Anarchists Disgruntled With Marxists, Communists, And The General Socialist Left - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

Wandering the information superhighway, he came upon the last refuge of civilization, PoFo, the only forum on the internet ...

The 'no government' movement.
Forum rules: No one line posts please.
#14787221
This is why many anarchists like myself are disgruntled with Marxists, Communists, and the general socialist left.

Image

Image

Time and time again Marxists or Communists turn against anarchists throughout history all around the world in persecution where this leads many anarchists altogether to avoid both ideologies completely.

Image
#14787625
Vasili Blokhin wrote:@Joka We can kill each other after the revolution, folks.

Which is precisely my point, wherever there is Marxists and communists there is a trail of executed or imprisoned anarchists. In China for instance being an anarchist is considered subversion of the communist government.
#14787905
Joka wrote:Which is precisely my point, wherever there is Marxists and communists there is a trail of executed or imprisoned anarchists.


A similar statement could be made about fascists. So are you then arguing in favor of liberalism? That would seem to defeat the purpose, unless you are advocating a genteel tea-room anarchism.
#14787911
quetzalcoatl wrote:A similar statement could be made about fascists. So are you then arguing in favor of liberalism? That would seem to defeat the purpose, unless you are advocating a genteel tea-room anarchism.

I argue for an anarchism without Marxist or communist influences. Bakunin was correct in his criticism of Marx.

Fascism is no good either.
#14787977
Engels wrote:Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?

Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they're talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.


Checkmate.

The Marxist recognizes the flow of history, how it works, what it is.

The anarchist seeks to blow individuals up. Then something something...Then utopia.

This is the kind of intellectualism the anarchist offers:

Some anarchist wrote: If anything, vandalism creates jobs, offering additional work opportunities to service industry employees and construction workers whose labor would not otherwise be required. This means you can’t smash capitalism one storefront at a time—but trying to might at least redistribute a little wealth downward. It is typically liberal for critics to present the poor as the victims of confrontational tactics, when in fact it is their own status and comfort they fear for.


I've worked a lot of jobs. I do restoration and maintenance at one of them now, and that includes cleaning bathrooms. When someone clogs a toilet, I never at all think, "Oh good! Additional work opportunities for my labor that would not otherwise be required!"

When someone tags the 19th century building (old by West Coast standards) I work in, I don't think, "How considerate of someone to look out for my job!"

When someone smashes a window, I don't think, "Thank you anarchists! I really had nothing better to do than get on my hands and knees and take the glass from everything, cutting my hands up, and then blow the rest of the day finding a suitable sheet of glass while you galavant around debating which punk group makes you more legitimate than the other!"

Protect the workers. Not your fragile sense of personal identity.
#14788492
The Immortal Goon wrote:Checkmate.

The Marxist recognizes the flow of history, how it works, what it is.

The anarchist seeks to blow individuals up. Then something something...Then utopia.

This is the kind of intellectualism the anarchist offers:



I've worked a lot of jobs. I do restoration and maintenance at one of them now, and that includes cleaning bathrooms. When someone clogs a toilet, I never at all think, "Oh good! Additional work opportunities for my labor that would not otherwise be required!"

When someone tags the 19th century building (old by West Coast standards) I work in, I don't think, "How considerate of someone to look out for my job!"

When someone smashes a window, I don't think, "Thank you anarchists! I really had nothing better to do than get on my hands and knees and take the glass from everything, cutting my hands up, and then blow the rest of the day finding a suitable sheet of glass while you galavant around debating which punk group makes you more legitimate than the other!"

Protect the workers. Not your fragile sense of personal identity.


Nice false caricature of anarchists concerning vulgar stereotyping of every anarchist in existence. Stalin or Mao Tse-tung would be so proud. (You probably idolize both.)

Fact of the matter is that early Marxists or communists would of got nowhere if anarchists didn't help them(a grave mistake), and what did anarchists get in return within Russia, Ukraine, China, Spain, Cuba, and other places after the revolution ? Violently stabbed in the back thrown into political persecution by the same Marxists or communists they aided!

