Originally published on November 22nd, 2025 at The Polar Blast. Recently republished by Anarchist Communist Group (ACG) UK on July 22nd, 2026.
For the past few years, a peculiar current has swept through parts of the anarchist milieu, particularly those corners closest to academia, the NGO apparatus, and the broad “social justice” ecosystems of the liberal left. It goes something like this: “we don’t live in revolutionary times”. The line is always delivered with a kind of weary resignation, as if the speaker has grown too sophisticated, too worldly, too traumatised or too professional to still believe in any of the old principles.
We are told that anarchists cannot reject electoralism, because that would be “dogmatic” or “purist.” We cannot maintain a principled anti-militarism in the face of imperial alignments and geopolitical chessboards, because that would be “naïve” or “privileged” or simply “not how the world works.” We cannot challenge nationalism, because apparently even anarchists must kneel before the altar of flags when the right war breaks out. And in Aotearoa, we are increasingly instructed that anarchists, of all people, should simply fall into line behind Labour, the Greens, or Te Pāti Māori, and that anything else amounts to assisting the Right, aiding fascism, or failing to take “real-world consequences” seriously.
It is a remarkable ideological contortion, one that has transformed a large portion of self-identified anarchists into adjuncts of liberalism, junior partners to parliamentary leftism, and in some cases loud defenders of militarised state power. This collapse is not merely political drift; it represents a profound refusal to uphold the most basic tenets of anarchism. It is a capitulation dressed up as realism, a surrender disguised as nuance, and a fear of being politically unfashionable mispackaged as maturity.
But at its core, this discourse expresses something simple and corrosive – a belief that anarchism is incapable of acting as a revolutionary force in its own right, and must therefore outsource its agency to liberal institutions.
One cannot understand the present collapse of anarchist independence without understanding the cultural ecosystem that many leftists now inhabit. In Aotearoa, as across the Western world, political energy has been systematically redirected into NGOs, consultancies, academic departments, and publicly funded “progressive” institutions which operate comfortably inside capitalism’s infrastructure. These spaces speak the language of radicalism but behave according to the incentives of bureaucracy.
Many young anarchists do not radicalise through struggle anymore, through occupations, workplace organising, anti-militarist resistance, housing fights, or anti-police action. Instead, they are socialised into a professional sphere where the primary goal is to secure contracts, maintain social capital, and avoid political risk. The result is predictable: anarchism becomes merely a branding aesthetic rather than a commitment to revolutionary action.
Inside those institutional spaces, rejecting electoralism is framed as childish. Criticising leftist parties is framed as sabotaging “progress.” Maintaining anti-militarist principles is presented as dangerous idealism. Refusing to collapse into a Labour-Green-Māori Party electoral bloc is seen as a betrayal of the “community.”
But these are not moral judgments, they are occupational ones. Anarchists working within NGO and academic networks quickly internalise that their material survival depends on aligning with the soft-left consensus. Electoral criticism risks contracts. Anti-militarism risks reputational safety. Anti-state politics complicates relationships with funders.
And so a new norm develops – anarchists should avoid being too anarchist. Radical rhetoric is allowed, even encouraged, so long as it ends up reinforcing the parliamentary left. Anything that threatens the state’s monopoly on legitimacy becomes unspeakable.
The result is an anarchism that speaks fluently about “mutual aid” yet forgets that mutual aid is not a social service but a weapon against the state’s claim to necessity. An anarchism that condemns racism and colonialism yet funnels all resistance into state-aligned institutions. An anarchism that champions decolonisation yet recoils from any challenge to parliamentary authority in Aotearoa. An anarchism that supports struggles overseas only when they align with Western strategic narratives.
In essence, it is an anarchism that has lost its nerve — and then rationalised that loss as intellectual sophistication.
The drift into electoral reasoning is a key symptom of this collapse. It takes several forms.
Sometimes it is explicit: “We must vote for Labour/Greens/TPM to keep the Right out.” Sometimes it is dressed up in social-justice rhetoric: “Marginalised communities are harmed when the Right wins, therefore anarchists have a responsibility to vote.” Sometimes it is wrapped in strategic fatalism: “Voting won’t save us, but it helps buy time.”
But underneath all of this is the same core assumption that the state must remain the primary vehicle for social change, and anarchists must adjust their politics to accommodate that reality.
It is extraordinary how quickly anarchists forget that the modern state, liberal or conservative, is structurally unable to abolish the exploitation, hierarchies, and coercive apparatus that define it. Even when left governments attempt reforms, they do so by strengthening the machinery anarchists seek to dismantle: police, prisons, militaries, borders, welfare bureaucracies, surveillance technologies, taxation extraction systems.
In Aotearoa, Labour is a textbook example. Every time it returns to power, the anarchist milieu fractures. Those closest to NGO infrastructures begin arguing for strategic support. The rhetoric of “harm reduction” becomes weaponised to shut down criticism from those who insist, rightly, that Labour has proven itself a reliable servant of capital, imperial alliances, and domestic managerialism.
This dynamic intensified during the Ardern era. Many anarchists who had once mocked parliamentarians found themselves reduced to timid criticism, or complete silence, because the social atmosphere of liberal adoration made genuine dissent feel culturally taboo. Within activist circles, Ardernism was treated as “good enough,” and anarchists who disagreed were cast as troublemakers, misogynists, or unrealistic purists.
A movement that views itself as revolutionary should never be this fragile. Yet the collapse was widespread and revealing: many anarchists were more committed to social belonging within the liberal cultural class than to anarchism itself.
Once this cultural shift occurs, a fatal logic takes hold: anarchists must not reject electoralism because their allies, often their employers, depend on it.
This is how a revolutionary tradition turns into a lobby group.
The most alarming expression of this drift has been the abandonment of anarchist anti-militarism. For centuries, anarchists have insisted that war is not an aberration but a predictable outcome of the capitalist state system. Militarism is the purest expression of hierarchical power, resource extraction, nationalism, and obedience. It is the machine that devours working-class youth to protect the interests of competing ruling classes.
Yet in recent years, many self-described anarchists have adopted a military logic indistinguishable from Western liberalism. They cheer for NATO when it suits them. They speak approvingly of sending weapons to proxy conflicts. They amplify the language of “defence,” “security,” and “strategic necessity.” They shame anti-militarists for “not supporting the right side.”
This is the most dangerous capitulation of all.
Once anarchists accept the legitimacy of war, they have surrendered their last meaningful distinction from the statist left. The result is an anarchism that obediently follows the emotional rhythms of Western media cycles, outraged when instructed, supportive when instructed, silent when instructed, instead of maintaining its own anti-militarist compass.
Part of this collapse is ideological. Part is material. But a significant part is psychological.
