Edit for clarity: I'm not asking why the Tankie/Anarchist grudge exist. I'm curious about what information sources - mentors, friends, books, TV, cultural osmosis, conveys that information to people. Where do individuals encounter this information and how does it become important to them. It's an anthropology question about a contemporary culture rather than a question about the history of leftism.
I've been thinking about this a bit lately. Newly minted Anarchists have to learn to hate Lenin and Stalin and whoever else they have a grudge against. They have to encounter some materials or teacher who teaches them "Yeah these guys, you have to hate these guys and it has to be super-personal like they kicked your dog. You have to be extremely angry about it and treat anyone who doesn't disavow them as though they're literally going to kill you."
Like there's some process of enculturation there, of being brought in to the culture of anarchism, and there's a process where anarchists learn this thing that all (most?) anarchists know and agree on.
Idk, just anthropology brain anthropologying. Cause like if someone or something didn't teach you this why would you care so much?
As an anarchist, how it went for me:
Read history. Have intimate relationships with at least two tankies (all my relationships end badly, so its a sure way to build a grudge).
Marx was cool though (sometimes), and I've got some ml comrades who are doing pretty much the right thing, and most importantly: I'd rather be murdered by my hot problematic ex in a few years than some shitty nazi tomorrow. So if there are firing squads for the anarchists, my last wish is that one of my exes do mine, please.
If I get my way, you guys can run the trains.
If none of this makes sense, read some less myopic history. The USSR was unquestionably better than the czarist regime, by a lot, and it was the worst most reactionary group of communists kind of giving communism a bad name by being generally shitty about being bare minimum decent¹. Also the bolsheviks killing all the other communists, not just the anarchists. Yes they moved Russia, technologically, farther in their short life than basically any civilization in history, but they did it by shitting on the core ideas of communism for some peripheral crap Marx said was 'probably a thing you need sometjing like to get there, I think'. There's an opportunity cost thing, and I'll give them more understanding, but they do not get a full pass for bad behavior just because they were communist. What's the incident where the term 'tankie' was born? Remember that one?
Yes they were better than the other world powers, but by as little as they could get away with while still calling themselves communist, like they relished the misery, fetishized the sacrifices, and frequently missed the god damn point. They ruled for a people they weren't willing to trust or like, a lesson robespierre had already fucking taught us, and that poisoned the idea of communism, or at least the word, for a lot of people. Thats why I still have to call myself an anarchist instead of an anarcho-communist if I want to turn libs.
¹which, yes, set the entire rest of the world against them. They had a few teeeensy difficulties. They still used it as a license to be otherwise just as awful as everyone else, and handled their problems in utterly deplorable ways.
Yes, we remember the incidents in which the USSR prevented Hungary and Czechoslovakia from becoming what eastern Europe has become now (after passing through a crisis that killed millions)
I can't imagine how after the liberalisation of eastern Europe in the 90s, anarchists will look at it and say "yeah, thank god the USSR didn't roll in the tanks this time".
May I help your imagination?
I often wonder what would have happened if various nations in the Eastern Bloc had been designated as buffer states, and allowed multi-party democracy, woth just pro-capitalist parties being suppressed. Including assassinating the occasional fascist that popped up in the big-tent movement. But "every possible party except mine is a pro-capitalist party" is not a useful or serious position.
I wonder what would have happened if RIAU and other groups holding territory against the Bolsheviks in the early USSR would have been truced with in order for them to dedicate their war efforts against the invading imperialist powers, and then granted special autonomous/devolution zones.
I wonder what would have happened if some of the demands of the striking sailors at Kronstadt, like plurality in the workers' councils, were granted- whether having the experience of 5000 socialist soldiers instead of having their blood being shed would have influenced the Winter War or even the Eastern Front of WW2 as a whole.
I also wonder about the missed opportunities from the party officials and public figures killed in the Great Purge, but that extends far beyond anarchists. With the degree to which the USSR was fighting itself for its first 2 decades especially, it's easy to wonder whether it could have avoided the political dilution and degeneration of the second half of the twentieth century.
All of those are interesting hypotheticals, and whether they would have brought more plurality within socialism than danger against the institutions and the socialist project, is up for anyone to guess.
