You’ll see anarchists praising Rosa Luxemburg, who if they had actually read her writings – they would see that she was very clearly one of the “authoritarian” socialists that they rail against so much.

You see them praise the Black Panthers, who were supported financially by the DPRK and aligned themselves with the Juche ideology of Kim Il Sung.

They even praise Thomas Sankara, who purged anarchists and arrested syndicalists.

If these people had succeeded, i have no doubt in my mind that anarchists would call them “tankies,” they would call their experiments “capitalism with a red flag.” And I also have no doubt in my mind that if the October Revolution, Chinese Revolution had been crushed, they would hail Lenin and Mao as proletarian heroes.

  • ReaZ@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    It is easy to support failed attempts because then they can imagine that this time those folks would have done things “perfectly” or in other words, the way the person imagining it would have done things. Without any of the messy details of having to work in the real world with real conditions.

  • Mzuark@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    Most self professed leftists don’t actually have a plan for what happens if they get the revolution they want. I guess they think the point of the ideology is just killing people and burning shit, not creating a better society.

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    Another thing I find hilarious with Anarchists is that many of them are huge EU supporters. Turns out they’re totally fine with centralization and large unelected bureaucracies in practice. These people are just LARPing.

  • angrytoadnoises@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    Yeah, Anarchists don’t seem to actually want to succeed in anything. They just want to perpetually feel superior about their morals as well as comfortable that nothing will ever change. They want to be cool, contrarian good guys, imagining a world that will only ever exist in books and stories.

    • ColonelRevolution@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      That’s why my anarchist phase was short-lived. I was reading about anarchism and I found out that many of them don’t even expect that the revolution will succeed. It’s just a desperate moral opposition to the status quo without any serious intention to change the material reality.

      Not a great strategy to make the world a better place lol

      • angrytoadnoises@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        I’m very much the same. Had a short anarchist phase, don’t entirely disagree with a lot of the worldview, but feel the situation is too desperate to rely on fantastical situations when there’s already existing theory on how to fix the world.

  • StalinsMoustache@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    for the revolution to succeed, youll need some sort of mechanism to oppress the oppressors. Most anarchists seem to want the revolution, but dont want to secure it cause oppression /authoritarianism/hiearchies is bad. A problem with being an absolutist.

  • savoy@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    They’re pretty much more liberal ultras. They bang on about this wonderful utopia and tear down any attempts at socialist revolution or maintaining a workers state. And not only that, but they don’t put in the needed work into building towards revolution or increasing class consciousness among the working class. They’re entirely fine trying to build cooperative farms or doing performative mutual aid.

  • Valbrandur@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    Aside from the what it is to be said by the already recomended text on western marxism and christianity by Jones Manoel on RedSails, which I find very fitting here, I have found out by experience that anarchists usually have a very strong tendency to romanticize the act of revolution in general, of sublevation to overthrow the existing hierarchies, and very little focus on what comes after, which is the organization of the new society that is to come.

    Chances are that this lack of focus is the result of the development of an anarchist’s conceptualization of a post-capitalist society falling an overwhelming majority of times in one of two fields: either authoritarianism (most of us have witnessed an anarchist accidentally developing the idea of vanguards in their search to defend their revolutions) or the most bizarre and impractical modes of production and self-defense that could be concieved, such as the idea that medicines and other highly complex products could ever be produced by individual people as a form of pastime.

    This is, overall, too much hassle for the average western anarchist, who doesn’t find the need to concern themselves with that simply because, for them, anarchism is just an aesthetic used as a form of expressing one’s identity and individuality, and not as a project to work towards.

    Edit: Grammar.

  • mo_ztt ✅@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Why put the Black Panthers in here? 🤨

    The Black Panther platform, as I understand it, was:

    • We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
    • We want full employment for our people.
    • We want an end to the robbery by the Capitalists of our Black Community.
    • We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
    • We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present day society.
    • We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
    • We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.
    • We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
    • We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black Communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
    • We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.

    The Juche platform is:

    • We must give our all in the struggle to unify the entire society with the revolutionary ideology of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung.
    • We must honor the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung with all our loyalty.
    • We must make absolute the authority of the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung.
    • We must make the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung’s revolutionary ideology our faith and make his instructions our creed.
    • We must adhere strictly to the principle of unconditional obedience in carrying out the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung’s instructions.
    • We must strengthen the entire party’s ideology and willpower and revolutionary unity, centering on the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung.
    • We must learn from the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung and adopt the communist look, revolutionary work methods and people-oriented work style.
    • We must value the political life we were given by the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung, and loyally repay his great political trust and thoughtfulness with heightened political awareness and skill.
    • We must establish strong organizational regulations so that the entire party, nation and military move as one under the one and only leadership of the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung.
    • We must pass down the great achievement of the revolution by the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung from generation to generation, inheriting and completing it to the end.
    • Black AOC@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      I think the Panthers and the DPRK end up getting mentioned in the same breath a lot because of the communications they shared; though nothing I’ve studied ever suggested they outright adopted Juche. If someone’s got like-- hard and fast recollection that’s stored somewhere that they did, though; I’d very much like to see it if only for completion of my own understanding.

      • diegeticscream[all]🔻@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        They were at least very complimentary of Juche. This article has a few more quotes of primary sources (though it’s a bit anti-communist):

        https://archive.ph/QYo19

        The Juche ideal centers on relying on the creativity of the people to adapt to their situation. It’s hard to say they didn’t adopt Juche if they say they’re influenced by it, and Juche isn’t a rigid structure.

    • diegeticscream[all]🔻@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      The Black Panthers were complimentary of the DPRK, and had warm relations with them:

      https://archive.ph/QYo19

      I don’t think your quote is a summary that really shows what the BPP might’ve liked about Juche:

      The Juche idea was created on the basis of such a practical requirement of the Korean revolution. The revolution is a struggle to meet the masses’ desire for independence by enlisting their strength. It is a struggle of the masses to free themselves. When they are armed with the revolutionary idea and united into an organized political force, the masses can emerge victorious in the revolution. The duty of revolutionaries is to go among the popular masses, masters of the revolution. to educate, organize, and inspire them to a struggle. The revolutionary forces, too, should be trained from among the masses, and all problems arising in the revolutionary struggle should likewise be resolved in reliance on their wisdom and strength.

      (On the Juche Idea - Kim Jong-Il p7)

      I italicized the bit that stood out to me as most like the BPP.

      The DPRK is mostly viewed pretty well here, btw. It’s not an insult or a smear to align the Black Panthers with them. It’s a compliment.

        • diegeticscream[all]🔻@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          I’m not in a big argumentative mood today, so I’d like to avoid any big debates if that’s ok! :)

          Lemmygrad is mostly Marxist-Leninist communists, and the DPRK is usually seen as adapting MLism to their conditions.

          When you start to dig into the U$ understanding of the DPRK, you’ll start to see that most of the negative, weird, news we read about them is either attributed to anonymous sources or directly comes from the CIA. Most of the insane, hard to believe stuff is pretty likely to be untrue.

          The conditions in the DPRK aren’t perfect, but they’re a direct result of being under siege for something like 90 years, sanctioned (literally) to death by the U$, and having something like 80% of all standing structures obliterated during the Korean war. It’s hard, but it looks like they’re making the best of what they can.

          If you’re curious, I’m happy to try to dig up some of the source threads from here and reddit. They’ve been talked about before!