Communist Perceptions of Anarchism

[Plutocrat]

I occasionally lurk around the forums but I decided to come forward to read what some of the communist think of anarchism.

I literally currently started reading “Demanding the Impossible - A History of anarchism” and there are a lot of phrases and concepts used by anarchist that remind me of an extreme version neoliberalism and paradoxically fascism.
The emphasis on individualism and their rationality in a self-regulating society is what is bothersome.

Well to start people are far from rational, I really can’t remember but social psychology proves this constantly for an example confabulation, poor perception of events and general limitation of memory. There are is a political study in which people are told that the author of a paper is anti-Cuban but writes a pro-Cuban paper and then the reader concludes that the author is pro-Cuban, I’m not entirely sure but it is something along those lines. Examples like those are numerous which reminds of a book called culture and identity, in that book the author summarizes David Humes conceptualization of the self as “The desires of individuals are often polymorphous, contradictory, and rarely reducible to easy calculation. Furthermore, wants are culturally conditioned and vary histrionically....”

Next with “self-regulation” doesn’t this notion have its in origins in divine intervention and what not? Does anyone see the potential for disaster with “self-regulation” and individualism? I apologize for this weak criticism but at the moment I cannot articulate my thoughts or most likely outright wrong but deregulation and libor price fixing come to mind.
Finally to me it seems like anarchism is just a middle class movement that sits on the fence that idolizes the self which again to me seems like a concept that is detrimental to solidarity and self-alienating and reminds me of a passage from the communist manifesto

“The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.”

Hell maybe I’m wrong but anarchism leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth and I’m skeptical. Overall I need to gather my thoughts and finish the book instead of jumping back and forth.

I apologize for the long-winded post

[tuwix]

There are many kinds of anarchists and those who focus on individuality in the majority of cases aren't anarchists at all. To be honest, communist and anarchist point of view aren't far away. The real difference is attitude to Lenin, Che, Stalin, Mao. Many communists love them and many anarchist hate them.
Pure Marxism and Anarchism (without Lenin's, Mao's, etc. influence) focus on means of production. They have to be owned by worker. And it doesn't care individual or collective. And impression that all economy must be collective is just distortion after Lenin's inventions.

[Plutocrat]

I see. Yea I read a bit further and the author explains the various forms of anarchism. I thought the authors choice of words were odd and it gave off a very libertarian vibe.

[Blake's Baby]

What do you mean 'libertarian' there Plutocrat? Of course Anarchists are 'libertarian'. The Organisation Platform of the General Union of Anarchists is also known as the Organisation Platform of the Libertarian Communists and the forum 'LibCom' is the forum of Libertarian Communism. Anarchists have been calling themselves 'Libertarian Communists' or 'Libertarian Socialists' for a century or more, as far as I can tell.

[Plutocrat]

Didn’t mean to be ambiguous but I’m referring American libertarianism. But was the term adopted because of the negative connotation associated with communism and anarchism?

[Plutocrat]

never mind my logic is f*****. the author I mentioned earlier explains the difference as

"In general, I define an anarchist as one who rejects all forms of external
government and the State and believes that society and individuals would
function well without them. A libertarian on the other hand is one who takes
liberty to be a supreme value and would like to limit the powers of government
to a minimum compatible with security. The line between anarchist and libertarian
is thin, and in the past the terms have often been used interchangeably.
But while all anarchists are libertarians, not all libertarians are anarchists.
Even so, they are members of the same clan, share the same ancestors and
bear resemblances. They also sometimes form creative unions."

not sure I can get into anarchism though

[Skyhilist]

Anarchists and American "libertarians" are complete opposites. Anarchists want workers to control the means of production... lolbertarians want workers to sell themselves to the highest bourgeois bidder, who will then essentially own their labor. Anarchists want liberation for workers, American "libertarians" want continued wage slavery.

[Plutocrat]

and thats the vibe the book gives off. to be honest I've I barely read a portion of it because of it but I shall persevere lol. what do you recommend

[Skyhilist]

and thats the vibe the book gives off. to be honest I've I barely read a portion of it because of it but I shall persevere lol. what do you recommend

Perhaps you'd enjoy The ABC of Anarchism by Alexander Berkman. I've read a bit of it, and it's a pretty good introductory work IMO.

[Blake's Baby]

Didn’t mean to be ambiguous but I’m referring American libertarianism. But was the term adopted because of the negative connotation associated with communism and anarchism?

Do you mean, did American capitalists who want minimal state intervention call themselves 'Libertarians' because Anarchists, who also call themselves libertarians, had a bad press? I doubt it. I think they did it to appeal to people of a petite-bourgeoise mindset who want the state to stop 'harrassing' them but also think it's OK to force other people to work for you. 'Right-Libertarianism' is the ideology of the petite-bourgeoisie par excellence. 'The state should butt out and leave me to exploit my workers as I see fit, while simultaneously breaking up capitalist concentrations that are bigger than I am'. It's the ideology of unsuccesful capitalists.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Most anarchists are communist; I assume that by "communist" you meant to say "Marxist".

I think the anarchist movement can be divided into two broad groups, the class struggle anarchists and the lifestyle anarchists. The latter group is irritating, but irrelevant outside the Internet. Within the former group one should distinguish proletarian anarchists (Malatesta, Serge, Zheleznyak etc.) from petite bourgeois ones (Makhno etc.). The latter are problematic due to their adventurism and individualism. The former, while thoroughly wrong on the question of state and state power, have historically shown a willingness to work with Marxist revolutionaries.

[blake 3:17]

The Marshall book is massive and while useful in some ways, is a little wonky in terms of its political outlook. I'd suggest just making note of any individuals or movements that you're interested in and following up on them.

[cyu]

From http://www.revleft.com/vb/group.php?do=discuss&group=&discussionid=4794

Capitalism is compatible with anarchism only as much as capitalism is compatible with democracy or Christianity - in other words, it's not compatible at all.

However, many people do believe compatibility exists. This belief exists because capitalists have a lot of money. They are able to throw that money at "think tanks" to develop ideas to basically fool the noobs into believing all sorts of nonsense that will keep the wealthy in power.

This type of behavior has been going on ever since great disparities in wealth existed, and ever since the wealthy felt the need to justify their power, lest the masses knock them down from their perch.

Also from http://www.revleft.com/vb/capitalist-science-self-t172025/index.html

Before he won the award, it looked like Hayek was washed up. He was considered a quack and fraud by contemporary economists, he had spent the 50s and 60s in academic obscurity, preaching the gospel of economic darwinism while on the payroll of ultra-rightwing American billionaires. Hayek had powerful backers, but was out on the fringes of academic credibility.

that all changed as soon as he won the prize in 1974. All of a sudden his ideas were being talked about. Hayek was a celebrity. newspapers treated his mumblings about the need to have high unemployment as if they were divine revelations. Margret Thatcher was waving around his books in public, saying “this is what we believe.”

Billionaire Charles Koch brought Hayek out for an extended victory tour of the United States, tapping Hayek’s mainstream cred to set up and underwrite Cato Institute in 1974 (it was called the Charles Koch Foundation until 1977).

[Domela Nieuwenhuis]

Most anarchists are communist; I assume that by "communist" you meant to say "Marxist".

I think the anarchist movement can be divided into two broad groups, the class struggle anarchists and the lifestyle anarchists. The latter group is irritating, but irrelevant outside the Internet. Within the former group one should distinguish proletarian anarchists (Malatesta, Serge, Zheleznyak etc.) from petite bourgeois ones (Makhno etc.). The latter are problematic due to their adventurism and individualism. The former, while thoroughly wrong on the question of state and state power, have historically shown a willingness to work with Marxist revolutionaries.

I see some flaws here.

-communist does not mean Marxist per sé
-Most anarchists are communist, but... (see first point)
-Why would anarchists be wrong about state and state power? Anarchists think the same about the state as Marxists do. State power has never been an issue. Only the question about how to procede after the revolution.
-shown a willingness to work with Marxists? What is that supposed to mean? There is a thing called 'common enemy'. Besides, there is more to Marxism than just Stalinism and the likes. Why would i (as an anarchist) prevent a revolution?

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Didn’t mean to be ambiguous but I’m referring American libertarianism. But was the term adopted because of the negative connotation associated with communism and anarchism?

American political discourse has a habit of using terms that are familiar to people all over then world, but have meanings that are more or less unique to American politics. I'm not sure where this habit came from but it caused an awful lot of confusion for me when I first started to read political material.

[Ele'ill]

Most anarchists are communist; I assume that by "communist" you meant to say "Marxist".

I think the anarchist movement can be divided into two broad groups, the class struggle anarchists and the lifestyle anarchists. The latter group is irritating, but irrelevant outside the Internet. Within the former group one should distinguish proletarian anarchists (Malatesta, Serge, Zheleznyak etc.) from petite bourgeois ones (Makhno etc.). The latter are problematic due to their adventurism and individualism. The former, while thoroughly wrong on the question of state and state power, have historically shown a willingness to work with Marxist revolutionaries.

I don't think this is accurate. There are a lot of 'lifestyle vegan animal-lib etc.. anarchists' that are sufficiently in-tune with class struggle myself included. In fact I have not met one of these 'lifestyle' anarchists who wasn't. Adventurism and individualism as a broad brush slur is pretty bunk too.

[Skyhilist]

Most anarchists are communist; I assume that by "communist" you meant to say "Marxist".

I think the anarchist movement can be divided into two broad groups, the class struggle anarchists and the lifestyle anarchists. The latter group is irritating, but irrelevant outside the Internet. Within the former group one should distinguish proletarian anarchists (Malatesta, Serge, Zheleznyak etc.) from petite bourgeois ones (Makhno etc.). The latter are problematic due to their adventurism and individualism. The former, while thoroughly wrong on the question of state and state power, have historically shown a willingness to work with Marxist revolutionaries.

Makhno is an individualist now? Last I checked anarcho-communism was not individualist... and I don't really see how he was "petite bourgeois" either. It seems you're just throwing around the typical labels that are used to condemn someone on this site without any real meaning (petite bourgeois, individualist, counterrevolutionary, liberal, etc.).

[Bronco]

Also seems a little strange to say that lifestyle anarchism basically only exists on the internet

[Os Cangaceiros]

Makhno was born into an extremely impoverished peasant family. Later he worked as a painter and an iron worker; it was around this time when he became politically active. So no, he wasn't exactly "petty bourgeois".

And as others have said, there really is no clear divide between "lifestyle anarchism" and "class struggle anarchism". Anarchism has had a dual character as a personal philosophy and as a program of political economy ever since the First International, there was no supposed golden age of "pure" class struggle anarchism in which there was never a question of personal philosophies or lifestyle choices in accordance with said philosophies.

[Ele'ill]

nevermind, op deleted their post

[Nikolay]

Perhaps you'd enjoy The ABC of Anarchism by Alexander Berkman. I've read a bit of it, and it's a pretty good introductory work IMO.

The ABC to Anarchism is probably the best introduction to Anarchism I've ever read. I never read books online (I prefer having a book in my hands), but I read the whole book online. I'd recommend it to anyone.

Also, isn't communism and anarchism generally the same thing; a stateless and classless society?

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I see some flaws here.

-communist does not mean Marxist per sé

I said as much. But the thread talks about "communist" perceptions of anarchism, and I think it's safe to assume that the original poster meant to say "Marxism" and not "communism".


-Why would anarchists be wrong about state and state power? Anarchists think the same about the state as Marxists do. State power has never been an issue. Only the question about how to procede after the revolution.

We "authoritarian" communists recognise the necessity of organising the proletariat as a ruling class, and that requires the existence of a proletarian state. Whereas anarchists think that class rule can exist without the state.


-shown a willingness to work with Marxists? What is that supposed to mean? There is a thing called 'common enemy'. Besides, there is more to Marxism than just Stalinism and the likes. Why would i (as an anarchist) prevent a revolution?

I was talking about people like Serge and Zheleznyak, anarchists who participated in the Bolshevik administration of Russia. Zheleznyak actually died in the Red Army, fighting the Makhnovtsy.

Few anarchists would, I think, prevent the revolution, but certain adventurist elements might attack the proletarian state.

I will respond to the rest later.

[Domela Nieuwenhuis]

We "authoritarian" communists recognise the necessity of organising the proletariat as a ruling class, and that requires the existence of a proletarian state. Whereas anarchists think that class rule can exist without the state.

We anarchists realise that there is no such thing as abolishing state by instating a new one. Proletariat rule is a rule none the less.
It is as Bakunin said: power corrupts the best.
Read it here (http://marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1867/power-corrupts.htm).



I was talking about people like Serge and Zheleznyak, anarchists who participated in the Bolshevik administration of Russia. Zheleznyak actually died in the Red Army, fighting the Makhnovtsy.

Anarchists fighting against anarchists...why? It can only be so if they were not true anarchists to begin with.



Few anarchists would, I think, prevent the revolution, but certain adventurist elements might attack the proletarian state.

Not certain adventurists. I think any anarchist is against a ruling party. We have always attacked the state. The revolution is good, but it will not end there. Not until we have total selfcontrol.

[Slavoj Zizek's Balls]

Just to make things clear...

Anarchism =/= Communism

One is a political philosophy, the other is a revolutionary socialist movement.

Oh and...

Communism =/= Marxism

Marxism =/= Science

Marxism is a worldview which suggests that communism is the solution, but focusses on criticising current society via historical materialism and the use of the scientific method (and dialectics). Science is an objective, systematic project that builds and organises knowledge by using testable explanations and falsifiable theories.

[Domela Nieuwenhuis]

Marxism =/= Science

Marxism is a worldview which suggests that communism is the solution, but focusses on criticising current society via historical materialism and the use of the scientific method (and dialectics). Science is an objective, systematic project that builds and organises knowledge by using testable explanations and falsifiable theories.

Thank you! You at least seem to get it.


Anarchism =/= Communism

One is a political philosophy, the other is a revolutionary socialist movement.


Which is which?

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

We anarchists realise that there is no such thing as abolishing state by instating a new one. Proletariat rule is a rule none the less.
It is as Bakunin said: power corrupts the best.
Read it here (http://marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1867/power-corrupts.htm).

Alright, but this simply reinforced my previous point: (most) Marxists and anarchists have different views on the question of the state and state power. I honestly find this notion of "power" as something detached from the material conditions of society, that can somehow "corrupt", to be idealistic, but to pursue this further would mean derailing the thread, and in any case I think cmrd. Lucretia has said it best in a previous thread (that I can't seem to find at the moment).


Anarchists fighting against anarchists...why? It can only be so if they were not true anarchists to begin with.

Unlike the various Eser groups that libcom promotes, Zheleznyak was actually an anarchist, an old anarchist sailor from the Baltic fleet to be precise. He fought the Makhnovtsy because they were endangering the front against Denikin, attacking the cities, carrying out pogroms, disrupting the procurement of grain, attacking Ukrainian soviet forces.

In the end, it doesn't matter if someone is an anarchist, a Bolshevik, an impossibilist or whatnot. If they are a class-conscious member of the proletariat, they will support the proletarian revolution.


Not certain adventurists. I think any anarchist is against a ruling party. We have always attacked the state. The revolution is good, but it will not end there. Not until we have total selfcontrol.

Russian revolutionary anarchists did not attack the state; neither did the Spanish or Chinese ones. In revolutionary situations, thankfully, most anarchists are guided by their proletarian consciousness, and not by libertarian sloganeering.


I don't think this is accurate. There are a lot of 'lifestyle vegan animal-lib etc.. anarchists' that are sufficiently in-tune with class struggle myself included. In fact I have not met one of these 'lifestyle' anarchists who wasn't. Adventurism and individualism as a broad brush slur is pretty bunk too.

Do you recognise the distinction between the proletarian standpoint and bourgeois "universalism"? Do you recognise the progressive nature of capitalism in comparison to previous modes of production? Do you support restricting the "autonomy" of the bourgeoisie? From our previous exchange, I think the answer to all of these questions is "no", so I don't see how you're "in tune" with the class struggle, sorry.

And before the charge of "following you around" is raised, you were the first to mention yourself as an example of a revolutionary lifestyle anarchist. And you were the first to mention veganism etc. Lifestylism is a bit more than that.


Makhno is an individualist now? Last I checked anarcho-communism was not individualist... and I don't really see how he was "petite bourgeois" either. It seems you're just throwing around the typical labels that are used to condemn someone on this site without any real meaning (petite bourgeois, individualist, counterrevolutionary, liberal, etc.).

Makhno came from a petite-bourgeois background and the Makhnovshchina was chiefly associated with the villages, including even kulak elements. And the federalism advocated by Makhno is just as individualist as Proudhon's federalism.


Also seems a little strange to say that lifestyle anarchism basically only exists on the internet

I said it was only relevant on the Internet, where this ultraminority of anarchists has been fairly successful.


And as others have said, there really is no clear divide between "lifestyle anarchism" and "class struggle anarchism". Anarchism has had a dual character as a personal philosophy and as a program of political economy ever since the First International, there was no supposed golden age of "pure" class struggle anarchism in which there was never a question of personal philosophies or lifestyle choices in accordance with said philosophies.

I don't think Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta, Ogarev, Nechayev, Durruti etc. could be fairly described as lifestyle anarchists.

[Mytan Fadeseasy]

I see some flaws here.

-communist does not mean Marxist per sé
-Most anarchists are communist, but... (see first point)
-Why would anarchists be wrong about state and state power? Anarchists think the same about the state as Marxists do. State power has never been an issue. Only the question about how to procede after the revolution.
-shown a willingness to work with Marxists? What is that supposed to mean? There is a thing called 'common enemy'. Besides, there is more to Marxism than just Stalinism and the likes. Why would i (as an anarchist) prevent a revolution?

Yes, I would suggest that anarchists and socialists have the same ultimate goal; however, they differ in their approach to achieving that goal of a society based on common ownership and a stateless democracy. Some socialist groups, however, seem to masquerade as socialist, and see their objective as state control of the means of production. As far as I know, no anarchists see this as the ultimate goal.

[Domela Nieuwenhuis]

Alright, but this simply reinforced my previous point: (most) Marxists and anarchists have different views on the question of the state and state power. I honestly find this notion of "power" as something detached from the material conditions of society, that can somehow "corrupt", to be idealistic, but to pursue this further would mean derailing the thread, and in any case I think cmrd. Lucretia has said it best in a previous thread (that I can't seem to find at the moment).

I agree in both the question of power between Marxists and other communists or anarchists and on not derailing the thread.
But, seeing power as something which cannot corrupt, might be technically right, but the people who are empowered can be corrupt none the less.
In the end the quote is: "power can corrupt the best" and not: "even the power of the best can be corrupted".



Unlike the various Eser groups that libcom promotes, Zheleznyak was actually an anarchist, an old anarchist sailor from the Baltic fleet to be precise. He fought the Makhnovtsy because they were endangering the front against Denikin, attacking the cities, carrying out pogroms, disrupting the procurement of grain, attacking Ukrainian soviet forces.

In the end, it doesn't matter if someone is an anarchist, a Bolshevik, an impossibilist or whatnot. If they are a class-conscious member of the proletariat, they will support the proletarian revolution.

But not the state. I don't know the history of that story, but if the Makhnovtsy did that, they probably had a good reason.



Russian revolutionary anarchists did not attack the state; neither did the Spanish or Chinese ones. In revolutionary situations, thankfully, most anarchists are guided by their proletarian consciousness, and not by libertarian sloganeering.

Anarchists are historically driven by their proletarian consciousness, but always have they had the abolishment of the state as their first and most important goal to accomplish the revolution.



Makhno came from a petite-bourgeois background and the Makhnovshchina was chiefly associated with the villages, including even kulak elements. And the federalism advocated by Makhno is just as individualist as Proudhon's federalism.
And Kropotkin was heavily bourgious by birth. That does not mean that what he advocates is bourgious-politics.
Anarchists' individualism is not to be mistaken with egoïsm. It just means imediate selfcontrol.


Yes, I would suggest that anarchists and socialists have the same ultimate goal; however, they differ in their approach to achieving
that goal of a society based on common ownership and a stateless democracy. Some socialist groups, however, seem to masquerade as socialist, and see their objective as state control of the means of production. As far as I know, no anarchists see this as the ultimate goal.

True.

[Slavoj Zizek's Balls]

Which is which?

Anarchism is the political philosophy (not the movement, the movement comes under various sub-sections of Anarchism) and Communism is the revolutionary movement.

[Ele'ill]

Do you recognise the distinction between the proletarian standpoint and bourgeois "universalism"? Do you recognise the progressive nature of capitalism in comparison to previous modes of production? Do you support restricting the "autonomy" of the bourgeoisie? From our previous exchange, I think the answer to all of these questions is "no", so I don't see how you're "in tune" with the class struggle, sorry.

the criticism was about the specific stuff you were saying regarding class and the proletariat not the above Q&A that I never participated in



And before the charge of "following you around" is raised, you were the first to mention yourself as an example of a revolutionary lifestyle anarchist. And you were the first to mention veganism etc. Lifestylism is a bit more than that. I bring it up because I think most of the time lifestyle anarchist is used as a slur when there's contention on things like 'socialist tradition', criticism towards organizing methods, criticism of industry and work and being a worker and the working class, criticism of unions, class struggle/social war and so on. Especially once someone says they are vegan and taking a position for animal liberation.

The difference between you and Crixus is that you are positively contributing to the forum by participating in this current thread and others with relevant discussion. I have not seen you post any off topic keyboard smashing baby tantrums or seen you create sympathy revenge manifesto threads in chit chat.

[Domela Nieuwenhuis]

Anarchism is the political philosophy (not the movement, the movement comes under various sub-sections of Anarchism) and Communism is the revolutionary movement.

Are you actually insinuating that anarchism is not revolutionairy, or am i getting that wrong?

[Slavoj Zizek's Balls]

Are you actually insinuating that anarchism is not revolutionairy, or am i getting that wrong?

Sorry, you're misinterpreting what I am saying. Anarchism is a political philosophy but the sub-categories of Anarchism like Anarcho-Communism or Anarcho-Syndicalism relate to the revolutionary movement part that I mentioned.

"Anarchism is distinguished, philosophically, by its scepticism towards such moral relations-by its questioning of the claims made for such normative power- and, practically, by its challenge to those "authoritative" powers which cannot justify their claims and which are therefore deemed illegitimate or without moral foundation." - Paul McLaughlin on the subject of authority (this explains the philosophy of Anarchism)

Anarcho-Communism and Anarcho-Syndicalism are the largest sub-divisions within Anarchism that are actually revolutionary. Anarchism itself isn't physically revolutionary because it is a political philosophy, not an application of a political philosophy or world view. Communism is revolutionary but Marxism isn't (by itself), not the best example but it will suffice.

[blake 3:17]

The ABC to Anarchism is probably the best introduction to Anarchism I've ever read. I never read books online (I prefer having a book in my hands), but I read the whole book online. I'd recommend it to anyone.

Also, isn't communism and anarchism generally the same thing; a stateless and classless society?

The book the OP is reading covers a very broad spectrum of thinkers and movements, many of which predate the word "anarchism". There are a number of people discussed in it I'm very interested in, like William Blake, who have strong affinities with anarchism. It covers a lot of ground...

I'm not in anyway to bash Berkman, who I have great respect for.

[Comrade Alex]

Anarchism is a very nice thought but its to unrealistic thier simply just can'tbe no govt no laws no state etc anarchism really only works as a temporary transition phase but eventually the state is reorganized anarchism is pure idealism at best is it interesting yes can it work no

[Captain Ahab]

Anarchism is a very nice thought but its to unrealistic thier simply just can'tbe no govt no laws no state etc anarchism really only works as a temporary transition phase but eventually the state is reorganized anarchism is pure idealism at best is it interesting yes can it work no
Why are you here then? All communists advocate the abolishment of the state as the final end goal.

[Comrade Alex]

Why are you here then? All communists advocate the abolishment of the state as the final end goal.
True communists want to abolish the state, as do I,but not as an immediate action we need the vanguard party and a state based on the dictatorship of the proletariat, not to mention capitalism must be driven out of the world
And to be honest just because you don't want a state dosent mean your an anarchist
Why I'm here a buddy told me about it and I came

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

But not the state.

