Anarchists and Marxists in the 21st Century

THE GUY WHO WROTE THE ARTICLE IS LITERALLY AN ANARCHIST
Seriously, get over your fucking victim complex

In 90% of the cases, trying to work with anarchists is not worth the time. They end up showing up drunk or smash shit. Also I really don't like the whole "yeaaaah man, Stalin was like, a fascist and shit, we are against hierarchy" shtick they do with normies, because once the people lured in by that become disillusioned with the utopianism, they are more likely to become liberals. It's not a solid ideological foundation.

Sorry I can't take an article seriously that likens Marx's theories to Newton's.

You are putting the cart in front of the horse with that statement. Everytime in history anarchists started to split in the most crucial moment. Of course they were getting fucked by it. At least Kropotkin went into armchair mode during the revolution and didn't try to stir up shit.

And his entire point was collaborate with Marxists and hope they'll throw you a bone among if they succeed with the faulty assumption anarchists just haven't read Lenin yet. I see no need to work with autists who think their edgy socdem parties are the vanguard, not because remember Catalonia, but because they're impotent larpers who don't do anything.

Impotent or not, when there is no revolutionary potential any ML party becomes a spectator and not an actor. All we can do is laying the ideological groundwork.

Anarchists however often actively alienate people, with their "autonomous groups" and shit. G20 was a fucking disaster for the left.

"Scientific Socialism" wasn't just a fancy name to make Marxists sound smart, famalam, it describes the basis of Marxist analysis. To liken Marx's theories to Newton's is completely valid because Marx attempted to do the same thing to political theory as what Newton did with physics

Have you even read the bloody article? Seriously, you sound so fucking butthurt. Literally all that the article proposes is that both sides be able to put aside their disagreements just for a moment in order to work towards a goal that IS IN THE INTERESTS OF BOTH OF THEM. You're acting like a fucking child

No you are wrong
web.uri.edu/isiac/files/lawofmot.pdf
marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/millenni/smith4.htm

And you're failing at that. If there is any revolutionary potential you will be swiftly crushed by the more popular facsists because normies were spooked by your hammer and sickles.
If you think some punk squats or burning cars is more off putting than draping yourself in sovietboo gear and screaming about how Stalin dindu nuffin then you've got your head shoved up your ass.

Yes, have you?
He is saying the divide is due to anarchists not reading Marx and Lenin as opposed to disagreeing with Marx or Lenin.
So rather than following the anarchist or closeted anarchist idea of revolution being the DotP for lack of a better term, anarchists should accept ML in exchange for being resected. Because this time the "worker's state" will not purge suspected sabotagers to "preserve the revolution". The article is horseshit and the author is a faggot.

That would prove Third Worldists right.
I don't see anybody doing that outside the internet. Not in the general public, anyway. If anything, anarchists have more of a dresscode than MLs in the West. Literally the only party that parades with Stalin portraits is the CPGB (ML). Like, in Germany we have the MLPD who has the funds to plaster every fucking street with Lenin pictures (I'm not exaggerating), and nobody gives a shit. Once the idiots at G20 burned cars of workers and took a selfie in front of it, you could literally see the left-wing parties drop at the next poll.

The first article simply states that Marx used the broader, German definition of science (Wissenschaft) than the strictly empirical one and that he didn't draw from Newton, I'll concede that
The second article, from what I skimmed (sorry, I'm not gonna read full articles on an active thread), talks about how dialectic materialism (which I never mentioned) is bullshit and goes further in depth on Marx's method.
I'll give you that the Newton quote is bullshit, but the broader point of Marxism as a method of social analysis still stands. Stop being a picky asshole just because a guy says a line you don't approve of.
And next time, if you actually want a decent response, try quoting the part that proves me wrong

Yes, I have. I was the only one who figured out that the guy was a bloody anarchist
So every Anarchist has read Marx and Lenin? All your quote is saying is that it's a good idea to read theory outside your comfort zone. The article is an anarchist telling his fellow anarchists to shape up.
Yeah, you haven't read the article, or at least you've read it from so biased a viewpoint that you manage to miss the fact that 1: he literally writes how Stalinists and "ML" are outdated LARPers, and 2: he mentions several times the "libertarian" side of Marxism, and even quotes CotGP to back him up. Quit being such a whiny bitch

I'll never understand how someone who lived 80 years ago is more outdated than someone who lived 150 ago. It's gonna be fun once the next revolution finds itself in the exact same predicament like Stalin did in the 30s in some differently shaped form.

