Red Comrade
27th June 2003, 17:59
Quote: from truthaddict11 on 1:07 pm on June 27, 2003
oh yes big poweful Stalinist policies Russia lets bring that back. because we alll know how great a superpower dictatorship with nukes is.
I don't agree with Stalin or many aspects of Stalinism, but it sure as hell was better than Russia. Prior and post WWII had NO homelessness, much less CHILDREN, and they supported international revolutions. There wasn't really any hunger (remember, post and prior WWII, it doesn't count if millions starved because of Nazi occupation) and everyone had work.
What do we have in the Russian "federation"?
Mass unemployment ,hunger, homelessness, a shitty education system. Bourgeois is running RAMPANT exploiting our workers in Russia! I don't even think they have minimum wage laws (I'm not sure though, but a friend that went 3 years ago said they didn't). Can you imagine being a little kid on the streets of Moscow during a Russian winter? It's not a pretty site.
The present situation of Russia is simply disgusting. Sure, they have more freedom than they did under Stalin, but really...what good is it if they are hungry!?
Also, the people of Russia seem to miss Communism, since the Communist party got second place in the recent Russian elections.
All I expect from you Anarchist counter-revolutionaries, siding with capitalists, even though they are more oppressive; they give you the illusion that you are "free".
(Edited by Red Comrade at 6:09 pm on June 27, 2003)
truthaddict11
28th June 2003, 03:04
take a read at thisThe Anti-Anarchist Rhetoric of Leftism
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Jason McQuinn
Anarchy #55
Spring/Summer 2003
Anarchist social movements and anarchist social critiques coalesced and developed into one strand of the more general array of social movements and critiques (from social-democratic liberalism to Marxist communism) which have often come to be described as the left. Yet they have always also stood in conscious opposition to every other strand of that same left. Anarchist social movements - in both their theories and practices - have their own logic and goals which are much more far-reaching - and which involve much more fundamental changes - than those of the political, non-anarchist left.
Social and political revolutionaries in the 19th century sought to develop their theoretical perspectives and practical activities in more and more coherent and effective ways. This led to the division of the international anti-capitalist revolutionary milieu into two powerful, but increasingly hostile, wings: the poltical left (which eventually became largely Marxist in orientation) and the anti-political anarchists. Throughout the development of both radical tendencies important criticisms have been traded, some cogent but many insubstantial or irrelevant. Some shallow commentators continue to argue that anarchist and political leftists differ only on means, while agreeing on the end (creation of a free, anti-capitalist, communal society). But most anarchists since Stirner, Proudhon and Bakunin have, on the contrary, argued that the actual, unspoken end of political leftism - and especially its Marxist variants - is the creation of a bureaucratic, statist political system in which classes are not abolished, but rather in which a new class of intellectuals and technicians substitutes itself for the capitalist ruling class in order to maintain hierarchical production relationships of wage labor (usually with the state substituting for traditional capitalists), while attempting to mitigate some of the inequalities of entrepreneurial capitalism through the coercive power of the state. It has only ever been anarchists (along with a small number of other anti-statists who haven't considered themselves anarchists per sewho have genuinely fought for the creation of a free, anti-capitalist, communal society in which classes are actually abolished and the political state is terminally suppressed.
Now, as the revolutionary political left is rapidly fading from the stage of history - wherever it hasn't already surrendered and made its peace with capitalist tyranny, it is time for anarchists to more closely examine the anti-anarchist rhetoric spewed out by this ever-hostile political left over the last century and a half. Not because the relatively impotent and receding left has increased its atacks on anarchists, though they still feebly appear on a predictably regular basis. But because during the former period of authoritarian Marxist ascendance within the international revolutionary milieu, anarchists too often ceded ground to the political left that can now be systematically reclaimed. Wherever the anti-anarchist political formulations of leftism have colonized the anarchist milieu, they can now be rooted out in order for anarchists to create, consolidate and push forward a genuinely anti-capitalist, social revolutionary movement, free from the crippling compromises of political leftism.
Anyone who has considered her or himself an anarchist for long has certainly heard many of the cliched terms of know-nothing Marxist abuse. Anarchists are "petty-bourgeois", "unrealistic utopians", "apolitical bandits", "decadent individualists", "anti-social elements", "infantile leftists", "naive idealists", or "in league with fascists" or nationalists or whites (counter-revolutionaries), or they are "objectively counter-revolutionary", etc. If not aimed directly at us personally, these terms of abuse are certainly aimed at plenty of other anarchists throughout Marxist theoretical and historical texts. In sad fact, it's a rare anarchist who hasn't been bombarded with the "petty-bourgeois" accusation hundreds of times (or, for occasioinal variation, accusations of being "bourgeois", "middle-class", or even "lumpen"). Non-Marxist leftists often have their favorite terms of abuse as well ("nihilists", "impractical idealists", advocates of "chaos" or "violence" and "destruction", etc.), but they pale into insignificance when compared with the sheer volume, intransigence and irrelevance of abuse anarchists worldwide have received from the Marxist left.
