Edit for clarity: I’m not asking why the Tankie/Anarchist grudge exist. I’m curious about what information sources - mentors, friends, books, TV, cultural osmosis, conveys that information to people. Where do individuals encounter this information and how does it become important to them. It’s an anthropology question about a contemporary culture rather than a question about the history of leftism.
I’ve been thinking about this a bit lately. Newly minted Anarchists have to learn to hate Lenin and Stalin and whoever else they have a grudge against. They have to encounter some materials or teacher who teaches them “Yeah these guys, you have to hate these guys and it has to be super-personal like they kicked your dog. You have to be extremely angry about it and treat anyone who doesn’t disavow them as though they’re literally going to kill you.”
Like there’s some process of enculturation there, of being brought in to the culture of anarchism, and there’s a process where anarchists learn this thing that all (most?) anarchists know and agree on.
Idk, just anthropology brain anthropologying. Cause like if someone or something didn’t teach you this why would you care so much?
As an anarchist, how it went for me:
Read history. Have intimate relationships with at least two tankies (all my relationships end badly, so its a sure way to build a grudge).
Marx was cool though (sometimes), and I’ve got some ml comrades who are doing pretty much the right thing, and most importantly: I’d rather be murdered by my hot problematic ex in a few years than some shitty nazi tomorrow. So if there are firing squads for the anarchists, my last wish is that one of my exes do mine, please.
If I get my way, you guys can run the trains.
If none of this makes sense, read some less myopic history. The USSR was unquestionably better than the czarist regime, by a lot, and it was the worst most reactionary group of communists kind of giving communism a bad name by being generally shitty about being bare minimum decent¹. Also the bolsheviks killing all the other communists, not just the anarchists. Yes they moved Russia, technologically, farther in their short life than basically any civilization in history, but they did it by shitting on the core ideas of communism for some peripheral crap Marx said was ‘probably a thing you need sometjing like to get there, I think’. There’s an opportunity cost thing, and I’ll give them more understanding, but they do not get a full pass for bad behavior just because they were communist. What’s the incident where the term ‘tankie’ was born? Remember that one?
Yes they were better than the other world powers, but by as little as they could get away with while still calling themselves communist, like they relished the misery, fetishized the sacrifices, and frequently missed the god damn point. They ruled for a people they weren’t willing to trust or like, a lesson robespierre had already fucking taught us, and that poisoned the idea of communism, or at least the word, for a lot of people. Thats why I still have to call myself an anarchist instead of an anarcho-communist if I want to turn libs.
¹which, yes, set the entire rest of the world against them. They had a few teeeensy difficulties. They still used it as a license to be otherwise just as awful as everyone else, and handled their problems in utterly deplorable ways.
I think you are extremely not aware of their achievements, or are undervaluing things such as guaranteed housing (I want to reiterate this point - it means that the state does not just up and torture and kill people by forcing them onto the streets - this is something that nobody seems to pay much attention to, including anarchists, for whatever reason), guaranteed healthcare (meaning that people are not tortured by being declined a basic need in this regard, either), the sort of women’s rights that we take for granted today (including criminalisation of marital SA - first in the world).
I am sorry, but in what world is that ‘the most reactionary group of communists’, and how is this ‘the bare minimum’? This is massive.
I’m not sure what groups are you referring to.
This is just straight up false. Their internal achievements were massive. Internationally, they supported basically every anti-colonial liberation movement in the world (which, for example, is a huge contrast between them and the PRC). They were not under any obligation to do the good that they did in that regard.
I’m sorry, but this is just obvious unsubstantiated fantasy. I am saying this as a person who both has put effort into investigating the USSR, and who has easy access to people who lived and worked in the USSR and who knows what those people think on the matter.
You’re completely missing the point of what I said for the sake of defensiveness, and its too late in the day for me to rewrite it better. Your points are all broadly addressed in whar youre replying to. Re-read what I already wrote or dont; youre not getting better out of me right now.
