Always sad when otherwise well-meaning people create rifts in the progressive world based on historical hangups. My thinking Stalin is pretty cool because he fought capitalism and championed a progressive and anti-fascist world isn't that different from you hating Stalin because you think he was a secret capitalist/reactionary/fascist. We have the same ideals in both cases.
I can talk about how I know these things about controversial parts of history that have been heavily propagandized in the US-led west, but it seriously doesn't matter that much. The only thing it would change in how you compose yourself now is that you will have hope, belief in a socialist future because you'll discover that there's actually been a pretty alright socialist past.
It should be something you want, but it isn't going to fundamentally change your ideals, nor will it mean I will work with you when I wouldn't before. You can be an anarchist or a trot and I will still work with you. What matters is: Will you work with me?
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in reply to Comrade Ferret • • •โญ ๐ ๐ ๐ง โญ reshared this.
Comrade Ferret
in reply to โญ ๐ ๐ ๐ง โญ • •Justin Macleod
in reply to โญ ๐ ๐ ๐ง โญ • • •Comrade Ferret likes this.
HeliosPi
in reply to Justin Macleod • • •@JustinMac84
@SordidAmok @Radical_EgoCom @ferret
There's a big difference between authoritarian and libertarian means of organizing, so this question rests on if we're working together through horizontal decision-making processes and/or adhoc mutual aid & solidarity networks, which don't have a hierarchy and don't force or coerce people to do what they don't want to do.
If the project or what-have-you becomes authoritarian then I'm out because with my limited time and energy i will support liberating efforts for freedom and survival, because that's the point.
Comrade Ferret
in reply to HeliosPi • •As a communist, and probably the most authoritarian sort people tend to think of, I've never seen nor heard of a movement except maybe Gonzaloites (which also do not count and are not organizing partners) that have a top-down means of revolutionary organizing. Perhaps ironically, it's the liberalized "Communist" parties that frequently employ this and have ossified and inept leadership.
You're always going to have a hierarchy of sorts in a revolutionary org, whether it's anarchist or Marxist, just because there really needs to be that structure and decisiveness. A revolutionary org is different from a mutual aid org or solidarity org, in the same way that even an anarchist army will have ranks.
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in reply to HeliosPi • • •I have a similar position when it comes to alliances. I'll ally with anarchists when it comes to things like strikes, protests, etc, basically anything that doesn't compromise my Marxist-Leninist position, but such alliances can only go so far with Marxist-Leninist (hierarchical) and anarchist (non-hierarchical) organization methods being so radically different. Any kind of alliances between the two would be, and should be expected to be, short-lived.
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Comrade Ferret
in reply to โญ ๐ ๐ ๐ง โญ • •LucyWrambles
in reply to Comrade Ferret • • •Here here! I personally don't think that a successful anarchist revolution can be arrived at naturally before the heat death of the universe, but that doesn't matter. I'll work with just about anyone on the left to overthrow the primary contradiction facing the world: capitalism. We can discuss and find solutions to our differences later, once the world isn't being burned down by imperialism and endless profit motivation.
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LucyWrambles
in reply to LucyWrambles • • •And like, personal rant: who is more likely to accept an individual anarchist commune that contributes to the whole of international society, or even keeps to themselves entirely insularly? The current order? Or a "hierarchical authoritarian" Marxist-Leninist dictatorship of the proletariat, which theoretically includes said proletarian anarchists?
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HeliosPi
in reply to LucyWrambles • • •@LucyWrambles @JustinMac84 @Radical_EgoCom
I think that's a good question, but a response that comes to my mind is a tired history.
After the Bolsheviks seized government control in the capital they soon became a counter-revolutionary force by imposing their order through force against the peasant uprisings and coopting or disbanding the worker soviets because they were an alternative form of power. Then they killed, imprisoned, or exiled people with different ideologies of them. Targeting the Mensheviks, revolutionary communists, and anarchists, among others. The Kronstadt rebellion highlights how the Bolsheviks became counter-revolutionary, since many of the sailors mass-murdered by the Bolsheviks were the people who had initiated the revolution.
later on under Stalin the carnivalesque terror of the state killing party officials for fulfilling quotas of "traitors" highlighted the absurdity of what the USSR turned into. Party officials had to target a certain amount of people so they made up reasons to, but then the general populace protested in response, so those state officials were killed, then new officials had to meet the same quotas, therefore killing and imprisoning more of the general populace irregardless of truth or not. A snake eating it's own tail.
