Breadnaan

well capitalism has brought a lot of good with it. its better than feudalism in countless ways. it industrialized much of the world and has allowed technological advancements that didnt exist previously. capitalism has been a step forward in human history, but we cant stop walking either. a lot of people seem to argue about whether capitalism has good in it from an abstract perspective, is it inherently morally good or bad. and some people will say capitalism drives innovation, capitalism feeds the hungry etc etc. and people see this and are rightfully upset, they see all the bad in capitalism, all the suffering it causes, all the people it doesnt feed and all the backwards and damaging "innovation" being made, and says its bad actually. and in some ways its true, capitalism is not a very good system, but we have to view things historically. its not just "bad" in some abstract sense, it causes specific problems and harms that we can understand and analyze the causes of, and it doesn't undo the real good thats come from it either. these harms aren't something we should look at to have a moral position, the reason we should care about these issues so that we can fix them.

if we compare capitalism to socialist projects and communist theories, it sucks, it pales in comparison. and thats a big reason we need to push against capitalism to end it, because there are better options available. but if we compare it to feudalism, to slave society and preindustrial society, theres been a lot of wins too. the only reason we can even "do communism" is because of changes in production brought by industrial capital, going from relatively isolated production with handicrafts and relatively individual farming tools, to collectivized production in factories. its also allowed for better transit and globalization, the internet, etc... of course it also brought increases in imperialism and global exploitation, but we dont have to judge from this perspective that liberalism pushes us too. its not either morally good or morally wrong. its both morally good and morally bad in different contexts. it has good things and bad things within it, like everything, everything has good and bad within it, our goals in life should generally be to locate the good within everything and figure out how best to make it flourish. sometimes that means changing something fundamentally into another thing, like capitalism into socialism. sometimes it just means taking something and shifting it in amount, in quantity, from being mostly good to being even-more-mostly good.

To put specifics to these claims, I would argue that capitalism is most well suited towards over-coming the challenge of scarcity, and in pre-industrial society overcoming scarcity was the most pressing challenge that society faced as a whole. So it could be argued that organizing economic matters around principles of competition was the most rational approach to meet this challenge with. If your primary concern is how to best allocate scarce resources where they will be used to the greatest effect, then you don't want to have all of your lumber being used by a craftsman who wastes an entire tree worth of wood to make a single chair and then discards the rest as scrap. You want a competitive setting where the producers who are wasteful and inefficient will go out of business, and where the producers who have the best processes succeed. Clearly our modern society is one which has long overcome the problem of scarcity, and most of what we feel as scarcity is artificially imposed by the economic system we live in. But even so, the conservative argument would be "How short-sighted and naive, the moment society has abundance you want to tear down the thing that created that abundance! The moment you dismantle capitalism because you feel jealous of the wealthy who were successful under capitalism is the moment that you will all become equally poor and start fighting against scarcity again because you slaughtered the golden goose which created that wealth!"

Which brings me to my other point, which is that the conditions which produced those benefits are also not constant over time. The "Sales Pitch" version of capitalism relies on the assumption that capitalist markets will have an abundance of competition, and it is this competition which acts as a self-regulating force (The Invisible Hand of the Market). And when I made the argument that "capitalism" was well suited to addressing the challenge of scarcity, it was this self-regulating mechanism that I was referring to. The idea that inefficient producers will fail on the market because producers who are more efficient will out-compete them. But the "Sales Pitch" assumes that abundant competition is the natural state of the market, when this could not be further from the truth! The entire point of a competition is to decide on winners and losers, and the entire point of this particular competition is that the losers will go out of business and get pushed out of the market while the winners are rewarded by being able to capture a larger market share. The natural endpoint of this process is that competition continues to shrink and shrink as wealth/market share continues to consolidate into fewer and fewer hands.

An argument could be made that despite this being the case, that in pre-industrial society the barrier to entry in most markets was so low that any producers that got pushed out of the market could easily be replaced by new producers. For most markets, the barrier to entry as a producer was the cost of a few hand tools and maybe a few years of apprenticeship to learn the trade, so you could reasonably conclude that it's possible that the rate at which producers went out of business and the rate at which new producers entered a market would cancel out at some natural and stable equilibrium point which could maintain a state of abundant competition indefinitely. But the barrier to entry as a producer is not a fixed quantity. As society and a market develops, the state of the art in a given market is constantly being pushed towards incorporating new technologies, and new labor-saving tools and machinery that increases the efficiency of those industries. And therefore, as a producer your barrier to entry to compete in any given market keeps getting higher and higher as time goes on and as being able to compete on the market requires a steeper and steeper investment in the specialized tools, machinery, facilities, and expertise that is required to produce at a level that is competitive with the rest of the market. So even if an equilibrium of indefinite and abundant market competition may have been possible in a pre-industrial society, the steady march forward of technology over time has made it clear that the assumption abundant competition is the natural state of the market is a relic of the distant past.

And without that abundant competition, the "Sales Pitch" version of capitalism has no leg to stand on to argue that it still beneficial overall to the whole of society to continuing organizing our economic lives in this way. The brochure simply asserts that competition is beneficial, without bothering to answer the question of whether the conditions to create/maintain an abundance of competition still exists today. The brochure wants you to ignore that the competition its analysis is based on is a thing of the distant past and instead asks you to judge capitalism on its past achievements regardless of whether those achievements could be replicated in the modern day. But the truth is that any benefits attributed to capitalism have always had a limited shelf-life simply because competition is self-annihilating, and the benefits of capitalism have long since expired.

This obsession with competition as an "Ideal" that we must live up to rather than it being an emergent property of a specific time, place, and level of social/technological development is what leads to solutions which are ultimately doomed to failure such as "trust-busting," and "small-business incentive programs." The logic goes that if capitalism requires an abundance of competition to function like it says in the brochure, then the solution must be to recreate a long past version of capitalist development and simply rewind the clock again every time wealth and market domination becomes too concentrated according to some arbitrary standard. But the thing is that large-scale enterprise is more successful than small business precisely because large scale enterprise is far more efficient and benefits from economies of scale. If your solution is to constantly undo the results of the competition that was designed to reward efficiency and punish waste, then the only thing this strategy could hope to accomplish is to constantly reset society back to a stage that was less productive and therefore increase everyone's toil only to end up back at the same logical endpoint again and again.