Many anarchists today are terrified of being seen as “irresponsible.” The wider liberal-left culture frames politics through the lens of compliance, safety, and harm-minimisation. Anything that challenges institutional frameworks is seen as reckless. Anything that disrupts political normalcy is dangerous. Anything that undermines parliamentary leftism is indirectly “helping the Right.”
This creates a paralysing moral landscape where the worst sin an anarchist can commit is not supporting the status quo loudly enough. The fear of being blamed for a right-wing victory becomes so overwhelming that many stop imagining politics outside the narrow horizon of elections. The fear of being accused of “not caring” about marginalised communities becomes a weapon used to silence radical politics.
In such a climate, anarchism becomes an identity, not a praxis – a way of feeling radical while behaving safely.
This anxiety-based politics produces an anarchist who:
• privately agrees the state cannot liberate anyone, but fears saying so publicly.
• privately knows elections change nothing fundamental, but votes anyway and pressures others to do so.
• privately opposes war, but shares liberal talking points so as not to appear insensitive.
• privately wants to resist capitalism directly, but settles for symbolic action within the system.
The result is tragic: anarchists who are radical everywhere except where it matters.
The situation in Aotearoa intensifies this collapse because the liberal left is structured around moral frameworks linked to biculturalism, Treaty discourse, and NGO-based social justice work. These are important terrains of struggle, but the state has learned to weaponise them to maintain legitimacy.
This produces a political landscape where anarchists are pressured to treat parliamentary actors, especially Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori as central vehicles for “progress,” even when their track record is deeply entangled with colonial administration, policing, market capitalism, and militarised foreign policy.
The liberal state in Aotearoa has become adept at performing moral virtue while intensifying its structural violence. It deploys kupu Māori in its rebranding while expanding prisons. It funds “community providers” while crushing working-class living standards. It hires iwi consultants while pushing militarised surveillance in the Pacific. It offers symbolic recognition while evading material decolonisation.
Yet many anarchists, immersed in NGO environments and Treaty workshops, struggle to critique this dynamic without being accused of cultural ignorance or reactionary politics. The result is silence, caution, or apologism, behaviours entirely incompatible with anarchist commitments to confronting state power, all state power, regardless of the rhetoric it cloaks itself in.
And so the argument returns: anarchists must support leftist parties; anarchists must not reject electoralism; anarchists must not oppose nationalist or militarised frameworks when they are framed as protective of Indigenous sovereignty or marginalised communities.
Such reasoning conflates the state with the people, a mistake anarchists spent 150 years warning against.
The claim that anarchists “can’t” reject electoralism, or “can’t” oppose leftist parties, is ultimately a claim about the impossibility of political imagination. It assumes that the state is the only terrain available, that nothing meaningful can be done outside of it, and that anarchists must align themselves with the managerial left because the alternative is irrelevance.
But this is only true if we accept the premises of liberal fatalism. The entire anarchist tradition exists because previous generations refused those premises. Emma Goldman did not look at the early 20th century and decide anarchists must support progressive mayors. Kropotkin did not conclude that the working class should vote for liberal reformers. Māori radicals in the 1970s did not decide that liberation ran through Parliament. The Spanish CNT did not believe emancipation required alliances with bourgeois parties, until internal liberal capture weakened them with disastrous consequences.
Anarchism has always insisted that politics extends far beyond electoral cycles. If anything, the crises of our age, climate breakdown, housing collapse, militarised imperial alignments, collapsing social infrastructure, prove that anarchist organising is not merely viable, but necessary. The state is not the only site of political action. It is not even the most effective one. It is simply the only one liberals can imagine.
If anarchism is to reclaim itself from liberal capture, it must reaffirm some basic, uncompromising truths.
Anarchists must reject electoralism not because elections are morally impure, but because electoral participation actively undermines the development of autonomous working-class power. Every hour poured into canvassing is an hour not spent organising. Every argument about strategic voting is a diversion from the real labour of building alternatives. Every second spent defending leftist parties is a second spent normalising the idea that liberation flows downward from Parliament rather than upward from struggle.
Anarchists must oppose all militarism, not selectively, not only when it aligns with Western interests, not only when liberals approve, because every war strengthens the state, intensifies nationalism, and expands the repressive apparatus that will ultimately be used against us.
Anarchists must reject the notion that leftist parties represent “the community.” Labour does not represent working people. The Greens do not represent ecological resistance. Te Pāti Māori does not represent decolonisation. Parties represent themselves – their leadership, their funders, their institutional incentives, their careers.
Anarchists must refuse the guilt-trip politics of liberalism — the idea that we are responsible for right-wing victories if we refuse to align with the parliamentary left. That logic is emotional blackmail used to discipline dissent.
Most importantly, anarchists must rediscover the confidence that we can act, we can organise, and we can build political power outside the state. We must stop believing that autonomy is impossible. The future belongs not to voters but to those who take the risk of creating something outside the suffocating frameworks of capitalist governance.
The liberal discourse infecting contemporary anarchism ultimately reduces to one pitiful sentence:
“Anarchism can’t do anything, so anarchists should help the liberals.”
It is a defeatist creed masquerading as pragmatism. It is the whisper of a movement that has lost faith in itself. It is the ideology of an anarchism that has forgotten its own history, its own victories, its own capacity to terrify the powerful.
When anarchists argue that they cannot reject electoralism, they are abandoning the principle that liberation grows from below. When anarchists argue they cannot oppose leftist parties, they are surrendering their independence to the very institutions designed to neutralise social movements. When anarchists argue they cannot maintain anti-militarism, they are accepting the logic of empire. When anarchists argue they cannot act without state permission, they are no longer anarchists at all.
We stand at a moment when capitalism is unravelling, the climate is breaking down, global militarism is accelerating, and the old political categories are collapsing. This is not a moment to retreat into the exhausted pragmatism of the liberal-left. It is a moment to reclaim the audacity and clarity of anarchism: the belief that the working class can organise itself, that communities can govern themselves, that solidarity can replace coercion, and that states, all states, are obstacles to freedom, not vehicles for it.
We owe the world something better than becoming the auxiliary wing of liberalism.
Comments
These kinds of pieces of…
These kinds of pieces of superficial: despite identifying "material" causes for this decline in "anarchism" (they really mean the entirety of the Left), the author provides no such materialist explanation. We are told that Leftists are simply psychologically weak.
Well, they are. But that's not an explanation. Notice that despite repeatedly attacking these various parties the author puts forward no anarchist path to victory, no anarchist strategy, no anarchist anything. Indeed, the author does not even identify who, exactly, they are speaking about.