This whole LARPing meme regarding MLs is getting tedious. People get blamed for LARPing for as much as studying Soviet history.

Are you twelve or something? You pretentious retard.

No, I'll probably read them later, but if you expect me to spend 30+ minutes reading your info dump while there are other posts to respond to and an active thread going on you're retarded. They looked good, by the way

Leninism emerged to not repeat the Paris Commune. The next logical step would be something that doesn't repeat revisionism, one can get draw form Mao or Hoxha or whatever.

You can't just ignore communist history, make tabula rasa and pretend we have to start from Critique of the Gotha Program again. No ML believes the next revolution will be exactly like the ones before - but it also won't be completely different.

The third world isn't exempt from that happening.
Then you've got your head up your ass.
And if they react that way to a few burnt cars, why do you think they will react more positivly to a prospective revolution and seizure of property under a banner that people have been conditioned to associate with poverty and repression?

Of course, but it seems to me that a lot of ML parties want to simply recreate the Soviet Union. The idea that "we need to avoid revisionism this time and it'll work" also doesn't answer the questions of how you get to the point of having a new Soviet Union again. I don't see how we'll be able to revolutionary war in this day and age outside of the framework of 3rd world "national liberation" guerilla movements.

Third World is less likely to go fascist because they will look up to their imperialist exploiters. They don't have anybody on the bottom to blame. In the first world, you have the idea of "everything used to be better in the past" which doesn't make sense for the third world because it always used to be shit for them, secondly, first worlders realize that the option to exploit somebody is probably more comfortable pursing than a socialist revolution that will bring turmoil and hardship.

Meant to add the caveat: Unless there's a total, worldwide collapse of capitalism. You might as well be a leftcom at that stage with all that armchair sitting you're gonna be doing

The reason why orientation towards the USSR isn't so bad is because a lot of the stuff that seemed bad was a result of the capitalist reaction against it. Sure, you might argue that within a western, developed country there surely would be less democratic deficit and more communization, but imagining a similar capitalist reaction would make me not so sure about it. A lot of the "bad stuff" in the USSR wasn't part of the Ideal of the Soviet Union, they were deficits caused by material conditions. When MLs talk about the USSR being relevant as a model of aim for, they talk about the ideal of the USSR - like, taking the, 1936 constitution at face value. What was so bad about the 1936 constitution, just in theory? I don't see it.

No, that you took that from my post shows how poor your reading comprehension is. The issue is that anarchism is not a symptom of being ignorant of Marx and Lenin but a disagreement with Marx and Lenin.
I have, not everyone that thinks you're an idiot hasn't read your drivel.
While I agree with that, he ignores that MLs or MLMs are the majority of Marxists with Trots bringing up the rear. That's almost all self-described Marxists wanting to state "socialism" as the DotP, which anarchists reject.
They can call themselves whatever they like and distance themselves from the stacheman, but if they're advocating for a DotP as state socialism than they're going against what anarchists want. So anarchists are to ignore the majority of outdated larpers to side with the much smaller group of larpers who largely want the same thing but with a friendlier face.
Now we get to the issue of this open letter which is that rather than attempt to strike out on their own, anarchists should be content to assist the libertarian leninists in building state socialism as a dotp and enjoy the esteemed respect that comes with it. Why should anarchists not form anarchist organizations to build dual power but instead work with marxists in marxist organizations pursuing marxist goals?

That applies for all communist tendencies, but Socialism in One Country is probably the least armchair-ish position, when we talk about an actual socialist revolution and not some commune or whatever Rojava is doimg. And that happens to be a ML position.

Global capitalism isn't going to collapse - it's going to outsource the problems, and it will be able to that for a long time. Where the contradictions of capitalism pile up, there is potential for a revolutionary moment, which won't be global though. This doesn't have to be some absolute Third World shithole though. Greece would be a country which could have the potential for that, if the EU neoliberals keep pushing their bullshit.

I think you underestimate fascism's ability to take root. In fact I think if it does come to the third world, it will be in the form of class collaborationism against the first world imperialists in favor of a capitalism that enriches the local bourgeoise at the expense of the proletariat. It won't be socialist, in one country or otherwise, and given how China is acting in Africa it wouldn't surprise me if some even sided with the western block to strengthen the imperialist West.

