Imagine un-ironically thinking militiamen in a horizontally structured, directly democratic fighting force like anarchists imagine would vote to fight an enemy like the Nazis in a battle as long as and as miserable as Stalingrad. Even in practically all ranks of The Red Army's chain of command before late 1943 there was widespread talk bout retreating into the Siberian wilderness and letting the Nazis have the lands left behind (tens of millions of Russians caught behind enemy lines be damned) cuz The Soviet Union apparently had plenty of land to give away comfortably. You give the soldiers a vote on matters like this and cowardice's gonna spread like wildfire and your "muh staytiss" enemy gets an easy W.
Plus you can't tell anarchists to do shit without them accusing you of authoritarianism. Don't leave your guard post cuz your feet are tired from walking? LOL Nope! "Excuthe me, but who are you to extherthithe your will over MY unique?"
That last one was actually a real problem anarchist Catalonia's militiamen had to deal with.
Even if you could magically create Anarchism without having to worry about things like resources and self-defense, the immediate result in half of the West would be people "democratically choosing" to have the most racist and theocratic shit possible in their communities
Daniel Young
The authoritarian/libertarian line is defined entirely by necessity/morality
Levi Miller
Well, duh. Nobody wants the state to continue to exist in a world without scarcity, class or war.
Camden Kelly
Yeah, you need a solid hierarchy to make an army work. Voting on every decision is bullshit. It means you've betrayed the rest of the army and become their enemy. He's the representative of the cumulative will of all your comrades. So shut up and keep walking. Otherwise you're out.
Sometimes I even wonder if they think we want the same communist world as they do.
Xavier Ross
Direct Democracy is necessary for a planned economy. Read Cockshott.
Henry Torres
Anarchism is when you throw a water balloon against a brick wall and blame the ☭TANKIE☭s when the balloon breaks instead of the wall.
Ryder Clark
Read the whole post again, there are two pairs.
They do, they are just foolish.
John Wilson
That's exactly what anarchists don't want though. They believe in laissez faire co-op faggotry or some shit like that.
Liam Ross
What anyone "wants" doesn't matter, you utter Utopian. What counts is material interests. A society without class, scarcity or war may still depend on a state to maintain itself, which is a sub-optimal outcome that will inhibit people's freedom.
Nicholas Hernandez
Durruti would disagree with you.
Lincoln Smith
"Anarcho"-communism is nothing but a reaction to Marxism, and doesn't make sense unless in that context. Unlike Marxism, which is at least a rationalist theory of economics, non-libertarian anarchism is a completely irrational, naive, utopian and whim worshipping ideology. Their hackneyed talk about "liberty" is just extreme egalitarianism.
I respect some marxists a great deal, I think their major flaw is a lack of appreaction of marginalism. But contemporary anarchists, for the most part, are to superstitious to debate properly.
Justin Lewis
Pfft. I loved being spanked when I was an anarchist.
Austin Bennett
Durutti got killed by one of his own incompetent militiamen who left his post cuz he got bored.
Why would anybody take what he said bout anarchism seriously?
Jason Reyes
There's a lot of polemic and controversy regarding his death, I'll need a source on that claim. As for the rest, I'm not an anarchist but anarchists don't reject all types of hierarchies, only unjustified hierarchies. And in war there are many justified hierarchies, especially if you plan on winning. Even of your example is true, it isn't inherent to anarchism, simply lack of discipline and determination, no doubt those things happened in the Red Army too.
Elijah Sanders
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Nathan Brown
Like always. Look up when Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto and when Proudhon wrote What is Property? Compare the results.
In contrast to right-libertarian anarchism, which is totally rational, materialist and well-grounded.
Wyatt Green
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Benjamin Murphy
Anarcho-communist authority is a Communist version of the Robber Barons, which was the case in Ukraine and Catalunia…
Chase Ortiz
For what exactly?
Zachary Cook
I'm imagining that the state could become a vital mediating entity within the post-scarcity economy, planning being organized hierarchically instead of peer-to-peer.