Worker protections? Nonexistent under communism especially after the inner political party or vanguard becomes the new elite (manager class) essentially becoming the new oppressive dictatorship of the working class altogether. Marxist or communist hypocrisy is always amusing and never ceases to amaze me. It all comes down to the Marxist and communist historical betrayal of anarchists, my motto is never again.
#14788504
Joka wrote:
Worker protections? Nonexistent under communism especially after the inner political party or vanguard becomes the new elite (manager class) essentially becoming the new oppressive dictatorship of the working class altogether. Marxist or communist hypocrisy is always amusing and never ceases to amaze me.


I agree with this statement entirely. Communist have always been a strange breed. And the ones who reside on this forum epitamise this statement. They want greater 'workers rights' and 'living conditions' yet idolize the biggest culprit to those rights and living standards in history. Stalin was no champion for workers. He treated them like animals. You worked yourself to death for Russia or you got shot. Voice of discontent meant you got shot. So there went your right to free speech too. He has to go down as the best propaganda expert in history. To this very day, with all the evidence published in history books, highly intelligent working class people still don't see the hypocrisy of Stalin. And what is more bizarre, they are people who can afford computers and the internet so they are able to enter this forum and write their views. They also have TIME to be able write their views too. And I expect they are all well fed and have safe working conditions when they enter employment too. God darn it, Capitalism is fucking shit for the west. How dare the west poor only have sixs weeks holiday a year, be able to afford luxuries, are well fed and able to claim benefits if made redundant? Being back Stalin and see how long you keep these things! And remember guys, if you relocate East, there is a country you can move to where you can live this utopian dream of yours. After all, why live the Capitals lifestyle when you can live the communist lifestyle?
#14788510
I see the capitalists have come out of the woodwork to defend their friends the anarchists :lol:

If I were to expand upon it a bit, the Marxism is the ideology of the revolutionary proletariat. It recognizes that the state is an institution of terror. That's what a state inherently is.

Lenin wrote:The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.

It is on this most important and fundamental point that the distortion of Marxism, proceeding along two main lines, begins.


Here, then, Lenin points out the main points of distortion:

1. That the state can be reconciled as it is, ultimately, a place for "reconciliation of the masses"

2. That the state can be used by a revolutionary, as it is an, "embodiment of this 'alienation'"

We reject both of these things. As do you.

For us though, the state is, as mentioned, an embodiment of the dictatorship of a class. Since we are interested in liberating a class, it makes some sense that we would want to keep our enemies down, until they (as a class) can be liquidated. The threat of finance, of money, of state now gone:

Lenin wrote:And the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy. Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists. We must suppress them in order to free humanity from wage slavery, their resistance must be crushed by force; it is clear that there is no freedom and no democracy where there is suppression and where there is violence.

Engels expressed this splendidly in his letter to Bebel when he said, as the reader will remember, that "the proletariat needs the state, not in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist".

Democracy for the vast majority of the people, and suppression by force, i.e., exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the people--this is the change democracy undergoes during the transition from capitalism to communism.

Only in communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists have disappeared, when there are no classes (i.e., when there is no distinction between the members of society as regards their relation to the social means of production), only then "the state... ceases to exist", and "it becomes possible to speak of freedom". Only then will a truly complete democracy become possible and be realized, a democracy without any exceptions whatever. And only then will democracy begin to wither away, owing to the simple fact that, freed from capitalist slavery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities, and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copy-book maxims. They will become accustomed to observing them without force, without coercion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for coercion called the state.

The expression "the state withers away" is very well-chosen, for it indicates both the gradual and the spontaneous nature of the process. Only habit can, and undoubtedly will, have such an effect; for we see around us on millions of occassions how readily people become accustomed to observing the necessary rules of social intercourse when there is no exploitation, when there is nothing that arouses indignation, evokes protest and revolt, and creates the need for suppression.


He goes on, and in more detail. As does Marx and Engels, of course. But here we see Lenin attempting to build the material from the theoretical. In the bourgeois republic, the most free society at the time, the freedoms are abstracted. Your freedom to speech is the same in theory as that of Ted Turner. In reality, he has far more freedom of speech owing to his material reality and conditions. We act that these theoretical rights be reconciled with the material world. To do that, we must act as a class.