This is an ultimately reactionary strategy aimed at preserving the current state of things rather than an honest strategy that's based on a genuine belief in the merits of capitalism. And so tactics like trust-busting and supporting small/local business is treated as the most extreme remedy that is willing to be considered in mainstream political discourse, because any acknowledgement that capitalism is not the system which is best suited to resolving the challenges of modern society would serve to undermine the power and authority of the capitalist class who greatly benefits from maintaining the current system indefinitely.

Ultimately, it is Socialists and Communists who have the strongest claim to inherit the credit and strongest arguments for the benefits that are currently attributed to capitalism. It is often argued that Socialists and Communists want to undo all of the progress made by capitalism because they want to centralize industries and therefore lose all of the benefits that competition has provided. But it is not Communists who call for centralization as an axiom which must be adhered to, rather it is capitalism which naturally centralizes industry into large scale enterprises which enjoy immense competitive advantages due to economies of scale which are so effective that they render the vast majority of potential competitors obsolete and redundant! We have run the experiment of capitalism for a few hundred years and the result that this experiment has produced has shown us that the most efficient way to organize the labor of society is not through a bunch of small owners competing amongst each other indefinitely, but instead that it is far more efficient to have people organized into large scale enterprises where huge numbers of people are cooperating with each other to advance the interests of the enterprise as a whole. It is the liberal who wants to keep putting band-aids on this system and is content with breaking up a monopoly every now and then or approving a small business loan program here and there who is ignoring the lessons and insight that capitalism has produced. Because even though capitalism is based on principles of competition, capitalism has proven that the most successful modern industries are ones which have organized large numbers of people to work together cooperatively towards a common goal.

The liberal wants to keep un-making this logical end state of capitalism and continue to fruitlessly recreate the conditions for a competitive market over and over again and keep re-running the experiment endlessly until the end of time hoping they will get a different result each time. On the other hand, the communist understands, acknowledges, and accepts the lessons and results that capitalism has produced and recognizes the truth that the success of modern industry is rightfully attributed to the work of large organizations of workers unified around a shared goal/task, and not through an abundance of small producers competing among each other like the sales pitch for capitalism asserts. The communist and the liberal will both correctly identify that the primary challenge/contradiction that society is struggling with in the modern day is the tyranny of the public being under the thumb of a relatively small handful of capitalists who privately own the economy, and because of the steady accumulation of wealth, power, and authority into fewer and fewer hands the tyranny and exploitation of these petty tyrants of industry continues to intensify. And where the liberal solution is to keep trying half-hardheartedly recreate the competition that the brochure version of capitalism claims is supposed to be the force that regulates the negative consequences of capitalism, it is the communist who instead recognizes that it is the huge number of people working together in large scale enterprise that is responsible for any success that is attributed to modern day capitalism. And instead of constantly undoing that success to create artificial competition so that capitalism can keep limping along, communists instead argue that we should keep building on that success. That we should not keep tearing down large scale enterprise endlessly in a pointless attempt to replicate an era of capitalism from the distant past. Rather we must identify that because we know that our modern problems are a result of the tyranny of a system where our labor is organized by and for the class of capitalists who privately own the economy, that to solve those problems we must attack the very institution of private ownership which holds authority over our economic lives! The position that these petty tyrants of history have in society is effectively a political office which gives them the authority to set the goals and priorities of the working class according to their own interests. And the only thing that qualifies the capitalist to hold this office and exercise that authority over the huge swathes of the population which they are permitted to command is that they privately own the means through which society is able to be productive. And the amount of authority a capitalist wields over the working people in a given society is directly proportional to the amount of capital that they own. It is not the large scale organization of workers which is the problem, but the undemocratic way in which our labor is organized by and for unelected tyrants whose only qualification for office is the quantity of their wealth. And this results in a viscous cycle where the more wealth a capitalist can steal from the workers they employ, the greater the number of workers they will be able to have authority over.

There is no necessary function or role that a capitalist fills in the organization of the labor of society that could not be fulfilled just as competently by governing bodies that are elected democratically by the workers themselves and organized around advancing the collective interests of the workers rather than organizing our entire lives around satisfying the interests of an unelected tyrant whose only qualification for holding authority is that they privately own your place of employment. The communist is not arguing to destroy the benefits that capitalism has produced, rather the communist is who best understands how those benefits were created, and argues that those benefits should belong to the people whose labor actually created that wealth. That the organization, priorities, and goals that the labor of society is set in motion towards pursuing should be decided by the workers themselves.

All that is to say is that the question posed by anon is not one that should be answered by doing some kind of cost-benefit analysis of capitalism in order to arrive at some black-and-white determination of if capitalism is good on the whole or bad on the whole, and you are correct to warn against that kind of abstract moralizing. But also, it is important to recognize that even if you could drill down into the weeds and have the most morally nuanced understanding of time-periods such as the industrial revolution as is possible to have, ultimately arriving at a determination on whether the industrial revolution was more good than bad or more bad than good isn't a very fruitful line of inquiry regardless. I believe it is far more important to put those developments in the proper historical context, and understand that arriving at an answer on whether the industrial revolution was good overall or bad overall will not necessarily provide insight on what the best path forward is today. If the goal is to be persuasive, I don't think getting into the weeds of the good and bad of the industrial revolution is all that helpful. I think it's much more important to be able to go "Let's assume that the good outweighed the bad and that the upheaval of the industrial revolution can ultimately be 'justified.' Let's take a step back and look at what the primary challenges that society was tackling at that stage of societal development, how do they compare to the challenges we are faced with today, and are the strategy and principles used to address the challenges of the past still well suited to the challenges of today or is a new approach needed?"

And it is by walking through that process of historical materialism that we can arrive at and support the conclusion that organizing towards communism is a historically progressive act which is best tailored to the challenges and conditions of modern society, even if we concede/accept the premise that capitalism was a historically progressive force at a previous point in history.