The author's piece is not a challenge against the Liberals. It is validation against anarchism. The author cannot define who he is speaking about, who he is defending, why this amorphously defined mob of "anarchists" has any political relevance or strength, or even why they would hold the keys to the failures of the reformist parties. This isn't a "tendency" or a "trend" in anarchism. It IS anarchism: an undefined, structureless mob of people with vaguely and superficially dissident ideas that are indeterminate, overbroad, and incoherent and which default to small groups and individuals, i.e. groups that are incapable of scaling. These actual ties that make up the actually existing anarchist non-movement are the material ties that are missing from the piece and of course there are no meaningful efforts to study that question, here or in most places, because the answer would of course be discrediting: anarchism is wholly made up of people involved in various bourgeois civil society initiatives that have no defined constituency of their own, except maybe in the abstract.
The supposed creep of reformist and non-profit politics is unsurprising. Anarchism lacks even a coherent definition, which is why half of the debates on sites like LibCom are about what "counts" as anarchism in the first place (the answers are always arbitrary). Nor can this be solved by picking a particular "wing" or "flavor" of anarchism: the individual flavors and wings are so ill-defined that they regularly bleed into each other, conveniently allowing almost anything to be simultaneously described as a type of anarchism, outside of anarchism, or an internal split within anarchism.
The end result of this indeterminacy is that "anarchists," by which one can only ultimately mean "people who call themselves anarchists, but with an asterisk so we can exclude the ones we don't like, whoever they happen to be" have no praxis or political agenda of their own. So where do they get their ideas about revolution, social change, praxis, what is to be done, who is to do it, etc.?
The same place everyone else gets it: the dominant political parties. That is why even though one can find an "anarchist" justification for virtually any path of action or policy or belief or disposition, anarchists nonetheless end up generally agreeing on certain things: police are bad, capitalism is bad, bad things are bad, Nazis are bad, etc. But they are stymied by the fact that beyond the bourgeois parties doing their thinking for them, they cannot put forward a meaningfully independent politics that doesn't share the bourgeois priorities. At best they can "out-radical" the bourgeois parties: where the bourgeois people call for reforming broken capitalism, they call for overthrowing it. Where the bourgeois parties call for regulating racism, they call for killing racists. Where the bourgeois groups call for X, the anarchists call for X+1!
But they cannot define the enemy properly, hence the superficial takes about Israel that repeat Zionist propaganda, the long history of homophobia (until the bourgeois parties began to embrace LGBT groups), the endless confusion about identity politics, etc. Anarchists inherit politics from the people they officially condemn, because the ideology is designed to blunt, disorient, and confuse any meaningful answer.
Notice that despite…
Notice that despite repeatedly attacking these various anarchists, Drakula13Masr puts forward no alternative path to victory, no alternative strategy, no alternative anything.
> Notice that despite…
> Notice that despite repeatedly attacking these various anarchists, Drakula13Masr puts forward no alternative path to victory, no alternative strategy, no alternative anything.
No kidding: I'd need my own article for that, and in any case, it's not necessary to put forward an alternative if an existing strategy is quite confused.
Specifically, the author of this piece appears to believe that a pep talk will fix the problem he has cited without acknowledging that the problem he has cited is not the result of a particular tendency or a psychological disposition at all (with only a very superficial reference to materialism). The inevitable disposition of any attempt to create a movement based on the ideological leanings of people united by an indeterminate, overbroad, and superficial pseudo-philosophy will always fail because those ideological bonds have no material basis. They are at best a broad collection of vaguely dissident ideas.
My "alternative" would be to drop this kind of childish "anarchist movement" organizing altogether. It only takes five minutes in most anarchist spaces to recognize that nobody reads, no one is required to read, and indeed reading marks you as a target of whoever is the loudest because you might accidentally call into question whatever silly politics actually binds the organizers together.
Instead, I would encourage activists to start from the classics (Marx, etc.) while finding the segments of the population whose interests actually coincide with the interests of the working class. Then build organizing ties directly with those who are oppressed. From there one can start to see all the crazy ways in which ruling elites divide people, leave them voiceless, etc. and you can maybe try organizing some kind of alternative or support. It's not exactly a complete roadmap but I think it's better than this kind of thing.
Childish is base a entirely…
Childish is base a entirely movement in a single man...
Better read the classic that build the international revolutionary movement. Bakunin, Malatesta, Kropotkin...
Also: https://www.blackrosefed.org/anarchist-theory-and-history-in-global-perspective/
Thanks, Ragnar. I appreciate…
Thanks, Ragnar. I appreciate the link to this retrospective on how anarchism has been defined in the past. But while the authors (basically) confirm most of the critiques I have repeated here, I don't think they overcome them. At best they are putting forward yet another questionable definition that has no real material roots. At best it is a narrower definition.
Insofar as they appear to be suggesting that anarchism refers to some sort of ideal-type associated with particular instances of social revolution I think that's correct but it does not necessarily justify organizing an "anarchist movement" as opposed to anarchism being an ideological influence in supporting actually existing communities of struggle, including those that lack anarchist or even leftist views.
Drakula13Masr wrote: At best…
Which one? The anarchism born in the First International (anarchist socialism, how they begin call themselves). And it has a clear definition of what stands for and what doesn't.
Ragnar wrote: Drakula13Masr…
This one: "Anarchism is a socialist and revolutionary ideology that is founded on specific principles, whose bases are defined by a critique of domination and a defense of self-management; in structural terms, anarchism advocates a social transformation based on strategies which must allow for the substitution of a system of domination by a system of self-management.37"
And it's not real material…
And it's not real material root because of?
It sounds like another…
It sounds like another arbitrary ideal-type. Anarchists are a vaguely defined group of people who believe in fairly broad ideals. These authors went through the list and either discounted people who were previously counted (such as Stirner) and added people who had been excluded. Maybe that is a worthwhile academic endeavor but it hardly suggests a clear strategy, constituency, theory, etc., like the kind that might be rooted in real-world social relations.
I think you're making a much…
I think you're making a much stronger claim than you've actually argued for.
You keep saying anarchism lacks "material roots", but I haven't seen you explain what you mean by that. What exactly would count as a material root in your view? And why would the anti-authoritarian current that emerged within the First International, with its organisations, newspapers, congresses, strikes, and revolutionary practice, not qualify?
At the moment, it feels as though you're dismissing a historical political tradition simply because it doesn't fit your preferred framework. But that isn't an argument; it's an assertion.
Likewise, you say the definition is "arbitrary". Compared to what? Every political tradition has to draw historical and theoretical boundaries. Marxists distinguish Marx from Lassalle, Luxemburg from Bernstein, Lenin from Kautsky. Nobody concludes from those debates that "Marxism" is therefore an arbitrary ideal-type.
So I'd encourage you to move beyond slogans like "ideal-type" or "no material roots" and defend those claims. What is your criterion? Why does anarchism fail it, while whatever alternative framework you're proposing succeeds? Unless you can answer those questions, I don't think you've shown that e.g. the Black Rose definition is arbitrary, only that you disagree with where it draws the boundaries.