This may be instructive for the principle. The Marxist abhors individual acts of terrorism for the following reasons:

Marx wrote:This latest Fenian exploit [an act of individual terrorism] in Clerkenwell is a great folly. The London masses, who have shown much sympathy for Ireland, will be enraged by it and driven into the arms of the government party. One cannot expect the London proletarians to let themselves be blown up for the benefit of Fenian emissaries. Secret, melodramatic conspiracies of this kind are, in general, more or less doomed to failure.


Lenin wrote:First, that party, which rejected Marxism, stubbornly refused (or, it might be more correct to say: was unable) to understand the need for a strictly objective appraisal of the class forces and their alignment, before taking any political action. Second, this party considered itself particularly "revolutionary", or "Left", because of its recognition of individual terrorism, assassination—something that we Marxists emphatically rejected.


Trotsky wrote:Communists do not hide their faces or furl their banners.

They present themselves openly to the working people as a party. The workers and peasants have come to know the Communists in action, by experience and in hard struggle. It is precisely for this reason that the party of Communist-Bolsheviks has acquired a decisive influence among the masses, and thereby also in the Soviets.


Trotsky wrote:But the disarray introduced into the ranks of the working masses themselves by a terrorist attempt is much deeper. If it is enough to arm oneself with a pistol in order to achieve one’s goal, why the efforts of the class struggle? If a thimbleful of gunpowder and a little chunk of lead is enough to shoot the enemy through the neck, what need is there for a class organisation? If it makes sense to terrify highly placed personages with the roar of explosions, where is the need for the party? Why meetings, mass agitation and elections if one can so easily take aim at the ministerial bench from the gallery of parliament?

In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes towards a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his mission. The anarchist prophets of the ‘propaganda of the deed’ can argue all they want about the elevating and stimulating influence of terrorist acts on the masses. Theoretical considerations and political experience prove otherwise. The more ‘effective’ the terrorist acts, the greater their impact, the more they reduce the interest of the masses in self-organisation and self-education. But the smoke from the confusion clears away, the panic disappears, the successor of the murdered minister makes his appearance, life again settles into the old rut, the wheel of capitalist exploitation turns as before; only the police repression grows more savage and brazen. And as a result, in place of the kindled hopes and artificially aroused excitement comes disillusionment and apathy.


Che wrote:It is necessary to distinguish clearly between sabotage, a revolutionary and highly effective method of warfare, and terrorism, a measure that is generally ineffective and indiscriminate in its results, since it often makes victims of innocent people and destroys a large number of lives that would be valuable to the revolution. Terrorism should be considered a valuable tactic when it is used to put to death some noted leader of the oppressing forces well known for his cruelty, his efficiency in repression, or other quality that makes his elimination useful. But the killing of persons of small importance is never advisable, since it brings on an increase of reprisals, including deaths.


Connolly wrote:Here, then, is the immense difference between the Socialist Republicans and our friends the physical force men. The latter, by stifling all discussions of principles, earn the passive and fleeting commendation of the unthinking multitude; the former, by insisting upon a thorough understanding of their basic principles, do not so readily attract the multitude, but do attract and hold the more thoughtful amongst them. It is the difference betwixt a mob in revolt and an army in preparation. The mob who cheer a speaker referring to the hopes of a physical force movement would, in the very hour of apparent success, be utterly disorganised and divided by the passage through the British Legislature of any trumpery Home Rule Bill. The army of class-conscious workers organising under the banner of the Socialist Republican Party, strong in their knowledge of economic truth and firmly grounded in their revolutionary principles, would remain entirely unaffected by any such manoeuvre and, knowing it would not change their position as a subject class, would still press forward, resolute and undivided, with their faces set towards their only hope of emancipation – the complete control by the working-class democracy of all the powers of National Government.


We are for a movement of the people. You are a movement for the individual. Ultimately, this is where the waves tend to break between us. And, I at least, would argue that this is for the same reason that the liberal state currently works the way that it does.

Take today, Donald Trump. He is the head of the most technologically sophisticated state that has ever existed in human history. Hardly an anarchist, and yet he too proclaims the same vaulted position of the correct interpretation of the individual in all things. When he says that the British tapped his phones for Obama, that he had the biggest crowds at his inauguration, and on and on; he is using the same technique that has been used since the beginning of the printing press. That is to say, he is placing his own interpretation of events as an individual into the marketplace of individual ideas where someone else's reality must be reconciled with his own in order to come up with an agreed upon middle ground.