What I can tell you is one thing: these hard decisions weren't made by "power hungry individuals", or by "authoritarianism". They were the consequence of the historical and material realities of the time, and carried out by a party composed of people wanting the best for the future of socialism in the RSFSR/Soviet Union. The reality is that the early USSR survived insurmountable odds: decomposed economy after pulling out from WW1 (which happened after a war with Japan), Russian civil war, the massive problems within dekulakization and agricultural collectivisation, and the looming threat and eventually invasion of Nazi Germany that murdered more than 20 million people in the Soviet Union. The fact alone that it was capable of doing so, tells me enough about the necessity of the decisions taken.
That does not mean that everything is perfect. Of course the Great Purge went way beyond too far, of course socialists don't ideally want to oppress working class revolutionaries like in the Kronstadt rebellion, but what should we attribute those to then? Mustache man bad? Lenin bad? Marxism-Leninism bad? Or to extremely difficult time periods which create extreme necessities?
Moreover: why, if all of this is supposedly embedded in the nature of the Soviet Union or Marxism-Leninism, such things stopped happening after the 1960s for the most part? There was no great purge, there was no rebellion like Kronstadt or Hungary with their subsequent repressions
I wouldn't attribute the excessive internal violence to heads of state being in essence bad, I would attribute them to mistakes being made. Mistakes made under duress, sure, but still avoidable mistakes.
I'm not an expert on this but there are comparisons that can be made with figures like Julius Caesar and Napoleon, who were relatively favorable to the poor/proletarians, and used institutional power to seize control of the state to fend off reactionary forces. Lenin is less like these other two, but it is a tragic model that repeats in history.
Something else that plays into it is the proverbial person with a hammer to whom everything looks like a nail. When you're a revolutionary force, any entity you have conflict with instinctively feels counter-revolutionary.
We accept that representational bodies should include all demographics, ideally proportionally, because we recognize that someone from one demographic cannot understand the full experience and implications of the others, and therefore cannot speak for the others. The mechanism here is that people with power are going to use it in ways that benefit themselves, consciously or subconsciously; there is also going to be inequities based on how close people are to power. There are no fully equitable and considerate leaders. And this problem happens even in anarchist groups. I've personally noticed and commented on how avowed anarchists can end up reflexively "leading" things in all but name. A critique of democracy that came out of Occupy was that it is impossible for even a general assembly to represent everyone equally.
The solution is to have a mechanism in place from the beginning for how to devolve and disperse both formal power and informal power, down to a level that is deemed as acceptable.
Anyone who converts to a certain identity is prone to being sectarian at first, as a way of confirming their identity. The more history I've studied and the more I've experienced, the more nuanced many of my positions have become.
They were fucking socialists. They came in with paratroopers and tanks to kill socialists. It was not a lib revolution, I dont have a problem with dead CIA puppet libs, this was socialists who wanted autonomy. This is why a lot of anarchists can't stand tankies.
Edit: List the things the USSR did wrong. It existed for seventy years and covered eleven time zones, so there's no way, even if they were the best ever, that its gonna be a short list. If it is a short list, consider that you might be rationalizing and covering up and lying to cover the fuckups of an empire thats been dead probably longer than you've been alive, and most of the pieces have been to war with other pieces since. Why? Its dead and gone, you sound like how libs sound after throwing an election. Let's do a post mortem so we can do better next time, let's dig deep into the fuckups and fucking learn from fucking history. There were cool parts too! And let's learn from those too! But you can't take either in isolation, that's not honest, and its not useful.
So was the USSR in 1986 applying Perestroika and Glasnost, and look where that led them. Many more socialists died as a consequence of the dismantling of the Eastern Bloc than as a consequence of USSR actions.
Yes, that's the US State Department version. Seeing how almost literally all countries that have taken these liberalisation policies have ended in Capitalism as a consequence (except possibly China depending on who you ask, and Cuba possibly might be on the way to that), I find it hard to believe that it would have brought the result of happier socialism for everyone.
Feel free to answer if you really mean that you want me to make a list of USSR L's, but I think it's not a stretch to say that Marxist-Leninists usually know as much of the repressions and bad stuffs in the USSR as any other flavour of socialists
I'm saying if you can't see their fuckups, if you buy all the cope, you aren't really learning much from their successes either, and this is just masturbating to an idealized past.