Chase Lewis
..or maybe, just maybe, it's an aversion to being an asshole and getting innocents killed in the name of some spooky reference of the "The People" and blind loyalty to muh party. You can't say that for certain, and besides if you have to 'dsicpline' soldiers by commanding them under threat of executing them for disoberying, then at what point are you even trying to establish communism anymore? Need I remind you military tribunals were also given to the nazis and vietnam soldiers? You dont have to agree with all anarchists about everything but get over this mindless sectarianism. Speak for yourself, I'm training with a rifle in one hand and a copy of Che on the other. (For the guerilla tactics, not the theory).
Sectarianism is a legitimate grievance but trying to unite various disciplines who have little in common under the banner of "the Left" is 10x more cancerous and destructive. For communism to get anywhere one of the sects will have to win. Or even better, destroy them all because they all fucking suck.
Funny how even the "anarchist" militia were pretty hierarchical
Also
Xavier Clark
You know for people who claim to be for the working class people like you seem to have a really low opinion of them.
Brayden Murphy
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Isaiah Wilson
It's not an opinion, it's fact. There is a reason the USSR spent decades on educating the people, because without a proper understanding of the world (which most people lack) they will revert to a "Baby wants it now" approach, despite the fact that things like Industrialization or non-scarcity takes a lot of time and development.
Well of course anarchists are against standing armies, one of the reasons they always lose
Cameron Johnson
Authoritarian armies have to deal with the same shit. Look at the Soviets in Afghanistan or the Americans in Vietnam, they ended up spending half the time raping and doing heroin. Vietnam soldiers had commander hitlists in underground newspapers, look up fragging ffs. Half of military strategy is how to put soldiers in a position where they have to fight or die. The Soviets fought so well because Hitler would have slaughtered them and their families if they lost. It works both ways, the US POW camps (and German ones on the Western front) were vacation retreats so Nazi soldiers would surrender the second they got the chance. The Vietcong would not engage with any troops that did not engage with them, "search and destroy" missions became "search and evade".
Anarchy is against unreasonable hierarchies, military ones can certainly be reasonable (there should be a way to take down bad commanders though). The one big US military base in Syria cadre is a strict authoritarian group where you aren't even allowed to have sex, but they don't let that apply to society at large.
Your egoist nerd strawman wouldn't join a military, except in an authoritarian regime with conscription. If you want a strong military we need an anarchist society where everyone in it is a true volunteer.
Kayden Young
Lol the "baby wants it now" approach is how the USSR was formed.
There hasn't been a single socialist state formed by Marx's immortal science, they were all either agrarian societies the did the baby wants it now approach, or had it shoved down their throats by the Soviets.
Gavin Anderson
Says the anarchist. Some of you are legit supporting the Mujahedeen to own the ☭TANKIE☭s on Twitter.
Jordan Kelly
it's not sectarian to point out differences between branches and arguing about flaws you see in others refusing to do so would be opportunism, the right approach to this is to tolerate the existence of others and to keep going regardless, not bringing this sort of stuff into unrelated discussions and just yelling labels at each other so these threads really aren't so bad, the only thing lacking is quality i really don't get how there are no quotations and sources the only thing remotely close to that is that zizek webm, that's really just sad and demotivating also, personally i don't really like the hostility in all of this but that's just how it is
that actually got me hot
Luke Collins
Everyone who posts on Twitter doesn't count as human anymore. Bad ☭TANKIE☭ takes (e.g. Assad is a socialist) are at least as bad as the bad anarchist takes.
Chase Ortiz
This. The state ain't gonna die unless class conflict dies with it.
Jayden Torres
Not to mention the fucking Dengist shitstorm raging on there 24/7. Still, at least ☭TANKIE☭s call revisionists out on their bullshit. "Good anarchists" let the "le Assad is an ebil dictator cuz muh Kurdz and US state department says so!" brigade run amok.
Matthew Morales
Lol really? What do they think of the Y.PG working with Assad the whole time?
Why does anyone read Twitter. It's a platform designed to make autists fight each other so they can see ads.
Jacob Lopez
This. Look, I've got waaay more common ground with anarchists than I do with capitalists of any stripe (even Dengists), but they're getting shot right alongside agents of Porky should by some miracle another 1917 scenario play out. Successful revolutions are a once in a lifetime shot at building socialism. I'll be damned if I let insurrectionist Makhnovites fuck everything up cuz they wanna yell "Das staytiss!" when you try surpress a capitalist counterrevolution with a vanguard party.