Even the state. There were anarchists in the soviets and there were anarchists in the various Spanish governments in the civil war.


I don't know the history of that story, but if the Makhnovtsy did that, they probably had a good reason.

Their good reasons were class reasons - the Makhnovshchina was thoroughly peasant and represented the peasant reaction to Bolshevik discipline and to the requisition measures.


And Kropotkin was heavily bourgious by birth. That does not mean that what he advocates is bourgious-politics.

The analogy fails because Kropotkin did not start a movement composed almost exclusively of the bourgeoisie and acting according to bourgeois mentality and prejudice.


Anarchists' individualism is not to be mistaken with egoïsm. It just means imediate selfcontrol.

And this "immediate self-control" - that not all anarchists advocate - is opposed both to large-scale socialised production and to revolutionary discipline.


the criticism was about the specific stuff you were saying regarding class and the proletariat not the above Q&A that I never participated in

And that is why I said that I think your answer would be "no". Until you answer I can't back this up with anything more substantial than my impression that you base yourself of some ethical sort of "autonomy" unconstrained by class considerations.


I bring it up because I think most of the time lifestyle anarchist is used as a slur when there's contention on things like 'socialist tradition', criticism towards organizing methods, criticism of industry and work and being a worker and the working class, criticism of unions, class struggle/social war and so on. Especially once someone says they are vegan and taking a position for animal liberation.

The term is often used in a negative manner, but that doesn't make it a slur. Obviously there is quite a difference between someone like Nechayev or Durutti and someone who thinks that veganism is an important political issue (note that being vegan doesn't in itself make one a lifestylist) or that opposition to science in the name of magic and mysticism is a revolutionary policy.

[Ele'ill]

And that is why I said that I think your answer would be "no". Until you answer I can't back this up with anything more substantial than my impression that you base yourself of some ethical sort of "autonomy" unconstrained by class considerations.

Dunno what you mean by 'ethical autonomy' or how my position (with actual posts I've made) ties into the fantastical Q&A you created (and I don't really care). I don't think about or model my desires to abolish a class based society (and other things) limited by a constraint of 'traditional' class based praxis. When you say class considerations you are correct, considerations.



The term is often used in a negative manner, but that doesn't make it a slur. Obviously there is quite a difference between someone like Nechayev or Durutti and someone who thinks that veganism is an important political issue (note that being vegan doesn't in itself make one a lifestylist) or that opposition to science in the name of magic and mysticism is a revolutionary policy. My opposition isn't to science it's to science as the industry it currently is. There is quite a difference between most revolutionaries you read about and yourself although I'm pretty sure you would never believe this, the world moves on and new people have ideas too, you know, about their own current relevant time, struggle, and desires.

[Domela Nieuwenhuis]

Even the state. There were anarchists in the soviets and there were anarchists in the various Spanish governments in the civil war.

Some say that that was the beginning of the end for the spanish anarchist-movement.
What kind of anarchist would support a new state?
Malatesta commented on that, that there were defectors, but that was okay, the anarchist movement was just purged from a few bad seeds.



Their good reasons were class reasons - the Makhnovshchina was thoroughly peasant and represented the peasant reaction to Bolshevik discipline and to the requisition measures.
Discipline being the keyword here.

[The Douche]

What is a "lifestyle anarchist" and in what ways do they differ from "class-struggle anarchists"?

What, especially, are the differences in regards to their politics?

[Akshay!]

What is a "lifestyle anarchist"?

Lifestyle anarchism is, in short, a lot of nonsense.

I totally agree with this (picked from the "john holloway is stupid" thread)-


Revolutionary anarchism, though, is hardly about creating gardens and singing. This is the sort of lifestyle "anarchism" that appeals to bored college kids who can't understand revolutionary violence or revolutionary patience.

[Ele'ill]

the preaching of revolutionary patience is kind of like when someone turns on the faucet in the bathroom to try and disguise the sound of their explosive diarrhea

[The Douche]

Lifestyle anarchism is, in short, a lot of nonsense.

I totally agree with this (picked from the "john holloway is stupid" thread)-

If anything is nonsense, your "answer" to my question is.

Lots of people like to garden and sing, from anarchists, to kings, it hardly counts as some sort of political qualifier.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

This post has been written collaboratively by yours truly and a couple of glasses of rum.


Dunno what you mean by 'ethical autonomy'

Throughout our previous exchange, you appealed to "autonomy" (I usually put the word in quotation marks because it could mean quite a few things), and your arguments seemed to be ethical in character - that is, you seemed to be advocating autonomy for everyone, from some supposed supra-class standpoint. Again, this is how matters seemed to me. I could be wrong, which is why I asked you to clarify (in the "fantastical Q&A" you refer to).


I don't think about or model my desires to abolish a class based society (and other things) limited by a constraint of 'traditional' class based praxis. When you say class considerations you are correct, considerations.

And that is where we differ. Class considerations dictate the line, or at least should dictate the line, adopted by revolutionary Marxists and those anarchists that base themselves on class analysis.


My opposition isn't to science it's to science as the industry it currently is.

I wasn't talking about you, though, or anyone on this site. I was talking about the people like T. Bey, that Bookchin skewers in the third part of his "Social anarchism or lifestyle anarchism?".


There is quite a difference between most revolutionaries you read about and yourself although I'm pretty sure you would never believe this, the world moves on and new people have ideas too, you know, about their own current relevant time, struggle, and desires.

Oh, preposterous. You mean my planned article on the Chuvash national question in the Russian Empire was pointless? Actually, yes, I realise that I am living in the present - hence my statements on questions such as the defense of the DPR Korea, on the Serb national question etc. etc.

And focusing on the present does not mean pretending that the past never happened; I reject this sort of facile fetishism of "original" thought that would have us reject decades of good, useful theory.


What kind of anarchist would support a new state?

One who recognises the proletarian nature of the state, probably, or one who wishes to destroy fascism and the reaction.


Discipline being the keyword here.

Quite so. And neither large-scale socialised production nor revolutionary action is possible without discipline, without trampling all over the "autonomy" of those who go against revolutionary action. Every worker understands this, which is why scabs and snitches are universally reviled.


What is a "lifestyle anarchist" and in what ways do they differ from "class-struggle anarchists"?

This is how Bookchin puts it:

"Today’s reactionary social context greatly explains the emergence of a phenomenon in Euro-American anarchism that cannot be ignored: the spread of individualist anarchism. In a time when even respectable forms of socialism are in pell-mell retreat from principles that might in any way be construed as radical, issues of lifestyle are once again supplanting social action and revolutionary politics in anarchism. In the traditionally individualist-liberal United States and Britain, the 1990s are awash in self-styled anarchists who — their flamboyant radical rhetoric aside — are cultivating a latter-day anarcho-individualism that I will call lifestyle anarchism. Its preoccupations with the ego and its uniqueness and its polymorphous concepts of resistance are steadily eroding the socialistic character of the libertarian tradition. No less than Marxism and other socialisms, anarchism can be profoundly influenced by the bourgeois environment it professes to oppose, with the result that the growing ‘inwardness’ and narcissism of the yuppie generation have left their mark upon many avowed radicals. Ad hoc adventurism, personal bravura, an aversion to theory oddly akin to the antirational biases of postmodernism, celebrations of theoretical incoherence (pluralism), a basically apolitical and anti-organizational commitment to imagination, desire, and ecstasy, and an intensely self-oriented enchantment of everyday life, reflect the toll that social reaction has taken on Euro-American anarchism over the past two decades."

Basically, lifestyle anarchists (and lifestyle pseudo-Marxists like Holloway) think that lifestyle choices - wearing this or that brand of sneakers, not eating eggs, eating eggs that are locally produced, singing, whatever, represent supreme political commitment.


the preaching of revolutionary patience is kind of like when someone turns on the faucet in the bathroom to try and disguise the sound of their explosive diarrhea

Oh, believe me, I'd very much like to go out and start torching things. If I let myself be guided by my subjective desires, I'd join your torchlight safari of fun. But alas, that's theoretically unsound. We're living in a period of revolutionary downswing, ever since the Soviet Union fell, and in any case the revolution demands more than just torching things, as fun as that is.

The lack of revolutionary patience is why certain groups were so eager to tail the various Occupy movement, "anti-capitalist" campaigns led by bourgeois states, Islamic clerics, Chavez, whatever.


Lots of people like to garden and sing, from anarchists, to kings, it hardly counts as some sort of political qualifier.

Precisely. But that is precisely what Holloway wants it to be: he claims that people who sing "because they like to sing" are anti-capitalist revolutionaries. That is lifestylism. Forget about smashing the state, go sing or start a garden with your mates. Eat local. Buy fair trade. Cause the bourgeoisie to die of laughter when they hear about your idealism (and if any survive they'll certainly find a way to cash in on your shiny new "anti-capitalist" lifestyle).

[The Douche]

Bookchin and you are fucking morons.

Why don't you show an example of somebody who thinks lifestyle changes will end capitalism? And why don't you show an example of somebody like that who posts on here? And why don't you post some examples of how this is the dominant trend in anarchism? Maybe some popular journals and stuff from the anarchist movement advocating ideas like those you describe?

And what the fuck does John Holloway have to do with anything? You say that lifestyle anarchism is the dominant form (even though so far your definition of lifestyle anarchism is "somebody who thinks singing will end capitalism", which is a laughable definition, and you tried to cite that idiot Bookchin, who is completely irrelevant, and renounced anarchism in favor of "grassroots" liberalism), and then you cite some washed up "marxist" liberal sociologist as evidence that anarchism is dominated by this boogeyman.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Bookchin and you are fucking morons.

Oh, the Internet drama. It's killing me.


Why don't you show an example of somebody who thinks lifestyle changes will end capitalism?

I've already mentioned J. Holloway and T. Bey. We can add Zerzan to that.


And why don't you show an example of somebody like that who posts on here?

There was that fellow who ranted about middle-class socialists, for example. I can't even remember his name, and I'm not motivated enough to search for it.


And why don't you post some examples of how this is the dominant trend in anarchism? Maybe some popular journals and stuff from the anarchist movement advocating ideas like those you describe?

If you'd bothered to read my previous posts, you'd have noticed that I think lifestylism is "irritating, but irrelevant outside the Internet". I certainly don't think most anarchists are lifestylists.

[The Douche]

I've already mentioned J. Holloway and T. Bey. We can add Zerzan to that.

Holloway is a "marxist", not an anarchist or "anarchist". Who is T Bey? Hakim Bey? If so, nobody gives a fuck about him. Zerzan? How is Zerzan a "lifestylist"? His influence is marginal, but, certainly more than Hakim Bey or Holloway.


There was that fellow who ranted about middle-class socialists, for example. I can't even remember his name, and I'm not motivated enough to search for it.

What does that even mean? And in what context? I also don't think its fair to accuse somebody who is perhaps just young and who has trouble expressing their views because of under-developed ideas of "lifestylism" just because its your whipping boy. Anything posted on here is quite likely to have come from a relatively young person who is still in the process of learning. Obviously that is not always the case though.

Maybe that term "middle class socialists" was meant to describe "progressives" or left-liberals, champage socialists, if you will. The sort of people who talk about socialism as green energy and single payer healthcare.


If you'd bothered to read my previous posts, you'd have noticed that I think lifestylism is "irritating, but irrelevant outside the Internet". I certainly don't think most anarchists are lifestylists.

Other posters in this thread seem to believe its much more prevalent than that. (personally, I would disagree that it exists in any meaningful way, I would say it is so minute, that it doesn't even rate on the scale of "irritating" things on the internet) You seemed to be coming to thier defense.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Holloway is a "marxist", not an anarchist or "anarchist".

You asked for examples of lifestylists, not lifestyle anarchists.


Who is T Bey? Hakim Bey? If so, nobody gives a fuck about him.

Yup, H. Bey. My mistake. In any case, no one might give a fuck about him, but he certainly exists.


Zerzan? How is Zerzan a "lifestylist"? His influence is marginal, but, certainly more than Hakim Bey or Holloway.

Zerzan literally believes that reverting to a "primitive" lifestyle will end class society. This is textbook lifestylism.


What does that even mean? And in what context? I also don't think its fair to accuse somebody who is perhaps just young and who has trouble expressing their views because of under-developed ideas of "lifestylism" just because its your whipping boy. Anything posted on here is quite likely to have come from a relatively young person who is still in the process of learning. Obviously that is not always the case though.

I really don't think so. (http://www.revleft.com/vb/so-youre-middle-t180728/index.html?t=180728&highlight=middle-class+socialist)


Other posters in this thread seem to believe its much more prevalent than that.

Who?

[The Douche]

Zerzan literally believes that reverting to a "primitive" lifestyle will end class society.

That is a laughable misrepresentation of Zerzan.


I really don't think so. (http://www.revleft.com/vb/so-youre-middle-t180728/index.html?t=180728&highlight=middle-class+socialist)

Dude. That post is in introductions, and its somebody's first post. You do realize how high the odds are, that that person is 15 years old or younger, and doesn't really "get it" yet? Something like that, a person who is not a part of the anarchist or communist movements, who is not even a radical in a meaningful way, that is what your position rests on?


Who?

Ashkay.

[helot]

Quite so. And neither large-scale socialised production nor revolutionary action is possible without discipline, without trampling all over the "autonomy" of those who go against revolutionary action. Every worker understands this, which is why scabs and snitches are universally reviled.

I think we need to be cautious of what we imply by the word 'discipline'. An inner discipline based on trying to achieve our goals, of being happy to do the shit work in order to help work towards our goals is of course incredibly important and i'd say even small scale socialised production is impossible without it let alone revolutionary action or transformation of social relations. However, i'd distinguish this discipline between the discipline of the barracks, the prison or the capitalist workplace.




This is how Bookchin puts it:

"Today’s reactionary social context greatly explains the emergence of a phenomenon in Euro-American anarchism that cannot be ignored: the spread of individualist anarchism. In a time when even respectable forms of socialism are in pell-mell retreat from principles that might in any way be construed as radical, issues of lifestyle are once again supplanting social action and revolutionary politics in anarchism. In the traditionally individualist-liberal United States and Britain, the 1990s are awash in self-styled anarchists who — their flamboyant radical rhetoric aside — are cultivating a latter-day anarcho-individualism that I will call lifestyle anarchism. Its preoccupations with the ego and its uniqueness and its polymorphous concepts of resistance are steadily eroding the socialistic character of the libertarian tradition. No less than Marxism and other socialisms, anarchism can be profoundly influenced by the bourgeois environment it professes to oppose, with the result that the growing ‘inwardness’ and narcissism of the yuppie generation have left their mark upon many avowed radicals. Ad hoc adventurism, personal bravura, an aversion to theory oddly akin to the antirational biases of postmodernism, celebrations of theoretical incoherence (pluralism), a basically apolitical and anti-organizational commitment to imagination, desire, and ecstasy, and an intensely self-oriented enchantment of everyday life, reflect the toll that social reaction has taken on Euro-American anarchism over the past two decades."

Basically, lifestyle anarchists (and lifestyle pseudo-Marxists like Holloway) think that lifestyle choices - wearing this or that brand of sneakers, not eating eggs, eating eggs that are locally produced, singing, whatever, represent supreme political commitment.


I think we should take Bookchin's tirade in Unabridgeable Chasm with a huge grain of salt. I've not been involved in any movement as long as Bookchin has (hell, i'm only in my 20s), and i dont live in the US and i do surround myself with committed people who's basis is class struggle but i think he was blowing it all out of proportion. Even the few people i've come across who are close to lifestylism dont reject class struggle and dont think lifestyle choices are the way towards a revolutionary transformation.






Oh and Hakim Bey is a paedophile who uses anarchism as a justification for abusing children.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

That is a laughable misrepresentation of Zerzan.

Correct me, then. Obviously I haven't read as much Zerzan as you have. Does Zerzan not advocate a return to what he considers a primitive lifestyle? And does he not claim that class society critically depends on our present technological lifestyle and would disappear along with it?


Dude. That post is in introductions, and its somebody's first post. You do realize how high the odds are, that that person is 15 years old or younger, and doesn't really "get it" yet? Something like that, a person who is not a part of the anarchist or communist movements, who is not even a radical in a meaningful way, that is what your position rests on?

What position? You asked for an example of a lifestylist on this site, and I provided one.


Ashkay.

I don't see how. All they did was say how stupid lifestylism is, and quoted some moron talking about how lifestylism is not what revolutionary anarchists stand for.


I think we need to be cautious of what we imply by the word 'discipline'. An inner discipline based on trying to achieve our goals, of being happy to do the shit work in order to help work towards our goals is of course incredibly important and i'd say even small scale socialised production is impossible without it let alone revolutionary action or transformation of social relations. However, i'd distinguish this discipline between the discipline of the barracks, the prison or the capitalist workplace.

But this "inner" discipline is also enforced, and at times of high revolutionary struggle it might be more arduous than barracks discipline. Revolutions are messy; people will be forced to die and forced to kill, and that does not come easy.


I think we should take Bookchin's tirade in Unabridgeable Chasm with a huge grain of salt. I've not been involved in any movement as long as Bookchin has (hell, i'm only in my 20s), and i dont live in the US and i do surround myself with committed people who's basis is class struggle but i think he was blowing it all out of proportion. Even the few people i've come across who are close to lifestylism dont reject class struggle and dont think lifestyle choices are the way towards a revolutionary transformation.

Possibly. But, and I write this as an admitted outsider, there really seems to have been an explosion of all sorts of primitivist, mystical, music-oriented and similar tendencies in the nineties, and though the trend has tapered off somewhat, the survivals are still there. But like I said, these people are not the majority of the anarchist movement.


Oh and Hakim Bey is a paedophile who uses anarchism as a justification for abusing children.

That's a fairly serious charge. I know he supports the NAMBLA group, but people can do that without abusing children (in fact, the Spartacists do so, for which they receive an unending stream of abuse, though there is precisely zero evidence that any of their members is a child molester).

[blake 3:17]

I was much more sympathetic to Bey than Bookchin in their debates in the 90s.

And I think most of us could do with a little more singing and gardening.

[helot]

But this "inner" discipline is also enforced, and at times of high revolutionary struggle it might be more arduous than barracks discipline. Revolutions are messy; people will be forced to die and forced to kill, and that does not come easy.
I understand your point but there are certain times when enforced discipline will be irrelevant. If we're having to have gunners at the back to stop widescale desertion the war is lost once more. We can't force the workers to revolt nor to continue a revolt as if it's necessary at the time there will be no way the workers will have the vital initiative to engage in the creative task of transforming society.




Possibly. But, and I write this as an admitted outsider, there really seems to have been an explosion of all sorts of primitivist, mystical, music-oriented and similar tendencies in the nineties, and though the trend has tapered off somewhat, the survivals are still there. But like I said, these people are not the majority of the anarchist movement. Maybe it's down to me being in a different time and different place.




That's a fairly serious charge. I know he supports the NAMBLA group, but people can do that without abusing children (in fact, the Spartacists do so, for which they receive an unending stream of abuse, though there is precisely zero evidence that any of their members is a child molester).

I read something about it ages ago.. Had a quick look on google for a source and couldn't find it so either he's faced no convictions for paedophilia or i just haven't delved far enough. So at the moment i take back the accusation due to a lack of evidence.

Having said that he is an apologist of paedophilia and uses anarchism as a justification for it. It's quite sickening that he'd use a political philosophy based on ending domination and exploitation to endorse the sexual abuse of children.

[Domela Nieuwenhuis]

One who recognises the proletarian nature of the state, probably, or one who wishes to destroy fascism and the reaction.

You know nothing of anarchism, do you? A state is a state. State == authoritarian (no matter what kind of state it is)



Quite so. And neither large-scale socialised production nor revolutionary action is possible without discipline, without trampling all over the "autonomy" of those who go against revolutionary action. Every worker understands this, which is why scabs and snitches are universally reviled.

I think you are mistaking discipline for organization.

[Ele'ill]

You know nothing of anarchism, do you? A state is a state. State == authoritarian (no matter what kind of state it is)


I think you are mistaking discipline for organization.

I think this kind of gets to the point or at least a big point especially the wacko 'discipline' stuff. I also want to clarify that 'the proletariat' being talked about here as some homogenized critical mass that a few anarcho-troublemaker-lifestylists are going to 'attack' is bosh and it's the other way around that the existence of a state/hierarchy/authoritarian program (of a party) by its very existence is an attack, its purpose is to control a monoculture of resistance and from what this user has said in other thread(s) it seems like the purpose is to maintain society in its current form with minor changes. They are correct though, at least partially, when they say that some anarchists want this too, not the state part but what I'd call a view of society and a future society that is extremely lacking and has way too much carry over from the previous for my liking.

[TheEmancipator]

Anarchists see workers' emancipation as one of many struggles. They see class warfare as an unseen aspect in parallel many other ideological, geopolitical, and various other struggles. Marxists believe that the proletarian revolution and dictatorship is the sole priority to emancipate mankind.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Makhno came from a petite-bourgeois background and the Makhnovshchina was chiefly associated with the villages, including even kulak elements.

Nope, not unless you want to make the term "petite-bourgeois" (should be "petite-bourgeoisie", by the way, or alternately "petty bourgeois" when used as an adjective) completely meaningless. Which many vulgar Marxists have worked hard to do over the years (somewhat ironically) And yes, Makhno's army was a peasant army, somewhat similar in character to Zapata's "Liberation Army of the South". Y'know, the same kind of people who deserve to be exterminated with chemical weapons and other means by the enlightened party.


I don't think Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta, Ogarev, Nechayev, Durruti etc. could be fairly described as lifestyle anarchists.

All of the people you just mentioned were prone to "libertarian sloganeering". As were many, many other famed "class struggle anarchists".

Case in point: http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1798707&postcount=12

That's really what the accusations of lifestylism boil down to, I think, is the question of whether radical thought addresses any questions about what sort of life the individual should lead, as well as questions relating to the personal freedom of the individual, etc. No one believes that gardening is going to overthrow the entire social order, that's an absurd strawman.

And, on the other side, a number of notable anarcho-individualists of the past were also involved in assorted labor and class struggles.

[The Douche]

Many leading historical figures of "class struggle anarchism" have at times engaged in illegalism/propaganda of the deed and other "lifestylist" behavior, like being vegans/vegetarians, being nudists, practicing free love, living on communes, supporting animal liberation, etc.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

You know nothing of anarchism, do you? A state is a state. State == authoritarian (no matter what kind of state it is)

I am familiar with anarchist theory; my point was that many anarchists have chosen to ignore this theory and to cooperate with revolutionary Marxists.


I think you are mistaking discipline for organization.

The latter is impossible without the former. An "organisation" that grinds to a halt every time an individual member or local branch throws a fit and refuses to carry out orders (and these orders are the result of a democratic process in most revolutionary organisations, making the behaviour of those who obstruct them antidemocratic as well as petty, individualist and childish) is not an organisation.


Nope, not unless you want to make the term "petite-bourgeois" completely meaningless.

How so? Surely even the poor strata of the peasantry are part of the petite bourgeoisie; class is not determined by income but by the relation one has to the means of production.


(should be "petite-bourgeoisie", by the way, or alternately "petty bourgeois" when used as an adjective)

I have seen the French adjective form "petit-bourgeois" used in English; my only mistake was adding an -e.


And yes, Makhno's army was a peasant army, somewhat similar in character to Zapata's "Liberation Army of the South". Y'know, the same kind of people who deserve to be exterminated with chemical weapons and other means by the enlightened party.

That was Antonov's army in Tambov, though. And yes, the party of the proletariat needs to advance the interest of the proletariat - through chemical weapons if that is necessary - and not of the peasantry or whatnot.


All of the people you just mentioned were prone to "libertarian sloganeering". As were many, many other famed "class struggle anarchists".

Alright? My point was that none of them could be called a lifestyle anarchist. Libertarian sloganeering - and yes, anarchists are unfortunately prone to libertarian sloganeering just as Marxist are prone to r-r-r-r-revolutionary sloganeering - is another matter.