Congress’s anti-communism target fell hard on Hollywood, and those in the industry who were suspected of communism at all were blacklisted from all jobs, because studio’s didn’t want to face backlash from Congress

Salt of the Earth was made nearly 100% with blacklisted crew members from Hollywood, and had such difficulty finding actors that they hired local citizens and miners from the actual strike the plot is based on. There were only 5 trained actors involved, and one of them (Rosaura Revueltas, the woman in the gif) was deported to Mexico before they finished filming on accusations of communism, with no proof and no substance. The filming was plagued with police harassment and threats (according to my professor they were shot at more than once), and the local union hall was burned down.

@thegenderienvy

Here's my two cents. I think the disconnect you feel with this post and why you don't feel like it is describing anarchists is because broadly speaking there's two different "schools of thought" that I see when it comes to how people define their politics.

One school defines their politics in a goal oriented way. They put a lot of thought into the kind of world that they would like to work towards, and use those goals as a model for how to live their life and the way that they build community in order to work towards that goal.

The other school defines their politics primarily in terms of strategy and tactics. They start not with a specific end goal in mind, but with the interests of a specific cohort in mind (usually but not always defined in terms of class position within a society). They then start with an analysis of the society they live in, what are the shared interests of your own cohort, what other cohorts/class interests in society that are in conflict with your cohort's interests, what are the strongest pieces of leverage your cohort holds as a group and what are the most effective ways to use that leverage, and what are the resources/leverage that those who have conflicting interests have to attack and/or suppress your cohort and what strategies are needed to weather that onslaught.

With that being said, there are many instances of Anarchists with a "Goal Oriented" definition of their own politics who will look at a post like this and think, "But I don't want to stop the production of food and medicine, this is an obvious straw man," or they will do what you have done here and use a "No True Scotsman" to say "Well, *real* anarchists don't think this way/want this outcome, so the post must be talking about the bad kind of anarchist."

But the kind of person that makes the post in the OP is typically one who defines politics in terms of strategy and tactics. And the commentary they are making is one along the lines of "I don't believe the anarchist principles of free association, non-hierarchical horizontal organization, and mutual aid are a sufficient/adequate set of strategy and tactics to tackle the logistical issues involved with managing the complex supply chains that modern food and medicine production/distribution rely on, and trying to build a world without an adequate strategy in place to manage these things in a way that is up to modern standards would be a strategic error and result in a world that has far more toil and suffering than is necessary. “

And these two groups end up constantly talking past each other. Because when a person who defines politics by tactics criticizes a person who defines politics by goals, they think that it’s their goals/values that are under attack. And in the reverse case when a person who defines politics in terms of goals/value criticizes a person who defines politics in terms of strategy/tactics, they almost always frame the person they’re criticizing as someone who is advocating for a plan of action they oppose as someone who has incompatible/dangerous values and beliefs (e.g. “Authoritarian personality disorder)

And the point of my post is not to say that all Anarchists have a “Goals/Values Oriented Definition of Politics” and that all Marxists have a “Strategy and Tactics Oriented Definition of Politics.” But I will say that in my experience speaking with anarchists who did prioritize strategy and tactics and who did put careful thought and consideration into these kinds of logistical questions, what I usually saw throughout the course of those conversations was that by giving these issues the serious thought that they deserved the anarchist would end up expanding their definition of things like “expertise-based justified hierarchies” and also expand their concepts of militancy/community defense to acknowledge the realities of class warfare and the need to protect and police your liberatory political project from capitalist encirclement, infiltration, and counter-revolution, such that the vast majority of the time they would end up reinventing Marxism-Leninism from base principles just with the label filed off.

So maybe you are right that “Real” anarchists do have an adequate plan in mind to address the complex logistics involved in administering/managing/navigating the global supply chains that modern medicine and agriculture involves. But the other problem with defining a “Real” anarchist is that anarchist is an inherently generalized/umbrella term in a similar way to how terms like "Leftist," or "Progressive," or "Socialist" are used. There is no recognized authority who can define what a "real" anarchist is, and if there was one anarchists would likely reject them on principle. There is certainly some pieces of literature and political theory that is broadly considered to be influential to anarchist thought, but there is not and likely will never be a shared consensus on what "Real" anarchism is.

Most people who self-ID as an anarchist have a highly personal and individual understanding of what that means and how it informs their value system, their moral code, their actions, their place/role in their communities, and how they build/support their communities. And that is great if what anarchism is to you is a framework for how you want to identify, the values you want to live by, and the kind of person you want people to see you as. But it also dramatically lowers the utility of the term for use in conversations about politics if every time you encounter someone who IDs as an anarchist if you have to sit down and have an extended conversation along the lines of "What does anarchism mean to you personally," to make sure everyone is on the same page before continuing.

Marxists have to deal with that too, but it has a self-correcting mechanism in the form of "telling people to do the reading" as a way of clearing up misunderstandings.

The natural rebuttal to "Read some anarchist theory," is to ask "Which texts/authors?" And when it comes to anarchism, if you ask 10 different anarchists what the most foundational works of anarchist thought are you will get 10 different answers.

"Read Anarchist Theory" is about as non-specific as "Read Progressive Theory," or, "Read Leftist Theory," or, "Read Socialist Theory."

The fact that the joke describes different and largely contradictory tendencies of anarchism is part of the commentary, not a sign that OP doesn't know anything about anarchists.

The fact that it's difficult to get anarchists to march to the beat of the same drum is kind of a big deal when if you're trying to organize effective political action, and it's a big problem if your theory of change involves organizing people around anarchist principles innit?

Plus there is a pervasive sentiment I've seen where anarchists expect to have the same level of access to modern goods that they have today, they just want to have their own local communities organized around principles of flat/horizontal organizational structures, consensus based rather than representative decision making, and where everyone's needs are satisfied through voluntary associations where no one has authority over anyone else.