Firstly, what points am I missing?
Secondly, you mistake an honest attempt to educate as ‘defensiveness’. If you want to try to escalate, I assure you that I can bite back and that I have studied the topic. I would like to ask you to keep things civil, however.
Except, they are evidently not.
You do not address the fact that the Bolsheviks were progressive even by today’s standards (the guaranteed housing alone is a very significant development that is possible due to planned economy and you may notice that planned economies at least usually - if not always - provide guaranteed housing).
You do not address the fact that the USSR did quite a bit more than ‘the bare minimum’ internationally, either. The claim in your original comment is outright false.
You do not address the fact that your claim that ‘they relished the misery, fetishized the sacrifices, and frequently missed the god damn point’ is just fantasy that doesn’t mean anything and is just meant to very vaguely paint communists in a bad light.
I am going to note that you refused to elaborate on any of that.
To be absolutely clear, the poor and lackluster decisions and retreats from “pure” Marxism and Leninism were by far the result of material conditions over a personal desire for power. The USSR was the world’s first socialist experiment and thus went on to make mistakes which would be corrected by later socialist experiments which would survive the 90s, but many of those things were forced by the invasion of 14 imperialist powers and the genocidal war campaign of the Nazis shortly after.
The history of Marxism (from the Marxist perspective) can be seen as legitimately taking the most successful form of liberatory thought and action in the modern day and trying to make it continually work in the cruel world we’re born into. It’s not perfect, but it’s been shown to work on a scale larger than any other strain of thought, and socialist revolutions have fed more children who’d gone hungry before than anything else prior or after.
For more context in this worldview, I highly recommend Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti and Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo
You can’t think if any others? Not one?
Everything else you said I addressed in my statement. Refer back to it.
Which socialist projects do you hold in higher regard?
Most of them. Different criticisms, but generally; most of them.
China hasn’t counted for decades; opposing America is not a defining component of socialism. It’s just a generally cool thing to do.
But my primary concern is not states and authorities; they dont generally interest me.
Also, surely you don’t hold the pogrom-loving Makhno’s territories in higher regard, do you?
Okay, why do you hold, for example, Vietnam in higher regard than the USSR? Why do you consider Angola to be better than the USSR? Why the early PRC over the USSR?
Yes, we remember the incidents in which the USSR prevented Hungary and Czechoslovakia from becoming what eastern Europe has become now (after passing through a crisis that killed millions)
I can’t imagine how after the liberalisation of eastern Europe in the 90s, anarchists will look at it and say “yeah, thank god the USSR didn’t roll in the tanks this time”.
They were fucking socialists. They came in with paratroopers and tanks to kill socialists. It was not a lib revolution, I dont have a problem with dead CIA puppet libs, this was socialists who wanted autonomy. This is why a lot of anarchists can’t stand tankies.
Edit: List the things the USSR did wrong. It existed for seventy years and covered eleven time zones, so there’s no way, even if they were the best ever, that its gonna be a short list. If it is a short list, consider that you might be rationalizing and covering up and lying to cover the fuckups of an empire thats been dead probably longer than you’ve been alive, and most of the pieces have been to war with other pieces since. Why? Its dead and gone, you sound like how libs sound after throwing an election. Let’s do a post mortem so we can do better next time, let’s dig deep into the fuckups and fucking learn from fucking history. There were cool parts too! And let’s learn from those too! But you can’t take either in isolation, that’s not honest, and its not useful.
So was the USSR in 1986 applying Perestroika and Glasnost, and look where that led them. Many more socialists died as a consequence of the dismantling of the Eastern Bloc than as a consequence of USSR actions.
Yes, that’s the US State Department version. Seeing how almost literally all countries that have taken these liberalisation policies have ended in Capitalism as a consequence (except possibly China depending on who you ask, and Cuba possibly might be on the way to that), I find it hard to believe that it would have brought the result of happier socialism for everyone.