Actually, libertarian sloganeering is an immense improvement over the romantic-reactionary sloganeering of many lifestyle "revolutionaries".


That's really what the accusations of lifestylism boil down to, I think, is the question of whether radical thought addresses any questions about what sort of life the individual should lead, as well as questions relating to the personal freedom of the individual, etc. No one believes that gardening is going to overthrow the entire social order, that's an absurd strawman.

I have already provided examples of people who believe this "absurd strawman".

I think your definition - "radical thought [that] addresses any questions about what sort of life the individual should lead" - is far too broad. But let's adopt it for a second, because I want to make a fairly broad point, and because you seem sympathetic to the notion. You do realise that chairman Bob Avakian is a "lifestylist" according to this definition? And does that not tell us something about the dangers of "addressing questions about what sort of life the individual should lead"? Sure, most anarchists are, or consider themselves to be, libertarians, but it really isn't difficult to see how Zerzan's little schemes (for example) would effectively obliterate access to effective, safe contraception and abortion.


And, on the other side, a number of notable anarcho-individualists of the past were also involved in assorted labor and class struggles.

To be honest, I can't recall any, unless you consider random assassinations a form of class struggle.


Many leading historical figures of "class struggle anarchism" have at times engaged in illegalism/propaganda of the deed and other "lifestylist" behavior, like being vegans/vegetarians, being nudists, practicing free love, living on communes, supporting animal liberation, etc.

None of these things make them lifestylists. Again, being vegan does not make one a lifestylist. Forcing everyone to be vegan might, though. Thinking that veganism is an important part of the processes that will overthrow capitalism is definitely lifestylism.


I think this kind of gets to the point or at least a big point especially the wacko 'discipline' stuff. I also want to clarify that 'the proletariat' being talked about here as some homogenized critical mass that a few anarcho-troublemaker-lifestylists are going to 'attack' is bosh and it's the other way around that the existence of a state/hierarchy/authoritarian program (of a party) by its very existence is an attack, its purpose is to control a monoculture of resistance and from what this user has said in other thread(s) it seems like the purpose is to maintain society in its current form with minor changes.

The existence of a definite, revolutionary party programme is an attack - an attack on adventurism and petty individualism. As for the rest, these "minor changes" correspond to a new mode of production. As well as clearing out some of the superstructure of the capitalist era, but you would undoubtedly decry this as limiting the "autonomy" of some people.

Even so, few people want to get rid of industry, so we don't go far enough for you. And why should we? Most of us, including the overwhelming majority of anarchists, recognise the progressive nature of capitalism in relation to primitive communism.


They are correct though, at least partially, when they say that some anarchists want this too, not the state part but what I'd call a view of society and a future society that is extremely lacking and has way too much carry over from the previous for my liking.

That was my point, more or less.

[Domela Nieuwenhuis]

I am familiar with anarchist theory; my point was that many anarchists have chosen to ignore this theory and to cooperate with revolutionary Marxists.
Abandoning/ignoring your anarchist ideology and actively trying to make a state is nothing more than converting from anarchism.
In no way are you an anarchist when you do that.

Imagine you being an atheist, but all of the sudden you start preaching the lord to your family. How the fuck can you do that if you're an atheist?

Same situation, but in stead of "atheist" and "the lord", fill in "anarchist" and "Marxism".


The latter is impossible without the former. An "organisation" that grinds to a halt every time an individual member or local branch throws a fit and refuses to carry out orders (and these orders are the result of a democratic process in most revolutionary organisations, making the behaviour of those who obstruct them antidemocratic as well as petty, individualist and childish) is not an organisation.
Carrying out orders? Seriously?
We are talking of anarchism!
Two words: decentralised and selfmanagment.

No really, anarchism and organization is definitely possible, but not in the way you are imagining.
Read this: "Anarchism and Organization" by Errico Malatesta. (http://www.marxists.org/archive/malatesta/1897/xx/anarchorg.htm)

[Akshay!]

Check out this video for a Marxist criticism of Anarchism -
KaDxFA1XCdc

[The Douche]

None of these things make them lifestylists. Again, being vegan does not make one a lifestylist. Forcing everyone to be vegan might, though. Thinking that veganism is an important part of the processes that will overthrow capitalism is definitely lifestylism.

You don't know anarchism as well as you think you do. There really is no "lifestylism", all anarchists are "lifestylists", the only question is to what degree.


Check this out for a Marxist criticism of Anarchism -

http://i1231.photobucket.com/albums/ee512/ilikeanani9/reaction%20gifs/nope.gif

[Ravachol]

lol @ all the little 'marxists' over here getting their panties all in a bunch over "lifestylism" (what is this, the late 90s? are we gearing up to go summit hopping again? lolz) pretending their shitty little LARP cults are anything else than a 'lifestyle'

[Dropdead]

All the ''anarchists'' I have met hate communists.. So I really don't know what to think about them.

[cyu]

Hello, it's nice to meet you ;)

I consider myself a communist, and an anarchist. I'd happily defend communism (or at least my version of communism) from any pro-capitalist "libertarian" who thinks he knows what he's talking about =]

[Ele'ill]

I like adventurism and petty individualism. That's what I've rediscovered through this thread, that those two things are vital keys to being alive and uncontrolled. It doesn't matter what exactly those two things mean at all since Semendyaev won't actually define what they are or what they mean in relation to professional revolutionary party politics but even with the broad brush slang letting my imagination run wild I think they're a desirable alternative.

[vizzek]

All the ''anarchists'' I have met hate communists.. So I really don't know what to think about them.

aren't you an "ex-anarchist?"

anyway that isnt really so surprising, considering what the word "communism" has been associated with historically. same reason that just about every leftist sect alive today calls itself "socialist" but not communist. I was an anarchist for a while and didn't meet anyone who opposed an overthrow of capitalism.

there are far better ways to critique anarchism than calling it "lifestylist."

[Domela Nieuwenhuis]

Hello, it's nice to meet you ;)

I consider myself a communist, and an anarchist. I'd happily defend communism (or at least my version of communism) from any pro-capitalist "libertarian" who thinks he knows what he's talking about =]

Shit, i caught myself defending Marxism two days ago! That dude was talking all kinds of bullshit about communism, but only lies.
I hate lies and inaccuracies.
If you're gonna bad-mouth communism, at least know what you're talking about.

[Ele'ill]

Even so, few people want to get rid of industry, so we don't go far enough for you. And why should we? Most of us, including the overwhelming majority of anarchists


I think the overwhelming majority of anarchists would oppose your 'we' and 'us' out of respect for all of the workers, houseless, unemployed struggling folks who would want to decide how to carry out their own struggles and how to actualize organization and solidarity on their own, who want to participate in their own life. Nobody in this thread has mentioned some mass purge of 'industry' as a thing and if you don't think certain industry is going to cease to exist or change drastically after a full societal transformation and global overthrow of capital then you're a wacko. There are things that are going to get shot up and torched that nobody will ever go back to.

[Os Cangaceiros]

How so? Surely even the poor strata of the peasantry are part of the petite bourgeoisie; class is not determined by income but by the relation one has to the means of production.

The peasantry =/= the petite bourgeoisie. The peasantry existed as a economic class of people before capitalism existed. Most peasants didn't employ people; most peasants didn't really have any real ownership over the hectares of land they worked. So how were peasants like Makhno or the peasants who worked in the hacienda system members of the "petite bourgeoisie"? They weren't. Next you'll be saying that serfs were also members of the "petite bourgeoisie".


That was Antonov's army in Tambov, though. And yes, the party of the proletariat needs to advance the interest of the proletariat - through chemical weapons if that is necessary - and not of the peasantry or whatnot.

And yet the "party of the proletariat" failed in a spectacular fashion when trying to turn Russia into anything other than a raging void of misery, partly because the geniuses in charge thought that their proletarian consciousness would be enough to prevent half of Russian agriculture from rotting away & cattle from dying en masse on the railways because of lack of food & water. All the hardman sloganeering in the world isn't going to change the fact that "primitive socialist accumulation" (lol) was marked by an incredible amount of ignorance and violence, not all of which was directed against the great boogeyman, THE KULAKS (who never really existed on any significant scale (http://libcom.org/library/third-revolution-nick-heath) in the first place).


Alright? My point was that none of them could be called a lifestyle anarchist. Libertarian sloganeering - and yes, anarchists are unfortunately prone to libertarian sloganeering just as Marxist are prone to r-r-r-r-revolutionary sloganeering - is another matter.

All of them (well, the ones who are actually anarchists, unlike, say, Nechayev) could be considered "lifestylists". Just because they don't conform to the constricted, pulled-out-of-someone-ass definition of lifestylism as being "the belief that gardening will destroy society" doesn't mean that their supposed lack of dedication to the glorious proletarian hivemind in favor of some modicum of personal freedom/agency to the individual hasn't been used against them as a cudgel by various Marxist hacks.


I have already provided examples of people who believe this "absurd strawman".

Who? Hakem Bey? You'll have to do better than that.


I think your definition - "radical thought [that] addresses any questions about what sort of life the individual should lead" - is far too broad. But let's adopt it for a second, because I want to make a fairly broad point, and because you seem sympathetic to the notion. You do realise that chairman Bob Avakian is a "lifestylist" according to this definition? And does that not tell us something about the dangers of "addressing questions about what sort of life the individual should lead"? Sure, most anarchists are, or consider themselves to be, libertarians, but it really isn't difficult to see how Zerzan's little schemes (for example) would effectively obliterate access to effective, safe contraception and abortion.

Chairman Bob believes in the complete subsumption of the individual to his ridiculous cult, which, like all cults, seeks to micromanage the lives of it's members. How is this relevant to anarchist thought in any way?


To be honest, I can't recall any, unless you consider random assassinations a form of class struggle.

Emile Armand, Enrico Arrigoni, Renzo Novatore, Zo d'Axa, Joseph Labadie, etc.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Abandoning/ignoring your anarchist ideology and actively trying to make a state is nothing more than converting from anarchism.
In no way are you an anarchist when you do that.

That would follow, if all anarchists wished to abolish the state for the sake of abolishing the state. That, however, is not the case. Anarchism is for the most part a workers' movement, and most anarchists demand that the state be abolished because they hold that the state is incompatible with workers' liberty.

Even so, given the situation they found themselves in, how else could the Russian anarchists react? They were given the choice of sitting on their hands and making themselves laughably irrelevant, joining the various fronts for the salvation of the motherland and similar nonsense that eventually coalesced into the White movement (and it was not unheard of for professorial anarchists to be found in the ranks of the Whites), support the actually existing workers' authorities, or allow themselves fevered dreams about a "third Russian revolution", objectively assisting the Whites like Makhno and Antonov.



Carrying out orders? Seriously?
We are talking of anarchism!
Two words: decentralised and selfmanagment.

Yes, and the Makhnovtsy merely received strongly-worded suggestions from batko Makhno. And could face the firing squad for noncompliance.


No really, anarchism and organization is definitely possible, but not in the way you are imagining.
Read this: "Anarchism and Organization" by Errico Malatesta. (http://www.marxists.org/archive/malatesta/1897/xx/anarchorg.htm)

I really like Malatesta, but the article is far too optimistic. I mean, Malatesta writes:

"An anarchist organization must allow for complete autonomy, and independence, and therefore full responsibility, to individuals and groups; free agreement between those who think it useful to come together for cooperative action, for common aims; a moral duty to fulfill one's pledges and to take no action which is contrary to the accepted programme. "

And that is all fine and well. Certainly no one thinks that it is better to whip people into obedience, at least not outside the bedroom. But moral duties are ephemeral things; organisations can't be built on the assumption that every member is moral. In the end, there has to be some way to compel members to act on the decision of the majority. Otherwise, the alleged organisation will become, at best, a loose association of individuals using the same name, unable to take collective action and completely dependent on the tyranny of self-important members.


You don't know anarchism as well as you think you do. There really is no "lifestylism", all anarchists are "lifestylists", the only question is to what degree.

If you say so. Still, there are anarchists who are lifestylists to a negligible degree and lifestylists who are anarchists to a negligible degree.


I like adventurism and petty individualism. That's what I've rediscovered through this thread, that those two things are vital keys to being alive and uncontrolled.

That's just the thing. Whether you feel alive and uncontrolled, while probably fairly important to you as an individual, is completely irrelevant in a political sense.


It doesn't matter what exactly those two things mean at all since Semendyaev won't actually define what they are or what they mean in relation to professional revolutionary party politics but even with the broad brush slang letting my imagination run wild I think they're a desirable alternative.

Adventurists try to force revolutionary situations when the material circumstances are unfavourable; petty individualists refuse party discipline, refuse to carry out democratic decisions of the centre, refuse criticism and constantly appeal to their alleged rights.


there are far better ways to critique anarchism than calling it "lifestylist."

Again, no one's doing that. I spent the better part of the last two pages arguing against an identification of anarchism with lifestylist nonsense. If anyone equates the two, that would be The Douche, Mari3L and possibly Ravachol.


I think the overwhelming majority of anarchists would oppose your 'we' and 'us' out of respect for all of the workers, houseless, unemployed struggling folks who would want to decide how to carry out their own struggles and how to actualize organization and solidarity on their own, who want to participate in their own life.

I think the overwhelming majority of anarchists are not tailists. Revolutionary anarchists have never been afraid of presenting a programme to the workers.


Nobody in this thread has mentioned some mass purge of 'industry' as a thing and if you don't think certain industry is going to cease to exist or change drastically after a full societal transformation and global overthrow of capital then you're a wacko. There are things that are going to get shot up and torched that nobody will ever go back to.

This is all far too vague. Certainly, every industry will "change drastically", but this change will most likely not be in the direction you desire. Previous economic forms have become obsolete for a reason.


The peasantry =/= the petite bourgeoisie.

That is correct. The correct formula would be:

the peasantry ⊂ the petite bourgeoisie


The peasantry existed as a economic class of people before capitalism existed.

So did the landowner class, which was still prominent in the early capitalist period. For that matter, so did the predecessors of the bourgeoisie. I don't see how that is an argument for, or against, anything.


Most peasants didn't employ people; most peasants didn't really have any real ownership over the hectares of land they worked.

This is vague; what is "real" ownership? The peasantry, even the lower strata, owned their land, placing them firmly in the petite bourgeoisie (unless they extracted surplus value from their hired help, which was extremely rare).


So how were peasants like Makhno or the peasants who worked in the hacienda system members of the "petite bourgeoisie"? They weren't. Next you'll be saying that serfs were also members of the "petite bourgeoisie".

The hired labourers who worked on the haciendas obviously did not own the means of production; neither did serfs. Makhno's family, on the other hand, owned their plot of land and most of the tools used to work it.


And yet the "party of the proletariat" failed in a spectacular fashion when trying to turn Russia into anything other than a raging void of misery, partly because the geniuses in charge thought that their proletarian consciousness would be enough to prevent half of Russian agriculture from rotting away & cattle from dying en masse on the railways because of lack of food & water. All the hardman sloganeering in the world isn't going to change the fact that "primitive socialist accumulation" (lol) was marked by an incredible amount of ignorance and violence, not all of which was directed against the great boogeyman, THE KULAKS (who never really existed on any significant scale (http://libcom.org/library/third-revolution-nick-heath) in the first place).

The phrase "primitive socialist accumulation" (laugh as much as you want - that is an objective necessity in backwards states, unless you think industry can be built from good intentions and peasant happiness) refers to the period of the first five-year plans and the collectivisation drive. In the rest of the paragraph, you seem to be talking about the period of Military Communism, or the partial restoration of Military Communism under the so-called Ural-Siberian method.

And yes, these periods were marked by violence. So what? The main tasks of the proletarian state in each period - respectively supplying the cities and the Red Army with food and industrialisation - were accomplished. Were there administrative errors? Of course there were, but given the material circumstances, it is surprising that there were not more errors. Was the peasantry opposed to these measures? Possibly the majority of them were, but again, so what? The party of the proletariat is not the party of the peasantry. We can not allow ourselves to be dragged into the mud of small commodity production and liberalism by peasant intransigence.

The article you link to is an astounding exercise in complete illogic. The proportion of kulaks was not as great as some imaginary Bolshevik implied - therefore, the kulaks were irrelevant. Outstanding.

As for the "Third Russian Revolution" - what class lead this revolution? Against the rule of what class? Obviously the least conscious strata of the peasantry against the rule of the proletariat. And socialists are supposed to applaud this?

In any case, it's nice to see people who are opposed to violence against peasants tacitly supporting the Esers-Maximists - you know, the racist party that thought class was genetic and that all "parasite" families must be exterminated.


All of them (well, the ones who are actually anarchists, unlike, say, Nechayev) could be considered "lifestylists". Just because they don't conform to the constricted, pulled-out-of-someone-ass definition of lifestylism as being "the belief that gardening will destroy society" doesn't mean that their supposed lack of dedication to the glorious proletarian hivemind in favor of some modicum of personal freedom/agency to the individual hasn't been used against them as a cudgel by various Marxist hacks.

Nechayev was active before anarchism became a separate tendency, certainly, and perhaps his barracks communism is an embarrassment, but he was clearly associated with principal anarchist thinkers like Bakunin. You act as if the term "lifestylism" was coined by Marxists in order to slander anarchists for being libertarians, but it was coined by an anarchist (now an ex-anarchist) and anarchists are no strangers to "hive minds" and social repression - again, just consider the duo of Nechayev and Bakunin.


Who? Hakem Bey? You'll have to do better than that.

Why? Has the Central Anarchist Organisation passed a fatwa against him or something? Actually, I did provide more examples - Holloway (The Douche objected that Holloway is a "Marxist", not an anarchist, but the point I was trying to prove was that lifestylism exists, not that it is unique to anarchism) and Zerzan (The Douche objected that I had misread him, without specifying further).


Chairman Bob believes in the complete subsumption of the individual to his ridiculous cult, which, like all cults, seeks to micromanage the lives of it's members. How is this relevant to anarchist thought in any way?

I don't think Chairman Bob can be fairly described as "micromanaging the lives" of RCPUSA members. Certainly, there is a creepy personality cult around the man, but he seems fairly innocuous, particularly compared to Logan or Healy. But certain anarchist groups do, effectively, micromanage the lives of their members. Certain branches of the Chernoye Znamya group were like that, as was Nechayev's circle.

I wasn't talking about that, though; I was talking about chairman Bob's notorious homophobia. Obviously Bob had an answer to your question - "how should an individual live their life?" Well, by not fucking members of the same sex, according to Bob. Undoubtedly, you will protest that anarchists are libertarians. But homophobic attitudes have been present in both the anarchist and the Marxist movement. A theoretical commitment to libertarianism is not a magical shield against backward notions - we have, on this very site, self-proclaimed anarchists that wish to restrict abortion for example. Even as a proposed policy, that is terrible. But when it becomes a lifestyle requirement? When female members are pressured not to carry out abortions? That is worse by several orders of magnitude.

Isn't it better to leave such questions to the individual rather than the party or federation committee, or some self-important theoretician?


Emile Armand, Enrico Arrigoni, Renzo Novatore, Zo d'Axa, Joseph Labadie, etc.

And how did these individuals participate in the class struggle? I am familiar with their biographies, at least in most cases, but I can't think of any strikes they led or participated in, any solidarity campaign etc. etc.

And Armand provides a good example of lifestyle anarchism:

«For having depicted in broad strokes a tableau of "the new humanity" to which we would like to evolve, we cannot be taxed with being "future-society-ists". The anarchist individualist is not a future society-ist; a presentist, he could not, without bad reasoning and illogic, think of sacrificing his being, or his having, to the coming of a state of things he will not immediately enjoy. Individualist thought admits no equivocation on this point. It is amid the old humanity, the humanity of dominators and dictators of all kinds, that the "new humanity" appears, takes shape, becomes. Individualists are permanent and personal revolutionaries, they try to practice, in themselves, in their circle, in their relations with their comrades of ideas, their particular concepts of individual and group life. Every time one of the characteristics of the "new humanity" implants itself in the mores, every time one or more human beings, at their risk and peril, anticipate them by word or action, "the new humanity is realized." In the domain of art, letters, science, ethics, personal conduct, even in the economic sphere, one finds individuals who think and act contrary to the customs, usages, routines, prejudices and conventions of the "old society", and attempt to break them down. In their kind of activity, they too represent the new humanity. Already the individualists take part in it, by their way of behaving towards the old world, because they reveal in each of their actions their intention, their win, their hope of seeing the individual free himself from the constraint of the herd, the mentality of the mass.»

(Anarchist Individualism as Life and Activity (http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/worldwidemovements/armand.html))

[Plutocrat]

Well I’ve been ua for quite some time but I didn't expect this lol
To clear somethings up I haven't been deleting peoples posts and im not 15 lol
This may sound odd but if there any French people on here can they pm I have some questions

[Domela Nieuwenhuis]

That would follow, if all anarchists wished to abolish the state for the sake of abolishing the state. That, however, is not the case. Anarchism is for the most part a workers' movement, and most anarchists demand that the state be abolished because they hold that the state is incompatible with workers' liberty.

Even so, given the situation they found themselves in, how else could the Russian anarchists react? They were given the choice of sitting on their hands and making themselves laughably irrelevant, joining the various fronts for the salvation of the motherland and similar nonsense that eventually coalesced into the White movement (and it was not unheard of for professorial anarchists to be found in the ranks of the Whites), support the actually existing workers' authorities, or allow themselves fevered dreams about a "third Russian revolution", objectively assisting the Whites like Makhno and Antonov.

As yo said it yor self, anarchists believe that worker-freedom can only exist without the state. Actively choosing for a new kind of state (that of the proletariat or whatever) is non-anarchist. However you toss and turn, at the end of the day it is non-anarchist.
I don't blame you. It's hard to understand from a Marxists perspective.


Yes, and the Makhnovtsy merely received strongly-worded suggestions from batko Makhno. And could face the firing squad for noncompliance
Those were Bolshevik lies. Pure anti-Makhnovtsy propaganda. I fact it was the Bolsheviks who had special punishment-brigades to kill defectors and their family. Ah yes, vanguards...


But moral duties are ephemeral things; organisations can't be built on the assumption that every member is moral. In the end, there has to be some way to compel members to act on the decision of the majority. Otherwise, the alleged organisation will become, at best, a loose association of individuals using the same name, unable to take collective action and completely dependent on the tyranny of self-important members.

Then what the hell do you expect of communism exactly? An everlasting vangard-party?

[Ravachol]

Blablabla...

If you say so. Still, there are anarchists who are lifestylists to a negligible degree and lifestylists who are anarchists to a negligible degree.

Blablabla...

That's just the thing. Whether you feel alive and uncontrolled, while probably fairly important to you as an individual, is completely irrelevant in a political sense.

Sooo... pray tell, what makes your political activity and/or hobby association politically relevant and anything else than a lifestyle choice?

[Engels]

This is how Bookchin puts it:

"Today’s reactionary social context greatly explains the emergence of a phenomenon in Euro-American anarchism that cannot be ignored: the spread of individualist anarchism. In a time when even respectable forms of socialism are in pell-mell retreat from principles that might in any way be construed as radical, issues of lifestyle are once again supplanting social action and revolutionary politics in anarchism. In the traditionally individualist-liberal United States and Britain, the 1990s are awash in self-styled anarchists who — their flamboyant radical rhetoric aside — are cultivating a latter-day anarcho-individualism that I will call lifestyle anarchism. Its preoccupations with the ego and its uniqueness and its polymorphous concepts of resistance are steadily eroding the socialistic character of the libertarian tradition. No less than Marxism and other socialisms, anarchism can be profoundly influenced by the bourgeois environment it professes to oppose, with the result that the growing ‘inwardness’ and narcissism of the yuppie generation have left their mark upon many avowed radicals. Ad hoc adventurism, personal bravura, an aversion to theory oddly akin to the antirational biases of postmodernism, celebrations of theoretical incoherence (pluralism), a basically apolitical and anti-organizational commitment to imagination, desire, and ecstasy, and an intensely self-oriented enchantment of everyday life, reflect the toll that social reaction has taken on Euro-American anarchism over the past two decades."