The reason most of the criticisms of anarchists from leftists (Marxist or otherwise) have so little intelligence is, of course, because most leftists never bother to read or educate themselves about anarchist history, practices or ideas. Many have only contempt for (anti-) political positions they don't understand. And most have never confronted their own socialization and domestication, leading them to fear the freedom of self-directed life in open opposition to every institutional form of authority. Unable to allow themselves to even conceive of their own and others' guninely lived freedom, their anxioeties induce them to lash out irrationally when faced with people unafraid to question every form of political authority, including that sought by leftist parties.
Further, left organizations and parties often purposefully slander anarchists in attempts to keep their members - or the targets of their organizing campaigns - from investigating for themselves. The foundation fpr the slander and defamation campaigns by leftists goes back at least to Karl Marx himself, who felt so hugely threatened by the theoretical and practical efforts of anarchists within his lifetime that he wrote many hundreds of pages (including the bulk of at least two books) explicitly attacking anarchists. In fact, he went to such great lengths to attack his anarchist arch-rival Mikhail Bakunin that in the end he preferred the destruction of the First International to the continued membership of Bakunin and other anarchists.
Although most anti-anarchist rhetoric has little meaning, there are a few actual arguments behind some of it that can be described and sometimes analyzed. Most of the rhetoric derives from the ideological work of Karl Marx, with substantial portions also contributed by his most viciously successful followers: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao Zhedong. Since the birth of the New Left in the 1960s, there have been additional developments in anti-anarchist rhetoric, mostly originating from the inherent moralism of identity politics, the nationalism inherent in national liberation movements, and the often intentional obfuscations involved in post-structuralist and post-modernist variants of leftism.
Marx versus Stirner, Proudhon and Bakunin
The historical anarchist movement developed alongside and in constant struggle with the political movements that were influenced directly by Karl Marx and his allies. Thus it is not surprising to find that a significant amount of Marx's writings during this period were devoted to criticisms - direct and indirect - of both particular anarchist theorists and the more general anarchistic tendencies influencing the revolutionary movements of the time. As Paul Thomas has argued in Karl Marx and the Anarchists"...Marx criticized, and criticized viciously, every anarchist with whom he came into theoretical or practical contact. All of Marx's objections reveal a method of social and political analysis that was fundamentally at variance with the anarchists' approach." [p. 14]
This fundamental variance in approach to radical social analysis between Marx and anarchists revolves first and foremost around their disparate perspectives on the place of politics in society, history and revolutionary movements. For Marx (and all the subsequent generations of Marxists) revolution and the abolition of capitalism are fundamentally conceived in political terms, while for anarchists they are conceived in intersubjective, social or communal terms. Put another way, Marx amazingly saw no inherent problem with the hierarchical relationships of political authority (up to and including forms of the nation-state) within revolutionary movements and post-revolutionary society. In fact, Marx (and the vast majority of his epigones) mercilessly derided anarchists for their clear and consistent critiques of all hierarchical social relationships and all political authority, despite the obviously central connection between these critiques and any genuinely social revolutionary movement.