Anyways, the point being is that historically authoritarian Marxist parties have been as bad or worse than authoritarian liberal governments, because at least libertarian believers aren't mass-murdered by liberal governments.
LucyWrambles
in reply to HeliosPi • • •@HeliosPi
Fair! History is important, and knowledge of history helps us learn and prevent repetition.
I'd argue that just about everyone who ever held a position of authority in the Soviet Union is dead. Ditto the Soviet Union. I don't think any respectable Marxist thinks that any of the literature is a literal step by step guide, not that I've found any that says "stab anarchists in the back", nor that the Soviet Union or any other experiment should be replicated to a T.
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LucyWrambles
in reply to LucyWrambles • • •@HeliosPi
To your last point, I'd argue that liberals have absolutely murdered, mass and otherwise, leftists of various stripes any time it looked like we might threaten the status quo, all around the world. And if not murder, suppress, undermine, imprison, and neuter, spreading falsehoods (the popular understanding of the words "anarchy" or "socialism" are great examples) and perpetuating illogical reactionary nonsense.
I think it's past time to bury the grudges of long dead men.
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HeliosPi
in reply to LucyWrambles • • •@LucyWrambles Good points. The liberal state isn't mass murdering people, but it's mass imprisoning people, causing immense suffering and destitution, the ongoing sixth great extinction event on Earth, and responsible for the Long Emergency, etc. etc.
I sure hope history in those cases doesn't repeat itself.
Comrade Ferret
in reply to LucyWrambles • •And crucially, we won't know what things will look like when capitalism is defeated. Whether or not we have a state, what it looks like, who leads or doesn't lead it, how people are organized, everything will depend on how the revolution goes. The USSR had such a strong state to start with because it had to: It had a massive army composed largely even of foreign invaders attempting to stop their revolution immediately upon the removal of the government. On the other hand, the Zapatistas were allowed to negotiate with the Mexican government, which was interested in avoiding long-term conflict; and besides that, isn't an effort to bring socialism to the whole nation, so it can be smaller, more directly democratic, with a negligible state.
Will our revolution be a huge bloody conflict with Musk and his cronies, bolstered by the TERF army of the UK and Putin's funding? Or will we suddenly have an awakening in the working class that they aren't expecting, and take over through means of noncompliance, networking, and communications technology? If the impossible happens and the American fascist regime crumbles, and our alliance stands poised to create something new, will the world be excited to follow, or will instead the continent face invasion from capitalists outside with intent to stop us? What infrastructure will be damaged and destroyed, and what will remain? All of this will determine whether our alliance will go more in the direction of a state or statelessness, and I hope we can be informed directly by a common sense of materialism, and understand that such things exist on a spectrum in response to conditions.
And when I talk to anarchists about this, they tend to understand: They admit that, if the new nation is under enormous threat, you may need to make hard decisions and have some level of unifying authority to combat that threat, so long as the intention is to remove the threat and dissolve the state as soon as possible. That is, after all, a revolutionary movement: As Engels said, there is nothing more authoritarian than a revolution, which is the imposition of the will of one group directly over another through force. And the revolution isn't over until it's over.
As both communists and anarchists, we all fight for the ultimate end of the state. The main difference is when we think that fight ends. Anarchists, perhaps, think that it ends as soon as one state does, whereas communists understand the revolution as ongoing until the enemies of the revolution are defeated, and not only the state that they opposed first. Maybe when we get there, there can be an understanding of the necessity for the revolution to continue, but as we've said, we're nowhere close to being there yet โ and it may well be that the conditions are such that the revolution does actually end with the death of the American oligarchy that rules the world.
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HeliosPi
in reply to Comrade Ferret • • •That's why i dig spokescouncils because an internal org's structure can be different than others and still participate in movement organizing and coordination.