I don't think a handful of micro-movements (relative to the scale of the global capitalist system) of middling success at best are very convincing evidence that anarchist principles either

a) Are fit for the scale of the challenge that liberating us from a globe spanning capitalist system presents

b) That anarchist principles are self-sufficient enough on their own divorced from existing relations of production to provide an attractive enough alternative to universally sway humanity to get on board with the program (especially not anyone whose medical care and continued ability to function relies on access to medical supplies that depend on very complex and interconnected supply chains being maintained)

For the Zapatista, they are a movement that does not even refer to themselves as anarchist, and they have the luxury of existing entirely within the borders of another state such that they are largely insulated from the kind of Cold War hostilities from the USA and its allies that any similar liberatory project would need to contend with. Their primary obstacle is just the Mexican government rather than the weight of the entire Cold War apparatus bearing down on them.

The anarchists of the Spanish Civil War had the benefit of support from the then newly formed Soviet Union instead of being faced with the task of fighting for liberation against all odds with no allies like the liberatory struggles that came before them were forced to do. And even with that advantage and not having to stand alone in their struggle, they still ended up defeated and unsuccessful in securing any enduring liberation, and their defeat was due at least in part to organizing around anarchist principles.

J. Sakai wrote about the Spanish Civil War that one of the biggest struggles the anarchists faced in waging that war was the simple reality of "latent anarchism" within the ranks. When the fascists would attack one fortification or some other point of strategic value, there was an unfortunately common tendency of anarchist soldiers to start "deserting to the front," which means that they abandoned their post to rush into where the fighting was happening and support their comrades in arms. And the problem with this is that it results in complete chaos and makes it near impossible to wage a war with any strategy in mind other than rushing from battle to battle.

The Spanish Anarchists did not lack any of the values that Anarchists prize. Their ranks were full of people who had deep love for one another, who were volunteers motivated by a passion to help and protect and fight for their community. Most were filled with revolutionary zeal, they were people who were spontaneous and eager to fight for each other and who were ready to leap into action without being told that they needed to do so. But those weren't the qualities they needed for victory, what they needed was a greater degree of order and regimentation and a chain of command and professional revolutionaries who have the skills to analyze the conflict from a bird's eye view and who have the authority to formulate a grand strategy and issue commands with the trust and confidence that they have comrades who will follow those commands.

In a proper organization, authority is not something that exists in opposition to the masses, it is something that is synergistic and acts as a force multiplier that enables a group to act with far more power and ability than they have as individuals. Even if you hold the ideals of abolishing hierarchy and seek to build a world where group decisions are made among people through consensus seeking processes, those principles are clearly not fit for the task of executing a war strategy where seeking consensus would introduce delays that eat up precious time in a situation where any hesitation could be putting thousands of your comrades lives at risk and where not having a sufficiently reactive ability to strategize and a sufficiently responsive army to execute that strategy would doom millions more if your revolution fails as a result.

And, largely the process to achieve that synergy so that authority is acting with the masses instead of in opposition to the masses is through Democratic Centralism, which employs extensive consensus seeking processes and long periods of debate and fact-finding and solicits input from every level of stakeholder involved in a decision when deciding on a path to commit to, but once a path is decided on it becomes the responsibility of those higher in the chain of command to formulate the most effective strategy for pursuing the goals that have been agreed upon and it becomes the responsibility of those lower in the chain of command to have trust in their comrades to be making decisions rationally even if you don't agree and it is a responsibility to carry out the duties you've been assigned knowing that your comrades are depending on and relying on you for your collective success.

Of course, it's not as though anarchists wholly eschew these things and that the only options are "anarchist chaos" and "vandguardist order." The anarchists of course had mechanisms for order and discipline while they were engaged in warfare just as the Bolsheviks employed consensus seeking processes through democratic centralism. These things are not opposites of each other, the question is primarily one of degree and emphasis rather than one of strictly opposed and mutually exclusive categories. But the way that I see it, the more that anarchists adopt and adapt the principles of vanguardism out of the necessity brought on by the reality of warfare and capitalist encirclement, the more those things feel like either a compromise or a betrayal of principles of the people who joined up under the banner of anarchism because of the ideals that they hold. And that is a recipe for internal tension and strife that can be avoided by being clear-eyed about what the path forward looks like from step one, and by building a party that places a strong emphasis on political education and explaining to people the need and utility of organizing structures that have been crafted with intention and which are well suited to the tasks and goals they are organized around advancing. It is generally not great for morale if you are forced to betray the principles you thought you were fighting for the moment your plans make contact with the enemy and you come to realize that your strategy is woefully ill-suited to the task in front of you.

As for the Makhnovists in Ukraine, I would not present them as a model to emulate even if we lived in an alternate history where the Makhnovists were the ones who had a successful revolution and it was the Bolsheviks who failed and disbanded before ever building anything durable. The atrocity propaganda that the Soviet Union has been bombarded with through decades of Red Scare and Cold War narratives is actually true of the Makhnovists. There are well documented anti-Semitic pogroms that were carried out by the Makhnovists. While Makhnov himself denounced these activities and ordered harsh punishments to those guilty of carrying out these crimes up to and including execution by firing squad, these pogroms nonetheless reflect the character of his movement which was anarchist on paper and in principle, but ended up as a mixed coalition where one of their most important alliances and constituents were land-owners who were fiercely protective of their property and whose primary motivation was anti-collectivization and anti-communism rather than any commitment to anarchist principles of free communes. And this development had drastically changed the class character of his movement overall, which was forced to largely abandon the struggle for equality in favor of instead fiercely guarding the property rights of the landowners in order to not upset a critical faction of support and therefore ended up fiercely guarding the capitalist exploitation of the landless that those property rights were essential to. These circumstances made Makhnov's movement one whose core tenant became anti-communism rather than pro-anarchism. Far from abolishing hierarchy, they became the enforcers of the hierarchy of the landed over the landless.