And finally, I don't see why it follows that because anarchists should work within broader communities of struggle, there should therefore be no anarchist movement. Historically, those things have gone together rather than being opposed. If you think they are incompatible, I'd be interested to hear the argument rather than simply the conclusion.
Drakula13Masr: My …
Drakula13Masr:
My "alternative" would be to drop this kind of childish "anarchist movement" organizing altogether. It only takes five minutes in most anarchist spaces to recognize that nobody reads, no one is required to read, and indeed reading marks you as a target of whoever is the loudest because you might accidentally call into question whatever silly politics actually binds the organizers together.
ASN: I think you are capturing correctly what's going in much of the USA and other parts of especially the Anglo World with many who "identify" as anarchists and so called anarchist bookshops/centres. Perhaps connected to coverage about anarchists/anarchism/black blocs in the corporate media.. What you are touching on is the sect/cult/pseudo church phenomena.
Definitely something like this occurred at Jura Books in Sydney associated with moves to establish a cult form 2003 to 2013 and afterwards. But also some who actually do read any anarchist stuff and identify as anarchists or anarcho-syndicalists - they develop a very perverted/warped interpretation stemming from the pervasive stalinist political culture and legacy and being influenced by the Trot groups of various tendencies
> I think you're making a…
> I think you're making a much stronger claim than you've actually argued for. You keep saying anarchism lacks "material roots", but I haven't seen you explain what you mean by that. What exactly would count as a material root in your view? And why would the anti-authoritarian current that emerged within the First International, with its organisations, newspapers, congresses, strikes, and revolutionary practice, not qualify?
Well let's be clear that every political movement that has more than 1 or 2 people has some kind of material roots. The question should be whether it has material roots in social relations that are predicated around opposition to the existing system. The ideological bonds among anarchists -- which appear to be their only bonds -- are not outgrowths of class relations that, when unencumbered by political repression, co-optation, etc. would tend towards revolution. People who talk about a new world but ultimately meet each other in the non-profit sector, academia, etc. have no such roots. Some of them may be very dedicated (in my experience, the opposite is equally true), but that does not mean the ideology is organized around a particular constituency that has revolutionary potential. Insofar as anarchism in practice tends to revolve around vague opposition to forms of oppression, hierarchy, or rule, such an ideology not only ends up being inevitably abstract, but also leads to the kinds of indeterminacy I've described before. It is difficult to even define who is welcome or welcome, who is the opposition or who isn't, what is acceptable and what isn't, what is to be done (or not be done). And even if those questions could be answered, it would be impossible to enforce their conclusions. Hence the problem with the Black Rose definition: even accepting that this is not yet another arbitrary definition of anarchism, what difference does it make?
That is what leads to what the author is describing. There is no ideological "neutral" zone. All political ideologies reflect class interests and, in the absence of rootedness in the working class rather than unity around a vague set of ideals, anarchist movements default to the class interests of the dominant class. Hence the opportunism the author describes.
> Likewise, you say the definition is "arbitrary". Compared to what? Every political tradition has to draw historical and theoretical boundaries. Marxists distinguish Marx from Lassalle, Luxemburg from Bernstein, Lenin from Kautsky. Nobody concludes from those debates that "Marxism" is therefore an arbitrary ideal-type.
I think there are fundamental differences. While all of the ideological differences you've mentioned may exist (Lenin vs. Bernstein etc.) they are generally rooted in an actual body of theory stemming from Marx's writings on historical materialism. They don't necessarily get it right or agree all the time, but the ideas and debates are centered around this understanding of history and how it changes. Even the name is more specific. It's the ideas associated with Karl Marx and their lineage. That alone makes it more straight-forward: it is a theory whose lineage can be traced, analyzed, changed, and measured against the real world.
Likewise, the generalized belief in party structures, states, and other institutions designed to enforce the hegemonic rule of the working class are to ensure (in theory) that the kind of indeterminacy and vagueness associated with anarchism does not get in the way of creating a counter-hegemonic political movement.
Whether or not Marxists have actually done any of that properly is of course a matter of debate but that means it is more than just a vague collection of people with shared values (though it may also be that). There is an objective component of the theory (historical materialism) that in turn explains or informs the rest of Marxist politics.
> And finally, I don't see why it follows that because anarchists should work within broader communities of struggle, there should therefore be no anarchist movement. Historically, those things have gone together rather than being opposed. If you think they are incompatible, I'd be interested to hear the argument rather than simply the conclusion.
Anarchists and everyone else should find oppressed people and support them. But a "movement" should be designed to protect the interests of its constituency. A movement based around theoretical vagueries is no such movement.
I think you've clarified…
I think you've clarified your position, but I also think you've smuggled your conclusion into your premises.
You say a political movement only has meaningful material roots if it is the direct political expression of social relations that inherently tend towards revolution. But that's precisely the point that needs demonstrating, not assuming.
Why should that be the criterion?
More importantly, I think you're creating a false contrast between Marxism and anarchism.
Marxism isn't "material" because people call themselves Marxists. It's material because it claims to analyse society through historical materialism and seeks to intervene in class struggle accordingly. But anarchism has never been merely a collection of ethical principles either. From Bakunin onwards, anarchism also developed a material analysis of capitalism, class, exploitation and the state, even where it disagreed with Marx's conclusions. Rejecting historical materialism as a closed system is not the same as rejecting materialist analysis altogether.
Likewise, political organisations are not themselves classes or social relations. They are political expressions that emerge within them. The anti-authoritarian current of the First International didn't appear because a group of philosophers invented "anarchism" in isolation. It emerged from concrete disagreements inside an international workers' movement over strategy, organisation, the state, federalism and revolution. Those debates reflected real conflicts within the labour movement itself.
Your argument also seems difficult to apply consistently.
Today there are countless academics, NGO workers and middle-class professionals active in Marxist organisations. Does that mean Marxism no longer has "material roots"? I don't think you would accept that conclusion, because you would probably argue that what matters is the politics, strategy and social orientation of those organisations rather than the individual class background of every member.
I'd say exactly the same applies to anarchism.
Historically, anarchist organisations rooted themselves in the workers' movement through unions, workers' associations, neighbourhood organisations, cooperatives and revolutionary federations. Contemporary especifismo expresses this through the concept of 'social insertion': anarchists do not see themselves as a substitute for working-class struggle, but as militants embedded within it, helping to build mass organisations while maintaining their own political organisation. That is precisely an attempt to root anarchist politics in working-class social relations rather than treating anarchism as a self-contained ideological subculture.
Finally, I think your definition of what constitutes a political movement creates another problem. You say a movement should defend the interests of its constituency. But what exactly is the constituency of Marxism? It isn't "the working class" in any direct sense. Marxist organisations are political minorities within the working class, just as anarchist organisations are. If being organised around a political theory rather than encompassing an entire class means anarchism lacks material roots, then the same criticism would seem to apply to every Marxist party as well.