There are socialist regimes, even centralized ones close to your ideology, that have not failed, that still exist, that have a better record of being on the right side of history. I dont have a ton of interest arguing the minutiae of a shitty dead empire that could have been really really fucking cool. Why the fuck do any of you never talk about them?
Please excuse me, which socialist country has a better record of being on the right side of history than the Soviet Union?!
I'll try and make you a list of the bigger ones IMO later or tomorrow. Again, I don't expect many people to know more about such issues than Marxist-Leninists, who are famously obsessed with the USSR.
I don't actually care, its just an exercise to see if youre delusional by checking roughly how many. Do it, but for yourself. Remember the people you love might be great, but they also suck. Remembering one without the other is not respecting their memory.
Cuba in particular, as far as nation States, tends to be on the right side of things earlier than most. I'm not interested in discussing it at present.
would not exist as a socialist state without the USSR and (though this may only be historical contingency) Krushchev, doing the only other correct thing he did besides rolling tanks on Hungary
Read what I actually wrote about the USSR though.
I don't know what makes you think I didn't. I saw a bunch of vague moral pronouncements and then you refusing to clearly answer questions. For that reason along with the fact that I really want to waste less of my time in internet arguments, I have no interest in the broader discussion here.
I just felt it would be helpful perspective that every existing socialist state (well, idk about Laos) and some of the historical ones owe(d) their existence to the victory of the Bolsheviks. I think that the subsequent progress made by states like Cuba should be understood as part of a historical progression that the USSR was a positive forbear in.
They owe their existence to the victory over the czar, which was a coalition of many many left groups. The Bolsheviks were there, but they were one small group among many during the revolution.
Do you mean the victory over the provisional government? Anyway, whatever. The answer regardless is no, not in a sense more direct than that we should accredit it to the invention of the wheel because that too is an earlier part of the causal chain. The Bolsheviks -- yes, because they ran out their opposition -- were the ones left standing and it was this political entity as it developed (and devolved) over time that was concretely the one responsible for helping the various other states. We don't know what the other left factions would have done or if they even would have survived long enough to do something productive. You really can't escape giving the Bolsheviks credit here.
But any of the comrades they betrayed would gave done it better. Or are you arguing that betraying their comrades is a plus, somehow?
Zero substantiation
I think a one-party system makes sense and we don't need to add weird moralistic flourishes, pretending parties are people and dissolving other parties is an act of murder. It's not like they just round up and shot everyone when they seized power, they just deemed central organization a necessity, but even those who opposed this were treated with kid gloves until things got graver in the following decade.
I'm going to note that you are very reluctant to actually elaborate on many of your points, including which socialist projects have a better record of being on the right side of history. Seriously, how many can you name other than Cuba and East Germany?
This person has been doing this after joining yesterday and repeating repeatedly debunked points while not elaborating on any of them.
Ah, famous socialist cardinal József Mindszenty.
With Czechoslovakia it's a bit more muddled, but looking at Gorbachev who was at first "we'll do socialism a bit better" and then "we are ceding power to capitalists now", I'm sceptical it wouldn't do something similar.
Did you just use the failure if the USSR via self-rat-fucking to justify the imperialism of the USSR? I get the names mixed up sometimes, so genuine question.
Incorrect term. Call it hegemonism if you want, or geopolitical interventionism, but not imperialism. The USSR did not engage in economic imperialism in any stretch of the word, not within itself, not with neighbouring countries, not with third parties. It was a source of raw materials for the Eastern Bloc which it traded within COMECON on exchange for industrial goods at approximately international market prices* (i.e. applying unequal exchange to itself in favour of COMECON countries), it supplied aid in the form of industrial development to poor third countries on exchange for local goods, many times those produced by the newly formed industries (instead of supplying aid in the form of loans for raw material extraction and expecting a return in hard currency with interest rates)... It's really impossible by any stretch of the word "imperialism" to apply it to the USSR.
*after the mid-50s
The Soviet invasion of Hungary was good and based and one of the few correct things Khrushchev did. It's worth bearing in mind the uprising in Hungary coincided with Israel, France and UK's attack on Egypt.
It was a mix of a popular uprising against Khrushchevs faked "secret" speech about Stalin which enabled the fascist elements (paid, armed and trained by US and UK) of Hungarian society to gamble their chance on getting rid of socialist rule.