Furthermore, the strategies the Makhnovists were forced to employ in their revolutionary activities as a matter of necessity were near identical to what the Bolsheviks were required to employ. The Makhnovists maintained two distinct orders of secret police as a means of defense against infiltration and sabotage who were accountable only to Makhnov himself, they engaged in the practice of forced requisition of agricultural products to feed their army as a wartime necessity, they suppressed rival political parties during the times where the continued existence of their political project was on shaky ground, and they restricted the freedom of the press as a counter-insurgency tactic. And while in theory they held elections for their army officers as a seemingly more fair method of organizing than the Red Army, in practice Makhnov held the unchecked authority to remove any officer at his discretion, making the elections a mere formality and with final say resting in the hands of a singular authority. The Makhnovist movement hardly provides a counter-example of a better and more anarchist way to build a revolutionary movement when they were largely forced by the reality of revolutionary organizing to employ the same exact tactics that anarchists criticize the Bolsheviks for. And in many ways, the Makhnovists became compelled to act in ways that were far more authoritarian than the Bolsheviks precisely *because* of their anarchism. As was admitted by Volin, who was a committed anarchist and one of Makhnov's fiercest supporters, it was because they lacked a vigorous and organized workers movement to support their insurrection that they became forced to employ harsher and harsher methods of coercion such as forced conscription to support their war effort as time went on.

At the end of the day, I'm not sure what positive example you believe that the Makhnovist movement has set the precedent for that I should be aiming to emulate or advocate for. They were not brilliant revolutionaries who are responsible for liberating hundreds of millions from the shackles of housing insecurity, food insecurity, and healthcare insecurity that were imposed by the capitalistic system they fought against. They were a somewhat fringe group in society without a tremendous amount of sway or support among the population, they had very little in the way of influence before their initial alliance and incorporation into the Red Army, and only gained a real measure of influence after splintering off from the Red Army and taking control of some number of the forces that were organized by the bolsheviks which Makhnov was able to take as a ready-made combat-ready force to employ towards his own ends, and the broad unpopularity of the aims of his movement caused it to quickly devolve into opportunism and abandoning its principles in order to make political alliances of convenience with strange bedfellows.

All of this context is usually brushed over in order to construct a narrative about Red Terror and the dangers of the duplicitous and authoritarian commies who ruthlessly and maliciously eliminate any ideological opposition to their regime and that's why the noble anarchist must always be wary of the red fash tankies who will stab you in the back the moment they obtain even the smallest taste of power! But the truth is that the conflict between the Bolsheviks and the Makhnovists had very little to do with ideology. These two factions came to blows because the context they existed within was one where the Bolsheviks had won a tremendous victory where the well-being of quite literally hundreds of millions of people relied on the continued success of their liberatory project in order to build something that could endure the harsh reality of capitalist encirclement and sabotage. And at that time period, their continued success was in a very fragile position as they were still embroiled in a civil war with the royalist White Army, on top of having to deal with limited military invasion by the "Great Colonial Powers of Europe" who were intervening on the White Army's behalf in the hopes of returning Tsar loyalists to power.

And in that context, the Makhnovists were taking actions that aided the White Army. In theory both the Makhnovist and the Red Army opposed the White Army, and at times would collaborate to strike against the White Army. And at others, the Makhnovists would attack and slaughter Red Army forces as they made their retreat from the front against the White Army, the Makhnovists would disrupt and destroy critical supply lines that the Reds needed to keep their army fed and well provisioned enough to engage with the White Army, and the Makhnovists would contest areas of tremendous strategic importance to the war effort in way that made planning a war effort near impossible. Makhnovists were frequently opportunists who struck at the Reds regardless of any consideration of strategy towards defeating their mutual enemy.

The thing that was at stake was not the success of one ideology over another, the thing that was at stake was hundreds of millions being doomed and having their pathway towards lifting themselves out of the oppression they had lived under either destroyed or at the very least significantly delayed if the counter-revolution of the White Army and the weight of the capitalist world behind them had been successful.

I have no meaningful opposition to the principles of anarchism, and I would welcome an alternative history where the Makhnovists and the Bolsheviks weren't on openly antagonistic terms and where the Makhnovists could have been given their own autonomous Oblast in a post-revolution post-civil war Soviet Union where they could enjoy the security that comes from being under the protection of a militantly organized vanguard so that they could have the peace and freedom to organize themselves in the manner of their own choosing. It would be interesting to see which ways anarchist organizing principles flourish when not subject to the pressures of survival and what unique strengths they might have that the Bolsheviks lacked. But I don't find it particularly enlightening to pass judgements on an ideology based on wartime decisions, because those decisions are not ones rooted in ideology but rather in the harsh realities of war. When you are engaged in a struggle for your very existence, the enemy is the one who dictates the terms you must engage on not your ideology. And with fog of war there is no reasonable expectation that anyone can arrive at "The Singular Correct Course of Action." But it is clear that the Bolshevik's conflict with the Makhnovists was one brought by the necessity of wartime considerations and by the fatal consequences that having a faction who will sabotage your armies and throw a wrench in your strategies at a time when you are defending yourself against near impossible odds presents, and not necessarily due to irreconcilable ideological split.

Still, if I am to accept the anarchist narrative surrounding Makhnovshchina that it was a real and viable path forward towards anarchism which only failed due to being violently betrayed by the Reds due solely to the Reds being dangerously authoritarian, even in that framing of events they are still defeated and have little legacy to show for their efforts other than a brief proof-of-concept. The task set before us is that we have a world to win. None of us are free until all of us are free. If the anarchism as practiced by Makhnovists is meant to be a model for action, then what does it say about the viability of that path forward if the stumbling block it fell at was being defeated by a socialist movement that was primarily composed of the impoverished, the beaten, and the downtrodden? Is it supposed to give me confidence that anarchism is up to the task of standing up to the most well funded and lethal armies in the world if the standard bearer you are asking me to consider as a model to emulate couldn't even best some peasants and impoverished workers? Is your aim to present people with a viable path to victory so that they can be filled with the revolutionary optimism needed to have the confidence that their efforts won't be in vain, or is your aim to engage in martyrdom and invoke pity for the plight of the anarchist?