Prepare for the least materialism you've ever seen in a socialist debate.

smh
Sorry fam, joking.
Seriously, you're never gonna have an "ideal" Soviet Union. The Soviet Union as it was in 1936 was itself a product of several compromises by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, whose theories were far more councilist before the revolution. Lenin didn't plan for the NEP, it became necessary due to the desperation of the USSR after the civil war. One look at the actions of capitalist states should show how quickly constitutional decrees are put on the wayside when pragmatism decrees it. To look at the laws and ideals of the Soviet Union isn't enough. You have to look at their actions, at what they did right and what they did wrong, and find a way to repeat the former while avoiding the latter. IMO, in our current conditions, the path we have to take is gonna look quite different from the one the Bolsheviks took.

Except the author is not saying that anarchist would be Marxists if they just read Marx, simply that all his bookdumb comrades should make the effort to read literature that isn't anarchist
How paranoid are you?
Jesus fucking christ you're dense. Just because you think all Marxists are ML doesn't mean that the author wants anarchists to go in lockstep with ML's. Unlike you, the guy actually has a sense of nuance. You're stubbornly refusing to give this article an honest read and clinging on to the notion that it's trying to indoctrinate you into bending the knee to ML's when all it's trying to tell you is to be fucking pragmatic about your activism. Are you gonna oppose a strike action because the guys who organised it are Marxists? If you are, you're not my comrade and you're not anyone's fucking comrade, you're just a contrarian asshole.

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fuggen savd :D

Could you elaborate what in your opinion is the main factor that makes you think this way? In the West, almost the entire economy is a service economy. You'd have to reindustrialize, evolve productive forces, while simultaneously resisting the reaction and sanctions. How would this be "vastly different" from the situation the USSR was in?

...

Whenever someone says this I know for a fact that they haven't read any of Trotsky's writings.

Many Trotskists I meet argue that. I'm talking about average, college campus trot though.

Marxists need to admit what they actually want is a democratic state, not anarchism, and the black and red can agree to disagree. Anarcho-communism is a meme that needs to stop.

really makes you think

anyways, if you've learned your lesson from the 20th century failures of marxism-leninism and social democracy and finally start rejecting stagism and embracing impossibilism, that'd be neat

Mostly in the sense that a revolutionary war would be impossible. The sheer power of imperialist states would force any revolutionary movement to become an insurgency, and a revolutionary state would not be able to expand very far outside the 3rd world due to NATO and the threat of nukes. What I think is gonna have to happen is the decline of the US as the sole global superpower, which we are already seeing, and the widespread failure of capitalism, which is already on life support, that will allow for insurrections that are gonna look a lot more "anarchist" or communization-ish than leninist.
Basically, a revolutionary state isn't gonna work. We're gonna need something far more international in order to succeed and even then it still seems dicey IMO.

t. brainlet

How would democratic descisions be enforced in a communist society?

How is anarcho-communism a meme?

If you'll answer my question, that's where I'm going

That sounds strange to me. I think most Trotskyists would argue that the USSR probably would have been *better* if the Left Opposition had won out, but Trotsky himself was very adamant that the bureaucratic degeneration of the country was a result of global isolation and economic/cultural backwardness; not any particular political faction.

Well it would kinda depend on what you mean by "democratic" and "communist", famalam. Just skip the rhetorical bullshit and get to the point

The point is, communistic decision making is democratic and majoritarianism requires coercion for compliance. You end up with a majority enforcing their will on the minority, which may do away with the state in a marxist sense (as a class-maintenance structure), but someone physically forcing me into a decision or system I don't agree with is too close to a state in the anarchist sense (the group with legitimate claim to coercion) for my liking. Communism just trades police for mobs. It's just a different colored boot stamping on your face.

People keep throwing that quote around, but I've never seen a source.

Ah, point taken

I've read the breadbook.
Rich coming from an anarchist

If that were to be true, then why have the imperialist powers utterly failed to constrain these revolutions? Starting with the Korean War, the US has failed to bring insurrections to their knees. The sheer amount of publicity and the financial burdern of wars make interventionism less and less likely. Just look how the DPRK is basically laughing into Americas face, while the US looks more and more like a toothless dog.
I would argue the exact opposite. The lack of productive industry and the change into a more service-orientated industry make a bottom-up seizure of production, such as factories or agricultural cooperatives, to establish communes or a gift economy far more unlikely. Both Catalonia as well as the Free Territory had anarchist revolutions because both were centers of production which could be seized directly without great effort, with Catalonia being an industrial center, and the Ukraine being an agricultural center. Also, I don't have nearly as much confidence on capitalism globally collapsing, porky will never make the Great Depression happening again, modern capitalism has perfected the art of outsourcing its contradictions.
It has so far. Not perfect, but it worked.
I don't see how developing socialism in one country somehow contradicts internationalism fam. You can't spark revolutionary moments in other countries at will. All you can do is exercising solidarity with the communists there. Well, unless you conquer.

