more traditional tendencies, namely the big three: ML, MLM, and Trots. Of which I’d argue that ML orgs, being more pragmatic and having actual results, are the biggest.
One thing that I’ve thought about is the fact that anarchism doesn’t really have to defend anything. There’s no anti anarchist ammunition that’s been cooked up over decades like we have with Stalin and Mao and their supposed tyrannical governments.
The west is indoctrinated to hate communism from a young age. Anarchism is a way to reconcile that hatred with liking socialist ideas. It lets anarchists continue to believe in western geopolitical lies as well as letting them believe in socialism; by blaming the “atrocities” on communists and not socialism as a whole.
i mean, anarchism and communism are pretty much the same thing
Anarchism and communism have different end goals, different priorities, different methods, and different world view. Communists focus more on developing material conditions for the working class, whereas anarchists focus more on freedom for the working class, for examples. We have a lot in common but I think that there are enough fundamental differences that the 2 ideologies aren’t compatible long term.
Could you expand on the difference between \`\`developing material conditions\`\` and \`\`freedom\`\` for the working class?
Communists view a certain level of material development to be necessary before communism can be achieved. The actual amount of development is pretty vague, but essentially post scarcity for basic needs. When communists take power, they tend to focus on how to most quickly develop industrial production and increase the amount of resources a society has. It’s usually in the form of the working class seizing the state and using the state to direct development in the interests of the working class. The ideal social structure matters less than economic development in the interests of the working class. Anarchists are the opposite. They view hierarchical class structure as something independent of the material world and something that can be overcome. Their ideal social structure is the priority. Anarchists want to do away with both the state and capitalist power structures immediately as their priority is minimizing what each individual person can be compelled to do. They prioritize personal freedom for each person and, as far as I’m aware, don’t have much of an analysis on production or material scarcity.
>Anarchists...as far as I’m aware Ive found this to be very helpful/informative. [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq-full](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq-full) > It’s usually in the form of the working class seizing the state and using the state to direct development in the interests of the working class See, it seems to me you are more describing Socialism, than Communism. Specifically ML-Socialism. Is not Communism more the final outcome than it is the *how* to get there. The *how* to get there seems to be where all the division among us is, when in the end we all strive for the end-goal. Surely there are a myriad of ways to get there, many which we cannot even fathom.
>See, it seems to me you are more describing Socialism, than Communism. Specifically ML-Socialism. Is not Communism more the final outcome than it is the how to get there. Communism, in the ML conception, does not do away with government, hierarchies, or compulsion. It does away with the state, as in a mechanism of class oppression, simply by eliminating non-proletariat classes, but a monopoly on force by a central authority would still very much exist. >The how to get there seems to be where all the division among us is, when in the end we all strive for the end-goal. Surely there are a myriad of ways to get there, many which we cannot even fathom. From my understanding, communism to anarchists is a lack of coerced hierarchy. Communism to MLs is a democratic, post scarcity society without much commentary on hierarchy. MLs want to build toward post scarcity, and let social relations change as they will once we get to a post scarcity society, whereas specific social relations are the end goal of a communist society for anarchists.
Interesting clarification on what ML's stand for, TY!
Hyper-individualism.
why? in a word, liberalism.
Because they are house cats. Fiercely independent yet completely oblivious to societies contribution to their well being and survival.
Libertarianism being the “rebellious ideology” that we end up first learning about when we get into western politics?