Not to be too mean about it, but whenever these examples are presented to me, it comes across as a devotion. It's as though the only world one is willing to accept is an anarchist one, and the duty to carefully study history in order to learn lessons that we can take with us into the present is instead replaced with the desire to simply "ctrl+F" through the annals of history to search for the briefest mention of people living the life you aspire to live in order to keep your dreams alive. It does not come across as a sincere effort to advocate a plan for a better world that uses the tools we have at our disposal to the greatest possible effect. Rather, it comes across as stubborn commitment to bring about a world on your terms and your terms only when you present what is at best a cautionary tale as a model for what you want to emulate and advocate for. If you want to advocate for anarchism, it would likely do you well to discard these as your go-to examples of anarchism in practice. There are far more persuasive examples to reach for such as the effectiveness of mutual aid networks, the strengths of dual power structures, and the merits of direct action. It doesn't help the cause to point to examples that are either failures, or who betrayed their own values in disastrous ways, or who at best shows/implies that the height of anarchist achievement is a movement that refuses the label of anarchism and which only has a footprint in the tens of thousands following a model that has not seen any widespread adoption or success in the ~4 decades since they've been founded because their situation depends on their own highly specific local circumstances.

To be fair, it's not like I myself am not guilty of showing support for movements that have a fraught history. After all, as is clear in this post I'm still willing to go to bat for the Soviet Union. But I think there is an important difference in providing critical support to a world history defining revolutionary project that is responsible for freeing hundreds of millions from the shackles of food, housing, and healthcare insecurity, and whose direct involvement supported the liberation of billions more from those same shackles. I do think it's important to stand by the era defining historical achievements of these projects regardless of the aspersions cast by a propaganda apparatus that is employed in defense of a global capitalist system whose continued existence desperately relies on convincing the public to continue believing that "The Cure is Worse than the Disease." That doesn't mean excusing the failures or crimes or betrayed ideals of any of these systems, but I genuinely do believe that it's a strategic error to denounce these projects and allow the propaganda regarding them to go unchecked. That it is worthwhile to differentiate between what things are actually betrayed ideals, which things are instead the result of hostile intervention by a world superpower with tremendous resources at its disposal which are being laser focused on the task of ensuring your project fails and your society collapses so that the pieces can be sold off and returned to the authority of capitalist oligarchs if/when the counter-revolution succeeds, and which things are straight up fabrications with no basis in reality that were invented whole cloth for the purposes of making the propaganda that is used to manufacture consent among the public to support the hostile and barbaric actions their governments are carrying out in their name.

If anarchism had similar era defining achievements, then I would be a Makhnov apologist all day long, because I would understand that the context for why the popular narratives regarding certain choices and actions are being emphasized and scrutinized and distorted and weaponized is to craft a narrative whose only purpose is to convince people that "The struggle for a better world is hopeless, your efforts will all be in vain, everything you fight for will turn to ash, the new world will be just as awful as the old one, just give up and save yourself the pain."

And that is a lie that I will never accept. The past *does* have lessons to teach us, it *does* have victories to build upon. The people who came before us have legacies fraught with betrayal and misery and hopeless odds but they also had their hands in things that were bigger than themselves, that are monumental, that are worth defending and protecting and that should by all rights be symbols of inspiration and hope and optimism and determination rather than treating them like the symbols of the inadvisability of fighting for a better world that our enemies want to paint them as.

Those who came before us *have* won tremendous victories worthy of being celebrated. Those victories *are* still with us and are still bearing fruit despite any setbacks, and we *will* continue to be victorious. Humanity *does* have a brighter future ahead of us.

@thegenderienvy

Here's my two cents. I think the disconnect you feel with this post and why you don't feel like it is describing anarchists is because broadly speaking there's two different "schools of thought" that I see when it comes to how people define their politics.

One school defines their politics in a goal oriented way. They put a lot of thought into the kind of world that they would like to work towards, and use those goals as a model for how to live their life and the way that they build community in order to work towards that goal.

The other school defines their politics primarily in terms of strategy and tactics. They start not with a specific end goal in mind, but with the interests of a specific cohort in mind (usually but not always defined in terms of class position within a society). They then start with an analysis of the society they live in, what are the shared interests of your own cohort, what other cohorts/class interests in society that are in conflict with your cohort's interests, what are the strongest pieces of leverage your cohort holds as a group and what are the most effective ways to use that leverage, and what are the resources/leverage that those who have conflicting interests have to attack and/or suppress your cohort and what strategies are needed to weather that onslaught.

With that being said, there are many instances of Anarchists with a "Goal Oriented" definition of their own politics who will look at a post like this and think, "But I don't want to stop the production of food and medicine, this is an obvious straw man," or they will do what you have done here and use a "No True Scotsman" to say "Well, *real* anarchists don't think this way/want this outcome, so the post must be talking about the bad kind of anarchist."

But the kind of person that makes the post in the OP is typically one who defines politics in terms of strategy and tactics. And the commentary they are making is one along the lines of "I don't believe the anarchist principles of free association, non-hierarchical horizontal organization, and mutual aid are a sufficient/adequate set of strategy and tactics to tackle the logistical issues involved with managing the complex supply chains that modern food and medicine production/distribution rely on, and trying to build a world without an adequate strategy in place to manage these things in a way that is up to modern standards would be a strategic error and result in a world that has far more toil and suffering than is necessary. “

And these two groups end up constantly talking past each other. Because when a person who defines politics by tactics criticizes a person who defines politics by goals, they think that it’s their goals/values that are under attack. And in the reverse case when a person who defines politics in terms of goals/value criticizes a person who defines politics in terms of strategy/tactics, they almost always frame the person they’re criticizing as someone who is advocating for a plan of action they oppose as someone who has incompatible/dangerous values and beliefs (e.g. “Authoritarian personality disorder)

And the point of my post is not to say that all Anarchists have a “Goals/Values Oriented Definition of Politics” and that all Marxists have a “Strategy and Tactics Oriented Definition of Politics.” But I will say that in my experience speaking with anarchists who did prioritize strategy and tactics and who did put careful thought and consideration into these kinds of logistical questions, what I usually saw throughout the course of those conversations was that by giving these issues the serious thought that they deserved the anarchist would end up expanding their definition of things like “expertise-based justified hierarchies” and also expand their concepts of militancy/community defense to acknowledge the realities of class warfare and the need to protect and police your liberatory political project from capitalist encirclement, infiltration, and counter-revolution, such that the vast majority of the time they would end up reinventing Marxism-Leninism from base principles just with the label filed off.