Feel free to answer if you really mean that you want me to make a list of USSR L’s, but I think it’s not a stretch to say that Marxist-Leninists usually know as much of the repressions and bad stuffs in the USSR as any other flavour of socialists
I’m saying if you can’t see their fuckups, if you buy all the cope, you aren’t really learning much from their successes either, and this is just masturbating to an idealized past.
There are socialist regimes, even centralized ones close to your ideology, that have not failed, that still exist, that have a better record of being on the right side of history. I dont have a ton of interest arguing the minutiae of a shitty dead empire that could have been really really fucking cool. Why the fuck do any of you never talk about them?
Please excuse me, which socialist country has a better record of being on the right side of history than the Soviet Union?!
I’ll try and make you a list of the bigger ones IMO later or tomorrow. Again, I don’t expect many people to know more about such issues than Marxist-Leninists, who are famously obsessed with the USSR.
I don’t actually care, its just an exercise to see if youre delusional by checking roughly how many. Do it, but for yourself. Remember the people you love might be great, but they also suck. Remembering one without the other is not respecting their memory.
Cuba in particular, as far as nation States, tends to be on the right side of things earlier than most. I’m not interested in discussing it at present.
I’m going to note that you are very reluctant to actually elaborate on many of your points, including which socialist projects have a better record of being on the right side of history. Seriously, how many can you name other than Cuba and East Germany?
Ah, famous socialist cardinal József Mindszenty.
With Czechoslovakia it’s a bit more muddled, but looking at Gorbachev who was at first “we’ll do socialism a bit better” and then “we are ceding power to capitalists now”, I’m sceptical it wouldn’t do something similar.
Did you just use the failure if the USSR via self-rat-fucking to justify the imperialism of the USSR? I get the names mixed up sometimes, so genuine question.
Incorrect term. Call it hegemonism if you want, or geopolitical interventionism, but not imperialism. The USSR did not engage in economic imperialism in any stretch of the word, not within itself, not with neighbouring countries, not with third parties. It was a source of raw materials for the Eastern Bloc which it traded within COMECON on exchange for industrial goods at approximately international market prices* (i.e. applying unequal exchange to itself in favour of COMECON countries), it supplied aid in the form of industrial development to poor third countries on exchange for local goods, many times those produced by the newly formed industries (instead of supplying aid in the form of loans for raw material extraction and expecting a return in hard currency with interest rates)… It’s really impossible by any stretch of the word “imperialism” to apply it to the USSR.
*after the mid-50s
So like what books were you reading? Did you have like a mentor who recommended literature or a reading list? Did any stand out as particular favorites?
This was a loooooooong time ago, and I was reading or listening to basically anything I could get my hands on, but i was already definitely an anarchist and vaguely a communist, had been the former since single digit years and the latter since at least age 16 or so. Uh, I think the ‘revolutions’ podcast had a non-objectionable thing on the Russian revolution, but idr if it covers this much.
I’ve come across podcasts that cover bits of it more recently, if you want me to DM links. No I didn’t have mentors. Not political anyway. I had some punk friends but they weren’t into history or theory. Mostly got radicalized by experience being varying degrees of alone; was lonely and alienating as fuck. I’d rather not get more personal publicly on this account.
If youre genuinely curious, I can dig some stuff up for you, but I’m not sure it will be what I read 10+ years ago. I have some interesting theory that explains what I specifically think, but I was already firmly in the ‘authority is not okay’ and ‘private property is just feudalism with extra gaslighting’ camps.
Thank you for the reply. I appreciate the offer but I don’t need links just now. I will think about what you said though, you’ve given me some touch off points to, idk, rework the question i guess? It’d be so much easier to figure stuff out if it wasn’t so hard to figure out what question you want to ask! : )
And how/where to ask it, now that web search is dead. Good luck figuring shit out!