Bookchin truly was gifted at whining. All I see is a leftist throwing a tantrum because other people aren’t listening to him and doing it his way. In the end, the accusation of “lifestylism” (along with individualism, the eternal leftist bogeyman) simply amounts to roundabout way of saying “sectarian.”

[Ele'ill]

That's just the thing. Whether you feel alive and uncontrolled, while probably fairly important to you as an individual, is completely irrelevant in a political sense.

big difference between 'feeling' controlled and 'being' controlled- one is an apology for authoritarian control over other people's lives to save party and formal organization with a dismissive 'it's their perception' in the face of individual's (many of them) actual recognition of being controlled. lol political sense, this isn't starcraft.




Adventurists try to force revolutionary situations when the material circumstances are unfavourable; petty individualists refuse party discipline, refuse to carry out democratic decisions of the centre, refuse criticism and constantly appeal to their alleged rights.

I think this is a strawman or a misunderstanding of theory on your part because I don't think too many people think they're forcing a revolutionary situation. The folks you're talking about aren't petty individualists they're everyone outside of your party organization who are bored and unengaged with your politics because your politics are boring and unengaging.



This is all far too vague. Certainly, every industry will "change drastically", but this change will most likely not be in the direction you desire. Previous economic forms have become obsolete for a reason.

I don't think you and I have talked enough on the forum for you to know what I desire.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

As yo said it yor self, anarchists believe that worker-freedom can only exist without the state. Actively choosing for a new kind of state (that of the proletariat or whatever) is non-anarchist. However you toss and turn, at the end of the day it is non-anarchist.

This doesn't make sense. Do you think anarchist should fight for the full maximum programme of anarchism, without delay, or else sit around doing nothing? That is an interesting notion, but most anarchists do not seem to subscribe to it.


I don't blame you. It's hard to understand from a Marxists perspective.

There is, in fact, nothing easier than understanding this phenomenon from a Marxist perspective: the material conditions are not determined by one's ideology, but one's actions and ideology are determined by the material conditions and the social relations that arise from them. In revolutionary situation, the proletariat rallies to the party of the proletariat (not just anarchists - members of the soviets were sometimes former Mensheviks, Trudoviks, Popular Socialists, even Kadets), and the petit-bourgeois elements in revolutionary parties, at best, have to be whipped into line.


Those were Bolshevik lies. Pure anti-Makhnovtsy propaganda.

Aha, so that story about Makhno executing pogromist commanders? That was also propaganda? Here is a nice choice - either the one anecdote that is constantly used to prove that Makhno disapproved of pogroms was an invention, or the Makhnovtsy used violence.

Even Avrich, who usually signs the praises of every peasant with a grudge against the Bolsheviks, is forced to admit that the Makhnovtsy used violence, and even conscription. How could they not? Do you think the entire peasant population of the districts encompassed by the Makhnovshchina suddenly became anarchists? Or that they were eager to resume fighting after having overthrown the government, partly, because it refused to demobilise the army?


Then what the hell do you expect of communism exactly? An everlasting vangard-party?

Individualism will, hopefully, be extinct in the higher phases of communism, but any individualist intransigence will presumably be met - well, not with violence necessarily, but with a refusal to cooperate. If someone thinks their esteemed self can violate the democratic decisions of society, why should society cooperate with them? Why should the consumer cooperatives provide them with products, why should the militias protect them?


Sooo... pray tell, what makes your political activity and/or hobby association politically relevant and anything else than a lifestyle choice?

I am currently not a member of any revolutionary organisation - I sympathise with the ICL and the IG, but neither have a section here - but let us assume that I am. Would associating with the ICL or the IG be a lifestyle choice? As far as I know, neither group demands that its members live in a certain way, at least not more than any other organisation. There are no special Spartacist clothes, members can eat whatever they want and sleep with whoever they want, there is no requirement to hang Robertson's picture on our walls etc. etc.

On the other hand, activity within a revolutionary organisation is politically relevant because it is collective action that engages the public sphere. The aggregate effect is important, the individual militants are not. They are almost interchangeable from a political perspective - as long as the consciousness and the dedication of two members are the same, their names need only concern the cadre office.


Bookchin truly was gifted at whining. All I see is a leftist throwing a tantrum because other people aren’t listening to him and doing it his way. In the end, the accusation of “lifestylism” (along with individualism, the eternal leftist bogeyman) simply amounts to roundabout way of saying “sectarian.”

Come, now, surely you don't mean to imply that individualism, and the associated liberalism, are not real, or are not problematic? I think there is ample evidence to the contrary. As for Boolchin's complaint being that people are not following his tactics, surely this is what all principled disagreement on the left comes down to? If our goals differ, we can't be part of the same "left"; conversely if our tactics are the same, we are at best bickering over personalities, which is uninteresting and obnoxious.

I think it's more than that. I might disagree with a revolutionary anarchist, a Marxist-Leninist or third-campist, but at the very least, we seem to be talking about the same thing. When someone starts to talk about political veganism, "temporary autonomous zones", raves and so on, I feel like I've accidentally walked into the wrong convention. I don't see how these things have anything to do with the politics of us "boring and unengaging" Marxists and anarchists.


big difference between 'feeling' controlled and 'being' controlled- one is an apology for authoritarian control over other people's lives to save party and formal organization with a dismissive 'it's their perception' in the face of individual's (many of them) actual recognition of being controlled. lol political sense, this isn't starcraft.

Well, if you think basic party discipline means that you are being "controlled", then yes, petty individualism is the key to being uncontrolled. It's also the key to being utterly politically irrelevant, which is, I think, demonstrated amply on this very site, with most individualists adopting a completely negative, and, dare I say it? boring line, a sort of hue and cry about "authoritarianism" and "substitutionism" taken to the extent of a parody.


I think this is a strawman or a misunderstanding of theory on your part because I don't think too many people think they're forcing a revolutionary situation. The folks you're talking about aren't petty individualists they're everyone outside of your party organization who are bored and unengaged with your politics because your politics are boring and unengaging.

Then my politics suit my personality perfectly. But at the very least I have a political position, unlike the various lifestylists, nihilists and the good nonexistent god knows what else.


I don't think you and I have talked enough on the forum for you to know what I desire.

I think I've read enough of your posts, not necessarily directed at me.

[Ele'ill]

Well, if you think basic party discipline...

I don't think about parties at all.




It's also the key to being utterly politically irrelevant...I hope everything is as utterly politically irrelevant as possible




But at the very least I have a political positionyou remind me of tobias from arrested development






I think I've read enough of your posts, not necessarily directed at me.
clearly not

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Don't watch sitcoms, sorry.

[blake 3:17]

@Akshay -- given Molyneux's role in the SWP, I'd say most anything he had to say would be an argument for anarchism.

[Ravachol]

I am currently not a member of any revolutionary organisation - I sympathise with the ICL and the IG, but neither have a section here - but let us assume that I am. Would associating with the ICL or the IG be a lifestyle choice? As far as I know, neither group demands that its members live in a certain way, at least not more than any other organisation. There are no special Spartacist clothes, members can eat whatever they want and sleep with whoever they want, there is no requirement to hang Robertson's picture on our walls etc. etc.


No, but members are required to perform a series of LARPing activities, handing out this or that leaflet/newspaper, paying dues, attending the no doubt endless and boring meetings, defending the correct positions in public debate and all that yadayada. In the end it ammounts to a lifestyle choice between getting your face tattooed, not eating meat and hopping freight trains or getting together with 5 people every sunday in the backroom of some pub wearing knitted sweaters and trying to divine the "correct line" on syria (lol) to put out in some rag to hand out to disinterested pedestrians.



On the other hand, activity within a revolutionary organisation is politically relevant because it is collective action that engages the public sphere.


5 people handing out leaflets or standing on the sideline near a strike are about as much 'collective action' as trying to sell CrimeThinc's "evasion" at a punk show.



The aggregate effect is important, the individual militants are not. They are almost interchangeable from a political perspective - as long as the consciousness and the dedication of two members are the same, their names need only concern the cadre office.


Yes, and pray tell, what does this relevant aggregate effect amount to for your (supposedly NOT LIFESTYLIST :rolleyes:) political activity or that of any of the miniature grouplets you recommend?

[Soman]

As a Stalinist I think Anarchism is silly. That's it.

[Domela Nieuwenhuis]

This doesn't make sense. Do you think anarchist should fight for the full maximum programme of anarchism, without delay, or else sit around doing nothing? That is an interesting notion, but most anarchists do not seem to subscribe to it.
While there is a state, there is no freedom, so yes, the full package.




There is, in fact, nothing easier than understanding this phenomenon from a Marxist perspective: the material conditions are not determined by one's ideology, but one's actions and ideology are determined by the material conditions and the social relations that arise from them. In revolutionary situation, the proletariat rallies to the party of the proletariat (not just anarchists - members of the soviets were sometimes former Mensheviks, Trudoviks, Popular Socialists, even Kadets), and the petit-bourgeois elements in revolutionary parties, at best, have to be whipped into line.
Whipped into line? You're fucking kidding, right?



Aha, so that story about Makhno executing pogromist commanders? That was also propaganda? Here is a nice choice - either the one anecdote that is constantly used to prove that Makhno disapproved of pogroms was an invention, or the Makhnovtsy used violence.

Even Avrich, who usually signs the praises of every peasant with a grudge against the Bolsheviks, is forced to admit that the Makhnovtsy used violence, and even conscription. How could they not? Do you think the entire peasant population of the districts encompassed by the Makhnovshchina suddenly became anarchists? Or that they were eager to resume fighting after having overthrown the government, partly, because it refused to demobilise the army?
Commanders yes, the soldiers where all let go. He did not murder his own like the Bolsheviks. I never claimed the Mahknovtsy did not use violence. They probably where not totally clean, weird shit happens during wars. But to claim Mahkno killed defectors is not true.

The Peasants realised they had no choice but to fight to keep their new-gotten freedom.

[Akshay!]

:laugh:
Some "anarchists" seem to think that one day there'll be a revolution and then suddenly - magically - every state in the world would disappear and then there would be love, peace, and happiness. Obviously I'm not saying that this is true for all anarchists - only the stupid ones.

[vizzek]

:laugh:
Some "anarchists" seem to think that one day there'll be a revolution and then suddenly - magically - every state in the world would disappear and then there would be love, peace, and happiness. Obviously I'm not saying that this is true for all anarchists - only the stupid ones.

could you cite some examples or

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I don't think about parties at all.

Obviously not.


I hope everything is as utterly politically irrelevant as possible

So, if you don't mind me asking, why are you on this site? If the topic doesn't interest you, it seems odd to linger here. You're far from the only one, though - there are several aggressively apolitical and antirevolutionary members.


No, but members are required to perform a series of LARPing activities, handing out this or that leaflet/newspaper, paying dues, attending the no doubt endless and boring meetings, defending the correct positions in public debate and all that yadayada.

Surprisingly enough, membership in a revolutionary organisation implies a certain modicum of revolutionary activity. Every organisation demands some level of commitment from its members. But the comparison to LARPing fails because in general, people LARP because they enjoy it (and I don't think we should laugh at them). Revolutionaries are members of revolutionary organisations because they want to accomplish something.


5 people handing out leaflets or standing on the sideline near a strike are about as much 'collective action' as trying to sell CrimeThinc's "evasion" at a punk show.

Oh, I agree. The left is atomised beyond belief today, and is rarely able to initiate large-scale action. But ideally, we would like to do so, whereas lifestylists are content to retreat to their little gardening/housing collective squats and try to start the revolution with themselves.


While there is a state, there is no freedom, so yes, the full package.

But like I said, most anarchists don't seem to agree with you. There are anarchists in many united fronts against this or that aspect of the bourgeois dictatorship, for example. I think these people should be applauded; obviously you think they should sit these united fronts out unless that particular antifascist demonstration in a provincial city can overthrow the state, immediately.


Whipped into line? You're fucking kidding, right?

Not using actual whips, but during revolutionary situations, the petit-bourgeois elements in an organisation are its most severe liability. If they are not put into line, they can ruin any action; consider the activities of right-wing Bolsheviks like Kamenev and Muranev for example.


Commanders yes, the soldiers where all let go. He did not murder his own like the Bolsheviks. I never claimed the Mahknovtsy did not use violence. They probably where not totally clean, weird shit happens during wars. But to claim Mahkno killed defectors is not true.

And when a Makhnovist commander ordered an assault, but a "soldier" refused to carry out this order?


The Peasants realised they had no choice but to fight to keep their new-gotten freedom.

The Provisional Government used the same rhetoric and was roundly ignored. So why do you think the newly demobilised soldiers would listen to the Makhnovtsy?

[Jimmie Higgins]

As a Stalinist I think Anarchism is silly. That's it.Hi and welcome,

Just for future reference, since you are new here, one-liners like this are not allowed. Essentially it doesn't help discussion and, particularly in a topic like this, can just lead to flaming and so on.

It's OK to say "I think this or that position is 'silly'" if you also provide a bit of a political rationale for stating so.

[Domela Nieuwenhuis]

But like I said, most anarchists don't seem to agree with you. There are anarchists in many united fronts against this or that aspect of the bourgeois dictatorship, for example. I think these people should be applauded; obviously you think they should sit these united fronts out unless that particular antifascist demonstration in a provincial city can overthrow the state, immediately.

I beg to differ. You probably mean most anarchists you know.
You still don't seem to realise that anarchism means that the state, capitalism and the bourgiousie all is heavily entangeled. No one can exist without the others. If anarchists are fighting bourgiousie, there also fighting the state and capitalism. There is no fighting only one.



Not using actual whips, but during revolutionary situations, the petit-bourgeois elements in an organisation are its most severe liability. If they are not put into line, they can ruin any action; consider the activities of right-wing Bolsheviks like Kamenev and Muranev for example.

But what has the petit-bourgious have to do with Makhno? And don't give me that crap about the Agrarfrage, in the end the peasants working for the large landowners are just as prole as the workers (so was Makhno).



And when a Makhnovist commander ordered an assault, but a "soldier" refused to carry out this order?

Hell i don't know. I wasen't there, and neither were you.



The Provisional Government used the same rhetoric and was roundly ignored. So why do you think the newly demobilised soldiers would listen to the Makhnovtsy?
Realising the right cause.

[Ele'ill]

:laugh:
Some "anarchists" seem to think that one day there'll be a revolution and then suddenly - magically - every state in the world would disappear and then there would be love, peace, and happiness. Obviously I'm not saying that this is true for all anarchists - only the stupid ones.

Just a thought, instead of replying to a position that's held by approximately 0 people ever, why don't you actually start contributing to the discussion by responding to the anarchists who are posting in this thread

[Ele'ill]

Obviously not.

So, if you don't mind me asking, why are you on this site? If the topic doesn't interest you, it seems odd to linger here. You're far from the only one, though - there are several aggressively apolitical and antirevolutionary members.

*This site is multi-tendency and I'm not opposed to revolution although I'm often opposed to the specifics.

[Engels]

Come, now, surely you don't mean to imply that individualism, and the associated liberalism, are not real, or are not problematic? I think there is ample evidence to the contrary.

Are you really going to use the Bookchinist tactic of equating any talk of existing, concrete individuals with bourgeois individualism and its abstractions? You would not differentiate between Stirner and Novatore and Hobbes and Locke?



As for Boolchin's complaint being that people are not following his tactics, surely this is what all principled disagreement on the left comes down to? If our goals differ, we can't be part of the same "left"; conversely if our tactics are the same, we are at best bickering over personalities, which is uninteresting and obnoxious. The “lifestylists” that earned Bookchin’s hostility (mainly primitivists, pro-situ and post-left anarchists) didn’t buy into Bookchin’s city-state fetish and rejected leftism and the usual leftist tactics as stale, mouldy and something to be discarded.

For Bookchin, lifestyle anarchists = any non-Bookchinists.



I think it's more than that. I might disagree with a revolutionary anarchist, a Marxist-Leninist or third-campist, but at the very least, we seem to be talking about the same thing. When someone starts to talk about political veganism, "temporary autonomous zones", raves and so on, I feel like I've accidentally walked into the wrong convention. I don't see how these things have anything to do with the politics of us "boring and unengaging" Marxists and anarchists.
I’ll only speak for myself here. I don’t care about party building or party discipline or proletarian states or other such tested and failed leftist leftovers from the previous century. The left is capital’s loyal opposition and its function is to recuperate revolutionary potential.

The revolutionary/communist perspective as anti-political, the rejection of work and the worker identity/role rather than its affirmation, the revolution of everyday life, a critique of technology and civilisation – these are all far more interesting to me.

[Engels]

:laugh:
Some "anarchists" seem to think that one day there'll be a revolution and then suddenly - magically - every state in the world would disappear and then there would be love, peace, and happiness. Obviously I'm not saying that this is true for all anarchists - only the stupid ones.

Father Akshay deigns to grace us with his presence and his marvellous straw men. Perhaps, he could also preach one of his sermons on those insolent, privileged westerners?

[Jimmie Higgins]

I occasionally lurk around the forums but I decided to come forward to read what some of the communist think of anarchism.Well I guess the question is 'which anarchist and anarchist ideas do you mean'? As with socialism there is a broad range of ideas under that umbrella and like socialism these ideas range from emancipatory working class politics to confused petty bougoise ideas and everything inbetween.


The emphasis on individualism and their rationality in a self-regulating society is what is bothersome.Not quite sure what you mean specifically. I think "induvidualist" based strategies for liberation are a dead end that usually leads to some elitist conclusions, but from my perspective, class self-emancipation is a collective effort but one which would actually create emense potential for induvidual self-development and personal expression (with vastly increased access to education and creative tools, more free-time, having input into whatever productive tasks, and so on).


Well to start people are far from rational, I really can’t remember but social psychology proves this constantly for an example confabulation, poor perception of events and general limitation of memory.This is really abstract to me, how do we base rationality of people - is there some ideal level of it that we all must measure ourselves against?

Anyway, concerning the problems in modern society, "irrational" behavior is probably only a small factor and are definately not fundamental to the irrationality of capitalist society, which is systemic in the capitalism of hidden exploitation, oppression, and alienation.


Finally to me it seems like anarchism is just a middle class movement that sits on the fence that idolizes the self which again to me seems like a concept that is detrimental to solidarity and self-alienating and reminds me of a passage from the communist manifesto.There is a middle-class pull on anarchism and middle class tendencies... just like with Socialism. This is especailly true in times of low class struggle when there is little real-world force to counter capitalism.

The comment about compatability with neo-liberal ideas is interesting, but I wouldn't say that this is broadly true of anarchism. I think there is a more general trend right now in which local activism acts as a sort of reformist adaption to neoliberalism and the end of Keynsian policies. There's some overlap where some people with these views call themselves anarchists, but I think they would really be more like "radical liberals" or sort of the anarchist analogue to reformist socialists. But this broader tendancy also includes many more people who would identify as progressives and pacifists and even some who seek pro-market "small capitalism" local efforts. It seems like a sort of a modern echo of utopian socialism.


“The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.”Yes, there is a tendency similar to this in anarchism... but again wouldn't this also describe utopian socialists, fabians, and reformist socialists?

Basically my point is that to talk of anarchism in such a broad way would be like talking of socialism without making distinctions between parlementary-reformists, fabians, utopians, and social-democrats. I'm not an anarchist and so I have various criticisms of specific things and specific trends, but some are more fundamental than others. There are many anarchists I would want to be on the same side with, many anarchist political trends that - though I may even disagree - I think have a positive role to play, and other trends that I think are total dead-ends.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I beg to differ. You probably mean most anarchists you know.
You still don't seem to realise that anarchism means that the state, capitalism and the bourgiousie all is heavily entangeled. No one can exist without the others. If anarchists are fighting bourgiousie, there also fighting the state and capitalism. There is no fighting only one.

Ah, so fighting against the Klan will somehow overthrow the state? I think that most anarchists are somewhat more careful than that.


But what has the petit-bourgious have to do with Makhno? And don't give me that crap about the Agrarfrage, in the end the peasants working for the large landowners are just as prole as the workers (so was Makhno).

But the rural proletariat was negligible in the Ukraine, particularly after the land reforms. The Makhnovshchina was mainly supported by middle peasants, and even kulak elements. These were petit-bourgeois or even bourgeois elements.


*This site is multi-tendency and I'm not opposed to revolution although I'm often opposed to the specifics.

You seem to be opposed to every specific revolutionary strategy, to be honest. But I wasn't talking about you when I mentioned aggressively antirevolutionary members - I was talking about the alleged "nihilists" and whatnot. What surprised me is your open antipolitical attitude. I'm not trying to get you banned, though, I'm just saying that it doesn't seem to make much sense that you would hang out on a political site so much.


Are you really going to use the Bookchinist tactic of equating any talk of existing, concrete individuals with bourgeois individualism and its abstractions? You would not differentiate between Stirner and Novatore and Hobbes and Locke?

I am talking about organisational individualism and liberalism, though it should be pointed out that both Stirner and Locke share certain theoretical assumptions.


I’ll only speak for myself here. I don’t care about party building or party discipline or proletarian states or other such tested and failed leftist leftovers from the previous century. The left is capital’s loyal opposition and its function is to recuperate revolutionary potential.

The revolutionary/communist perspective as anti-political, the rejection of work and the worker identity/role rather than its affirmation, the revolution of everyday life, a critique of technology and civilisation – these are all far more interesting to me.

Good for you! As for me, I have no interest in Heideggerean mysticism or moralistic lifestylism. This demonstrates the split I have been arguing for for the last few pages. We might call ourselves "left", but there is no real commonality between us. I have much more in common with a Marxist-Leninist or an anarchist like Bookchin than the anti-civ, "revolution of everyday life" people.

[Jimmie Higgins]

No, but members are required to perform a series of LARPing activities, handing out this or that leaflet/newspaper, paying dues, attending the no doubt endless and boring meetings, defending the correct positions in public debate and all that yadayada.LARP? This is a rather silly and empty argument. By this definition, doing anything is playing a role. But what roles are being played, if we break this down? So in the above examples, the role being played is of someone who is attempting to organize, agitate, and educate... as the old IWW slogan says. Now unless they are "playing" Big Bill Haywood or Eugene Debs and they think they are participating in a lumber strike, then the role that they are "playing" is actually the role that they are attempting to do (irregardless of how sucessfully or not). They are role-playing at attempting to connect radical politics to wider groups of people and create space for political discussion and organizing in their communities and if they are part of a group they may also be role-playing trying to attract people to that group. But this is the role they are playing and doing!

I think there is a bit of role-playing on the radical left and probably always has been to some extent. But I don't think people going to coalition meetings or working on some struggle are "playing" at anything other than what they are attempting to do. The LARPers seem to me to be like the self-proclaimed Leninist vanguards parties who imagined that their "purity of political theory" put them at the head of a non-existant mass working class movement; they played at dennouncing their imgainged Menshivik opponents, they played at imagining themselves the sole heirs to various movements and figures. Maoist groups at the same time LARPed as gurellas in the "belly of the beast"; Some radicals - including anarchists -today, LARP at thinking that their street battles with police, connected to no larger class forces than the dozens of participants, are challenging the state and inspiring the masses by moralistically confronting cops... whose job it is to control and arrest small crowds of people anyway and most workers don't need to find reasons to be harassed by the cops. Long Live the Oakland Commune - a wonderful sentiment for the tens of us in the movement who knew the reference, but really, LARPing: a park-occupation imagined as a liberated city.


In the end it ammounts to a lifestyle choice between getting your face tattooed, not eating meat and hopping freight trains or getting together with 5 people every sunday in the backroom of some pub wearing knitted sweaters and trying to divine the "correct line" on syria (lol) to put out in some rag to hand out to disinterested pedestrians.It would be lifestylism if anyone thought tatoos were a viable route to liberation. For the boring sect you describe, they may be disconnected or ineffective, but what they are trying to do is re-build radical politics among wider numbers of the population... they believe that a radicalized working class is the key to revolution - not the act of discussing politics for the hell of it or wearing sweaters.


