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  • We’d have more than two if it hadn’t been for tankies stabbing us in the back.

    This is a phrase that keeps popping up in anarchist spaces but once you look at what it makes reference to it's... Simply not true? It's mostly used to refer to the Spanish Civil War, but one only needs to pick up a high school history book to learn that the May Days were a result of the anarchists attempting to antagonize the entirety of the Republican side by hindering war efforts, and not only the PCE or other Soviet-alligned communists, who held a rather small amount of power inside the Republican government.

    But go, go on, tell me how Makhno was a counter-revolutionary or something. Kulak? Or was it about not being able to tolerate a non-authoritarian alternative.

    If to not be authoritarian is a priority for you, reading Voline's accounts of his participation in the makhnovist movement should be enough to realize that his project is probably not the one you want to rally behind the most.

      • You know it’s kinda rich of you to refer to, of all people, Voline. If he was critical of Platformism guess what he had to say about Bolshevism. Even before Trotsky tried to have him killed.

        I am not talking about Voline's personal opinions on neither platformism nor bolshevism, but on his accounts on the makhnovite project. I do not know what is your definition of tyranny since, as you implied, ideas amongst anarchists vary quite a lot. However, if you consider that the actions taken by state socialist projects to ensure their survival are tyrannical, I suppose you would too consider tyrannical the anti-mennonite massacres perpetrated by the black army after Eichenfield, the existence of a 200-men personal bodyguard corps (the Black Sotnya) for Makhno or the closure of the Bolshevik revolutionary committees of Alexandrovsk and Ekaterinoslav and threats of arrest and execution of its members, which ensured that the only speech that enjoyed of freedom in Makhnovia had to be anarchist-alligned. Acceptable? You will say if yes or no. Anti-authoritarian? I'd beg to differ.

        …somehow you also ignored the two successful ones. I kinda wonder whether you even know which I’m talking about.

        Rojava and the Zapatistas, I presume. The Zapatistas have already declared publicly and explicitly that they are not anarchists and that they reject such label, so there is not much else to say. Rojava on the other side is one project that anarchists in my area began to detract from after they began collaborating with the US army, but even then there exists fair criticism of it and accusations of repressing minorities by closing down Assyrian schools. Don't misinterpret me: despite its faults I do have a generally positive view on Rojava, but I do not think it is the paragon of non-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian virtue that western anarchists generally set as the bare minimum.

        You have not addressed my comments on the anarchist actions in the May Days during the Spanish Civil War, but I will not assume malicious intent from your part.

        Also, if you bother answering at all I’d like you to give an example of a revolution of yours that didn’t end in tyranny. Shouldn’t actually be that hard for a tankie as you don’t think tyranny is bad, so why not admit it that there’s none?

        I have no bad faith in this discussion, and I would like to ask you to do the same. We do not think that "tyranny is good": we think that the state is needed for a revolutionary project to survive as much as it is its fate to disappear as class contradictions do too. We are dialectical materialists: even if we wanted for some reason the state to persist, the march of history would do away with it nonetheless, and we would have to accept it.

        To answer your question: I am, again, not aware of what do you consider tyranny, but I have found most anarchists to be pretty accepting of Sankara's Burkina Faso and admit that its pros outweight the cons.

        Edit: grammar.

    • Just ignore the Zapatistas who are a current example of anarchism in practice.

      And saying the Soviets held little power in the Spanish Republic is just a bald faced lie. The Soviets withheld supplies from non-soviet militias and actively damaged the war effort because they'd rather focus on garnering power than actually fighting fascists.

      • Just ignore the Zapatistas who are a current example of anarchism in practice.

        Their words, not mine. Yes, the Zapatista project has worked at their current scale and is doing well, I have no problems admiting that. That does not mean however that I think their methods would work on a larger scale, especially if they ever became a threat for imperial capitalism to be attacked with military force beyond attempting to contain them inside Chiapas as they have until now. As it happened to the USSR facing invasion during the Russian Civil War, as it happened to Cuba with the Bay of Pigs invasion and as it happened to Vietnam. And the Zapatistas do so too, as they claim that they are not driven by ideological purities and will adopt whatever it is that works for them.

        And saying the Soviets held little power in the Spanish Republic is just a bald faced lie.

        I said that the PCE and the Soviet-alligned communists had a rather small amount of power within the Republican government, and that is not a lie. The PCE only controlled three ministries within the government during the May Days, which is the event seen as the "betrayal" that led to the anarchists' demise in Spain.

        Soviets withheld supplies from non-soviet militias and actively damaged the war effort because they’d rather focus on garnering power than actually fighting fascists.

        It is hard to work with abstract mentions, but I am willing to address this if you use more specific examples of Soviet sabotage of the war effort that I can look at and work with.

        Edit: formatting.

86 comments