So maybe you are right that “Real” anarchists do have an adequate plan in mind to address the complex logistics involved in administering/managing/navigating the global supply chains that modern medicine and agriculture involves. But the other problem with defining a “Real” anarchist is that anarchist is an inherently generalized/umbrella term in a similar way to how terms like "Leftist," or "Progressive," or "Socialist" are used. There is no recognized authority who can define what a "real" anarchist is, and if there was one anarchists would likely reject them on principle. There is certainly some pieces of literature and political theory that is broadly considered to be influential to anarchist thought, but there is not and likely will never be a shared consensus on what "Real" anarchism is.

Most people who self-ID as an anarchist have a highly personal and individual understanding of what that means and how it informs their value system, their moral code, their actions, their place/role in their communities, and how they build/support their communities. And that is great if what anarchism is to you is a framework for how you want to identify, the values you want to live by, and the kind of person you want people to see you as. But it also dramatically lowers the utility of the term for use in conversations about politics if every time you encounter someone who IDs as an anarchist if you have to sit down and have an extended conversation along the lines of "What does anarchism mean to you personally," to make sure everyone is on the same page before continuing.

Marxists have to deal with that too, but it has a self-correcting mechanism in the form of "telling people to do the reading" as a way of clearing up misunderstandings.

The natural rebuttal to "Read some anarchist theory," is to ask "Which texts/authors?" And when it comes to anarchism, if you ask 10 different anarchists what the most foundational works of anarchist thought are you will get 10 different answers.

"Read Anarchist Theory" is about as non-specific as "Read Progressive Theory," or, "Read Leftist Theory," or, "Read Socialist Theory."

The fact that the joke describes different and largely contradictory tendencies of anarchism is part of the commentary, not a sign that OP doesn't know anything about anarchists.

The fact that it's difficult to get anarchists to march to the beat of the same drum is kind of a big deal when if you're trying to organize effective political action, and it's a big problem if your theory of change involves organizing people around anarchist principles innit?

Plus there is a pervasive sentiment I've seen where anarchists expect to have the same level of access to modern goods that they have today, they just want to have their own local communities organized around principles of flat/horizontal organizational structures, consensus based rather than representative decision making, and where everyone's needs are satisfied through voluntary associations where no one has authority over anyone else.

@thegenderienvy

Here's my two cents. I think the disconnect you feel with this post and why you don't feel like it is describing anarchists is because broadly speaking there's two different "schools of thought" that I see when it comes to how people define their politics.

One school defines their politics in a goal oriented way. They put a lot of thought into the kind of world that they would like to work towards, and use those goals as a model for how to live their life and the way that they build community in order to work towards that goal.

The other school defines their politics primarily in terms of strategy and tactics. They start not with a specific end goal in mind, but with the interests of a specific cohort in mind (usually but not always defined in terms of class position within a society). They then start with an analysis of the society they live in, what are the shared interests of your own cohort, what other cohorts/class interests in society that are in conflict with your cohort's interests, what are the strongest pieces of leverage your cohort holds as a group and what are the most effective ways to use that leverage, and what are the resources/leverage that those who have conflicting interests have to attack and/or suppress your cohort and what strategies are needed to weather that onslaught.

With that being said, there are many instances of Anarchists with a "Goal Oriented" definition of their own politics who will look at a post like this and think, "But I don't want to stop the production of food and medicine, this is an obvious straw man," or they will do what you have done here and use a "No True Scotsman" to say "Well, *real* anarchists don't think this way/want this outcome, so the post must be talking about the bad kind of anarchist."

But the kind of person that makes the post in the OP is typically one who defines politics in terms of strategy and tactics. And the commentary they are making is one along the lines of "I don't believe the anarchist principles of free association, non-hierarchical horizontal organization, and mutual aid are a sufficient/adequate set of strategy and tactics to tackle the logistical issues involved with managing the complex supply chains that modern food and medicine production/distribution rely on, and trying to build a world without an adequate strategy in place to manage these things in a way that is up to modern standards would be a strategic error and result in a world that has far more toil and suffering than is necessary. “

And these two groups end up constantly talking past each other. Because when a person who defines politics by tactics criticizes a person who defines politics by goals, they think that it’s their goals/values that are under attack. And in the reverse case when a person who defines politics in terms of goals/value criticizes a person who defines politics in terms of strategy/tactics, they almost always frame the person they’re criticizing as someone who is advocating for a plan of action they oppose as someone who has incompatible/dangerous values and beliefs (e.g. “Authoritarian personality disorder)

And the point of my post is not to say that all Anarchists have a “Goals/Values Oriented Definition of Politics” and that all Marxists have a “Strategy and Tactics Oriented Definition of Politics.” But I will say that in my experience speaking with anarchists who did prioritize strategy and tactics and who did put careful thought and consideration into these kinds of logistical questions, what I usually saw throughout the course of those conversations was that by giving these issues the serious thought that they deserved the anarchist would end up expanding their definition of things like “expertise-based justified hierarchies” and also expand their concepts of militancy/community defense to acknowledge the realities of class warfare and the need to protect and police your liberatory political project from capitalist encirclement, infiltration, and counter-revolution, such that the vast majority of the time they would end up reinventing Marxism-Leninism from base principles just with the label filed off.

So maybe you are right that “Real” anarchists do have an adequate plan in mind to address the complex logistics involved in administering/managing/navigating the global supply chains that modern medicine and agriculture involves. But the other problem with defining a “Real” anarchist is that anarchist is an inherently generalized/umbrella term in a similar way to how terms like "Leftist," or "Progressive," or "Socialist" are used. There is no recognized authority who can define what a "real" anarchist is, and if there was one anarchists would likely reject them on principle. There is certainly some pieces of literature and political theory that is broadly considered to be influential to anarchist thought, but there is not and likely will never be a shared consensus on what "Real" anarchism is.