5 people handing out leaflets or standing on the sideline near a strike are about as much 'collective action' as trying to sell CrimeThinc's "evasion" at a punk show.If people were selling a CrimeThinc book, that would be a political, not a lifestyle act - even if the point of the activity was to advocate for lifestyle-based solutions. They would be making a political argument... unless they think that the very act of selling books itself is what will cause revolution.

Handing out leaflets isn't a collective action and I don't know anyone who'd argue it was... but the focus is what? Either on trying to build their group among wider groups of people or on trying to build the possibility of collective action by building that coalition or grassroots movement - mobilizing some kind of collective power. I don't know of any radical groups who think that the act of handing out fliers or leaflets itself is anything other than a means... that's the problem with so-called lifestylism: not the act in of itself, but concluding that the act is an end in of itself.


Many leading historical figures of "class struggle anarchism" have at times engaged in illegalism/propaganda of the deed and other "lifestylist" behavior, like being vegans/vegetarians, being nudists, practicing free love, living on communes, supporting animal liberation, etc.I think the criticism of lifestylism is not about the acts themselves, but in thinking that induvidually living or acting in a certain way will lead to revolution itself. All tactics are valid - provided that they are effective. Even counter-cultures and alternative working class cultures can be political in certain contexts of a mass movement - the history of the IWW has good examples of that. Alternately, there is nothing wrong with people liking various lifestyles - there should be more of that possible for people - but the problem is in the tendency - and I'd say it's mainly a liberal outlook, not anarchist, to see those personal choices or preferences as a viable route to revolution. This is ineffective by and large in my view, but it also leads to a kind of moralism and often elitism (which go hand in hand IMO). If, like in the 60s, some people see the way to fight capitalism is, dropping out, for example then those who can not afford or are unwilling to "drop out" are part of the problem.

Liberal lifestylism is huge in the Bay Area and it definately has an elitiet and "pro-small capitalism" bent to it. By and large I don't think you can honestly call it anarchist at all, most would say they are "progressives" or something, but there is all pull of these ideas on some anarchist and socialist thinking.


The revolutionary/communist perspective as anti-political, the rejection of work and the worker identity/role rather than its affirmation, the revolution of everyday life, a critique of technology and civilisation – these are all far more interesting to me. Well how do we get from here to there is the question. I don't need to "affirm" my role as a wage-worker, it's thrust on me... I have no wealth or savings, but debt and rent. If I do not work, then I am still a worker, just an unemployed one both practically and in the eyes of society. I don't need to "affirm" the power of the state, I live in freaking Oakland - did Occupy have to "affirm" the power of 14 police departments cracking people's heads for trying to organize in a park? The cops famously shot someone at a Subway station a few blockes from my appartment, racial profling is daily experience for black and brown youth in my neighborhood. How can we speak of "daily revolution" when daily demoralization and oppression are what people face?

To get from here to there, from wage-work to our own LIFE, revolutions need power just like Malcolm X talked about - change doesn't happen from a seat at the table or the good will of the oppressors or from trying to pretend the state and system don't have a web over everything under the sun and moon. Our power is that the system can't run without us and that we can shut things down and take over... but this requires organizing with people and "boring meetings" occasionally, in other words, politics.

[Fionnagáin]

I've gone dumpster-diving and pamphleteering, and, far as I can see, the main difference between the two was that the dumpster-diving was fun. Pretending that either represent some inherently significant political act is silly, but that's not an argument for or against either of them, just against being a wanker about it.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I've gone dumpster-diving and pamphleteering, and, far as I can see, the main difference between the two was that the dumpster-diving was fun. Pretending that either represent some inherently significant political act is silly, but that's not an argument for or against either of them, just against being a wanker about it.so if people organize with each other, they can challenge the system, yeah?. Could everyone dumpster dive to end capitalism? No.

Dumpster diving as fun is ok, dumpster diving as a way to end capitalism is impossible.

Personally I like LSD and comic books... Is that a revolutionary act? Will that ever bring down the system?

[Ele'ill]

You seem to be opposed to every specific revolutionary strategy, to be honest. But I wasn't talking about you when I mentioned aggressively antirevolutionary members - I was talking about the alleged "nihilists" and whatnot. What surprised me is your open antipolitical attitude. I'm not trying to get you banned, though, I'm just saying that it doesn't seem to make much sense that you would hang out on a political site so much.

Being critical of formal organization doesn't mean that I am uninterested or going to be unengaged in conversation on the topic. This site isn't 'revtrot' or 'revtradition' and certainly by 'every specific revolutionary strategy' you're referring to the only one that has been discussed here which is yours.

[Fionnagáin]

so if people organize with each other, they can challenge the system, yeah?. Could everyone dumpster dive to end capitalism? No.

Dumpster diving as fun is ok, dumpster diving as a way to end capitalism is impossible.

Personally I like LSD and comic books... Is that a revolutionary act? Will that ever bring down the system?
Who said anything about "bringing down capitalism"? The idea was just to game the system a little, a venerable working class tradition if there ever was one. Like I said, some people might make a big song and dance about it, but that just means they're arseholes, doesn't have any bearing on the activity itself.

[Ele'ill]

It's often times extremely liberating, borderline lifechanging, for individuals, sometimes in groups, to confront a barrier or an oppressive aspect of society by breaking through the mold of what they otherwise should be doing. It isn't liberating in the sense that it actually liberates them from any of it, sometimes it kind of does depending on what it is, but it helps shed the baby teeth and break down the mode of discipline we face as being objects within a rigid society.

[Domela Nieuwenhuis]

Ah, so fighting against the Klan will somehow overthrow the state? I think that most anarchists are somewhat more careful than that.

The Klan??? What the hell are you rambling about?


But the rural proletariat was negligible in the Ukraine, particularly after the land reforms. The Makhnovshchina was mainly supported by middle peasants, and even kulak elements. These were petit-bourgeois or even bourgeois elements.
Okay. Now what? "Whip" any other than proletarians into line as you nicely put it?
Since i'm a small business owner (besides by mechanic dayjob), some would consider me petit-bourgious. But in no way am i to reform to capitalism, whatever might happen. I am probably every ounce as revolutionairy as you are. Our only difference is the way towards and especially after the revolution.
...
But since i'm petit-bourgious...please don't whip me! :(

[Captain Ahab]

If one were to take a careful look at Semendyaev's posts one can see this curious lack of any citation whatsoever in his claims about Makhno.
Perhaps Semen would be kind enough to back his statement on what "kulak" elements supported Makhno.

[bcbm]

But I wasn't talking about you when I mentioned aggressively antirevolutionary members - I was talking about the alleged "nihilists" and whatnot.

how are we anti-revolutionary?

[Jimmie Higgins]

It's often times extremely liberating, borderline lifechanging, for individuals, sometimes in groups, to confront a barrier or an oppressive aspect of society by breaking through the mold of what they otherwise should be doing. It isn't liberating in the sense that it actually liberates them from any of it, sometimes it kind of does depending on what it is, but it helps shed the baby teeth and break down the mode of discipline we face as being objects within a rigid society.

This is true, but don't the politics come first in these cases? Isn't someone, at least partially, politically convinced that society is oppressive in order to then feel a sense of solidarity or self-liberation from the act?

And if feeling a sense of self-freedom or testing ourselves is the point, then so is skydiving and mountain climbing or yachting for the rich. Oh how the petty-bourgoise love to test themselves. I guess the rest of us get a little petty-rebllion and LSD to help us get our kicks. And I don't have a moral issue with people simply enjoying the thrill of these things either* -- only a problem with the tendency of people to sometimes romanticize these things and seeing them as a meaningful contribution towards actual change in of themselves.

If everyone who'd ever shoplifted candy or whatever else we could grab from the liquor store for thrills as a teenager became personally liberated in a way that did much for class struggle, then we'd already be living in a liberated society.

If I was an abused prisoner in a cell, it may feel good and liberating to yell at the guards, to throw something or hit them if I got a chance... I would often also need to defend myself from time to time. In the first instance I may feel better for having done this, I may have shown an aggressive posture towards the guards, but other than that, nothing; in the second it would be out of sheer necessity and even if I lost, I would have at least tried to maintain ground. But I would not be able to free myself until I materially built myself a way out, tunneling out bit by bit.

People should do what they like and enjoy what they enjoy as much as is possible... they should just stop making manifestos out of it.

*Although extreme mountain climbing seems really stupid to me... go on a hike. Or take some drugs, it's safer.


Who said anything about "bringing down capitalism"? The idea was just to game the system a little, a venerable working class tradition if there ever was one. Like I said, some people might make a big song and dance about it, but that just means they're arseholes, doesn't have any bearing on the activity itself.Yeah, to me, what you are describing and in support of is just a lifestyle, not lifestylism. But in California anyway, there is a tendency (generally among liberals, but it has an influence on some people on the Left) of lifestylism: seeing their personal lifestyle choices as being radical acts in of themselves.

[Engels]

I am talking about organisational individualism and liberalism, though it should be pointed out that both Stirner and Locke share certain theoretical assumptions.

This is far too vague for me to articulate a suitable reply.


Good for you! As for me, I have no interest in Heideggerean mysticism or moralistic lifestylism. That’s nice. Neither do I.


This demonstrates the split I have been arguing for for the last few pages. We might call ourselves "left", but there is no real commonality between us. I never did say I was a leftist or that we had much in common.


I have much more in common with a Marxist-Leninist or an anarchist like Bookchin than the anti-civ, "revolution of everyday life" people. Of course you do. Bookchin too was a tireless defender of the faith and never stopped trying to re-enact the glory of a bygone era.

[Engels]

Well how do we get from here to there is the question.

Are you asking if I have programmatic specifications or favour a particular organisational from? No, I don’t.


To get from here to there, from wage-work to our own LIFE, revolutions need power just like Malcolm X talked about - change doesn't happen from a seat at the table or the good will of the oppressors or from trying to pretend the state and system don't have a web over everything under the sun and moon. Our power is that the system can't run without us and that we can shut things down and take over... but this requires organizing with people and "boring meetings" occasionally, in other words, politics. I don’t think that the question of power is solved by one group exchanging it with another, or by dispersing it more equally. And I agree with your point about the role of the worker being given to them by capital. I meant that revolutionary potential of workers arises from their negative potential: from their rejection of work and their role as worker. So why in the world would I want to take over my workplace? Ignoring the fact that it’s a shit job (as most work tends to be), it would entail the continuation of work as separate activity and of politics as a specialised sphere separate from social life. Seeing as politics arose alongside class society, ending class divisions means going beyond politics.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Being critical of formal organization doesn't mean that I am uninterested or going to be unengaged in conversation on the topic. This site isn't 'revtrot' or 'revtradition' and certainly by 'every specific revolutionary strategy' you're referring to the only one that has been discussed here which is yours.

Except this isn't a discussion about the united versus the popular front, about participation in parliamenary bodies or anything like that, is it? This is a discussion about collective political action versus individualist lifestyle choices. Collective political action is, of course, "my" strategy. During the course of this thread, you have claimed that (1) "my" strategy of collective political action is simply one possible strategy, and (2) that the one alternative (except waiting for the dolphins to contact the space aliens to give us all socialism, I suppose), lifestylism, does not exist. So, which is it?

And this isn't about tendencies. There are revolutionary and lifestylist anarchists, Bordigists, hell, perhaps there are Hoxhaists who think socialism can be fought for by plastering Enver's face everywhere and learning Albanian. Though it should be pointed out that this post-left nonsense was once more influential on this site, and that many if not most actual left tendencies were excluded. As the site attracted more users, these bizarre rules were rescinded, apparently, but even today, certain administrators sympathetic to these positions are not above threatening to exclude "state capitalists". I don't want this site to become RevTrot (no, please, I'd die of boredom), but some people are apparently more than comfortable with it being RevUltraLeft or RevStyle.


Who said anything about "bringing down capitalism"?

That's sort of the topic around this site is ostensibly built. If that is not what the post-left is talking about, how is it more relevant to this site than, I don't know, the average price of a Che shirt?


The Klan??? What the hell are you rambling about?

Anarchists participate in demonstrations against the Klan in America, right? It was just an example (I was discussing an old anti-Klan demo that the SL and the ISO participated in in another thread). Obviously fighting the Klan, the fascists, etc. etc., marching for LGBT equality and so on, will not immediately bring down the state. Yet most anarchists participate in such actions - obviously, then, they disagree with your maximism.


Okay. Now what? "Whip" any other than proletarians into line as you nicely put it?

Well, yes. And whip those proletarians that jeopardise revolutionary action into line as well.


Since i'm a small business owner (besides by mechanic dayjob), some would consider me petit-bourgious. But in no way am i to reform to capitalism, whatever might happen. I am probably every ounce as revolutionairy as you are. Our only difference is the way towards and especially after the revolution.
...
But since i'm petit-bourgious...please don't whip me! :(

I'm a member of the middle strata myself. I am not trying to insinuate anything about your subjective consciousness. But the fact is, our strata tend to act horribly confused in revolutionary situations. Perhaps, if the revolution came, we would both be exemplary revolutionaries. Perhaps we would lose nerve and start making mistakes like Kamenev and Muranev, in which case we would be subject to party discipline. Perhaps we would turn out to be scoundrels like Plekhanov. Who knows? People think that their subjective dedication to the revolution ensures them against error and degeneration, but that just isn't the case, unfortunately.


If one were to take a careful look at Semendyaev's posts one can see this curious lack of any citation whatsoever in his claims about Makhno.
Perhaps Semen would be kind enough to back his statement on what "kulak" elements supported Makhno.

I could cite Soviet sources, but you would simply proclaim them inadmissible. But, for example, Arshinov, an anarchist, notes that even during the height of the land reform, the kulaks were given "an equal share" with other peasants. And, as Arshinov further admits, the reform was not carried out everywhere. Palij writes that the third Makhnovist congress rejected "with approval of both the poor and the rich peasants" the "Bolshevik expropriators". During the latter phase of his insurgency, Makhno would send telegrams - some of these could be found in the Makhno Archives, online, the authors apparently not realising how much it compromises their batko - to the Cossacks urging them to kill their "oppressors" in the food dictatorship.

And the Makhnovist policy of "free trade" with the cities (the cities Makhno called a "poison") only meant the enrichment of the kulaks, the only stratum with anything to trade.


how are we anti-revolutionary?

Since you - I mean the general tendency, but this was also the impression I got from our very brief conversation in a past thread - reject the possibility of a revolution.


This is far too vague for me to articulate a suitable reply.

I already gave the example of Kamenev and Muranev - refusal to carry out orders from the centre, engaging in individual action that goes against the party line, defending oneself by reference to alleged personal rights vis a vis the revolution etc. etc.

[bcbm]

Since you - I mean the general tendency, but this was also the impression I got from our very brief conversation in a past thread - reject the possibility of a revolution.

uh no i dont and i never have:confused:

[Captain Ahab]

I could cite Soviet sources, but you would simply proclaim them inadmissible. But, for example, Arshinov, an anarchist, notes that even during the height of the land reform, the kulaks were given "an equal share" with other peasants.
What is wrong with this. Would the ideal policy have been to make the Kulaks without anything?
And now that you mention Arshinov:
http://www.nestormakhno.info/english/makfaq/h_6_8.htm

Secondly, we could just point to the eyewitness accounts of the anarchists Arshinov and Voline. Both stress that the Makhno movement was a mass revolutionary movement of the peasant and working poor in the Southern Ukraine. Arshinov states that after Denikin's troops had been broken in 1919, the Makhnovists "literally swept through villages, towns and cities like an enormous broom" and the "returned pomeshchiks [landlords], the kulaks , the police, the priests" were destroyed, so refuting the "the myth spread by the Bolsheviks about the so-called kulak character of the Makhnovshchina." Ironically, he states that "wherever the Makhnovist movement developed, the kulaks sought the protection of the Soviet authorities, and found it there." [Op. Cit., p. 145] Yossif the Emigrant, another anarchist active in the movement, told anarchist Alexander Berkman that while there was a "kulak" element within it, "the great majority are not of that type." [quoted by Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth, p. 187] According to Halyna Makhno (Makhno's wife), when entering a town or village it was "always Makhno's practice to compel the rich peasants, the kulaki , to give up their surplus wealth, which was then divided among the poor, Makhno keeping a share for his army. Then he would call a meeting of the villagers, address them on the purposes of the povstantsi [partisan] movement, and distribute his literature." [Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia, p. 149]

And, as Arshinov further admits, the reform was not carried out everywhere.
This does not support your case as it ignores various material realities that prevent land reform from being applied everywhere at once.

Palij writes that the third Makhnovist congress rejected "with approval of both the poor and the rich peasants" the "Bolshevik expropriators". During the latter phase of his insurgency, Makhno would send telegrams - some of these could be found in the Makhno Archives, online, the authors apparently not realising how much it compromises their batko - to the Cossacks urging them to kill their "oppressors" in the food dictatorship.
Hostility to your beloved Bolshevism does not strengthen your case.
Approval is also not the same as support.

And the Makhnovist policy of "free trade" with the cities (the cities Makhno called a "poison") only meant the enrichment of the kulaks, the only stratum with anything to trade.
I didn't realize Makhno's view of the cities determined the entire stance of a movement towards them. The rest of this statements is not backed by anything and is an assertion.

But you are right in a way. A very tiny Kulak element supported Makhno. But such fact does not support your arguments against him much.
EDIT: lol fixed mistake

[Ele'ill]

This is true, but don't the politics come first in these cases? Isn't someone, at least partially, politically convinced that society is oppressive in order to then feel a sense of solidarity or self-liberation from the act? And if feeling a sense of self-freedom or testing ourselves is the point, then so is skydiving and mountain climbing or yachting for the rich. Oh how the petty-bourgoise love to test themselves.

I was mainly referring to the lifestylist slur being thrown at people who were already politically aware. Poor people do some of those things too but those activities aren't really even a comparison to what I posted.



I guess the rest of us get a little petty-rebllion and LSD to help us get our kicks. And I don't have a moral issue with people simply enjoying the thrill of these things either* -- only a problem with the tendency of people to sometimes romanticize these things and seeing them as a meaningful contribution towards actual change in of themselves.

If everyone who'd ever shoplifted candy or whatever else we could grab from the liquor store for thrills as a teenager became personally liberated in a way that did much for class struggle, then we'd already be living in a liberated society.I wasn't thinking of stealing candy bars when I made the post however maybe if every organization wasn't based around control of escalation and rigid discipline and copied the more autonomous model of stealing candy bars we'd already be living in a liberated society.




If I was an abused prisoner in a cell, it may feel good and liberating to yell at the guards, to throw something or hit them if I got a chance... I would often also need to defend myself from time to time. In the first instance I may feel better for having done this, I may have shown an aggressive posture towards the guards, but other than that, nothing; in the second it would be out of sheer necessity and even if I lost, I would have at least tried to maintain ground. But I would not be able to free myself until I materially built myself a way out, tunneling out bit by bit.How about sabotaging the toilets and sinks. How about other subversive actions to carry out on your own or with others over a period of time.


People should do what they like and enjoy what they enjoy as much as is possible... they should just stop making manifestos out of it.I think that 'manifestos' is a bit of a stretch and it's quite obviously the formal organizations referencing and creating them but you do see a lot of communiques from individuals and affinities. Keeping in mind that things aren't great I think what it does if nothing else is help people realize just how illegal their own liberation is but how easy it is to attack those once seemingly scary and incomprehensible barriers and obstacles that oppress them. Both a new and the current world come into sharper focus when you subvert the authority of the candybar corps. If you do this enough, you could create a candybar culture of resistance and influence individuals and groups within traditional organizations to eat more candy via shoplifting. If nothing else, free candy!




*Although extreme mountain climbing seems really stupid to me... go on a hike. Or take some drugs, it's safer.

Yeah, to me, what you are describing and in support of is just a lifestyle, not lifestylism. But in California anyway, there is a tendency (generally among liberals, but it has an influence on some people on the Left) of lifestylism: seeing their personal lifestyle choices as being radical acts in of themselves.A lot of personal/individual decisions to act are very radical although again I am confused why the anti-lifestyle side of this discussion can't just come out and say what specific lifestyle stuff is 'allegedly' radical but 'actually isn't'.

[Ele'ill]

Except this isn't a discussion about the united versus the popular front, about participation in parliamenary bodies or anything like that, is it? This is a discussion about collective political action versus individualist lifestyle choices. Collective political action is, of course, "my" strategy. During the course of this thread, you have claimed that (1) "my" strategy of collective political action is simply one possible strategy, and (2) that the one alternative (except waiting for the dolphins to contact the space aliens to give us all socialism, I suppose), lifestylism, does not exist. So, which is it?

And this isn't about tendencies. There are revolutionary and lifestylist anarchists, Bordigists, hell, perhaps there are Hoxhaists who think socialism can be fought for by plastering Enver's face everywhere and learning Albanian. Though it should be pointed out that this post-left nonsense was once more influential on this site, and that many if not most actual left tendencies were excluded. As the site attracted more users, these bizarre rules were rescinded, apparently, but even today, certain administrators sympathetic to these positions are not above threatening to exclude "state capitalists". I don't want this site to become RevTrot (no, please, I'd die of boredom), but some people are apparently more than comfortable with it being RevUltraLeft or RevStyle.

no this thread is about communist's perception of anarchism to which you pretty much stated that post-left criticisms of traditional professional revolutionary organizations was just individual lifestyle anarchist bs instead of good 'real revolutionary' anarchists which is the actual bs. Your 'collective action' is much different than a post-left concept of 'collective action'. This site has users who are influenced by post-left stuff but the main discussion on the forum is about pro-rev tradition and historical figures, stats and other boring shit. You're just mad because of the valid criticisms.

[blake 3:17]

This is true, but don't the politics come first in these cases? Isn't someone, at least partially, politically convinced that society is oppressive in order to then feel a sense of solidarity or self-liberation from the act?

And if feeling a sense of self-freedom or testing ourselves is the point, then so is skydiving and mountain climbing or yachting for the rich. Oh how the petty-bourgoise love to test themselves. I guess the rest of us get a little petty-rebllion and LSD to help us get our kicks. And I don't have a moral issue with people simply enjoying the thrill of these things either* -- only a problem with the tendency of people to sometimes romanticize these things and seeing them as a meaningful contribution towards actual change in of themselves.

If everyone who'd ever shoplifted candy or whatever else we could grab from the liquor store for thrills as a teenager became personally liberated in a way that did much for class struggle, then we'd already be living in a liberated society.

I ran into my now favourite and now retired prof, who was a Shachtmanite, on the street last night and we had an interesting chat. He taught Sociology & the last class of his I took was Sociology of Revolution. He'd pointed out that a lot of younger students just weren't interested in macro issues and had previously been slightly disdainful of 'deviance", etc. He made some interesting comments on failed/stalled Left project we'd both been involved with, and gave some ground to 'micro-politics'.

There's no need to romanticize banditry -- at the same time there are skills involved that deserve respect. When you were referring to LSD & comic books -- both are massive, and in many ways have been more successful subversive influences on North America than any kind of orthodox leftism. One of the few times I nearly pooped myself in public was meeting Robert Crumb...

[Domela Nieuwenhuis]

Anarchists participate in demonstrations against the Klan in America, right? It was just an example (I was discussing an old anti-Klan demo that the SL and the ISO participated in in another thread). Obviously fighting the Klan, the fascists, etc. etc., marching for LGBT equality and so on, will not immediately bring down the state. Yet most anarchists participate in such actions - obviously, then, they disagree with your maximism.

Antifa is a big part of anarchist ideology, so yes anarchists demonstrate the Klan. What i said is not, attack one and it is enough. What i did say was You cannot attack one without attacking the other. We fight the system as a whole. That's why anarchists participate in those demonstrations. You need to read what i wrote better, because i never implied that fighting one abolishes the others.



Well, yes. And whip those proletarians that jeopardise revolutionary action into line as well.

That's why people are so anti-communist today, because people like you think you should whip people to comply. As Malatesta said:

We anarchists do not want to emancipate the people; we want the people to emancipate themselves.