The problem with this, obviously, is that the objective truth is not to be found in anything Trump says in these matters; and so we are left reconciling our individual realities in order to conform to those of another individual. Or, to quote something similar enough:

Zizek wrote:Lenin’s legacy to be reinvented today is the politics of truth. We live in the “postmodern” era in which truth-claims as such are dismissed as an expression of hidden power-mechanisms — as the reborn pseudo-Nietzscheans like to emphasize, truth is a lie which is most efficient in asserting our will to power. The very question, apropos of some statement, “Is it true?”, is supplanted by the question “Under what power conditions can this statement be uttered?”. What we get instead of the universal truth is the multitude of perspectives, or, as it is fashionable to put it today, of “narratives” — not only literature, but also politics, religion, science, they are all different narratives, stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of ethics is to guarantee the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives can peacefully coexist, in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual minorities, will have the right and possibility to tell his story.

...When Lenin said “The theory of Marx is all-powerful, because it is true,” everything depends on how we understand “truth” here: is it a neutral “objective knowledge,” or the truth of an engaged subject? Lenin’s wager — today, in our era of postmodern relativism, more actual than ever — is that universal truth and partisanship, the gesture of taking sides, are not only not mutually exclusive, but condition each other: in a concrete situation, its UNIVERSAL truth can only be articulated from a thoroughly PARTISAN position — truth is by definition one-sided. This, of course, goes against the predominant doxa of compromise, of finding a middle path among the multitude of conflicting interests. If one does not specify the CRITERIA of the different, alternate, narrativization, then this endeavor courts the danger of endorsing, in the Politically Correct mood, ridiculous “narratives” like those about the supremacy of some aboriginal holistic wisdom, of dismissing science as just another narrative on a par with premodern superstitions. The Leninist narrative to the postmodern multiculturalist “right to narrate” should thus be an unashamed assertion of the right to truth. When, in the debacle of 1914, all European Social Democratic parties (with the honorable exception of the Russian Bolsheviks and the Serb Social Democrats) succumbed to the war fervor and voted for the military credits, Lenin’s thorough rejection of the “patriotic line,” in its very isolation from the predominant mood, designated the singular emergence of the truth of the entire situation.

In a closer analysis, one should exhibit how the cultural relativism of the “right-to-narrate” orientation contains its own apparent opposite, the fixation on the Real of some trauma which resists its narrativization.


This is, as you'll see, the problem with the cult of personality, which Lenin and others very much avoided in life. The anarchist and other emphasis on the individual correctness is, in a dialectic way, also an emphasis upon the supposed tyrant. For Joseph Stalin (like Trotsky after exile) was also asserting an individual's analysis and thoughts instead of that of a class.

And here is where we come to your assertions that I am a fan of Stalin or Mao, I am not in particularly (though I lean toward the latter instead of the former if forced to choose). And this is, in part, because I refer to myself mostly as a Connollyist—James Connolly being a hero among anarchists too (though firmly a Marxist). The question is, should I be a Marxist, should I be for the elevation of the class (the class and the individual being dialectically the same) instead of the specific individual; what would my slogan be from preventing a crass single interpretation that all must follow?

Connolly wrote:I believe that the development of the fighting spirit is of more importance than the creation of the theoretically perfect organisation; that, indeed, the most theoretically perfect organisation may, because of its very perfection and vastness, be of the greatest possible danger to the revolutionary movement if it tends, or is used, to repress and curb the fighting spirit of comradeship in the rank and file.


And here the knot is neatly untied as cleanly as if Alexander himself had done it. The party speaks for, and is, the class. If or when it ceases to be, it begins perpetuating the alienation that it was supposed to destroy—something that is mostly inevitable when it comes to creating revolution, and the reason that the mechanism will wither away when it ceases to have a purpose.

But we are a long way from an actual (global) socialism.

For the anarchist, as near as I can figure, it's a lot of blowing stuff up and expecting everyone to go for the ride. The deed itself being the propaganda to which to persuade.