Fascists marked Communists homes with a white cross and those of jews with a black cross for extermination squads:
(Herbert Apheker, The Truth About Hungary, p.220)
CIA sent terrorists to Hungary under the RED SOX program (Horthy here was the leader of the Hungarian fascists under 23 years of fascist rule in Hungary until Soviet liberation).
(James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence, by Michael Howard Holzman, pp. 150-160)
(ibid)
(MI6 trained rebels to fight Soviets in Hungarian revolt, The Independent)
Hungary, in 1954, was considered a "weak spot" of the Soviet Union according to US committee '
(Truth About Hungary p.112)
USA was planning on WW3 with Soviet Union in 1943 (2 years before WW2 ended) whilst the British - at war with Hungary at this time "looked on at favour of Horthy" (Horthyism was the brand of fascism in Hungary in power for 23 years prior to Soviet liberation which was only more and more influenced by Nazism as the alliance with Austria and Germany deepened during that period and was to be the main fighting force in 1956)
(Herbert Apheker, The Truth About Hungary, p.71)
Americans gravitated toward the fascist elements in Hungary at the end of WWII
(ibid p. 73)
NATO furnished support to the fascistic elements of the Horthy fascists with:
(ibid p.95)
credit to /u/JoeysStainlessSteel
I do find that the presence of the Arrow Cross Party more or less intact in Hungary is often missed in the discussion.
Ah yes, the other thing that very easily makes me fuel my grudge against the USSR, the complete and utter revision of the 1956 uprising in Hungary based on one book written by an american and the fucking independent article where the second part of the quote ("But he added: "There is no evidence that this was specifically sparked by MI6 because there was another series of events"") is ALWAYS cut out for some reason.
I'll help [email protected] out here. We can summarize the first quote as follows:
As for the rest, the CIA/MI6 possibly contributing (note: it would have happened either way - the material reasons why people went on general strike/took up arms would still be there) to the start of the uprising does not serve as evidence for much other than confirm the obvious fact "the USSR and NATO were geopolitical enemies". It's akin to saying China abandoned socialism by 1969 because of this, or that Lenin was a "german agent".
Yes, the uprising in reality did not have a single coherent ideology: some were libs, while others (most) were workers with actual grievances against the bureaucracy, who were forming workers' councils (e.g. Greater Budapest Workers' Council) and demanding direct workers' control of industries. Though note: none of the prominent participating organisations made any calls to return to capitalism, and the said workers' councils were the only ones that persisted for months after the military intervention, until the leaders were all arrested. Even if we suppose that the initial leaders of the movement were sponsored by the West, that soon stopped being the case because the leading organisations obviously changed.
reads like handwaving from The Economist
The Economist, famously the voice of workers who are striking in order not to have to give back the factories to capitalists.
" Even if we suppose that the initial leaders of the movement were sponsored by the West, that soon stopped being the case because the leading organisations obviously changed."
Source? edit: Realized, even if the leading organization changed...wouldn't the same actors be behind the scenes regardless?
"it would have happened either way - the material reasons why people went on general strike/took up arms would still be there"
What agitated those conditions for the express purpose of dismantling a socialist project while having a history of doing so? You're not defending them, you're making excuses for a color revolution dedicated to dismantling a socialist project. If anything, the fact that the soviet union actually had hesitancy and wanted to work/deal with worker councils runs counter to the point 401k is making.
Heya buddy, gonna respond to the fact that it was a color revolution?
It's absolutely gross that this got upvoted. I guess CIA terrorists are "fucking socialists".
it was a fascist counterrevolution supported by MI6 and the CIA and you are falling for the western lie about it
I think you are extremely not aware of their achievements, or are undervaluing things such as guaranteed housing (I want to reiterate this point - it means that the state does not just up and torture and kill people by forcing them onto the streets - this is something that nobody seems to pay much attention to, including anarchists, for whatever reason), guaranteed healthcare (meaning that people are not tortured by being declined a basic need in this regard, either), the sort of women's rights that we take for granted today (including criminalisation of marital SA - first in the world).
I am sorry, but in what world is that 'the most reactionary group of communists', and how is this 'the bare minimum'? This is massive.
I'm not sure what groups are you referring to.