I'm a member of the middle strata myself. I am not trying to insinuate anything about your subjective consciousness. But the fact is, our strata tend to act horribly confused in revolutionary situations. Perhaps, if the revolution came, we would both be exemplary revolutionaries. Perhaps we would lose nerve and start making mistakes like Kamenev and Muranev, in which case we would be subject to party discipline. Perhaps we would turn out to be scoundrels like Plekhanov. Who knows? People think that their subjective dedication to the revolution ensures them against error and degeneration, but that just isn't the case, unfortunately.

I habe the feeling you are a bit unsure about your position in a revolution. I on the other hand am quite sure about what i want. If the revolution comes and my business turns to shit, so what! If it doesn't support the wants of the people, what good was it anyway. It's more of a hobby for me anyway. |I'd actually do it for free (and that's what i've been doing a lot anyways; free work for family and friends).
Also, as an anarchist i feel not subjected to any party-leadership.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Are you asking if I have programmatic specifications or favour a particular organisational from? No, I don’t.No, how do we "negate" wage labor? Boycotting it may work for small groups of induviduals as long as their moral resolve lasts, but will not work for the entirety of the population and, furthermore, opting out tends to separate people from the rest of the working class... and often tends to create an elitist attitude in regard to the masses of "sheeple" not willing to live off the grid or live in squats and so on.


I don’t think that the question of power is solved by one group exchanging it with another, or by dispersing it more equally. And I agree with your point about the role of the worker being given to them by capital. I meant that revolutionary potential of workers arises from their negative potential: from their rejection of work and their role as worker. So why in the world would I want to take over my workplace?

Whoever controls production controls society. Mass repression for them can only go so far. Resistance for us can also only go so far - we need more than resistance to get rid of the system though. We need different relationships to things that can replace the current relationships.

If capitalism can turn thousands of peasants into the working class, if it can overcome massive resistance to the process of prolitarization among rural people all over the world, if it can smash native armed resistance in the Americas and other parts of the world... do you really think opting out is an option for more than a tiny minority? If opting out and negating work was a threat to the system, don't you think the capitalists would be worried about the 30-50% of Oakland's black youth who are unemployed chronically?

No, they won't care about us one way or the other until people have some kind of collective resistance, especially one that does impact production. In fact if "negation" was a threat to the system, then US black people would not be being marginalized so systematically. A threat to the system may come out of this situation, but it would be because of mass rioting and collective movements by black people, not because of their non-self-imposed "negation" of work.


Ignoring the fact that it’s a shit job (as most work tends to be), it would entail the continuation of work as separate activity and of politics as a specialised sphere separate from social life. Seeing as politics arose alongside class society, ending class divisions means going beyond politics.So since politics reflects the fact of a society where there are different class interests, the way to overcome class divisions is to ignore politics? Just like if we don't talk about racial discrimination, we won't "legitimize" race? Maybe I'm not understanding you here.

At any rate, taking over workplaces and communities (I mean hell, why would I want to take over the slum neighborhood and the crappy apartment I live in either?) is the "how we get from here to there" that I was speaking of. Power doesn't concede anything and it can't be ignored away or subverted through slow-building alternatives on the side. To get rid of it, there needs to be some kind of counter-power. Some people think that this could happen through armed struggle, but I think that our "power" when it comes to that is much weaker than their power of arms (the state), but collectively, as workers, we have our hands on the wheels of the system and can shut it down and "build our own new tracks" so to speak, in our own way.

Frankly I think a lot of the alternatives to this basis truism of Marxism and class-oriented anarchism comes out of revolutionary pessimism. In the 70s marxists thought that workers were "bought-off" and part of the problem and some looked to students or ghettoized people as the agents of revolution themselves. Not that either of those groups can't be the most radical at a given time, but that students blowing up some police cars can't overthrow a system that can survive (and actually profit from) two world wars, atomic weapons drops, destruction of whole industrial areas and so on. Now some people look to the so-called precariate or romanticize living off the grid or whatnot and it's really a similar thing... pessimism due to lack of class struggle from our side.

[Os Cangaceiros]

So did the landowner class, which was still prominent in the early capitalist period. For that matter, so did the predecessors of the bourgeoisie. I don't see how that is an argument for, or against, anything.

It's against the argument that being a peasant automatically makes one a member of the petite-bourgeoisie. The peasantry as an doomed & ruined petty bourgeois class was the Menshevik line, not the Bolshevik line...Lenin actually saw the peasants as potentially revolutionary post-1905. The reason was because the benefits of overseas European imperialism had driven food prices to the rock bottom, impoverishing the peasants despite the property they may or may not own.


This is vague; what is "real" ownership? The peasantry, even the lower strata, owned their land, placing them firmly in the petite bourgeoisie (unless they extracted surplus value from their hired help, which was extremely rare).

They didn't really own the land. For example, in Moldovia, peasants were rented out land from landlords (labor rent, or dijmă la tarla) and this was enforced harshly. One instance of this rent being raised on the peasants resulted in a violent pogrom in which over 20,000 were slain. In 1893 an edict was passed forbidding peasants from leaving their communes at all, basically a form of neo-serfdom. And that's without even getting into the rents that peasants owed their landlords (even after the end of serfdom), the state in the form of "redemption dues", or the fact that peasants worked communally & the commune, not the individual farmer or family, "owned" the land, strip-farming usage of which was established at the village assemblies (skhod). This was thought to prevent individual people and families from acquiring their own land and passing it on to their children. Therefore no one invested in it. This was a common system of the peasantry all over Europe. Later efforts by the Russian state to break up the communes post-1900 often met with violent resistance, as the vast majority of the peasantry preferred to remain in the communal arraignment as far as 1917. (The so-called "kulaks" only represented about 3% of the peasantry in 1900...they were regarded with hostility by other peasants, as "devourers of the commune").


The hired labourers who worked on the haciendas obviously did not own the means of production; neither did serfs. Makhno's family, on the other hand, owned their plot of land and most of the tools used to work it.

Really? Do you have any proof for that assertion? Regardless, Makhno's work history as a farm laborer, industrial painter and metal worker is not "petty bourgeois" in the slightest. Or is someone permanently tainted by their family background?

The phrase "primitive socialist accumulation" (laugh as much as you want - that is an objective necessity in backwards states, unless you think industry can be built from good intentions and peasant happiness) refers to the period of the first five-year plans and the collectivisation drive. In the rest of the paragraph, you seem to be talking about the period of Military Communism, or the partial restoration of Military Communism under the so-called Ural-Siberian method.[/quote]

Preobrazhensky was a tool and "primitive socialist accumulation" was a fool's errand. It was the result of the paradox of a communist revolution in a state with a supposedly under-developed industrial complex (or at least not as developed as Germany or the United Kingdom). In the aftermath of the failure of revolution in western Europe, it became apparent to some that with enough willpower they could somehow create an industrially developed state and then there would be no more contradiction! Because as any good Marxist knows, it's conscious human agency that develops the forces of production to their "destiny"...not, y'know, hundreds of years of social struggles, class conflicts, technological advances, ebbs and flows in state power, etc. Nope, with enough factories, starved/dragooned peasants, iron production etc we'll drag this feudal mudhole out of the mire and build socialism! Gotta go through hell to get to heaven!


And yes, these periods were marked by violence. So what? The main tasks of the proletarian state in each period - respectively supplying the cities and the Red Army with food and industrialisation - were accomplished. Were there administrative errors? Of course there were, but given the material circumstances, it is surprising that there were not more errors. Was the peasantry opposed to these measures? Possibly the majority of them were, but again, so what? The party of the proletariat is not the party of the peasantry. We can not allow ourselves to be dragged into the mud of small commodity production and liberalism by peasant intransigence.

The violence was not directed against the class enemy. It was directed against the people of Russia, who were left to starve in the countryside as the food they produced was funneled to the cities which forbidded them from even moving with internal passports. But hey, at least the Red Army got food, right? You need someone to keep the people in line, lest they get upset over their glorious "planned economy" (which, as Hillel Tiktin points out, wasn't a planned economy at all...it was a chaotic pile of shit well into the 1930's). The proletariat didn't exactly have it awesome in this system, either...don't try to make it sound like that was the case. Sure there was increased literacy and skills, but workers were forced to put in long hours and never has there been such a massive increase in industrial production with so little to show for it in the way of consumer goods for the average proletarian. Maybe if you work enough long days in workers paradise, you'll be able to retire in your late 60's like a good Stakhnovite (if you live that long) So while it's all good to gas the people living hand-to-mouth in some pathetic thatched hut because they're "petty bourgeois" in some bizarre way, let's not forget that aspect.


The article you link to is an astounding exercise in complete illogic. The proportion of kulaks was not as great as some imaginary Bolshevik implied - therefore, the kulaks were irrelevant. Outstanding.

Yeah, they were pretty much irrelevant. Certainly not anywhere near as relevant as they were to become in Marxist-Leninist mythology.


Nechayev was active before anarchism became a separate tendency, certainly, and perhaps his barracks communism is an embarrassment, but he was clearly associated with principal anarchist thinkers like Bakunin.

Nechayev was never an anarchist. He was associated with Bakunin, but he was a radical populist narodnik, never an anarchist. Vera Zasulich was associated with or had correspondence with Bakunin, Marx & Trotsky during her lifetime...was she an anarchist, or a Trotskyist? No, of course not.


You act as if the term "lifestylism" was coined by Marxists in order to slander anarchists for being libertarians, but it was coined by an anarchist (now an ex-anarchist) and anarchists are no strangers to "hive minds" and social repression - again, just consider the duo of Nechayev and Bakunin.

Bookchin was a Trotskyist turned anarchist, who in his later years stumped for the Libertarian Party here in the USA (if he's who you're referring to). His body of thought is problematic in a few ways, as others have pointed out. But that's not even the main point in regards to "lifestylism". The main point is that: 1) the spectre of "lifestylism" within anarchism has been routinely overstated, including by Bookchin, and 2) what's referred to as "lifestylism" is not a new phenomenon, and has been a facet of anarchism as practiced by many of the most respected class struggle anarchists.


Why? Has the Central Anarchist Organisation passed a fatwa against him or something? Actually, I did provide more examples - Holloway (The Douche objected that Holloway is a "Marxist", not an anarchist, but the point I was trying to prove was that lifestylism exists, not that it is unique to anarchism) and Zerzan (The Douche objected that I had misread him, without specifying further).

Holloway is not an anarchist.

Zerzan does not want to "solve" the problem of class society with a return to the primitive. He merely sees class as a symptom of mankind's sedentary lifestyle as a result of the Neolithic revolution and the abandonment of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. So you're definitely misreading him if you think his most pressing concern is that of "class", it goes much deeper than that.


I don't think Chairman Bob can be fairly described as "micromanaging the lives" of RCPUSA members. Certainly, there is a creepy personality cult around the man, but he seems fairly innocuous, particularly compared to Logan or Healy. But certain anarchist groups do, effectively, micromanage the lives of their members. Certain branches of the Chernoye Znamya group were like that, as was Nechayev's circle.

It's a cult. I've interacted with those motherfuckers, they distribute "Revolution" (their paper) and leaflets about the magic "new synthesis" (developed through the raw dialectical genius of Avakian). I don't know what Chernoye Znamya is. Nechayev was a scumbag and not an anarchist, like I said. He was a narodnik and, like most of the narodniks, Nihilists and disciples of Herzen, he had an unfortunate fascination with conspiratorial violence.


I wasn't talking about that, though; I was talking about chairman Bob's notorious homophobia. Obviously Bob had an answer to your question - "how should an individual live their life?" Well, by not fucking members of the same sex, according to Bob. Undoubtedly, you will protest that anarchists are libertarians. But homophobic attitudes have been present in both the anarchist and the Marxist movement. A theoretical commitment to libertarianism is not a magical shield against backward notions - we have, on this very site, self-proclaimed anarchists that wish to restrict abortion for example. Even as a proposed policy, that is terrible. But when it becomes a lifestyle requirement? When female members are pressured not to carry out abortions? That is worse by several orders of magnitude.

Avakian justified opposition to homosexuality as a "degeneracy" of bourgeois society. That's a dictation of lifestyle of an entirely different sort than anarchist lifestyle edicts, which were to be brought about through principles of free association (a concept of which many are critical, including myself). Anarchists were some of the first to oppose homophobia, actually, Emma Goldman specifically.


Isn't it better to leave such questions to the individual rather than the party or federation committee, or some self-important theoretician?

That's pretty much what anarchists have argued. Funny how it often hasn't worked like that in ostensibly socialist states though :rolleyes:




And how did these individuals participate in the class struggle? I am familiar with their biographies, at least in most cases, but I can't think of any strikes they led or participated in, any solidarity campaign etc. etc.

And Armand provides a good example of lifestyle anarchism:


By fighting in the Spanish Civil War, organizing strikes, fighting in revolutionary groups, publishing worker's papers, etc? Emile Armand spent years in prison for his anti-militarist and anarchist activities. You're short-sighted if you don't see how those things are related to class.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I ran into my now favourite and now retired prof, who was a Shachtmanite, on the street last night and we had an interesting chat. He taught Sociology & the last class of his I took was Sociology of Revolution. He'd pointed out that a lot of younger students just weren't interested in macro issues and had previously been slightly disdainful of 'deviance", etc.Do you mean the students or the Professor were distaninful of 'deviance'?


He made some interesting comments on failed/stalled Left project we'd both been involved with, and gave some ground to 'micro-politics'.Maybe I'm not sure what you mean but if you mean a sort of rejection of the idea of reshaping (or even confronting) larger structures of power in favor of grassroots politics and or "community-building". Well yeah, I think that's true in my experience too. I see it as sort of a glass is half-full/half-empty thing of neoliberalism... no faith in (keynsian or social) reforms (which could be a positive or negative conclusion) and a focus on grassroots, which I also see as potentially positive or negative.

The positive is the desire for something else and possible a critique of what exists now. The negative, I think, is a reflection of a pessimism about change among some people who have views like this - far more likely to be "liberals" of some sort than even self-identified anarchists or marxists. Often it's litterally, "you can't change things, but you can tend to your (urban) garden" sort of politics.

In Oakland, I think one of the side-effects of Occupy is that there is probably a similar thing happening here as happened to Berkeley after the free-speech movement or San Francisco in the late-beat, early hippy era where lots of people (mostly young white, probably vets of UC budget-cut struggles) seem to be moving here because of a perception of radicalism (in addition to a more general white youth culture developing here as both service-worker and yuppie young people are priced out of S.F.).

This is a positive thing, it opens the potential for more organizing and a population which might actually want to both live here but would be opposed to the increased police violence and gentrification this population shift is connected with (not the radicals or youth specifically, the larger migration of professionals to Oakland created by housing prices in SF and the mass evictions by the Banks in Oakland leading to a "flipping frenzy" by developers).

At any rate, no doubt most of the people in this developing youth culture are not radicals, but the appeal of certain values and rejection of "corporations" opens the possibility for further radicalization. And people come to radical politics from all sorts of differnet angels - often from alternative lifestyles or various idealist conceptions of things and whatnot. That's great, but it's also IMO just a starting point. Radicals in of themselves might be able to create a counter-culture, but radicalism needs to get beyond that in my view. It doesn't mean someone who's a vegan has to eat BBQ in the 'hood, but I think it does mean that a radical vegan (and this is a silly example I'm using to make a point - there are, I'm sure, pleanty of vegans who are doing practical political organizing) should develop political relationships with people who like the BBQ in deep East Oakland or whatnot.

Reading a book by Marx, getting enough propaganda out there, or having a rebel culture are not enough IMO. They can all be starting points for induviduals and on that level these are all valuable, but then it needs to get beyond that. I think most of the "hard-lifestylism" is among self-identified liberals (vegans who think everyone needs to be vegan to "solve" problems of this society, or people who advocate dropping out or living off the grid), but I think a connected issue on the Left for Marxists and anarchists is a little insularity - a turn to lifestyle or disconnected dogma - as a kind of "circle the waggons" tactic during times of low working class fight-back and low class consiousness.

This is mostly annecdotal and may be more specific to the Bay Area - and I don't even know if I understood your point :blushing: - so take it with a grain of salt.


One of the few times I nearly pooped myself in public was meeting Robert Crumb...:lol:

If I ever ran into John Waters, I might have a similar reaction.

[The Feral Underclass]

Communism is the revolutionary movement.

Is communism the revolutionary movement? I'm not sure that's really the correct way to understand it. You can have revolutionary movements that are communist, but there are lots of revolutionary movements that aren't.

Communism refers to a social relationship. It is the existence of a certain kind of social organisation.

[Engels]

I already gave the example of Kamenev and Muranev - refusal to carry out orders from the centre, engaging in individual action that goes against the party line, defending oneself by reference to alleged personal rights vis a vis the revolution etc. etc.

What do two long dead Bolsheviks have to do with anarchists today? And can you give me examples of any “lifestylist” (the ones Bookchin railed against: Black, Zerzan, Clark, or Watson etc.) appealing to “personal rights?”


No, how do we "negate" wage labor? Boycotting it may work for small groups of induviduals as long as their moral resolve lasts, but will not work for the entirety of the population and, furthermore, opting out tends to separate people from the rest of the working class... and often tends to create an elitist attitude in regard to the masses of "sheeple" not willing to live off the grid or live in squats and so on.

The critique and rejection of work is nothing new. From 1917 to 1936 to 1969, workers have pretty much rejected their role when they got the chance and had to be coerced back to it. You can't demand a qualitative change, for a completely different life if you base your liberation on the very institution that is used to enslave you: work.


If opting out and negating work was a threat to the system, don't you think the capitalists would be worried about the 30-50% of Oakland's black youth who are unemployed chronically?

I haven't said anything about opting out?!


So since politics reflects the fact of a society where there are different class interests, the way to overcome class divisions is to ignore politics? Just like if we don't talk about racial discrimination, we won't "legitimize" race? Maybe I'm not understanding you here.

I meant the rejection of politics with regard to the content of communism. Politics is another form of mediation and reached its zenith with democracy which is a specialised time and space separate from the rest of social life, subordinating individual interests to its logic. This in turn means that the revolutionary perspective involves the rejection of democracy entirely, including absurd notions of fulfilling the promises of the bourgeois revolution, or calls for “proletarian democracy” or realising some idealised “direct democracy.” Ending class society would necessarily entail getting rid of politics.


Frankly I think a lot of the alternatives to this basis truism of Marxism and class-oriented anarchism comes out of revolutionary pessimism. In the 70s marxists thought that workers were "bought-off" and part of the problem and some looked to students or ghettoized people as the agents of revolution themselves. Not that either of those groups can't be the most radical at a given time, but that students blowing up some police cars can't overthrow a system that can survive (and actually profit from) two world wars, atomic weapons drops, destruction of whole industrial areas and so on. Now some people look to the so-called precariate or romanticize living off the grid or whatnot and it's really a similar thing... pessimism due to lack of class struggle from our side.

This brings us back to the whole “lifestylism” issue which, despite having died in the 90s, some apparently want to resurrect. I think pessimism is beside the point. It’s about finding other ways to struggle against capital and the state.

Look at this thread. Accusations of “lifestylism” are supported by appeals to tradition (lifestylists are straying from the faith) or straw men (lifestylists are individualists; they think singing and gardening will lead to revolution.) There still hasn’t been any real answer to as why leftist sect building or their usual activities are not “lifestylist.”

[blake 3:17]

@JH -- as usual largely in agreement. Dude I was referring to was a player in Berkeley FSM but regrets his Stalinophobia. Brother is super good cat. Gets some teasing because everybody solid on Left loves him, but says "We just disagree about Cuba."

I've two solid close friends -- 20 years plus-- that are vegans and they're super cool about it. And their dedicated veganism has done as much for international social justice as most of my Trot stuff. They're also both anarchists who've done tons of really good interesting social justice, radical culture, co-op, FTP stuff too, and it's not a contest.

I was getting shit last night from an old comrade for being too pro-anarchist, but our criticisms of the Marxist left were the same and pretty close to yours. I've been through periods of withdrawal from it and just doing other stuff and waiting for a chance for something real to emerge, and it's the same old same old. Oakland and Toronto are very different cities, but I get fed up with these Little Lenins that think they know SOOOO MUCCCCCCHHHH more than me. It's like the dude on here dissing Kanye West -- if it's so easy, YOU DO IT. I do believe in trying to have some organizational unity, but if it means me getting chewed out for not doing 100% radical unionism on a job that the Scholarly Comrade has never worked or in a movement they don't participate in, forget it.

Got a valid criticism? Make it. Don't have one? Go home and think about it. Either way listen. That's how socialists should operate. Not frequently enough.

[Jimmie Higgins]

The critique and rejection of work is nothing new. From 1917 to 1936 to 1969, workers have pretty much rejected their role when they got the chance and had to be coerced back to it. You can't demand a qualitative change, for a completely different life if you base your liberation on the very institution that is used to enslave you: work.Sure it's not new a new idea. I'm not toally clear what you think negating work entails though - if you mean ending alienation and work as we know it, then I think we agree on all but semantics and maybe about some conceptions about how to get there. If you think it means that there is a revolution without workers collectivly organizing themselves and production in some way, then I think we'd have to just agree to disagree on this point. It's not the field and the cotton which enslaves people in the Antebellum south, it's not the land that the Estate occupies or the rye that enslaves the surf, it's the social relations.

A revolutionary situation which ends with a full collapse of production (rather than the democratic self-reorganization of necissary tasks in order to make sure lights and food and water are still running) would be one which would not last long in my opinion and workers would quickly loose faith in the possibility of communism because of massive instability and hunger and so on.

And I'd disagree that workers have historically voluntarily rejected work in the abstract, rather than fought for greater and greater control over the process and demands - including, in revolutionary situations, "taking over" and running things themselves - this even begins to happen in non-revolutionary but sharp mass strikes and so on. Spanish workers and farmers took over their work and ran cities through worker organizations. Sounds like work to me - just working together rather than for someone else.


I haven't said anything about opting out?!No, I did. This is one alternative I often hear form people in the bay area. You didn't really say what negating work meant to you, so I took on various arguements for how that can happen. I didn't touch on primitivism, but that's another argument you hear - especially form some environmentalists - in the Bay Area but it's genocidal misantrhopic madness in my opinion, one step removed from people who fansacize about the zombie apocalypse (which I do myself, for fun - I just don't think it's actually a possibility) or the rapture.


I meant the rejection of politics with regard to the content of communism. Politics is another form of mediation and reached its zenith with democracy which is a specialised time and space separate from the rest of social life, subordinating individual interests to its logic. This in turn means that the revolutionary perspective involves the rejection of democracy entirely, including absurd notions of fulfilling the promises of the bourgeois revolution, or calls for “proletarian democracy” or realising some idealised “direct democracy.” Ending class society would necessarily entail getting rid of politics.Yes I agree that ending class society would mean that formal collective decision making by workers (who would no longer exist as a seperate group) is unnecissary and tasks could be done more ad-hoc or just through mutual agreement among the people directly involved. And when I speak of democracy, I mean collective decision-making, (I favor majority-rules, but concensus would also be a method of democracy) - I do not mean parlementary democracy.

I personally believe that a "dotp" or proletarian democratic period is necissary - in order to get to communism/anarchism - this is part of why I identify with these and not anarchist politics though I see the ultimate aim of anarchism and marxism as the struggle for the same thing. Capitalism is relationships among people, but it's also physical structures and the whole framework for how modern cities and populations and infrastructure has been formed. It will take a lot of coordination and decision-making among people to figure out how to restructure these things, try to eliminate structural inequalities, figure out how to just get rid of old jobs that are useless, how to figure out how to coordinate complicated tasks. IMO this will take democratic methods because of the level of decision making. When these social and structural inequalities have been eliminated, production re-arranged and prioritised around meeting people's needs and wants, then these sorts of big decisions impacting huge populations, will be less necissary and people can meet their needs through basic cooperation and mutal arrangements and whatnot.