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โญ ๐ ๐ ๐ง โญ
in reply to Comrade Ferret • • •โญ ๐ ๐ ๐ง โญ
in reply to โญ ๐ ๐ ๐ง โญ • • •@HeliosPi @SordidAmok @JustinMac84
...the anarchists were willing to abandon their strict adherence to non-hierarchy and adopt a hierarchical organizational method more similar to ML's, but how likely that is isn't known to me. This is all the best case scenario, not anything guaranteed to occur. As I mentioned before, I'm more than willing to ally with anarchist, but I would definitely formulate my plans for the event of a pre-revolution breaking of the alliance. 2/2
Comrade Ferret
in reply to โญ ๐ ๐ ๐ง โญ • •โญ ๐ ๐ ๐ง โญ
in reply to Comrade Ferret • • •@HeliosPi @SordidAmok @JustinMac84
I think you may want to read up on the history of the First International, the Paris Commune, and the Popular Front during the Spanish Civil War, because they're clear examples of how having multiple different (and not just different, but also contradictory) ideologies under one movement can destroy the movement.
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Comrade Ferret
in reply to โญ ๐ ๐ ๐ง โญ • •โญ ๐ ๐ ๐ง โญ
in reply to Comrade Ferret • • •โญ ๐ ๐ ๐ง โญ
in reply to โญ ๐ ๐ ๐ง โญ • • •@HeliosPi @SordidAmok @JustinMac84
..making the correction that the workers can't just capture the existing capitalist state, like the Paris Commune workers did, but that they must abolish the state completely and create a new one. We shouldn't even be trying to replicate the Soviet Union exactly as it was or any previously existing socialist experiment. That isn't scientific at all. What we should be doing is what all of the successful socialist of the past (Marx, Engels, Lenin)..2/3
โญ ๐ ๐ ๐ง โญ
in reply to โญ ๐ ๐ ๐ง โญ • • •@HeliosPi @SordidAmok @JustinMac84
...have done: learn from the mistakes of past socialist experiments so we don't make the same mistakes again. Thanks to past socialist experience, we now know that a revolutionary movement must be united ideologically to prevent schisms that will destroy the movement. 3/3
Comrade Ferret
in reply to โญ ๐ ๐ ๐ง โญ • •Blaise Pabรณn
in reply to โญ ๐ ๐ ๐ง โญ • • •The Spanish Civil war was crazy. I read Orwell's Homage to Catalonia and he would describe the silliest of disagreements.
That said, the heavy central integration is brittle in different ways, look at what is happening in Russia, where the population is following a lunatic off a cliff. (or the USA, which is lining up at the bottom of a similar hill)
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Comrade Ferret
in reply to Blaise Pabรณn • •HeliosPi
in reply to โญ ๐ ๐ ๐ง โญ • • •@Radical_EgoCom @SordidAmok @JustinMac84 Anarchists and others who want freedom wouldn't abandon those principles though because then there's nothing to fight for.
Often forces organized by central control are more easily defeated by state forces. I've read that decentralized forces have won conflicts, but in defense. Hence anarchist forces during the Spanish Civil War being more effective in the cities before going on the offensive. Hierarchically organized forces have succeeded better offensively, but they're still easier to defeat because their enemy can either cut off the head(s) or coopt them. Ultimately state forces have won by economic co-optation when they couldn't by might.
โญ ๐ ๐ ๐ง โญ
in reply to HeliosPi • • •โญ ๐ ๐ ๐ง โญ
in reply to โญ ๐ ๐ ๐ง โญ • • •@HeliosPi @SordidAmok @JustinMac84
...both defensive and offensive measures are required in combat, and if a method of organization is capable of doing one and not the other, it will render itself as an ineffective method of organizing combatants in a war setting. Hierarchical organizations have more than proven themselves of being capable of both defensive and offensive measures (reference is practically every single war), so... 2/3
โญ ๐ ๐ ๐ง โญ
in reply to โญ ๐ ๐ ๐ง โญ • • •@HeliosPi @SordidAmok @JustinMac84
...despite the valid flaw you mentioned of hierarchical organizations being susceptible of defeat from co-optation and "cutting off the head," it is still an effective form of organization regardless. 3/3
HeliosPi
in reply to โญ ๐ ๐ ๐ง โญ • • •HeliosPi
in reply to HeliosPi • • •@Radical_EgoCom @SordidAmok @JustinMac84
The Suriname Boni fought a 150 year guerrilla war against the Dutch and won, remaining autonomous to this day. Russell Maroon Shoatz wrote a well-known essay about this (and more) titled: "The Dragon and the Hydra: A Historical Study of Organizational Methods".