So I don't think you've shown that anarchism is uniquely abstract. Rather, you've proposed a criterion that either excludes almost every revolutionary political organisation, or else has to be applied differently to anarchism than to Marxism. I'd be interested to hear why.
I also wonder whether you're conflating contemporary activist culture with the historical anarchist movement. If your critique is aimed at a certain NGO-oriented or campus-based anarchism, I share some of those concerns. But that seems quite different from claiming that anarchism as a historical current (from the First International through the CNT, FORA, FAI or especifista organisations today) has no material roots in working-class struggle.
"You say a political…
"You say a political movement only has meaningful material roots if it is the direct political expression of social relations that inherently tend towards revolution. But that's precisely the point that needs demonstrating, not assuming. Why should that be the criterion?"
How can it be anything else?
"More importantly, I think you're creating a false contrast between Marxism and anarchism. Marxism isn't "material" because people call themselves Marxists. It's material because it claims to analyse society through historical materialism and seeks to intervene in class struggle accordingly. But anarchism has never been merely a collection of ethical principles either. From Bakunin onwards, anarchism also developed a material analysis of capitalism, class, exploitation and the state, even where it disagreed with Marx's conclusions. Rejecting historical materialism as a closed system is not the same as rejecting materialist analysis altogether. Likewise, political organisations are not themselves classes or social relations. They are political expressions that emerge within them. The anti-authoritarian current of the First International didn't appear because a group of philosophers invented "anarchism" in isolation. It emerged from concrete disagreements inside an international workers' movement over strategy, organisation, the state, federalism and revolution. Those debates reflected real conflicts within the labour movement itself. "
You brought up Marxism, not me. I simply pointed out how they are ideologically distinct.
"Your argument also seems difficult to apply consistently. Today there are countless academics, NGO workers and middle-class professionals active in Marxist organisations. Does that mean Marxism no longer has "material roots"? I don't think you would accept that conclusion, because you would probably argue that what matters is the politics, strategy and social orientation of those organisations rather than the individual class background of every member. I'd say exactly the same applies to anarchism."
That's not the argument. Indeed, individual Marxist professors or graduate students that belong to a Marxist study group, Marxist drinking club, or Marxist internet chat group are also not engaged in meaningful class struggle. The difference is there is more to Marxism than that. Can that truly, honestly be said of "Anarchism"? It never scales. It is designed to be limited to individual activists and their small groups because the ideology is centered around decentralization. That in turn leads to both the larger indeterminacy and solipsistic ideas about what technically constitutes anarchism, but also the inevitable ideological spinelessness: because anarchism is designed to be solipsistic, it cannot put forward a strategy that is rooted in history and represents the interests of the working class, and inevitably slides into the reformism/opportunism the author mentions. To be clear, so do all the other "Leftist" movements that are floating around. They are also ideologically confused and weak. The difference is that the confusion is not necessarily baked into the theory.
"Finally, I think your definition of what constitutes a political movement creates another problem. You say a movement should defend the interests of its constituency. But what exactly is the constituency of Marxism? It isn't "the working class" in any direct sense. Marxist organisations are political minorities within the working class, just as anarchist organisations are. If being organised around a political theory rather than encompassing an entire class means anarchism lacks material roots, then the same criticism would seem to apply to every Marxist party as well."
Indeed, they are all doing a terrible job.
"The anti-authoritarian current of the First International didn't appear because a group of philosophers invented "anarchism" in isolation. It emerged from concrete disagreements inside an international workers' movement over strategy, organisation, the state, federalism and revolution. Those debates reflected real conflicts within the labour movement itself....Historically, anarchist organisations rooted themselves in the workers' movement through unions, workers' associations, neighbourhood organisations, cooperatives and revolutionary federations. Contemporary especifismo expresses this through the concept of 'social insertion': anarchists do not see themselves as a substitute for working-class struggle, but as militants embedded within it, helping to build mass organisations while maintaining their own political organisation. That is precisely an attempt to root anarchist politics in working-class social relations rather than treating anarchism as a self-contained ideological subculture....I also wonder whether you're conflating contemporary activist culture with the historical anarchist movement. If your critique is aimed at a certain NGO-oriented or campus-based anarchism, I share some of those concerns. But that seems quite different from claiming that anarchism as a historical current (from the First International through the CNT, FORA, FAI or especifista organisations today) has no material roots in working-class struggle."
Where is the evidence of this? Where are these mass organizations? Who is building them? And more importantly, where and how does the theory underlying anarchism actually call for this? You are suggesting that campus-based student lefty groups and NGO-oriented groups are somehow different. If they are different, where is the dividing line, ideologically? Where is it in the real world?
"The difference is that the…
"The difference is that the confusion is not necessarily baked into the theory."
What, in your view, is a theory that doesn't have confusion baked in to it?
"And more importantly, where and how does the theory underlying anarchism actually call for this?"
What, in your view, is the theory underlying anarchism? Does Kropotkin qualify? Malatesta? The platform? Is your position that the Haymarket martyrs, the FORA or the CNT did not have material roots in the working class struggle?
"What, in your view, is a…
"What, in your view, is a theory that doesn't have confusion baked in to it?"
To be clear: the specific confusion I was talking about, not confusion more generally. Marxism is certainly confusing sometimes but I don't think the theory is responsible for the confusion identified here. Insofar as "Marxist" groups that you find in Western societies are also filled with silly, illiterate college kids, one can contrast those groups' "theory" with, well, actual Marxist theory.
> What, in your view, is the theory underlying anarchism? Does Kropotkin qualify? Malatesta? The platform?
That is the problem. There isn't really a theory underlying anarchism. It is difficult to say any of those people do (or don't) qualify without drawing the line arbitrarily. If others are suggesting otherwise, then they should explain.
> Is your position that the Haymarket martyrs, the FORA or the CNT did not have material roots in the working class struggle?
No, but I don't think their theories of change are rooted in those material roots. There are people from all kinds of political backgrounds that engage in very real-world efforts to defend the interests of the working class (e.g. religious people, etc.), that does not mean their belief system is designed to effect change.
Drakula13Masr as a formal…
Drakula13Masr as a formal member of an Anarchist-Communists Federation I write from my own personal perspective anonymously and not on behalf of the federation I am part of, that I almost wholeheartedly agree with your critique. And one of our comrades himself wrote on this topic a few years ago quote "THEY MAY BE MODERN, BUT THEY ARE NOT ANARCHISTS, IF ANARCHISTS STILL EXIST THEY SHOULD FIRST SETTLE THEIR SCORES WITH THE "MODERN ONES"." Does this sound familiar? When the Italian communist left went out to condemn and categorize the so-called renegades in parallel they condemned the so-called modernizers most of all, out of deniers, falsifiers and modernizers - the last one was the worst to them.