But after a sucessful revolution, I think there will still be "politics" and I think that probably even something like parties would form based around wanting to prioritize this or that, or even over advocating ways to reorganize our communities when it comes to larger structural questions. What do we do about the environmental toll capitalism has taken on the planet? I think people might group up to advocate various ways to deal with nuclear waste from all the weapons left over and all the nuclear plants. Sould we seek to moderate and reduce the harmfulness of fossile fules while seeking easier and less harmful alternatives, or should we immediately abandon them and rapidly push for an alternative?

This is a general point of disagreement among anarchists and marxists, but it can also be misleading: many marxists don't believe in a dictaorship by workers, but for workers; and some anarchists do basically have this conception of a dictatorship by workers, but they just call it "the revolutionary period" or something and maybe don't use the language of democracy and talk about "administration" or whatnot - but more or less they would also see the necissity of a period of majority control in supressing the old order's leftovers and in reorganizing society from the bottom up.


This brings us back to the whole “lifestylism” issue which, despite having died in the 90s, some apparently want to resurrect. I think pessimism is beside the point. It’s about finding other ways to struggle against capital and the state.Well there are lots of ways to struggle, but it doesn't mean they are all applicable at any time or even at all.

I've tried to be clear that I am not trying to paint anarchism with a broad brush, but take up some specific arguments. I have also said that in my experience life-style ideas - that is, living in a certain way, even spending money in a certain way as a viable road to social change - is a broader phenomena with people all over the Bay Area (who would probably consider themselves liberals, though some who might see themselves as anarchists or marxists) thinking that BP or SHELL give a shit that they choose to ride a bike for moral reasons; that their choice to be vegan is "their part" towards challenging things. I have no problems with bikes or being vegan - and pleanty of vegans and bike-riders have been non-lifestylist organizers in the Oscar Grant movement or Occupy even while personally enjoying that lifestyle. I think this is the point Mari3L and others have been trying to stress. That is not my issue. I think people are kinda boring culturally these days (though I also think youth culture is getting better) and I really like counter-cultures, but as something cultural, not as a way out of this shit.


Look at this thread. Accusations of “lifestylism” are supported by appeals to tradition (lifestylists are straying from the faith) or straw men (lifestylists are individualists; they think singing and gardening will lead to revolution.) There still hasn’t been any real answer to as why leftist sect building or their usual activities are not “lifestylist.”This argument doesn't make sense to me: you say that lifestylism died in the anarchist movement and yet you are also suggesting that organizing, agitating, and propaganda is lifestylist. If that's true then, that many anarchists do see the primary way forward is through the class struggle and engage in the same sorts of community organzing, agitating, and propaganda activities -- in fact many have a very good orientation that's much better than some of the more insular marxist groups IMO -then lifestylism is alive in anarchism!

The difference is that marxists and anarchists who are engaging in these activities do not see the activities as the threat to the system, they see the collective power of workers in struggle as the threat to the system. They see these methods as a means to help in a subjective way to further the potential of this. They might do it poorly, workers might be demoralized and beaten down or they might be too convinced by ruling class ideas at times, but this is the goal of these activities.

Lifestylism (again, this is outside of the "anarchism" discussion specifically - I think this is a more general trend which only sometimes overlaps into anarchist or marxist politics as with other liberal or reformist ideas at times) is not being critiqued for lifestyle, but for seeing the personal lifestyle choice as a revolutionary act in of itself. People in Oakland who want to grow their own food are not a threat to the system - they aren't even a threat to the food industry. If gardening is a way to organize people and get them to hang out socially and out of that organize... then it's not "lifestylism" or at least not what I am critical of. If they think everyone just needs to garden, then yes it's an iduvidualist solution, actually non-sollution, to capitalism and oppression. Even the worst political sect, does their activities in order to try and organize other people, or get their (in this example) shitty ideas out - they do not think that the act of doing this will bring down capitalism, they hope to subjectivly help the class to put itself in a better position to be able to achieve liberation. It doesn't mean sucess automatically, it doesn't mean the group doing it doesn't have bad ideas on things, but it's not an activity for the sake of itself.

From what you and other posters here have been saying, it sounds like lifestyle-ism is divorced from lifestyle in contemporary anarchist groups and circles and then that's a positive thing. There are lots of anrchists (some even bike-riding vegans :lol:) in Oakland who are organizing and definately not lifestylists. I have encountered it among people who seem kind of new to the whole thing or just kind of superficially anarchist, but mostly it seems like a wider trend in the Bay Area among people who might identify themselves as progressives or whatnot. Take ciritical mass - if people are doing that as part of a wider effort to force the city to add bike lanes, like in the past, then that's a political act. But some of the people doing it today, it's just lifestyle. It's also self-marginalizing for those who see it as a political act, rather than a fun activity. Several years ago a group of maybe two dozen rode by and some of the members just yelled at people, moralistically telling them that by driving they were the cause of the Iraq war. That doesn't reflect everyone whose gone on those rides, I'm just saying that some of these ideas are out there generally and I don't think they provide much use in regards to revolution. People should just like the things they like, but change takes class struggle in my view.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Oakland and Toronto are very different cities, but I get fed up with these Little Lenins that think they know SOOOO MUCCCCCCHHHH more than me. It's like the dude on here dissing Kanye West -- if it's so easy, YOU DO IT.Lol. Right, and even if it was possible, what good is having all the answers when nobody's hardly thought of any questions yet.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

uh no i dont and i never have:confused:

Well, I refer you to our previous exchange in the thread "How to win workers over to the cause?", or something to that effect.


What is wrong with this. Would the ideal policy have been to make the Kulaks without anything?

That, or to substantially decrease their allotment, vis-à-vis the middle and the poor peasantry. Anything else would have left them with diminished, but still overbearing power. Breaking them would have been the only consistently progressive policy.


And now that you mention Arshinov[...]

And now that I mention Arshinov, he said something that, surprise surprise, portrays the Bolsheviks in a negative light, and for which he does not provide evidence. Shall I quote L. Trotsky on the class nature of the Mahnovshchina, then?


This does not support your case as it ignores various material realities that prevent land reform from being applied everywhere at once.

How is it, then, that the Bolshevik authorities were able to ignore those material realities and implement land reform throughout the Bolshevik territory?


Hostility to your beloved Bolshevism does not strengthen your case.

The point was that the rich peasants supported Makhno according to the documents of his own organisation, and that he himself called on them to assist his uprising.

Makhnovist documents admit that Makhno's army was financed by "expropriations" from the rich peasants - which apparently did not bother them at all, since they "approved" of Makhno. Trotsky also notes that, unlike the middle peasants in the KomUch People's Army or the Antonovshchina, Makhno's units were chiefly cavalry squadrons. Cavalry is an expensive sport, and the Red Army was only able to raise cavalry units because units of the former Russian Army defected to the Bolsheviks (note that the Red Guards, the Workers' Fellowships etc. had few if any cavalry detachments). Were did Makhno get his horses and tachankas?


I didn't realize Makhno's view of the cities determined the entire stance of a movement towards them. The rest of this statements is not backed by anything and is an assertion.

The cities are important as concentrations of the most advanced layers of the proletariat, of course. The Makhnovtsy (unlike the urban Black Flag group, mind) despised the cities with their large-scale production, labour discipline and requisition detachments.

But that's not the point. The point is that Makhno implemented a policy of "free" trade with the cities that favoured the kulak stratum. Who else would have traded with the urban centres but those who had surplus produce?


A lot of personal/individual decisions to act are very radical although again I am confused why the anti-lifestyle side of this discussion can't just come out and say what specific lifestyle stuff is 'allegedly' radical but 'actually isn't'.

Political veganism, lesbian separatism, politicised squats, gardening, various "communes" and whatnot, freeganism, and so on, and so on.


no this thread is about communist's perception of anarchism to which you pretty much stated that post-left criticisms of traditional professional revolutionary organizations was just individual lifestyle anarchist bs instead of good 'real revolutionary' anarchists which is the actual bs. Your 'collective action' is much different than a post-left concept of 'collective action'. This site has users who are influenced by post-left stuff but the main discussion on the forum is about pro-rev tradition and historical figures, stats and other boring shit. You're just mad because of the valid criticisms.

What valid criticism? That it's boring. Oh, bother. We're not here to entertain you, and if you choose politics based on what appeals to your sense of excitement, well...


Antifa is a big part of anarchist ideology, so yes anarchists demonstrate the Klan. What i said is not, attack one and it is enough. What i did say was You cannot attack one without attacking the other. We fight the system as a whole. That's why anarchists participate in those demonstrations. You need to read what i wrote better, because i never implied that fighting one abolishes the others.

I never said that you did. The point was that anarchists can and do participate in political action that does not immediately overthrow the state. Why is it, then, that you denounce Spanish and Russian anarchists for siding with the Bolsheviks against the bandits and the White armies?


That's why people are so anti-communist today, because people like you think you should whip people to comply.

So what? Discipline is necessary, and communists should neither abandon the principle of revolutionary discipline nor downplay it. If that pushes the wavering elements away from us, so be it. One committed, disciplined militant is, in the end, worth any number of confused, demoralised individuals.


As Malatesta said:


We anarchists do not want to emancipate the people; we want the people to emancipate themselves.

So do we Marxists. But how will the people - or rather, the proletariat - emancipate themselves? As individuals? That is ridiculous. The proletariat will emancipate itself as a collective, as a class. And for collective action there needs to be discipline. Individuals that step out of the line need to be disciplined.


I habe the feeling you are a bit unsure about your position in a revolution.

Oh, I'm sure. But at the same time I realise that my subjective certainty is completely irrelevant. Subjectively, Plekhanov must have considered himself the most stalwart of the Russian Marxists. We all know how that turned out.


It's against the argument that being a peasant automatically makes one a member of the petite-bourgeoisie.

I don't see how that follows.


The peasantry as an doomed & ruined petty bourgeois class was the Menshevik line, not the Bolshevik line...Lenin actually saw the peasants as potentially revolutionary post-1905. The reason was because the benefits of overseas European imperialism had driven food prices to the rock bottom, impoverishing the peasants despite the property they may or may not own.

An impoverished layer of the petite bourgeoisie is still petit-bourgeois. The confusion between class and income bracket is rather prevalent, though, and it seems to have led some right into the hands of petit-bourgeois movements like Occupy, the Indignados and whatnot.

The Bolsheviks recongised the revolutionary potential of the petite bourgeoisie in the democratic revolution (the Mensheviks, on the other hand, continued to tail bourgeois liberals). Not one Bolshevik would have dreamed of putting forward the Eser line that the peasantry was an important force in the socialist revolution.


They didn't really own the land. For example, in Moldovia, peasants were rented out land from landlords (labor rent, or dijmă la tarla) and this was enforced harshly. One instance of this rent being raised on the peasants resulted in a violent pogrom in which over 20,000 were slain. In 1893 an edict was passed forbidding peasants from leaving their communes at all, basically a form of neo-serfdom. And that's without even getting into the rents that peasants owed their landlords (even after the end of serfdom), the state in the form of "redemption dues", or the fact that peasants worked communally & the commune, not the individual farmer or family, "owned" the land, strip-farming usage of which was established at the village assemblies (skhod). This was thought to prevent individual people and families from acquiring their own land and passing it on to their children. Therefore no one invested in it. This was a common system of the peasantry all over Europe. Later efforts by the Russian state to break up the communes post-1900 often met with violent resistance, as the vast majority of the peasantry preferred to remain in the communal arraignment as far as 1917. (The so-called "kulaks" only represented about 3% of the peasantry in 1900...they were regarded with hostility by other peasants, as "devourers of the commune").

Alright, villagers whose relation to the means of production is semifeudal are not petit-bourgeois in the usual sense. But these individuals are not usually covered by the term "peasantry", in Marxist work, and neither is the rural proletariat.

That said, communal or cooperative systems of land ownership can be, and usually are, petit-bourgeois. Just as an individual does not cease to be bourgeois when they share the ownership of the means of production with other stock-owners, so the peasant does not cease to be petit-bourgeois if they are a member of an artel or mir. They still own the means of production, albeit cooperatively.


Really? Do you have any proof for that assertion?

Most biographies of Makhno seem to agree on that point; the one resource I can cite off the cuff is the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, which describes his background as a "krestyanskayi", not as rural-proletarian.


Regardless, Makhno's work history as a farm laborer, industrial painter and metal worker is not "petty bourgeois" in the slightest. Or is someone permanently tainted by their family background?

Most people are certainly influenced by their background. But that's neither here nor there, admittedly. What is relevant is the class composition of the Makhnovist movement.


Preobrazhensky was a tool and "primitive socialist accumulation" was a fool's errand. It was the result of the paradox of a communist revolution in a state with a supposedly under-developed industrial complex (or at least not as developed as Germany or the United Kingdom). In the aftermath of the failure of revolution in western Europe, it became apparent to some that with enough willpower they could somehow create an industrially developed state and then there would be no more contradiction! Because as any good Marxist knows, it's conscious human agency that develops the forces of production to their "destiny"...not, y'know, hundreds of years of social struggles, class conflicts, technological advances, ebbs and flows in state power, etc. Nope, with enough factories, starved/dragooned peasants, iron production etc we'll drag this feudal mudhole out of the mire and build socialism! Gotta go through hell to get to heaven!

Impressive rhetoric. I might quote you out of context if I ever feel the need to harangue someone. That said, the notion that conscious human action can never impact the development of the productive forces is, in addition to being obviously wrong, a mechanicist bastardisation of Marxism.

Of course the material basis in Russia constrained the development of the forces of production, and the subjective intentions of Soviet planners often clashed with the material capacities of the Russian economy. For example, Preobrazhensky sometimes implies that primitive socialist accumulation could lead to socialism. Obviously, unless one thinks that the Soviet Union was socialist this is not, in general, true.

That said, it seems that the state of the economy demanded something like the primitive socialist accumulation. After all, the centrist leadership of the Soviet Union was forced to implement the Ural-Siberian method, a return to the policies of Military Communism, and they were forced to carry out collectivisation etc. etc., despite these policies being associated with the Left Opposition, and being hated by all of the peasant strata.


The violence was not directed against the class enemy.

Not against the primary class enemy, at least not directly, but it was directed at elements that were foreign to the proletariat. You seem to take a moralistic, "universal" standpoint instead of the proletarian one.


It was directed against the people of Russia, who were left to starve in the countryside as the food they produced was funneled to the cities which forbidded them from even moving with internal passports.

Again, are we supposed to oppose these policies because of the human cost? But why should that matter? We are for the revolution. If the revolution requires that we eat babies, it is not only permissible to eat babies, it is absolutely required.


But hey, at least the Red Army got food, right? You need someone to keep the people in line, lest they get upset over their glorious "planned economy" (which, as Hillel Tiktin points out, wasn't a planned economy at all...it was a chaotic pile of shit well into the 1930's).

There was no planned economy in the period of Military Communism. As for the rest, well, what do you (or Ticktin) expect? That someone just clap their hands and construct a planned economy? It doesn't work like that, unfortunately.


The proletariat didn't exactly have it awesome in this system, either...don't try to make it sound like that was the case. Sure there was increased literacy and skills, but workers were forced to put in long hours and never has there been such a massive increase in industrial production with so little to show for it in the way of consumer goods for the average proletarian.

And yet, the authority (albeit deformed by the bureaucratic caste) of the proletariat as the ruling class was strengthened.


Nechayev was never an anarchist. He was associated with Bakunin, but he was a radical populist narodnik, never an anarchist. Vera Zasulich was associated with or had correspondence with Bakunin, Marx & Trotsky during her lifetime...was she an anarchist, or a Trotskyist? No, of course not.

Did Zasulich write articles about the permanent revolution, or a stateless society? She did not. Nechayev, on the other hand, wrote quite a lot about the stateless society that he envisioned would be established immediately after the revolution. Therefore he was, at least, a proto-anarchist.


Bookchin was a Trotskyist turned anarchist, who in his later years stumped for the Libertarian Party here in the USA (if he's who you're referring to). His body of thought is problematic in a few ways, as others have pointed out. But that's not even the main point in regards to "lifestylism". The main point is that: 1) the spectre of "lifestylism" within anarchism has been routinely overstated, including by Bookchin, and 2) what's referred to as "lifestylism" is not a new phenomenon, and has been a facet of anarchism as practiced by many of the most respected class struggle anarchists.

I specifically stated, in my first post on this thread, that lifestylism is irrelevant outside the Internet. As for the second contention, you still haven't provided us with anything resembling a proof. At best, you have pointed out that certain class-struggle anarchists have had unconventional lifestyles. Alright, but that's not what is being disputed here. No one thinks that revolutionaries should live boring, conventional, heteropatriarchal lives. But having an alternative lifestyle is not in itself revolutionary, and you still haven't demonstrated that any of the class-struggle anarchists though otherwise.


Zerzan does not want to "solve" the problem of class society with a return to the primitive. He merely sees class as a symptom of mankind's sedentary lifestyle as a result of the Neolithic revolution and the abandonment of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. So you're definitely misreading him if you think his most pressing concern is that of "class", it goes much deeper than that.

I don't care what his most pressing concern is, saying that the class society is a "symptom" of the sedentary lifestyle implies that it could be overthrown through a lifestyle change. And that is, quite simply, bollocks, and Zerzan probably knows it, hence his paradoxical status as a "primitivist" Internet celebrity and darling of the people that distribute mimeographed pamphlets.


I don't know what Chernoye Znamya is.

The Black Flag group, an association of revolutionary anarchists from the urban areas of the Pale of Settlement region in Russia. Hit fairly hard by repression under Stolypin, certain remnants became little more than cults of revolutionary youth, violent direct action etc. etc. Other remnants of the group ended up supporting the Bolsheviks during the civil war.


Avakian justified opposition to homosexuality as a "degeneracy" of bourgeois society.

So did Durruti. Again, libertarianism does not make one magically immune to stupidity and bigotry.


That's a dictation of lifestyle of an entirely different sort than anarchist lifestyle edicts, which were to be brought about through principles of free association (a concept of which many are critical, including myself).

And if the free association wants to exclude homosexuals? Or to refuse to preform abortion etc.? I am not arguing against such associations (at least not at this point), but it's naive to think that their "free" status makes it impossible for them to be reactionary.


That's pretty much what anarchists have argued. Funny how it often hasn't worked like that in ostensibly socialist states though :rolleyes:

That depends on the period and the state in question. The Bolshevik authorities were the first to systematically tear down laws against behaviour that violated heteropatriarchal norms, often despite their own personal bigotry. Democratic Germany was significantly more progressive in these matters than the Bonn regime. Etc. etc.


By fighting in the Spanish Civil War, organizing strikes, fighting in revolutionary groups, publishing worker's papers, etc? Emile Armand spent years in prison for his anti-militarist and anarchist activities. You're short-sighted if you don't see how those things are related to class.

Anti-militarism is not necessarily proletarian; there is religious anti-militarism, "ethical" (meaning bourgeois) anti-militarism and so on. Armand's activities seem to have been rather restricted; mostly writing for various bulletins about free love. That is admirable, but hardly serious revolutionary activity.

[Ele'ill]

Political veganism, lesbian separatism, politicised squats, gardening, various "communes" and whatnot, freeganism, and so on, and so on.

Squats and communes and even freegan and vegan concepts/ideas when interjected by more radical theories pertaining to action move from being an opinion to that of tangible praxis. I think what upsets you about this has nothing to do with silly 'lifestylism' it's the fact that what's really on your mind is that these things are individuals and groups taking action, often times successfully so, often times just for fun, outside of some archaic doctrine of homogenization when it's clear that your program is insufficient for what is the reality of the world and for the reality that is the vastness of people's desires. Basically you're mad because they aren't working for you.




What valid criticism? That it's boring. Oh, bother. We're not here to entertain you, and if you choose politics based on what appeals to your sense of excitement, well...

but what excites me is relevant theory for action in the world right now

[Domela Nieuwenhuis]

I never said that you did. The point was that anarchists can and do participate in political action that does not immediately overthrow the state. Why is it, then, that you denounce Spanish and Russian anarchists for siding with the Bolsheviks against the bandits and the White armies?
Because fighting at the side of Bolsheviks is the same as fighting for a new state. That is conflicting with wanting to abolish it.



So what? Discipline is necessary, and communists should neither abandon the principle of revolutionary discipline nor downplay it. If that pushes the wavering elements away from us, so be it. One committed, disciplined militant is, in the end, worth any number of confused, demoralised individuals.
Forcing people to be communist will never work. If you wan't unrest in your area, be sure to force people to do your bidding.

A Dutch comedian once said: "You can't torture people into joining Amnesty International."


So do we Marxists. But how will the people - or rather, the proletariat - emancipate themselves? As individuals? That is ridiculous. The proletariat will emancipate itself as a collective, as a class. And for collective action there needs to be discipline. Individuals that step out of the line need to be disciplined.
That's not emancipation, that's downright domination.
You are one crazy person...:confused:



Oh, I'm sure. But at the same time I realise that my subjective certainty is completely irrelevant. Subjectively, Plekhanov must have considered himself the most stalwart of the Russian Marxists. We all know how that turned out.
So you rather have a nation of doubting followers than half a nation of people who are sure about what they're doing?

I rather have a groep of anarchists who are absolutely sure and not entirely with me, than a nation of people who might as well swing with Nationalists or Capitalists if they have a more smooth talk.

[Dropdead]

Because fighting at the side of Bolsheviks is the same as fighting for a new state. That is conflicting with wanting to abolish it.



Forcing people to be communist will never work. If you wan't unrest in your area, be sure to force people to do your bidding.

A Dutch comedian once said: "You can't torture people into joining Amnesty International."


That's not emancipation, that's downright domination.
You are one crazy person...:confused:



So you rather have a nation of doubting followers than half a nation of people who are sure about what they're doing?

I rather have a groep of anarchists who are absolutely sure and not entirely with me, than a nation of people who might as well swing with Nationalists or Capitalists if they have a more smooth talk.

I don't know if this is off-topic but what about if one day there will be ''anarchy'' ? What will you do when people don't like it? You can't force them to be anarchists, so what will you do? Let them form a government?

[Ele'ill]

I don't know if this is off-topic but what about if one day there will be ''anarchy'' ? What will you do when people don't like it? You can't force them to be anarchists, so what will you do? Let them form a government?

government is violence, people are welcome to larp but once it moves past that i'm pretty sure action will be taken although in a functioning society why would anyone want government etc.. etc.. off topic

[bcbm]

Well, I refer you to our previous exchange in the thread "How to win workers over to the cause?", or something to that effect.

i didnt deny the possibility of revolution i took a cynical view towards the lefts idea of how revolution happens and their part in it

[helot]

I don't know if this is off-topic but what about if one day there will be ''anarchy'' ? What will you do when people don't like it? You can't force them to be anarchists, so what will you do? Let them form a government?

You know communism would be anarchy right?

The same would go.. You cannot force the workers to emancipate themselves.

[Captain Ahab]

That, or to substantially decrease their allotment, vis-à-vis the middle and the poor peasantry. Anything else would have left them with diminished, but still overbearing power. Breaking them would have been the only consistently progressive policy.

But they did just that.

"literally swept through villages, towns and cities like an enormous broom" and the "returned pomeshchiks [landlords], the kulaks , the police, the priests" were destroyed,
Here Kulaks were killed.
Makhno also followed a program of expropriation which earned him the hatred of the kulaks.


Needless to say, this land redistribution reinforced Makhno's popularity with the people and was essential for the army's later popularity and its ability to depend on the peasants for support. However, the landlords and richer kulaks did not appreciate it and, unsurprisingly, tried to crush the movement when they could. Once the Austro-Germans invaded, the local rich took the opportunity to roll back the social revolution and the local pomeshchiks and kulaks formed a "special volunteer detachment" to fight Makhno once he had returned from exile in July 1918. [Arshinov, Op. Cit., p. 59]

http://www.nestormakhno.info/english/makfaq/h_6_8.htm
As you can clearly see what Makhno did not do was to leave the Kulaks literally nothing. But then again I'm assuming these were former Kulaks. Had they still been Kulaks perhaps you'll have a stronger case. But then I demand you quote from Arshinov so I know you're not manipulating any words here.

