chapotraphouse

I am an anarchist - anarchists (as far as a monolithic ‘anarchists’ exists) do not hate communists. Anarchists are likely to disagree with some aspects of Marxist-Leninist ideology - they may even hate some aspects of it. But they do not hate communists - many of them would even identify as communists. Essentially all anarchists and communists share the same common end goal - a moneyless, classless, stateless society. Anarchists and MLs disagree on the implementation details - the best way to reach our goal.

The question as to why an anarchist would come to be in opposition to the ML approach for implementing communism - it’s not really about an “information source”, it’s just application of ideology. It would require the creation of a hierarchy. If the anarchist believes that hierarchy to be unjustified, then they will oppose it.

I couldn’t really point to any sort of individual source for my ideology. I came to realise over time that the one common thread that exists for all forms of oppression is power over others - wherever one group has held power over another group, oppression has occurred. If we want to prevent oppression, the answer emerges: get rid of as many imbalances of power as possible.

An anarchist knows that the risk of having a transitional state is that those empowered by the state will abuse that power to betray the people and the revolution. How likely that risk is, and whether it’s viable (or even possible) to achieve communism without a transitional state is the most important aspect which will define how (un)willing the anarchist would be to work with marxist-leninists.

Hope this helps, happy to answer any other questions you have about anarchism.

I guess same way people screeching anarkiddies while not having read any theory ever

I wouldn’t say anarchists are a monolith in this regard. There are multiple networks which have some overlap, but aren’t necessarily the same. Like someone who gets radicalized on Reddit is going to be different from someone who gets radicalized because their sister volunteered for Food Not Bombs a lot. But both may have read the bread book.

Probably because most western socialists come to leftist politics not through on-the-ground organizing, but rather, some dissatisfaction with their own society that leads them to seek alternatives. The first place to seek alternatives is going to be looking to the past or reading theorists, and then it depends on a lot of factors on who they'll sympathize with. It's often just aesthetics because I've organized with both Marxist and anarchist organizations and there's not a whole lot of difference when you're actually outdoors.

Also there's a long history of western states using Trotskyism as a cudgel against leftist organizing. It's cooked into the standard education now that Trotsky was supposed to be party secretary after Lenin, but Stalin betrayed them all. That's the standard understanding of how things went, so that takes a lot of time to disentangle. The primary operating mode of the western mind is an imperialist xenophobia and depending on how they get over that will say how their political outlook may shake out

Also I can't stress enough how much of simply an aesthetic it is, at least in the west. It doesn't matter. Unless you live in like...Greece or the Philippines or somewhere in rural Colombia, there aren't warring factions of Marxists and anarchists. The only sectarian conflict I've ever seen in person were when cops were involved, like the "Maoist" groups that would overturn tables at Food not Bombs or show up at PSL events to call the organizers a bunch of crackers.

On the ground you gotta understand how little of this actually matters. There simply isn't major conflict. Anarchist and Marxist groups cooperate all the time. They might have disagreements on how to do stuff or what symbols to use, but it basically never matters. The closest thing to a sectarian conflict that I can remember among the groups I roll with is around 2021 some of the anarchists I knew wanted to boycott the covid vaccine. But they ended up getting it anyway so who cares

Anarchist here. You don't get taught to hate MLs, you just get exposed to a lot of MLs making aggressive and ill-informed arguments against anarchism and it gets on your nerves.

I don't hate Lenin either, even though his writing is full of the same sort of thing, and I don't particularly disagree with him about much. I think tankie vs anarchist is mostly a disagreement about definitions tbh.

Probably in the minority with this one, my "grudge" originates from reading this: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq-full#toc562

And while it's much more toned down since then, it is still present as what you describe as "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." - which from my perspective is more like that the leaders of the USSR tended to resort to abuse of power in order to hold power and MLs are very vehement about the fact that these were no big deals or even were completely necessary to keep the project going, while, coming from anarchist circles, from my perspective these events change the nature of the project itself. This is mostly why i can relate to trots more - they are not afraid to call out what they perceive as self-serving use of power as mistakes, or even crimes.

I think it’s a couple of things

Western chauvinism inculcates “those are bad countries doing bad things in a bad system” which takes a lot to unlearn.

Authority can and always is abused for corruption and has been abused for corruption in communist systems, which in part justifies the charge that any system with structural authority will be abused for corruption.

Angst vibes lead to a “fuck every system” attitude.

By standing against all authority structures that actually exist or have existed, they are immune to criticisms based on reality, so I think to a degree it’s a stand you take when you want to take a stand but don’t want to accept that reality is always flawed.

Communist states are often militaristic which sits uncomfortably close to nationalism.