To begin with, Marx attacked the early anarchist philosopher Max Stirner (pseudonym for Johann Kaspar Schmidt, and other of The Ego and its Own) at tedious length for hundreds of pages in his long unpublished, but eventually influential, The German Ideology. Fortunately for Marx, the tiresomely repetitive and largely irrelevant, ineffectual attacks on Stirner have been edited out of most editions of this text, making a slim, readable book out of an otherwise bloated, bilious and unreadable manuscript. When Marx isn't just fulminating over the straw-man "contradictions" he continually constructs in order to demolish, the major themes of his criticisms of Stirner in The German Ideology include:
(1) the arbitrary attribution of "petty bourgeois" [TGI, pp. 130, etc.] ideas to Stirner in what was to become a permanent and ultimately meaningless Marxist accusation against all anarchists, despite the fact that Stirner was employed as a teacher and translator for most of his working life;
(2) criticisms that Stirner "consistently abstracts from historical epochs, nationalities, classes, etc.,..." [TGI, p. 140] in the exposition of his philosophy and that for Stirner "The speculative idea, the abstract conception, is made the driving force of history, and history is thereby turned into the mere history of philosophy." [TGI, p. 142] (i.e. Stirner didn't write primarily as a social theorist, as Marx perversely insisted he should have, and Stirner certainly didn't accept Marx's inept historical materialist dogma, though neither was Stirner the naive "idealist" Marx accused him of being); and
(3) the claim that Stirner's conception of individuality ignores the current domination of the individual and society by capital (and its division of labor, etc.), which itself completely ignored Stirner's explicitly anarchist understanding that, of course, the individual is systematically exploited and repressed, and in fact "The State rests on the - slavery of labour. If labour becomes free, the State is lost." [The Ego and Its Own, edited by David Leopold, p. 105]
Most of Marx's arguments and attacks in The German Ideology primarily function as evasions of Stirner's own fundamental critiques of all humanist forms of ideology (including Stirner's passing criticisms in The Ego and Its Own of Marx's own early Feuerbachian humanism). This left Marx free to ignore every important question raised by Stirner, all the while complaining that Stirner didn't approach philosophy and social theory from Marx's own dogmatic perspective. This Marxist refusal to answer anarchist criticisms, while inventing mostly irrelevant ant irrational criticisms of anarchist theorists and activists has been the preferred modus operandi for well over a century now, and shows no signs of changing.
Similar tactics are used by Marx with more justification in his criticisms of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the influential French mutualist and federalist, who was one of the first to publicly call himself an anarchist. Proudhon was more of a (highly successful and widely influential) polemicist and iconoclast than a coherent theorist. Like most anarchists throughout history (and quite unlike authoritarian leftists such as Marx), Proudhon had no use for the construction of complete theoretical systems, whose closed nature makes free thought unlikely, if not impossible. Nor did Proudhon have much use for Marx himself. Marx occasionally acknowledged the groundbreaking importance of some of Proudhon's influential early work, especially his book What is Property? ("property is theft" was Proudhon's celebrated response to the book's title question). But he concentrated on criticism of Proudhon's many inconsistencies and (most justifiably) his lack of understanding of the radical necessity to oppose capitalism as a total system rather than opposing particular aspects of capitalism without aiming to abolish the whole. Still, Marx never came to terms with Proudhon's own more important anarchist insights that "the abolition of the exploitation of man by man and the abolition of government are one and the same thing" and that political "communism 'reproduces...all the contradictions of liberal political economy'." [Karl Marx and the Anarchists, pp. 212-3]
In later years during the growth of the First International, Marx went on to argue - against both the Proudhonist mutualists and the increasingly influential Mikhail Bakunin - that political organization and struggle was essential. Marx consistently argued for forms of class struggle aiming at statist reforms (naively arguing that participation in statist politics wouldn't strengthen the state, even though these reforms would have to be enforced by it) as well as for the encouragement of liberal democracy. In opposition to Marx's drive for the adoption of authoritarian, statist political measures, the revolutionary Russian Bakunin helped give form to the international anarchist movement then coalescing around anti-political principles of organization and struggle. Bakunin, with increasing influence, especially throught southern Europe, argued that "it is necessary to abolish completely, in principle and in practice, everything that might be called political power, for so long as political power exists, there will always be rulers and ruled, masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited."
Ultimately, the contradictions embodied in the ideas of these tow figures, Marx and Bakunin, led to the disuntegration of the First International itself. Marx had long before maneuvered to situate himself at the head of the formal organizational leadership of the International. He then used the leverage of this position, including his ability to forge credentials and stack the 1872 Hague congress of the International, to expel Bakunin and exile the General Council to its grave in New York in order to save it from the increasingly overwhelming influence of the anarchists, whose numbers within the International's sections were constantly growing. However, this was not before Marx and his allies had once again raised their bizarre old accusation that Bakunin was an "agent of the Tsar", and accused Bakunin of attempting to establish his own "personal dictatorship" over the International (through his already previously dissolved International Alliance of Social Democracy, no less).
Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin
With the passing of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky rescued Marxism from the impending oblivion delivered by the successful institutionalization of European social democracy. The orthodox Marxist social democrats of the Second International had reduced Marxist dogma to a completely reformist "science" by the time the Great War finally broke out in 1914. The bankruptcy of Marxist proletarian internationalism was revealed when the huge social democratic parties of Europe each chose patriotic national chauvinism over international solidarity.