And now that I mention Arshinov, he said something that, surprise surprise, portrays the Bolsheviks in a negative light, and for which he does not provide evidence. Shall I quote L. Trotsky on the class nature of the Mahnovshchina, then?

You tried to use anarchists writers to form the foundation of your argument against Batko in reply to me. Naturally this is doomed to failure as the words of these anarchists completely undermine your case when one goes beyond the cherry picks you provide.


How is it, then, that the Bolshevik authorities were able to ignore those material realities and implement land reform throughout the Bolshevik territory?

Because the Makhnovists implemented land reform in a different way that was not through the state. It also helps that they lasted longer than the free territory of the Ukraine.


The point was that the rich peasants supported Makhno according to the documents of his own organisation, and that he himself called on them to assist his uprising.

I just quoted an above statement showing how rich peasants hated makhno. The rich peasants only approved of Makhno's distaste of the Bolsheviks. Also there were poor cossacks. These poor Cossacks also supported the Bolshies.

Makhnovist documents admit that Makhno's army was financed by "expropriations" from the rich peasants - which apparently did not bother them at all, since they "approved" of Makhno.
What the hell is wrong with this? And two, rich peasants were bothered.

Trotsky also notes that, unlike the middle peasants in the KomUch People's Army or the Antonovshchina, Makhno's units were chiefly cavalry squadrons. Cavalry is an expensive sport, and the Red Army was only able to raise cavalry units because units of the former Russian Army defected to the Bolsheviks (note that the Red Guards, the Workers' Fellowships etc. had few if any cavalry detachments). Were did Makhno get his horses and tachankas?

From the expropriations of the Kulaks. Funds and other things they had. As well as what poor peasants had.


The cities are important as concentrations of the most advanced layers of the proletariat, of course. The Makhnovtsy (unlike the urban Black Flag group, mind) despised the cities with their large-scale production, labour discipline and requisition detachments.
Bolshie lies and propaganda refuted in depth here: http://www.nestormakhno.info/english/makfaq/h_6_10.htm


But that's not the point. The point is that Makhno implemented a policy of "free" trade with the cities that favoured the kulak stratum. Who else would have traded with the urban centres but those who had surplus produce?
Assertions. Prove that these cities "favoured" the kulak stratum. Surplused produced?:lol: Expropriations mate.

Now here's what I've gotten. It seems you've trusted the words of Trotsky and :lol: the Great Soviet Encyclopedia to form your opinion on Makhno.

Therefore I shall trust the words of Stalin and his party to judge Trotsky as a fascist spy that sought to undermine the CCCP. He was also to boot a rich peasant.

[Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist]

If it means anything, I think anarchists are better revolutionaries than 70% of "communists" who think that we can just circle jerk over theory until the masses spontaneously arise and the military disappears by magic so the glorious party can achieve state power when the proletariat spontaneously decides that cult number 129# deserves to lead them because of their stance on historical issue B that happened 500 years ago.

[Domela Nieuwenhuis]

I don't know if this is off-topic but what about if one day there will be ''anarchy'' ? What will you do when people don't like it? You can't force them to be anarchists, so what will you do? Let them form a government?

Well...this:


government is violence, people are welcome to larp but once it moves past that i'm pretty sure action will be taken although in a functioning society why would anyone want government etc.. etc.. off topic


You know communism would be anarchy right?

The same would go.. You cannot force the workers to emancipate themselves.

Thanks people, couldn't have said it better.

[cyu]

I think anarchists are better revolutionaries than 70% of "communists" who think that we can just circle jerk over theory until the masses spontaneously arise


This is actually one of the reasons I respect these guys, theory or no, because dammit, there's actually action being taken: http://kasamaproject.org/projects/revolution-in-south-asia

[International_Solidarity]

I think in many cases the work and history of our Anarchist comrades has proved that Stateless Communism will be able to exist in the future. The successes of the CNT in Spain particularly amaze me, as they were able to create a truly stateless society. To me, Anarchism is irreplaceable and Anarchists have proven that "true" Communism can be successful when the conditions are right, and they basically prove that the transition through Socialism and the education of the masses will eventually be able to lead to a truly Communistic state.

Fascinating documentary on the CNT/FAI: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmFNcdaL-a0&list=PL3585423B0787A5BF

Although I do believe that this is situational, and that Anarchism attempts to skip a step (Socialism) that is very needed in order to achieve complete world revolution.
That being said, I love my Anarchist comrades!
Solidarity with all Anarchists! :)

[V.Vendetta]

Here is the fundamental different between Anarchist-Communists and Marxists; Marxists have this idea of moving society toward Communism, while Anarchists cannot have such an ambition. Now of course Anarchist-Communists want communism, but we cannot hold any aim of steering society there.

Anarchists advocate the self-emancipation of the working class; the revolution must be carried out by the workers themselves, for themselves, on their own terms. We don't accept any vanguard or party, nor any seizure of state power at all. Anarchists act as a "leadership of ideas" and nothing more. We participate in revolutionary movements as a tension toward freedom, equality, and self-management. We encourage, build, and defend liberatory social structures. But we do not impose a program on the masses, nor do we see ourselves as administrators directing society toward some end goal.

I am an Anarchist-Communist but, as an Anarchist, I can not be dogmatic about that. Ultimately, whatever form a post-revolutionary society takes will be determined by the revolutionary people themselves. We will likely see a wide variety of different liberatory social arrangements arise during and after a social revolution, and the ones that work best and most maximize freedom and solidarity will be the most widely adopted.

One final thought. Marxists limit their analysis to class, while Anarchists see an even deeper root of oppression; social hierarchy itself. Anarchists oppose all forms of social hierarchy in favor of cooperative voluntary associations of free individuals. Anarchist-Communists support communism because we see it as the social form most maximizing individual freedom and solidarity.

Though Anarchists and Marxists, in a sense, want the same end goal, we are very different as far as our analysis and our underlying values and principles.

[blake 3:17]

Lol. Right, and even if it was possible, what good is having all the answers when nobody's hardly thought of any questions yet.

I think that's more to the point. And maybe where I lean to certain types of non-party or cultural forms of socialism or anarchism or communism.

I find the Left/Marxist groups really kind of imitate various bureaucratic machines. And many of the anarchists I've worked with have been the worst at doing this. It's not some simple "ideology" in the sense that one freely adopts...

As for things like Critical Mass -- OK -- consciousness is important, but what if a bunch of regular riders aren't all that conscious? But they show up. It's like the ultra-revolutionists who do picket line support for 20 minutes and then disappear...

I met with an old comrade the other night, who I only ever agree with on united front strategies (pretty good eh?), and we were talking about the weird disdain for doing community radio shown by some of our former comrades. Both of us were involved in community radio for many years, and didn't think it the be all and end all of the struggle, just a part. Others had a weird contempt for it, as if working on a counter hegemonic project with a pretty wide base was totally stupid, but working on some teensy sectarian project was sooooo important. Didn't make any sense but I swallowed it at the time.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Squats and communes and even freegan and vegan concepts/ideas when interjected by more radical theories pertaining to action move from being an opinion to that of tangible praxis.

Perhaps. But can these ideas lead to revolutionary praxis? Or do they simply make certain individuals happy? The point is not to make individuals happy, or to make the bourgeoisie unhappy, but to change the mode of production.


I think what upsets you about this has nothing to do with silly 'lifestylism' it's the fact that what's really on your mind is that these things are individuals and groups taking action, often times successfully so, often times just for fun, outside of some archaic doctrine of homogenization when it's clear that your program is insufficient for what is the reality of the world and for the reality that is the vastness of people's desires. Basically you're mad because they aren't working for you.

but what excites me is relevant theory for action in the world right now

What "action in the world right now"? Because, right now, all I see are ostensible socialists slavishly tailing petit-bourgeois movements. If this is "real action in the world right now", socialists should have nothing to do with it.


Because fighting at the side of Bolsheviks is the same as fighting for a new state. That is conflicting with wanting to abolish it.

The "new state" already existed, and it could not be abolished without opening the way to the Whiteguards or to Franco.


Forcing people to be communist will never work.

Perhaps, but I never suggested anything similar. Even so, members of revolutionary organisations need to uphold the decisions of the organisation, or get out of the way.


If you wan't unrest in your area, be sure to force people to do your bidding.

If you want unrest, fight for the revolution. We can not expect everyone to simply, spontaneously, become communist, and elements of the old society will try to stop the revolution violently no matter what we do.


That's not emancipation, that's downright domination.

That is domination of the class over the individual. As I said, the proletariat needs to emancipate itself as a class, not as isolated individuals.


So you rather have a nation of doubting followers than half a nation of people who are sure about what they're doing?

I rather have a groep of anarchists who are absolutely sure and not entirely with me, than a nation of people who might as well swing with Nationalists or Capitalists if they have a more smooth talk.

I would rather have a movement of proletarians, whose objective interest is aligned perfectly with that of the revolution, and who are class-conscious, than a movement of the most theoretically refined petite bourgeoisie who will, in general, lose their courage and degenerate in any seriously revolutionary situation.


government is violence, people are welcome to larp but once it moves past that i'm pretty sure action will be taken although in a functioning society why would anyone want government etc.. etc.. off topic

Quite so, action will be taken. And what is that if not keeping people in line so that they do not ruin the results of collective action with their own petty little rebellions?


i didnt deny the possibility of revolution i took a cynical view towards the lefts idea of how revolution happens and their part in it

But then the revolution you think is possible is not the same as the revolution most people on this forum talk about.


But they did just that.


"literally swept through villages, towns and cities like an enormous broom" and the "returned pomeshchiks [landlords], the kulaks , the police, the priests" were destroyed, Here Kulaks were killed.

Not necessarily; "destroyed" does not imply "killed", and in any case, other Makhnovist sources, including primary ones published at the time of the rebellion, talk about "rich peasants" etc.


Makhno also followed a program of expropriation which earned him the hatred of the kulaks.

Apparently not, since documents published by the Makhnovist movement itself talk about approval from the rich peasants. And it is easy to see why. Expropriation was practiced by every army that was operating in the Ukraine at the time, but only the Makhnovtsy favoured a policy of free trade with the cities, that could only enrich the kulaks.


As you can clearly see what Makhno did not do was to leave the Kulaks literally nothing. But then again I'm assuming these were former Kulaks. Had they still been Kulaks perhaps you'll have a stronger case. But then I demand you quote from Arshinov so I know you're not manipulating any words here.

"At Gulyai-Polye he immediately devoted himself to revolutionary work, first seeking to organize the peasants of his village and its surroundings. He founded a farm-workers’ union, organized a workers’ commune and a local peasants’ soviet (council). The problem that concerned him most was that of uniting and organizing the peasants into a powerful and firm alliance so that they would be able once and for all to drive out the landed gentry and the political rulers and to manage their own lives. It was to this end that he guided the organizational work of the peasants, both as a propagandist and as a man of action. He sought to unite them in the face of the flagrant deception, injustice and oppression of which they were victims. During the period of the Kerensky government and in the October days of 1917, he was president of the regional peasants’ union, of the agricultural commission, the union of metal and carpentry workers, and, finally, president of the Peasants’ and Workers’ Soviet of Gulyai-Polye.
It was in this last capacity that in August, 1917, he assembled all the pomeshchiks (landed gentry) of the region and made them give him all the documents relating to lands and buildings. He proceeded to take an exact inventory of all this property, and then made a report on it, first at a session of the local soviet, then at the district congress of Soviets, and finally at the regional congress of Soviets. He proceeded to equalize the rights of the pomeshchiks and the kulaks with those of the poor peasant laborers in regard to the use of the land. Following his proposal, the congress decided to let the pomeshchiks and kulaks have a share of the land, as well as tools and livestock, equal to that of the laborers. Several peasant congresses in the governments of Ekaterinoslav, Tauride, Poltava, Khar’kov and elsewhere followed the example of the Gulyai-Polye region and adopted the same measure."

Two things need to be noted here. First, these measures were applied only sporadically. The Makhnovtsi left the decision to expropriate the kulaks (possibly) to peasant congresses that included the kulaks. Second, it isn't at all clear what land the kulaks had an equal share of. All land in the village? Land that belonged to the mir? Land seized from the pomeshchiks? Only the first option represents an actual equalisation, the others would mean a net gain for the kulaks.



You tried to use anarchists writers to form the foundation of your argument against Batko in reply to me. Naturally this is doomed to failure as the words of these anarchists completely undermine your case when one goes beyond the cherry picks you provide.

Of course Arshinov and Voline will write positively about the Makhnovshchina. My point was that, even in their highly embellished account, one can discern the support that the kulak stratum showed to their batko.


Because the Makhnovists implemented land reform in a different way that was not through the state.

No, of course not. The Makhnovtsy established no state. They simply - how should I say it? - they had a number of peasant congresses, many of which elected their lider maximo batko Makhno to leading positions, whose orders were enforced by an army on the basis of "voluntary" mobilisation and so on.


From the expropriations of the Kulaks. Funds and other things they had. As well as what poor peasants had.

That doesn't add up. The Makhnovshchina was from the beginning a cavalry force. Did they perhaps expropriate the kulaks before they organised themselves as an army?


Bolshie lies and propaganda refuted in depth here: http://www.nestormakhno.info/english/makfaq/h_6_10.htm

See Avrich, "Anarchist Portraits" (http://www.ditext.com/avrich/7.html), and Mallet, "Makhno in the Russian Civil War" (another source sympathetic to Makhno):

"While there is some justice in Arshinov's defence to Bolshevik
accusations of lack of Makhnovist influence in the towns as resulting
from never being in a town of any size long enough —Olexandrivske
four weeks, Katerynoslav two periods of one and five weeks res-
pectively - it was the attitude of Makhno and the insurgents which
was largely responsible for the small following they found among
the workers. Makhno's own views showed in his description of
Moscow during his travels in 1918, although on the occasions he
spoke in Olexandrivske and Katerynoslav in 1917 he was well
received. He was however speaking as an individual, not, as in the
autumn of 1919, as the commander and spokesman of an all-
conquering army. The attitude of the Bolsheviks, who still had much
influence among the workers, had hardened against him. Relations
between them, while not generally openly hostile, could hardly be
described as warm.
At first, things did not go too badly in Olexandrivske. The
Makhnovists organised two workers' conferences, at which the
workers were urged to restart production under their own control,
and establish direct relations with the peasants. The workers were
not very keen, and wanted wages - the Whites had been behind-
hand in this - rather than ideas and goodwill. An initiating com-
mission was set up including shoemakers and railway workers, but,
when the latter asked for payment of arrears, Makhno told them:
In order to ensure the widest possible restoration of normal rail-
way services in the area we have liberated, and acting on the
principle of the organisation of their own free existence by the
peasant and worker organisations and their unions, I propose that
the comrade workers and employees energetically organise and
restore things themselves, setting sufficient tariffs and wages for
their work, apart from military traffic. 8
It is the last four words which are the most significant, for most
traffic in a civil war is military, and at that time most of the traffic
round Olexandrivske was of the Makhnovists. It was therefore un-
realistic and unfair to expect the railwaymen to take this advice: at
least the Reds and Whites would have held out expectation of pay-
ment, even if the promise was not in the end fulfilled. A few trains
did, however, start running shortly afterwards, and a few factories
and unions showed signs of life.
What good work had been done in these preliminary consulta-
tions was swept away by the quarrel which broke out at the Olex-
andrivske congress. The Mensheviks had had some legal positions
in the unions under White rule, but Bolshevik influence was now
increasing. The Mensheviks did not have the same eager appetite
for political power as the Bolsheviks, but they did share with them
a distrust of the non-Marxist left. Makhno was a definite improve-
ment on the Whites, but hardly welcome for his own sake.
At insurgent insistence, the unions did agree to send delegates to
the congress, but for information only. There was some jockeying
for position, which exasperated Makhno: he called the Mensheviks
'Iapdogs of the bourgeoisie'. 9 The congress, mostly peasants, fully
agreed with him, but six of the workers' delegates walked out on
the spot: twelve, including the Communists, remained. Both sides
immediately buttressed their positions. A conference of eighteen
mostly metallurgical plant committees stated that they and the
unions would disclaim all connection with the congress, making it
an exclusively peasant body. Makhno's reply illustrates the gulf
between the two sides:
It it possible that the workers of Olexandrivske and its suburbs
should, in the persons of their Menshevik and right SR delegates
at a free and businesslike congress, put forward a Denikin-type
opposition? And if such people are calling an extraordinary con-
gress and passing a resolution of protest against their being called
by their true names, this does not surprise me in the least.
Scoundrels like the infamous thieves and cowards who fled from
justice at the congress are incapable of anything apart from this
underhand treachery. 10
Short of open fighting, it is hard to see how relations between
Makhno and the Olexandrivske workers could have been worse.
The dispute came to a fortunate and abrupt end with the retreat
towards Katerynoslav, and was not a good augury for cooperation
there.
There were some minor successes in Katerynoslav. The workers
at a tobacco factory won a collective agreement they had hitherto
been refused, and the bakers, among whom there had long been a
strong anarcho-syndicalist influence, set themselves to preparing the
socialisation of their industry, plans being drawn up both to feed the
army and the civilian population. We have already seen that large
sums were handed out to those in need: but, for the most part, the
record was poor. A typical misunderstanding occurred when the
Makhnovists sent some captured White guns to the big Bryansk
engineering works for repair to the locks. The work was done, so
the workers asked for payment. Not surprisingly, they felt insulted
at the offer of a small payment in kind. Angered in turn by this
seeming ingratitude, Makhno ordered the guns to be taken without
any payment at all. When he followed this up with an article in the
insurgent paper in which he attacked the Bryansk workers as
'Scum, self-seekers and blackmailers, trying to increase their pros-
perity at the expense of the blood and heroism of their front-line
fighters', 11 the level of polemic and misunderstanding had reached
a point not far above that of Olexandrivske. It is not difficult to see
how an initial mutual caution could, and did, turn into suspicion
and hostility. The pace of events was too fast, conditions too adverse,
for the two sides to understand each other. It is to Makhno's credit
that he tried to get through to the workers: to many peasants, the
towns sapped the lifeblood of the countryside through taxes and
conscription. Makhno, on the other hand, genuinely believed in an
equal partnership of peasants and workers, but, short of time and
understanding, made little impression on the latter."



Assertions. Prove that these cities "favoured" the kulak stratum.

Not the cities, but free trade between the cities and the countryside, since the kulaks were the only ones who had anything to trade.

[Captain Ahab]

Okay Trot, let's dance.





Not necessarily; "destroyed" does not imply "killed", and in any case, other Makhnovist sources, including primary ones published at the time of the rebellion, talk about "rich peasants" etc.

The only other bloody meaning that "destroyed" could possibly take was that these kulaks ceased being kulaks. Two, show me these documents mate because I have no idea if you're showing honesty here.


Apparently not, since documents published by the Makhnovist movement itself talk about approval from the rich peasants.
Show me these documents.


And it is easy to see why. Expropriation was practiced by every army that was operating in the Ukraine at the time, but only the Makhnovtsy favoured a policy of free trade with the cities, that could only enrich the kulaks.
Assertions. I want proof that free trade with the cities benefited only the kulaks and that they benefited from it. Also I want proof showing expropriation was done by Tsarist troops and White troops in the same manner of the makhnovists.






snip
snip

Two things need to be noted here. First, these measures were applied only sporadically.
No. I've never heard of this claim. Back it up.

The Makhnovtsi left the decision to expropriate the kulaks (possibly) to peasant congresses that included the kulaks.
I want proof that these were Kulaks that weren't expropriated and retained their status of wealth.

Second, it isn't at all clear what land the kulaks had an equal share of. All land in the village? Land that belonged to the mir? Land seized from the pomeshchiks? Only the first option represents an actual equalisation, the others would mean a net gain for the kulaks.

They had an equal share in what all the other labourers had after being expropriated. So it's fair to assume that would entail all land in the village. I think it's pretty clear this was NOT a net gain for the Kulaks.


Of course Arshinov and Voline will write positively about the Makhnovshchina. My point was that, even in their highly embellished account, one can discern the support that the kulak stratum showed to their batko.

You couldn't find this shit amongst anarchist sources mate. So don't you dare pretend you could construct an argument against Makhno with them.



No, of course not. The Makhnovtsy established no state. They simply - how should I say it? - they has a number of peasant congresses, many of which elected their lider maximo batko Makhno to leading positions, whose orders were enforced by an army on the basis of "voluntary" mobilisation and so on.

What you're implying here is that any form of governance is a "state". But this is irrelevant as land reform was not enforced through the Black Army.


That doesn't add up. The Makhnovshchina was from the beginning a cavalry force. Did they perhaps expropriate the kulaks before they organised themselves as an army?
The idea that the horsies could be supplied by the poor peasantry that constituted Makhno's army is beyond you it seems.



See Avrich, "Anarchist Portraits" (http://www.ditext.com/avrich/7.html), and Mallet, "Makhno in the Russian Civil War" (another source sympathetic to Makhno):

"snip"

:lol:This doesn't support your original claim at all.




Not the cities, but free trade between the cities and the countryside, since the kulaks were the only ones who had anything to trade.
Bullshit the Makhnovists were bound to have surplus to trade that was expropriated from the Kulaks as well as whatever materials any individual possessed. Their conflicts with other armies were bound to get them materials from them after a victory as well.

[Ele'ill]

Perhaps. But can these ideas lead to revolutionary praxis? Or do they simply make certain individuals happy? The point is not to make individuals happy, or to make the bourgeoisie unhappy, but to change the mode of production.

The idea of these actions is a non-static spectrum of varying intensity and the varying opportunities to escalate into a larger event become clear(er) as a concept as barriers to individuals and groups are circumnavigated and overcome. Resistance is learned, solidarity is learned.




What "action in the world right now"? Because, right now, all I see are ostensible socialists slavishly tailing petit-bourgeois movements. If this is "real action in the world right now", socialists should have nothing to do with it.;)1



Quite so, action will be taken. And what is that if not keeping people in line so that they do not ruin the results of collective action with their own petty little rebellions?
preventing a line? the continuation of war against political and social hierarchies?

[Domela Nieuwenhuis]

The "new state" already existed, and it could not be abolished without opening the way to the Whiteguards or to Franco.
First of, i don't know what Franco has to do with the USSR.
Secondly, the State existed and wasn't about to be abolished. Even after the White Guards were beaten in 1923.
The new state lasted to exist and never had there been one sign of an abolishment at hand.



Perhaps, but I never suggested anything similar. Even so, members of revolutionary organisations need to uphold the decisions of the organisation, or get out of the way.
I seem to remember quotes like:

Discipline is necessary
And:

And whip those proletarians that jeopardise revolutionary action into line as well.
You were saying?



If you want unrest, fight for the revolution. We can not expect everyone to simply, spontaneously, become communist, and elements of the old society will try to stop the revolution violently no matter what we do.
There is a big difference between attacking and defending, remember that. What i meant was political unrest under the people after the revolution. If people are being forced and are not behind your ideas, you will have a counter-movement on your hand, wether you fight it or not. Force does not changes someones opinion.



That is domination of the class over the individual. As I said, the proletariat needs to emancipate itself as a class, not as isolated individuals.
I never said we need to individualise. I said we need to emancipate, be it all at once or as an individual. Forcing someone to emancipate is not to emancipate.
And no, it's just domination of the few.



I would rather have a movement of proletarians, whose objective interest is aligned perfectly with that of the revolution, and who are class-conscious, than a movement of the most theoretically refined petite bourgeoisie who will, in general, lose their courage and degenerate in any seriously revolutionary situation.
This is leading nowhere. Of course we'd rather have a large group of trained people with the exact same ideological wants as we do.
Reality-check: that will never happen by force.

Oh, being forced to play along with someone else's game is what we do right now! And what is the result of that!? (i'll give you a hint: we are right here!)

[Ele'ill]

Quite so, action will be taken. And what is that if not keeping people in line so that they do not ruin the results of collective action with their own petty little rebellions?

Also, if collective action from 'the left' results in petty rebellions and insurrection to rid the world of hierarchy and domination it is a failed collective action from 'the left' to begin with.