We have taken on a similar direction while most have been blissfully unaware of the real current in line with Marx, now we want to root out those who stand in contradiction with Anarchist-Communism and establish a program, principles and doctrinal clarity to be accepted by the International of Anarchist Federations.
More so you are right more than anything about how organizational matters have been lackluster and disconnected from the workers (Bukharin called us the movement of the declassed haha), at this point we have embraced being a shoddy book club entirely composed of just a few nobodies with their free time, but I am glad that the Federation still exists, after all it was founded in over a hundred years ago and somehow has still survived with all its archives to be able to pass on knowledge and when time comes through gradual effort to be able to have a real presence when the historical moment is ripe. Until then we must condemn and criticize the lot of "anarchism". Those who are allergic to reading Marx, reading in general and have no refined position as to why we differ from the lot of self-proclaimed "Marxists" cannot possibly be taken as anything other than anti-intellectual buffers who contribute nothing and only muddy the waters decaying into leftism (that is the left wing of capital). Some commenter immediately goes "Don't read Marx read Malatesta" like what? What???? Malatesta, you know Malatesta's friend Carlo Cafiero, before he had schizophrenia he did a simplified version of Capital volume I which Marx himself sent a letter of thanks for it, you know they both read Marx right? They both worked with his objective analysis in spite of not being in agreement with his proposals / thesis for action. Anarchist-Communism generally begins with the death of Bakunin, with Malatesta and Carlo.
Anyone who rejects Marx fundamentally rejects the objective analysis of the capitalist mode of production or is trying to rediscover it independently or in part from other authors to string it together without having the label "Marx" on it. We cannot help but disagree with the methodology, its been over a hundred years we're still in the schism, we disagree with the methodology proposed but accept the objective analysis, and Marxists say that we can't do that because the methodology is married to the analysis quote "marxists understand that the sole criterion for truth is practice and that theory and action are inseparable. anarcho-communists either deny this or don't understand it which is why their currents have universally developed into sectarian scholasticism."...
FROM MY VIEW THERE ARE ONLY FEW FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCES THAT SET US APART SUCH AS:
Marx's thesis on the instrumentality of the state (as an instrument of repression of one class over another).
^If it can really be yielded, go ahead and use it, don't cling when its obsolete, it must be obsolete when it has carried out world revolution, its functions must be replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production. . Why haven't you carried out your program? Is it because the instrument is an incubator for opportunists who are incompetent or saboteurs on purpose?
Marx and Engels' semantics on authority ('captain of the ship"), there will be necessarily managerial positions, they simply must not abuse their position to constitute "authority" i.e. the captain threatens passengers with his post to get them to submit to him when their lives depend on him.
Marx and Engels' semantics on DOTP... which ties into the thesis of instrumentality of the state. I don't reject the process I agree with it but am doubtful of a class dictatorship leading class abolition with its self-abolition as a last goal, if they really don't fall into opportunism, if they can really fulfill their program, then they should go ahead and attempt it, but they must correct the mistakes of their past, they must see what lead to the degeneration of the IInd and IIIrd international clearly.
Invariant "Marxists" are absolutely disgusted when we tell them if they succeed in the outcome of their program it would be akin to anarchist society for us. They say "NOOO, ITS NOT ANARCHISM, LOOK THERE ARE MANAGERS" and pretend we must care for some abstract notion of "hierarchies", I understand them they are used to the lot of modern "anarchists" and cannot distinguish us apart, I understand if they decide to put a bullet through my head, but please, don't touch the book club, the book club is there to discuss shortcomings and study indiscriminately.
The "class party" form, the vanguard, organ of class consciousness (which organ again?), it is described as the "head" of the workers movement which is otherwise "headless". Okay, but which is the true "class party" again? When will the historic "class party" show up and lead a world revolution? I'm waiting. There are a bunch of them right now, and they're all full of retards it seems, I have more respect for others who don't claim to be THE class party, like Quinterna N+1 but believe themselves to be a precursor to it (reserve) rather than those who roleplay as modern day "revolutionaries", come on you're just book clubs like us. And how can a single vanguard party from the working class single-handedly lead a world revolution as its own international by simply making "chapters" proselytizing? What kind of intellectual giants will be at the top to be able to handle it? Bordiga tried to solve this clusterfucked mess by suggesting all of the self-proclaimed class parties manage the USSR since it was supposedly the "home of the proletariat", as if they gave a shit, look at what the party form had lead to! But it's not the fault of the party form right? Yeah just try again, better luck next time.
If all goes well we might be able to reconcile the first international with the purest of eggheads against all who have tainted both words of "anarchist" and "communist" and against bourgeois civilization.
Am I shadowbanned from here…
Am I shadowbanned from here again? Last time it was for criticizing "ukrainian army anarchists" ...
"one can contrast those…
"one can contrast those groups' "theory" with, well, actual Marxist theory."
Would you care to explain how you define what is and isn't actual Marxist theory, with particular reference to how you're not drawing a line arbitrarily?
"That is the problem. There isn't really a theory underlying anarchism. It is difficult to say any of those people do (or don't) qualify without drawing the line arbitrarily. If others are suggesting otherwise, then they should explain."
I see. So on one hand we have the fact that pretty much the entire anarchist movement and virtually any existing anarchist would recognise Kropotkin as a significant and important anarchist theorist, but on the other hand Drakula off the internet doesn't know if he'd qualify, so it's impossible to say one way or the other really.
R Totale wrote: "one can…
He was more or less poking at the boundaries of who is part of a "canon". That is more or less the same question for "marxists" to who is "marxist" they could not possibly legitimize all the tendencies who proclaim themselves as such, and they could not legitimize everyone who has been proclaimed as "communist", I quite like how N+1 Quinterna dodged around this question by a series of self-reflecting questions quote :
What Is there a difference between you and other communist groups or parties?
One should ask not what difference passes between "us" and "others", but what is communism and what it means to be communists. Unfortunately the existence in the world of thousands of groups and different "communist" parties demonstrates that the real question the most different answers are given, then understanding the explanations on the countless differences it depends too much on the predisposition of those listen. In any case, the absence above all distinguishes us, in the our work, of all categories normally found elsewhere, such as the democracy, anti-fascism, parliamentary cretinism, frontism, the moralism about freedom and the person, individualism, trade unionism, centralism democratic, workerism, anarchism etc.
Its a big problem when a person tries to define something by everything it is not, or to go out and define everything it is against, a type of linguistic limitation. Somewhat easier to do with general labels with which to neatly categorize other subjects, but it's still not foolproof. Generally things can get so twisted that if two people agree on a subject but express themselves in a different way they can come to hate each-other to a point where actual differences and hostilities begin to take form.