However, in the East the early collapse of the Russian war effort was followed by the collapse of the Russian state and a simultaneous revolutionary awakening of the soldiers, workers and peasants. This series of events, combined with the cynically astute political maneuverings of Lenin and his Bolshevik Party, allowed Lenin to refashion this same bankrupt social democratic Marxism into an ideology of state capitalist counter-revolution. In the name of "Communism", Lenin and Trotsky presided over the destruction of the Russian Revolution and the mass repression of revolutionaries. The "Bolshevik Revolution", actually only a coup d'etat, proceeded not only to replace the Provisional Government's efforts to rebuild the Russian state machinery, but it systematically stripped away whatever power the revolutionary Russian people had gained over their lives.
Inevitably, the Russian anarchists, fighting for a social revolution directly controlled by the people themselves, became the major roadblock standing in the way of consolidation of the Bolshevik regime as it eliminated all rival parties and movements. This focused both Bolshevik repression and Leninist and Trotskyist rhetoric squarely on all the forms of anarchist resistance to new Bolshevik Marxist tyranny. Aside from the meaningless old Marxist accusations that anarchists are "petty bourgeois" (or "bourgeois", etc.), this is the moment when the major anarchist groups active in Petrograd and Moscow were categorized as "bandits" (for their redistribution of property and occupation of buildings!), when they weren't alleged to be "objectively counter-revolutionary" (for their opposition to the destruction of the revolution by the Bolsheviks!). Trotsky added nasty lies about the anarchist Makhnovschina guerillas in the Ukraine opening the front to the White armies, the Tsarist counter-revolutionaries (while, in actuality, Trotsky's Red Army was attacking the Makhnovschina relentlessly).
With the consolidation of state capitalism in the Soviet Union under Stalin, the Bolshevik counter-revolutionary repression and terror reached its logical extreme, not only within the Soviet Union but wherever the Third International (Comintern) could reach through affiliated parties throughout the world. In revolutionary Spain this meant an all-out effort to destroy the anarchist movement along with the 1936 revolution in order to install the Spanish Communist Party in power. To this end all the old anti-anarchist calumnies mentioned above were trotted out once more.
The New Left and identity politics
Although the 1960s and 1970s marked a genuine upsurge in radical and revolutionary movements, culture and events across continents, the much vaunted New Left was never able to distinguish itself sufficiently from the old left to prevent it from suffering most of the same fatal problems. The Civil Rights movement remained steadfastly committed to reformist political approaches. The new Marxist-Leninist groups - born in the 1960s and after - sometimes repudiated Stalinism (it being uncool in those hip times), but just as often did not. With the (formal) decolonization of Asia and Africa, national liberation struggles bent on establishing new state capitalist regimes (or just new capitalist regimes with a little progressive rhetoric thrown in) were uncritically celebrated. Large parts of the anti-war movement opposing the US invasion of Vietnam provided a prime example of this. And, unsurprisingly, these nationalist struggles often became models for the new identity movements of blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, feminists and others.
Although anarchists also began reappearing in slowly, but steadily increasing numbers from the 1960s, they remained a minuscule minority of most organizations and actions. Nor were they very knowledgeable of the actual history of the international anarchist milieu, its theoretical debates and practices, or its relationship to the political left. Thus it wasn't unusual for unlikely amalgamations of Marxist-Leninism and anarchism, Stalinism and anarchism, anarchism and identity politics, or even capitalism and anarchism to appear. With a ready body of established dogma to regurgitate, social-democratic Marxists and the new Marxist-Leninist (sometimes also Stalinist and/or Maoist) sects took advantage of the naivete of many of these new anarchists to press into service once again the now aged accusations against anarchists made all the way back to Marx. As a result, since the 1960s, not only has the perennial battle between anarchist anti-politics and Marxist politics been rejoined numerous times and places, but old historical lies and accusations from the First International, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Revolution, etc. have been repeated again and again.
Left anarchists or anti-anarchist leftists
However, that brings us to the present day, more than a decade following the implosion of the Soviet Union and the international discrediting and collapse of the Marxist left. Now that anarchy is the only remaining credible revolutionary anti-capitalist game in town, it's about time for any and all self-respecting anarchists to jettison the leftover leftist rhetoric that seeped into the movement during all those years when anarchists were a beleaguered minority. Today, there's no excuse for any anarchists to adopt anti-anarchist rhetoric for use against other anarchists. It's past time for us all to abandon the "petty bourgeois" slurs and all the rest, which have become pure farce in the mouths of those to whom they were originally aimed.
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