They prefer The Y.P.G. taking orders from The United States cuz apparently working with Assad's gonna lead to them getting Shoah'd by Turkey or some such shit. Plus they don't see working with anybody else as getting the Kurds a state of their own.
The S.DF doesn't want a state of their own though.
Lincoln Long
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Easton Scott
Nearly as idealist as anarchists is the idea that the USSR was a mistake because of its backwardness. They solved that problem and industrialized, the idea that that would fuck the revolution is basically disproven. It also wasn’t the cause of the USSR’s downfall.
Christopher Fisher
Accurate tho.
Jaxon Hughes
it's like you are so new to this whole thing that you never heard leftcoms screeching on about how the SU wasn't "real socialism"… wtf is this post of yours… the SU is so on point in being just what Marx described, i don't even know where to begin with your baseless completely void of thought shitpost put more effort into this, maybe some ML will bother then to give a response if you actually show that you're genuine and not just a buffoon who doesn't know most basic things and couldn't care less about hiding this fact
Nolan Sanders
If soldiers don't believe in what they're fighting for then their enemy already has an easy W. I'd rather have soldiers fighting for their freedom or the lives of their family who make the decision to fight than I would a soldier fighting because men with guns took him from his home and commands him to fight or they'll shoot him or lock him in a cage. That's something all barely trained armies have to deal with.
You're not even arguing against anarchism, you're arguing against democracy.
It'd be nice if I saw more authoritarians actually present solid counterarguments instead of using their absent knowledge of history to set up shitty strawmen to knock down. Do you realize how ignorant you sound when you conflate Platformism and Insurrectionism? You mean like the time when the Red Army repeatedly doublecrossed the Black Army and eventually destroyed the system of soviets and communes in the Free Territory? Or the time when the Stalinists in the Spanish Civil War decided to suppress unions and their control over their collectivized workplaces because they were scaring the Communists' bourgeoisie allies too much? Truly these were brave defenses from counterrevolution.
John Allen
Proudhon, far from being a modern-day anarcuck, was more of a liberal trying to reconcile capitalism with socialism. Contemporary Left-anarchists indeed draw from Proudhon, but the anarchist movement is hardly Proudhonian in character: you're not trying to reconcile capitalism and socialism, nor are you trying to "restore" markets and property like Proudhon wanted.
Jeremiah Green
I didn't say it was a mistake bitch, praying at the alter of historical determinism and setting up a bourgeois society would've been.
Carson Martin
It went both ways. You are no better than the "tankie" you are attacking if you are as one-sided.
The "makhno dindu nuffin wronk and ebil bolshies destroy himf" is the stupidest shit ever.
Marxism is just anarchism with extra steps so you are really proving yourself wrong. Anarchism gets shit done faster and doesn't degenerate into authoritarian capitalist state every time it gets tried.
Kevin Hall
I disagree. Anarchism is either actual based people beating up people they don't like(the og ones) or Petit bourgeois children to be shot
Jace Martin
It's literally the opposite. If you need someone to force you into discipline, then you have admitted to yourself you don't have discipline, but need a structure or threat of force/failure to do the things you would have done had you discipline.
So people should be forced to stand on their feet past their optimal effectiveness because "muh stiff upper lip"? Or should the person on guard duty be relieved/changed at intervals to ensure that the person on guard duty is actually able to guard if/when the time comes?
Reminder that it's the anarchists who want to keep going with the revolution, while the M-Ls always seem to stop the revolution at the point when they are in control of the bureaucratic State. Funny, huh? It's almost as if one group wants to play the political game and rule over the State, while the other group wants to achieve a Stateless, classless society Marx envisioned. One, of course, are "proper Marxists", while the others are "anarkiddies who never read Marx", despite Marx never actually prescribing what a post-insurrection society would look like. Then ☭TANKIE☭s online think it *has* to be like the USSR, while anarchists have a "let's see what happens when the time comes" attitude, "we'll figure it out amongst ourselves as long as we have basic ground rules, like no one gets to own anything or tell others what to do."
Uhhh no, that's not it at all. Wanting to improve your life through hard work and patience vs wanting it improved immediately without having to work or wait is different.
Logan Brooks
Not true. The conscripts who fought in Vietnam weren't the most motivated but they never lost a battle. The quality of the personnel wasn't why those wars ended in failure.