Most people who self-ID as an anarchist have a highly personal and individual understanding of what that means and how it informs their value system, their moral code, their actions, their place/role in their communities, and how they build/support their communities. And that is great if what anarchism is to you is a framework for how you want to identify, the values you want to live by, and the kind of person you want people to see you as. But it also dramatically lowers the utility of the term for use in conversations about politics if every time you encounter someone who IDs as an anarchist if you have to sit down and have an extended conversation along the lines of "What does anarchism mean to you personally," to make sure everyone is on the same page before continuing.

Marxists have to deal with that too, but it has a self-correcting mechanism in the form of "telling people to do the reading" as a way of clearing up misunderstandings.

The natural rebuttal to "Read some anarchist theory," is to ask "Which texts/authors?" And when it comes to anarchism, if you ask 10 different anarchists what the most foundational works of anarchist thought are you will get 10 different answers.

"Read Anarchist Theory" is about as non-specific as "Read Progressive Theory," or, "Read Leftist Theory," or, "Read Socialist Theory."

@thegenderienvy

Here's my two cents. I think the disconnect you feel with this post and why you don't feel like it is describing anarchists is because broadly speaking there's two different "schools of thought" that I see when it comes to how people define their politics.

One school defines their politics in a goal oriented way. They put a lot of thought into the kind of world that they would like to work towards, and use those goals as a model for how to live their life and the way that they build community in order to work towards that goal.

The other school defines their politics primarily in terms of strategy and tactics. They start not with a specific end goal in mind, but with the interests of a specific cohort in mind (usually but not always defined in terms of class position within a society). They then start with an analysis of the society they live in, what are the shared interests of your own cohort, what other cohorts/class interests in society that are in conflict with your cohort's interests, what are the strongest pieces of leverage your cohort holds as a group and what are the most effective ways to use that leverage, and what are the resources/leverage that those who have conflicting interests have to attack and/or suppress your cohort and what strategies are needed to weather that onslaught.

With that being said, there are many instances of Anarchists with a "Goal Oriented" definition of their own politics who will look at a post like this and think, "But I don't want to stop the production of food and medicine, this is an obvious straw man," or they will do what you have done here and use a "No True Scotsman" to say "Well, *real* anarchists don't think this way/want this outcome, so the post must be talking about the bad kind of anarchist."

But the kind of person that makes the post in the OP is typically one who defines politics in terms of strategy and tactics. And the commentary they are making is one along the lines of "I don't believe the anarchist principles of free association, non-hierarchical horizontal organization, and mutual aid are a sufficient/adequate set of strategy and tactics to tackle the logistical issues involved with managing the complex supply chains that modern food and medicine production/distribution rely on, and trying to build a world without an adequate strategy in place to manage these things in a way that is up to modern standards would be a strategic error and result in a world that has far more toil and suffering than is necessary. “

And these two groups end up constantly talking past each other. Because when a person who defines politics by tactics criticizes a person who defines politics by goals, they think that it’s their goals/values that are under attack. And in the reverse case when a person who defines politics in terms of goals/value criticizes a person who defines politics in terms of strategy/tactics, they almost always frame the person they’re criticizing as someone who is advocating for a plan of action they oppose as someone who has incompatible/dangerous values and beliefs (e.g. “Authoritarian personality disorder)

And the point of my post is not to say that all Anarchists have a “Goals/Values Oriented Definition of Politics” and that all Marxists have a “Strategy and Tactics Oriented Definition of Politics.” But I will say that in my experience speaking with anarchists who did prioritize strategy and tactics and who did put careful thought and consideration into these kinds of logistical questions, what I usually saw throughout the course of those conversations was that by giving these issues the serious thought that they deserved the anarchist would end up expanding their definition of things like “expertise-based justified hierarchies” and also expand their concepts of militancy/community defense to acknowledge the realities of class warfare and the need to protect and police your liberatory political project from capitalist encirclement, infiltration, and counter-revolution, such that the vast majority of the time they would end up reinventing Marxism-Leninism from base principles just with the label filed off.

So maybe you are right that “Real” anarchists do have an adequate plan in mind to address the complex logistics involved in administering/managing/navigating the global supply chains that modern medicine and agriculture involves. But the other problem with defining a “Real” anarchist is that anarchist is an inherently generalized/umbrella term in a similar way to how terms like "Leftist," or "Progressive," or "Socialist" are used. There is no recognized authority who can define what a "real" anarchist is, and if there was one anarchists would likely reject them on principle. There is certainly some pieces of literature and political theory that is broadly considered to be influential to anarchist thought, but there is not and likely will never be a shared consensus on what "Real" anarchism is.

Most people who self-ID as an anarchist have a highly personal and individual understanding of what that means and how it informs their value system, their moral code, their actions, their place/role in their communities, and how they build/support their communities. And that is great if what anarchism is to you is a framework for how you want to identify, the values you want to live by, and the kind of person you want people to see you as. But it also dramatically lowers the utility of the term for use in conversations about politics if every time you encounter someone who IDs as an anarchist if you have to sit down and have an extended conversation along the lines of "What does anarchism mean to you personally," to make sure everyone is on the same page before continuing.

Marxists have to deal with that too, but it has a self-correcting mechanism in the form of "telling people to do the reading" as a way of clearing up misunderstandings.

first of all, TVP was not about centering my feelings about transfems' abusers or what they went through. going on about how disgusted and enraged I felt underneath submissions would have actively detracted from the voices I was trying to center. TVP was not about my voice

second, abusers are not a subhuman class of people. they are often very ordinary people that exist in our lives. even my worst abuser did not abuse me because he was a subhuman monster or a demon. he abused me because he had systemic power over me, and that power went unchecked by any of the people or systems that could have protected me. he was thoroughly, mundanely human

go out and fuck someone you aren’t attracted to because a stranger on tumblr said to

go out and date someone you aren’t attracted to because a stranger on tumblr said to

You’re Not Allowed To Be Gay Anymore

what this post DOES mean

if you just ‘prefer’ to avoid majority black areas of your city

if you just ‘prefer’ to read, write, think, and talk about men

if you just ‘prefer’ to socialize with people you (perceive as) your assigned birth sex

if you just ‘prefer’ to exclusively watch white-directed movies, read white-written books, listen to white-authored music

if you just unconsciously perceive men as more authoritative/competent and ‘prefer’ to be spoken to by them