R Totale wrote: "one can…
Gotta say, every time you make these bad faith, low quality arguments out of defensiveness you basically confirm the critiques.
> what is and isn't actual Marxist theory
From your first post, you have tried to turn this into a discussion about Marxism when I've only brought it up as a contrast. What is or isn't Marxist theory is based on the ideas written by Marx and centered around historical materialism. The reason that isn't up for debate is because, well, those were Karl *Marx*'s ideas. The debates within Marxism have these hard boundaries by definition, and those ideas themselves are connected to the historical process of social change which is also not exactly arbitrary because it is based on history. As a result, debates within Marxism, what counts as the "correct" Marxism, etc. have these narrowing limits. Additionally, as mentioned above, because decentralization is not a core tenet of Marxism, Marxist parties and institutions have the ability to institutionalize Marxist ideas. This has the dual effect of being clear as to what a party stands for in advancing its agenda but also the ability to draw boundaries against those who put forward bad political lines.
> So on one hand we have the fact that pretty much the entire anarchist movement and virtually any existing anarchist would recognise Kropotkin as a significant and important anarchist theorist
Most people, anarchist or not, would recognize Kropotkin as a " significant and important anarchist theorist," the problem is that Kropotkin himself would not know what to do with that conclusion as Kropotkin, like all the other early anarchists, put forward ideas that were overbroad and deeply contradictory and could not scale. The issue isn't the guy, it is the ideas.
I think we're finally…
I think we're finally getting to the substantive disagreement, because you're now making a very specific claim: that decentralisation is not merely a method used by anarchists, but that it is "baked into" anarchist theory in such a way that anarchism cannot scale, cannot develop a class-rooted strategy, and inevitably becomes a collection of small activist groups.
That's a claim that can actually be argued for. But I don't think you've demonstrated it.
Where, specifically, does anarchist theory say that decentralised organisation means organisation must remain small, local, or incapable of federating? Those are three very different things.
Federalism, decentralisation and the autonomy of local organisations are not synonymous with organisational fragmentation. In fact, one of the defining arguments of the anarchist tradition has been that mass organisations can be federated without becoming a centralised state-like institution.
You can find this explicitly in Bakunin. His conception of the International was not a network of isolated individuals doing their own thing. He argued for the organisation of the masses through the different functions of everyday life and labour, including organisation by professions and trades, and for the federation of workers' associations.
Malatesta is even harder to reconcile with the idea that anarchism is inherently incapable of scaling. He explicitly argued for a specific anarchist political organisation that would intervene in mass movements, and saw workers' organisations and unions as a central terrain for anarchist activity.
So if your argument is that "modern anarchist organisations frequently fail to do this", I have much less disagreement with you, especially in UK. That's an empirical argument, and there is plenty of anarchist history that supports a critique of anarchists becoming subcultural, fragmented or disconnected from working-class struggle. Even Black Rose themselves explicitly acknowledge that parts of post-war anarchism became primarily intellectual, cultural and disconnected from social movements.
But that's very different from saying that this failure is inherent to anarchist theory.
In fact, the Black Rose article makes almost exactly this distinction. It doesn't argue that every group calling itself anarchist is therefore part of the historical anarchist tradition. It distinguishes between a broad libertarian universe and an historical anarchist tradition, and defines the latter through a combination of critique of domination, self-management and a strategy for revolutionary social transformation. That strategy explicitly involves mobilising dominated classes and building concrete social force through struggles.
So I think you have two possible arguments, and you need to choose between them.
If your argument is:
"A lot of contemporary anarchist groups are small, socially isolated, NGO-oriented, academic or subcultural, and therefore fail to develop a revolutionary working-class strategy."
Then I can agree with a substantial part of that criticism. But that is a criticism of the practice and trajectory of particular anarchist milieus, not a demonstration that anarchism itself is incapable of doing otherwise.
If instead your argument is:
"Anarchist theory itself makes mass, federated, class-rooted organisation impossible."
Then I think you need to demonstrate that from the actual theory. And simply pointing to the fact that many contemporary anarchists don't organise that way doesn't establish it.
In fact, you can find e.g. in Spain the actual CNT and CGT is recovering the muscle strength, having more than 100.000 members all together in a national scale and been a key factor of the social unrest. The national confederation of rent unions that born a couple of years pass through the milestone of 10.000 members. Heavily influenced by anarchism.
There's also an important issue with your question: "Where are these mass organisations? Who is building them?"
That is a perfectly legitimate question to ask of anarchists today. But it cuts both ways.
Where are the mass revolutionary working-class organisations built by Marxists today?
You have already said that Marxist professors, study groups and internet communities aren't meaningful class struggle, and I agree. So why should I accept the existence of a Marxist theoretical tradition as evidence that Marxism possesses the necessary material roots, while demanding that anarchists demonstrate a currently existing mass movement before their theory is considered capable of producing one?
If the answer is "because Marxism contains a superior theory of history", then that's the argument you actually need to make. You can't simply assume that historical materialism automatically produces a class-rooted political strategy. History doesn't provide much evidence for such an automatic relationship.
And this is also where I think your concept of "social relations that tend towards revolution" needs much more explanation.
Which social relation, exactly, inherently tends towards revolution?
Workers are capable of revolutionary struggle, but they are also capable of accepting capitalism, voting for reformist parties, joining nationalist movements, becoming union bureaucrats, or simply trying to improve their individual position within the existing system. There is nothing mechanically revolutionary about occupying a particular position within the relations of production.
That is precisely why revolutionary politics exists in the first place: because the potential contained in a social position has to be organised, developed and fought for politically.
This is also where the anarchist concept of social insertion becomes relevant. Social insertion doesn't mean "anarchists go into communities and bring anarchism to them." It means anarchists organise themselves as militants within the actual struggles of working people, workplaces, unions, housing struggles, community struggles, etc. and seek to help those struggles develop their own independent capacity for collective action and self-management.
The political organisation and the mass organisation are therefore not the same thing.
The anarchist organisation doesn't claim that the workers' movement needs to become an anarchist club. It exists precisely so that anarchists can maintain political coherence while participating in broader organisations that include people who don't identify as anarchists.
And that brings me back to your original question about the dividing line between campus leftism, NGO activism and anarchism rooted in working-class struggle.
There "is" a dividing line, but it isn't simply whether someone calls themselves an anarchist. The relevant questions are material and organisational:
Who are you organising?
Where are they located socially?
Are they participating in an ongoing collective struggle?
Are they developing their own capacity to act?
Are you building durable organisations rather than campaigns around individual activists?
Are those organisations accountable to their members?
Can they exercise power independently of NGOs, political parties, the state and professional activists?