The Marxist, instead, looks at how the world works and acts accordingly. This is, I maintain, the most elegant and useful ideology of liberation for this reason.
#14788511
B0ycey wrote:I agree with this statement entirely. Communist have always been a strange breed. And the ones who reside on this forum epitamise this statement. They want greater 'workers rights' and 'living conditions' yet idolize the biggest culprit to those rights and living standards in history. Stalin was no champion for workers. He treated them like animals. You worked yourself to death for Russia or you got shot. Voice of discontent meant you got shot. So there went your right to free speech too. He has to go down as the best propaganda expert in history. To this very day, with all the evidence published in history books, highly intelligent working class people still don't see the hypocrisy of Stalin. And what is more bizarre, they are people who can afford computers and the internet so they are able to enter this forum and write their views. They also have TIME to be able write their views too. And I expect they are all well fed and have safe working conditions when they enter employment too. God darn it, Capitalism is fucking shit for the west. How dare the west poor only have sixs weeks holiday a year, be able to afford luxuries, are well fed and able to claim benefits if made redundant? Being back Stalin and see how long you keep these things! And remember guys, if you relocate East, there is a country you can move to where you can live this utopian dream of yours. After all, why live the Capitals lifestyle when you can live the communist lifestyle?


I agree with what you say about the working class under communism however please understand that I don't support capitalism either as I don't view it being any better.

To Immortal Goon,

That's where you and I disagree, I don't believe the state can be reconciled in any shape, pattern, or fashion. When you liquidate a class or group of people you always inevitably become the new oppressors. For me as an anarchist seeking autonomy the goal should be realizing and creating a separatist autonomous society. Any kind of statist society cannot be reconciled or reformed. It instead should be abandoned and thrown away. I seem to recall historically Marxists employing many acts of terrorism for their cause. I believe in the middle path where the extremism of both individualism and collectivism is best avoid. A middle path of both should be sought out instead.
Last edited by Joka on 22 Mar 2017 07:34, edited 1 time in total.
#14788514
Joka wrote:however please understand that I don't support capitalism either as I don't view it being any better.


Being an anarchist I didn't think you did. But Capitalism has made the West very wealthy and that is just a fact. It's just that the US are shit at spreading that wealth throughout their classes in a fair manner. And this is why the US working class are today relying on the false hope given by Trump last November.
#14788515
B0ycey wrote:Being an anarchist I didn't think you did. But Capitalism has made the West very wealthy and that is just a fact. It's just that the US are shit at spreading that wealth throughout their classes in a fair manner. And this is why the US working class are today relying on the false hope given by Trump last November.

An extreme minority very wealthy at the expense of the majority united under oligarchy or kleptocracy.
#14788516
Joka wrote:An extreme minority very wealthy at the expense of the majority united under oligarchy or kleptocracy.


But that's just it. The US poor look at these people and believe that his what a fair lifestyle should be. The US poor in terms of the real poor (poor in poor countries) are not poor. They are in fact very wealthy and I'm sure people living in poor nations would love to trade places with them. If you can feed yourself and your family, and have the time and money to write your discontent on the internet, I think perhaps your lifestyle isn't so shit after all. But that doesn't mean the US shouldn't share its wealth more fairly throughout its society.
#14788518
B0ycey wrote:But that's just it. The US poor look at these people and believe that his what a fair lifestyle should be. The US poor in terms of the real poor (poor in poor countries) are not poor. They are in fact very wealthy and I'm sure people living in poor nations would love to trade places with them. If you can feed yourself and your family, and have the time and money to write your discontent on the internet, I think perhaps your lifestyle isn't so shit after all. But that doesn't mean the US shouldn't share its wealth more fairly throughout its society.


Being poor has much more to it than material basis as there are other attributes to it specifically social and existential that has nothing to do with acquired wealth although that does have a huge part of it. There is nothing glamorous about being poor in the United States especially concerning reduced lifespans, overall-health(physical and mental), and the ability to acquire healthcare. Lack of general individual autonomy plays a huge role also. There is more to life and existence than simple subsistence as subsistence is not enough. A pet dog can subsist also.

To have authentic individual independence and autonomy is where freedom lies not the propaganda of all this representative 'freedom' we hear about from all kinds of states.
(Both left and right.)
Last edited by Joka on 22 Mar 2017 08:32, edited 7 times in total.

"Ukraine’s real losses should be counted i[…]

I would bet you have very strong feelings about DE[…]

@Rugoz A compromise with Putin is impossibl[…]

@KurtFF8 Litwin wages a psyops war here but we […]