This is just straight up false. Their internal achievements were massive. Internationally, they supported basically every anti-colonial liberation movement in the world (which, for example, is a huge contrast between them and the PRC). They were not under any obligation to do the good that they did in that regard.
I'm sorry, but this is just obvious unsubstantiated fantasy. I am saying this as a person who both has put effort into investigating the USSR, and who has easy access to people who lived and worked in the USSR and who knows what those people think on the matter.
You're completely missing the point of what I said for the sake of defensiveness, and its too late in the day for me to rewrite it better. Your points are all broadly addressed in whar youre replying to. Re-read what I already wrote or dont; youre not getting better out of me right now.
Firstly, what points am I missing?
Secondly, you mistake an honest attempt to educate as 'defensiveness'. If you want to try to escalate, I assure you that I can bite back and that I have studied the topic. I would like to ask you to keep things civil, however.
Except, they are evidently not.
You do not address the fact that the Bolsheviks were progressive even by today's standards (the guaranteed housing alone is a very significant development that is possible due to planned economy and you may notice that planned economies at least usually - if not always - provide guaranteed housing).
You do not address the fact that the USSR did quite a bit more than 'the bare minimum' internationally, either. The claim in your original comment is outright false.
You do not address the fact that your claim that 'they relished the misery, fetishized the sacrifices, and frequently missed the god damn point' is just fantasy that doesn't mean anything and is just meant to very vaguely paint communists in a bad light.
I am going to note that you refused to elaborate on any of that.
[crickets]
So like what books were you reading? Did you have like a mentor who recommended literature or a reading list? Did any stand out as particular favorites?
This was a loooooooong time ago, and I was reading or listening to basically anything I could get my hands on, but i was already definitely an anarchist and vaguely a communist, had been the former since single digit years and the latter since at least age 16 or so. Uh, I think the 'revolutions' podcast had a non-objectionable thing on the Russian revolution, but idr if it covers this much.
I've come across podcasts that cover bits of it more recently, if you want me to DM links. No I didn't have mentors. Not political anyway. I had some punk friends but they weren't into history or theory. Mostly got radicalized by experience being varying degrees of alone; was lonely and alienating as fuck. I'd rather not get more personal publicly on this account.
If youre genuinely curious, I can dig some stuff up for you, but I'm not sure it will be what I read 10+ years ago. I have some interesting theory that explains what I specifically think, but I was already firmly in the 'authority is not okay' and 'private property is just feudalism with extra gaslighting' camps.
Thank you for the reply. I appreciate the offer but I don't need links just now. I will think about what you said though, you've given me some touch off points to, idk, rework the question i guess? It'd be so much easier to figure stuff out if it wasn't so hard to figure out what question you want to ask! : )
And how/where to ask it, now that web search is dead. Good luck figuring shit out!
To be absolutely clear, the poor and lackluster decisions and retreats from "pure" Marxism and Leninism were by far the result of material conditions over a personal desire for power. The USSR was the world's first socialist experiment and thus went on to make mistakes which would be corrected by later socialist experiments which would survive the 90s, but many of those things were forced by the invasion of 14 imperialist powers and the genocidal war campaign of the Nazis shortly after.
The history of Marxism (from the Marxist perspective) can be seen as legitimately taking the most successful form of liberatory thought and action in the modern day and trying to make it continually work in the cruel world we're born into. It's not perfect, but it's been shown to work on a scale larger than any other strain of thought, and socialist revolutions have fed more children who'd gone hungry before than anything else prior or after.
For more context in this worldview, I highly recommend Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti and Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo
You can't think if any others? Not one?
Everything else you said I addressed in my statement. Refer back to it.
Which socialist projects do you hold in higher regard?
In fairness, the USSR was the first Marxist experiment. There were other socialist experiments before that, most important to us being the Paris Commune.
There were a whole lot of weird utopian socialist cults in America. Like Oenida silverware started out as a utopian sex cult.
Most of them. Different criticisms, but generally; most of them.
China hasn't counted for decades; opposing America is not a defining component of socialism. It's just a generally cool thing to do.
But my primary concern is not states and authorities; they dont generally interest me.
Okay, why do you hold, for example, Vietnam in higher regard than the USSR? Why do you consider Angola to be better than the USSR? Why the early PRC over the USSR?
Also, surely you don't hold the pogrom-loving Makhno's territories in higher regard, do you?