And does your political organisation have a strategy for helping those struggles develop rather than simply recruiting people into an ideological subculture?
Those are questions an anarchist organisation should be able to answer.
But notice what happens here: once we start asking those questions, we're no longer talking about whether anarchism has a "vague opposition to hierarchy". We're talking about strategy, organisation, class composition, political organisation and the relationship between militants and mass movements.
And that's exactly why I think the definition you're criticising matters.
It doesn't magically create a successful anarchist movement. No definition does. What it does is establish what counts as anarchism and what does not, and therefore gives you something against which to judge actual organisations and practices.
If an organisation calls itself anarchist but has no working-class base, no strategy for building mass organisation, no conception of social transformation, and exists primarily as a social scene for activists, then I have no problem saying that it is failing to live up to the historical political tradition it claims to represent.
But that's very different from concluding that anarchism is "designed" to produce that outcome.
So I'd genuinely like to see the argument for that last claim. Not examples of anarchists failing. Not examples of anarchists being small. Not the existence of campus anarchists or NGO activists.
Show me where the core anarchist theorists actually argue that decentralisation means permanent small-group organisation, that anarchists should not build mass organisations, or that political organisation cannot be federated across workplaces and communities.
Because if you can't show that, then you're not demonstrating a contradiction within anarchist theory. You're demonstrating a contradiction between anarchist theory and the practice of some anarchists and those are not the same thing.
But both the CNT and CGT are…
But both the CNT and CGT are parties to workplace contracts with no strike agreements and both would support regional nationalism eg Catalan nationalism so breach anarcho-syndicalist support for direct action and internationalism so drawn into the ways of Spanish corporate unionism
No but... Try to probe that…
No but... Try to probe that argument Asn. Because is out of the reality.
"From your first post, you…
"From your first post, you have tried to turn this into a discussion about Marxism when I've only brought it up as a contrast. What is or isn't Marxist theory is based on the ideas written by Marx and centered around historical materialism. The reason that isn't up for debate is because, well, those were Karl *Marx*'s ideas. The debates within Marxism have these hard boundaries by definition, and those ideas themselves are connected to the historical process of social change which is also not exactly arbitrary because it is based on history. As a result, debates within Marxism, what counts as the "correct" Marxism, etc. have these narrowing limits."
I mean, I'm interested in Marxism because if anarchism's being critiqued I want to know what the alternative is, if it's not just 'everything's fucked' or 'people use words in different ways therefore language is meaningless.'
Again, you make these claims about marxism and historical materialism but we know that if you ask a leftcom, a Maoist and a Jacobin editor what is and isn't compatible with historical materialism, you're going to get completely different answers. So what is and isn't in, and how is your dividing line any less arbitrary?
"Most people, anarchist or not, would recognize Kropotkin as a " significant and important anarchist theorist," the problem is that Kropotkin himself would not know what to do with that conclusion as Kropotkin, like all the other early anarchists, put forward ideas that were overbroad and deeply contradictory and could not scale. The issue isn't the guy, it is the ideas."
I mean, a few posts back you seemed to be arguing that it wasn't possible to say what anarchist ideas are, so glad we've moved on from that. What do you think the actual contradictions in the ideas are?
I find myself in an odd…
I find myself in an odd place, I agree with many of the points made in this article in general but still think this article is making a poor argument. It's not clear who it's even aimed at other than a nebulous "other" who are bad and wrong. Is there a specific group, tendency or even geographical area that are doing all of these things, or should we just take it at face value?
How are we the readers supposed to weigh up the charges it makes? Is this a serious issue or is it confined to a handful of individuals scattered across the globe? And are their positions being accurately skewered? Is there an underlying reason for it? An article can't answer every question, but this doesn't seem interested in asking many of them.
Links would be nice, but I'd settle for direct accusations, that I can look up myself.
I also see that “Anarchism can’t do anything, so anarchists should help the liberals.” is a quote, but isn't attributed to anyone. Is it something someone said genuinely or did the author come up with it? We readers need to know things like this if we're to get
Anecdotally, -and I have to go to anecdotes since there's no better evidence provided- I've seen some individuals using the label of anarchist and advocate voting and support for candidates, but they've all been new to anarchism and curiously North American, most of which are already actively promoting social democratic groups like the DSA. So from the evidence I have seen, it seems to be the case of people new to an idea enthusiastically adopted it before they really understood what its about.
A problem all ideas and tendencies share, the stereotype is probably the student marxist who declares with certainty and confidence that X is authentic proletarian expression while Y is counter revoltionary, while still working through the Manifesto. But these cases usually solve themselves with time and experience. Those advocates either get better after learning more or switch to another idea or just drop out entirely.
I saw the same thing happen in the UK during Corbyn mania, on social media you had disaffected people of every kind jumping on the momentum, but there wasn't much impact on any established groups besides declines in membership.
From experience putting up with them was extremely annoying, but once they had some experience of what the Labour party was they either came back or dropped their previous affiliations.
There was also a strange minority counter current of people who started on the other side but got interested in our ideas through contact, (remember Black Rose?)
"From your first post, you have tried to turn this into a discussion about Marxism when I've only brought it up as a contrast. What is or isn't Marxist theory is based on the ideas written by Marx and centered around historical materialism. The reason that isn't up for debate is because, well, those were Karl *Marx*'s ideas. The debates within Marxism have these hard boundaries by definition, and those ideas themselves are connected to the historical process of social change which is also not exactly arbitrary because it is based on history. As a result, debates within Marxism, what counts as the "correct" Marxism, etc. have these narrowing limits."
Not up for debate says the advocate for the school of thought so diverse, contentious and irreconcilable that its constituent factions often must resort to expulsions, slander, assault and mass murder of their own heretics... to keep the plates spinning.
And that's not even mentioning dozens of these factions were set up decades before the soviet publishing empire made the actual texts of Marx available to the majority of the faithful, many of whom still won't read the bits that clash with their abridged canon.
I'm seeing a lot of…
I'm seeing a lot of different posts that overlap but as it seems my previous comments were not entirely clear I'm weary of continuing to make responses until I have more time.
However, this tidbit from R Totale:
> I mean, a few posts back you seemed to be arguing that it wasn't possible to say what anarchist ideas are, so glad we've moved on from that. What do you think the actual contradictions in the ideas are?
No, I'm still saying that. That doesn't mean that there aren't certain people who, for whatever reason, are commonly accepted as anarchist thinkers or ideologues, in Kropotkin's case because he was one of the early writers.
The contradictions in the ideas are many, but let's start with one key one: where is the line between individual freedom and collectivism in Kropotkin? Can you tell me what, if anything, is guaranteed to the individual in a society based on the ideas of Kropotkin? By contrast, which things are guaranteed to the "collective" (if not the state)? Assuming there is some kind of answer, who enforces it?