chapotraphouse

My experience has been with comrades who were good organizers but never really well read. They eventually decide to make an effort and go onto Reddit to find what theory they should be reading if they're an anarchist. (Reversing the order of operations in my opinion). They get really into reading about heroic historical figures and their context-specofic grudges from a hundred years ago and fail to really see the bigger picture as a result.

Westerners: “I get to claim to be radical and against everything I don’t like and still not have an actually defend any flawed history? Great!”

I think most self identified anarchist these days don't arrive at anarchism because of some deep introspective journey. They leap into it based on inherent biases against ML states. They learn all about the evils of capitalism and decided to be against it but still believe all the bullshit about the USSR and China. I don't think it's people being educated or pushed to be anti-communist more not being pushed to actually study communism and look at AES critically through it's own lense. In which case they are going to default the cultural western view of seeing them as totalitarian and therefore evil. They just sort of default to it as it feels right.

i would guess it stems from the desire to rebel against the authority and perceiving the state as unjust, they (correctly) see the capitalist government unjustly enforcing the law on them, and see the communists as doing something similar but under the banner of the hammer and sickle.

i was listening to Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House on the spanish civil war episode, where he talks about how the anarchist ideology came from some russian noble who went to the serfs villages and rebelled against the royalty (iirc) - i guess it would make sense to the anarchist that they see communists as something akin to royalty in regards of the structures of authority.

it makes sense to me i guess, i think about all the media produce with marvel superheros and stuff - so i presume the anarchists see all forms of authority as bad, and see sides as good and bad as oppose to people acting in material interests. especially when the authority in america like the police fuck with people so badly it polarises people to be staunch anti structure framework kind of mindset

Everybody is taught that communism is bad and should be hated. It's not how they learn to hate commies, it should be asked how they learn not to. Lots of anarchists I've met like to talk about "authoritarianism" and "totalitarianism." Two made-up words created to sound like scary descriptors of evil foreigners. Any definition of those two words is either vague enough to describe any form of state ever, or so precisely crafted to only fit the description of one country, that it is functionally meaningless. I did read about the person who popularised "authoritarianism" receiving CIA funding, but I've lost the bookmarks sadly, so now it's just a kooky conspiracy theory.

Lots of people realise the system is fucked and there is a need for something radical. They will start out by calling themselves something like "social democrats" or "leftist liberals", which allows them to be very smug online. From this point on many will at some point realise that their ascribed ideology is still just the status quo. This motivates a curiosity, which most often results in them encountering work by a CIA asset. This work prompts a change.
This change tends to move towards "anarchism" (actually liberalism). These people then decide to call themselves anarchists, which allows them to be smug online, while still supporting the status quo. Other people become trots, so they can be smug in bookstores while supporting the status quo. Other people become left-coms so they can be smug in an armchair and angry online and do nothing to change the status quo.

Other people get their ideology from memes. Cultural hegemony goes brrr. People are taught commies are bad, but also make memes about shit being fucked. This leads to CIA assets making memes, which makes some people reconsider their ideology. Many of these people end up becoming something like "social democrats" or "leftist liberals", which allows them to be very smug online. From this point on many will at some point realise that their ascribed ideology is still just the status quo. They see more memes. They "change" their ideology (still posting things online) to being "anarchists" (liberals posting things online supporting the status quo.) This allows them to be smug online. Other people become trots, so they can be smug in bookstores while supporting the status quo. Other people become left-coms so they can be smug in an armchair and angry online and do nothing to change the status quo.

edit: Added a paragraph and made it a bit more tongue-in-cheek

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

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

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.

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.

An interesting connection that I've observed over and over again to the point that it's practically a law in my head, is how many of these newly minted anticommunist "anarchists" also end up being anti-black or more accurately anti-black radical politics, the same phenomenon emerges subtly among many academic western Marxians and more obviously with the whole maga"communist" conservative subculture

Historically, anti-communism and anti-blackness have been inseparable and the anxiety is obvious, westerners fear communism will lead to minorities escaping their subordinate positions and inflicting some nebulous horror upon them, this anxiety is so baked into American consciousness that you had Trump accuse Kamala Harris (neoliberal par excellence) of being a communist, anyone with sense understood that as being an expression of both anticommunism and more prominently anti-blackness

My theory (which is largely lifted from Professor Gerald Horn) is that anti-communism in the west is directly proportional with anti-blackness and explains the savage irrational anti-left hatred that you observe among so many newly minted so-called radicals, the state and it's various intelligence orgs supply the mental and intellectual architecture of anticommunism while anti-blackness supplies the emotional fuel that sustains that state effort

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronstadt_rebellion

None of the Kronstadt rebellion's demands were met.[205] The Bolsheviks did not restore freedom of speech and assembly. They did not release socialist and anarchist political prisoners. Rival left-wing groups were suppressed rather than brought into coalition governance. The Bolsheviks did not adopt worker council autonomy ("free soviets") and did not entertain direct, democratic soldier election of military officials. Old directors and specialists continued to run the factories instead of the workers. State farms remained in place. Wage labor remained unchanged.[206] Avrich described the aftermath as such: "As in all failed revolts in authoritarian regimes, the rebels realized the opposite of their aims: harsher dictatorship, less popular self-government."[207]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Goldman

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Disillusionment_in_Russia

Goldman described the rebellion as the "final wrench. I saw before me the Bolshevik State, formidable, crushing every constructive revolutionary effort, suppressing, debasing, and disintegrating everything".[1]