The plantations were like death camps and from the start people fled into the forest and mountains, eventually "developing and using a very effective form of decentralized organizing that not only served to help them defeat their former enslavers, ..."
The Dutch were able to coopt some of the marooner communities on Suriname through treaties since the Dutch were losing militarily, in exchange for not accepting anymore escaping slaves and helping hunt down others, they received supplies and relative autonomy.
The still enslaved Africans learned they couldn't escape to those marooner communities so they fled to smaller ones, which one became the Boni Marooners.
"Yet even while the Boniโs became the main fighting force amongst all of those Maroons who were still at war with the Dutch, they still observed and respected the democratic wishes of any fugitives or Maroon groups they dealt with; never trying to centralize all control in their hands. Although they were past masters in the use of coordinated guerilla campaigns amongst all of the decentralized groups โ during which a unified command was essential โ they still never demanded that everyone integrate themselves into the Boni community; or put themselves directly under Boni outside of when participating in agreed-upon guerilla campaigns and during raids. Thus, the Dutch recorded their knowledge of the frequent coming together of the decentralized fighters of Kormantin Kodjo, Chief Puja, Boni and Baron during large campaigns, while separating and remaining decentralized and autonomous otherwise."
autonomies.org/2022/05/for-rusโฆ
Reinforcing this is an excerpt from the book "Worshipping Power, An Anarchist View of Early State Formation", one way is the rebel state, in which a fighting force with a charismatic leader maintains central control by force of arms after their rebellion and imitates the previously occupying state, such as with Haiti.
On Jamaica, against the English, the most well known resistance figure of the "Windward Maroons, who were organized in a decentralized, anti-authoritarian fashion, was Granny Nanny. The Leeward Maroons, on the west side of the island, were organized hierarchically. Their leaders were men, the most famous of whom was named Kodjo. It was the Windward Maroons who resisted signing peace treaties with the English the longest. After signing the treaties, the maroons on Jamaica were obliged to help the British return newly escaped slaves and suppress slave rebellions, in return for peace and partial autonomy. ..."
I quote this next part in full because its the most apt and dramatic example, from Haiti.
"In the 1750s, Mackandal led a group of enslaved African plantation workers in a rebellion against the French colony. The movement was hierarchically organized, and when its leader was executed, it quickly died out. In 1791, the rebellion that would eventually defeat the French Crown, the English, the Spanish, and then the French republican troops under Napoleon broke out and spread in a horizontal, decentralized fashion, not developing hierarchical forms for several years. The most influential people in sparking the uprising were two Voudun priests, a man and a woman. It is noteworthy that among all the maroon resistance movements, the decentralized ones were the only ones in which women also held leadership positions, and leadership was more often shared, whereas the centralized movements, which were also more likely to imitate European cultural and political forms, were exclusively led by men.
Eventually, Toussaint LโOuverture claimed the title of general and organized a European-style army, centralizing the resistance movement. On the cusp of victory, he submitted to Napoleonโs demands, helping the French to restore a certain kind of order to the island. This betrayal sparked a new decentralized rebellion, which forced the French out. A number of Toussaintโs officers, however, inserted themselves into leadership positions, establishing a European-style state with French assistance. One after another, first Dessalines and then Henry Christophe, ruled like tyrants and were eventually assassinated by their own people. [26]"
theanarchistlibrary.org/librarโฆ
For Russell Maroon Shoatz: The tradition of Maroon โanarchismโ
AutonomiesJustin Macleod
in reply to HeliosPi • • •Comrade Ferret likes this.
Sordid Amok!
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Comrade Ferret
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