Consensus decision making is a literal joke though. Nothing ever happens and the groups that utilize it consistently collapse.

I agree. That's why I think a anarcho-communism is a meme. There is a fundamental contradiction in the way decisions would be made and handled between the anarchist and communist perspective, though I can't tell which is worse better

Korea and Vietnam were supported by other major powers, and the war in Vietnam practically destroyed the country. Post USSR, the only real opposition to imperialist powers have either been insurrections or states with a nuclear arsenal, and both only prevent them from destroying you, it gives you no possibility to expand. I'll remind you that the USSR would likely have been able to take over all of Europe if it weren't for MAD. Any new revolutionary state will face the same issue
The decline of industry in the first world is exaggerated, though there's no doubt that we'll have to reindustrialise to a degree, though how we go about it would be vastly different from what happened in the USSR. We're not turning peasants into labourers, we're turning service workers into industrial workers by restoring old industries and rendering most service jobs defunct or obsolete. In my former post I was really only talking about what I expect the immediate insurrection to look like. Let's be real here: no one has any idea what's gonna happen after that, and all the revolutionaries before us didn't either.

True, but it's very likely that any revolution would not sweep over the globe but will stay restricted to one country. However, the more countries become socialist, the more the economic cooperation can work out. Cuba and the DPRK fare reasonably well, considering their conditions. You are getting the sanctions and trade bans anyway, no matter how your revolution looks like.
That's not actually in contradiction to Marxism-Leninism. The bolsheviks were a mass movement with a "libertarian" basis that established councils everywhere. I mean damn, self-organized bolshevik militias were basically the main reason Petrograd wasn't taken over by Tsarists after the February Revolution. The only difference is that their goal was to seize the state, whereas your goal is - well, I don't really see it.
Fair enough. But how do you rebuild industry without at least 4-5 years of state capitalism? Where will the materials be coming from?

The author is placing the blame on anarchists for any "misunderstanding" and as the rest of the article is based the advice is that anarchists should come to the Marxist table with at best a bone thrown to them.
Most isn't all, for someone crying about nuance and literacy you sure lack either.
This guys "nuance" is a one-sided compromise of a state socialist DotP with more lolberty and freedumb than the USSR. That isn't anarchism or even communization anarchism-in-denial, it's the same recycled left-unity tripe we've seeing for years and has gone nowhere. We don't need to unify with impotent larpers or useless academics, in fact we should actively avoid it.
And what is pragmatic about siding with larpers or armchairs who don't do anything? By and large marxists of any stripe have left the streets for the classroom for the ballot box. The most they can offer is expertise in selling newspapers or advice on how to continually lose elections.
Given that the last one I heard of saw the KKE get cucked by Golden Dawn, I would. Especially considering how unions are collaborationist and no longer revolutionary.
Oh boo hoo, I won't be cannon fodder for the libertarian leninists. I guess when you and all 4 of your comrades play D&D you can cry about mean sectarianism.

Looking at the squabbles between anarchists and Marxists it seems clear to me that we need a, shall we say, third way.

It's propaganda

Schnitz if it is you, even you can't deny that ML revolutions have given into revisionism, and anarchists have been betrayed by MLs. That is not to say that a next revolution would be impossible and that anarchists and MLs can't work in tandem (different material conditions and gift of hindsight etc), but we'd be fools to see that centralised forms of power have backfired into becoming revisionist/ capitalist.
Centralised forms can collapse just as decentralised structures can. Thomas Sankara's Burkina Faso being one example.

As cited in Lilley, Sasha (2011). Capital and Its Discontents: Conversations with Radical Thinkers in a Time of Tumult. Fernwood Publishing. p. 22. ISBN 1604865326.

Isn't it funny how Malatesta & co. basically hated and disavowed Makhno – the one anarchist who actually got to dirty his hands in a revolution – just so they can keep their idealist conception of a pure revolution?

The only ones consistently, again and again, throughout history 'betraying' anarchism are the anarchists themselves. The reason for this is that you can't be faithful to contradictory ideas. Grow the fuck up and read a book.