#CNT Technologies Android Course | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

anarcho-pup · 7 years ago

Text

To The Vanguardists, for our Past and Future

This was posted by /u/TheMightyRocktopus on Reddit and I just loved it so much, I had to share it with any comrades here:

"Considering that every measurable indicator for quality of life (that isn't some bullshit freedom index, usually designed by the CIA, that only measures how easy it is to cheat on your taxes or steal land from the poor) significantly declined after the fall of the Berlin wall (and had already begun falling after Glasnost had been implemented for a couple of years), from infant mortality to -self-reported happiness to daily caloric intake to sexual satisfaction -- considering all of that, then, yes, I am a little bit sad. I am also a little bit sad that significant financial aid for national-liberation movements across the globe from Canada to Angola to Japan has disappeared, which in the case of Peru arguably led to the Shining Path becoming more and more culty and authoritarian, and therefore more ultraviolent and sickeningly brutal. And of course I am also quite sad that for nigh-on thirty years the United States and its allies have been almost totally unopposed in their wholesale plunder of the globe and its people.

But on the other hand, I'm delighted that the left-wing has been set free of an authoritarian and murderous ideology, now proved to contain the seeds for its own destruction in its very conception. I'm happy that an environmentally-destructive entity has been abandoned, even if for little gain. I'm overjoyed that the greatest threat to the revolution, the death-knell of revolutions of positive social upheaval from Kronstadt to Ukraine to Manchuria to Catalunya to Cambodia to Grenada to Czechoslovakia to Hungary to East Germany to Tiananmen Square has been buried far underground.

Those who mourn the loss of tacky red-yellow colour coordination should cease to cry and become more loyal patrons of McDonalds. Those who mourn the end of their social-democracy-without-democracy, a social-dictatorship if you will, can rest easy with the knowledge that North Korea is still packing political dissidents into camps and handing out free methamphetamine. Those who weep over their shattered idols can still wallow in their delusion with the likes of Grover Furr, loudly proclaiming to a pack of howling capitalists and bemused socialists -- "NOT ONE CRIME!" -- blissfully unaware that they are mere entertainment, commodified by the liberal establishments that have enough of a deficit in taste as to house their rantings, a caricature of a caricature of an atrocity. But I refuse to join them.

What limp and lifeless dregs remain of the Stalinists are still unaware of their own delusion: they answer loudly the logically impossible objections of the capitalists with their own fallacious fantasies. The capitalists say to them: the Holodomor happened because communism failed as an economic system, but also Stalin was a dictator who wanted to kill the Ukrainians. They cannot have it both ways. But rather than point out the failure of this two-pronged approach, the Stalinist is compelled by their own ideology to fall into their own trap. They announce at once that the Holodomor was a naturally-occurring famine -- one which the by-now fully mechanized, fully collectivized Ukrainian economy was unable to weather without millions of deaths -- but also that it was caused by the Kulaks (who had all been dead or imprisoned for 18 months at the start of the famine, and who were mostly children) and by grain-hoarders (so that's why they starved, they had all that food!). Only the anarchists and left-communists have the correct answer to such questions: that is that Stalin was a dictator. He was a totalitarian murderer who murdered people.

They claim that we anarchists are the sectarians, yet how many vanguard parties have populated even a tiny country like Nepal: The UCPN(M), the CPN(UML), the CPN(ML), the CPN(UCM), the CPN(United), the CPN(MC), the NWPP, the CPN(Unified), and those are just the ones with seats in government. Turkey has the MKP, the MKLP, the TKEP/L, the TKP/ML, and the MLSBP. It used to be worse. The Turkish communists actually have their shit together, largely due to significant influence from the PKK. While anarchism is infinitely more varied in thought than Leninist ideology, and anarchists can't even agree on whether markets are okay, or whether we should abandon technology wholesale or all give ourselves prehensile android cocks, I honestly can't name a time when anarchists have even gotten in a fist-fight. Has one anarchist even ever killed another over ideological disagreement? It must have happened, but I can't actually think of any concrete example.

Engels claimed, at the end of his very clumsy dismantling of an argument nobody ever gave in "On Authority", that we serve the reaction. But when have we ever? Stalin claimed that we are the greatest threat to the revolution, worse than the fascists or the liberals, but which revolution was betrayed by the anarchists? The Black Army rescued Moscow from Denikin, and were butchered for it by Trotsky. The CNT-FAI kept the whole of Spain from sweeping into the hands of the Falangists, but they were ridden down like a herd of bison in Barcelona and shot in the back in Madrid. The freed Manchu and Korean slaves and the Mutualist and AnCom revolutionaries of the Shinmin Prefecture took in Marxist refugees and radicals fleeing the nationalists in China and the fascists in Japanese-occupied Korea, and the fiercest revolutionaries among them were assassinated by Stalinists, their equipment sabotaged, their food-stores destroyed.

I'm a pro left-unity guy. I've already praised the Turkish communists, despite laughing at their alphabet soup. I wish the Naxalites nothing but success in their fledgling revolution. I think Cuba is pretty nifty. I like my local Trots a lot more than they like me. At the last May Day march, a high-ranking Hoxhaist and I bonded over anti-imperialism, opposition to exploitation of students in general, and disgust over US war crimes in North Korea, Vietnam, Yemen, and Syria. I have a particular soft spot for zany Maoists. The position of anarchists has always defaulted to left-unity. Our only demand is revolution, and we will proceed with our demands regardless of whether or not the vanguard is behind us. But the vanguard almost always stops short of revolution. Their stance, more often than not, is that it is never quite the right time, the material conditions are not yet perfect, the wind is blowing the wrong way, it's raining, class consciousness has not yet been achieved. That is the nature of hierarchical power: to maintain and obtain. The peak of vanguard power is reached always at the cusp of the revolution, always at the breaking point. When the working class are at the height of their power but the depths of their despair. When the factories are being seized and the mansions are ablaze, the best the vanguard can muster is a couple of death-squads to shoot the proletariat in the back as they fulfill the predictions and prescriptions of Marx to the letter. This is why Lenin forced the Constituent Assembly to dissolve just weeks after it was formed: the Bolsheviks only received less than 25% of the vote.

The Stalinists are right about one thing: anarchists are fools. We continue to hold out our hands for the Stalinists to bite our fingers off and then claim that anarchists always lose for lack of fingers, and that we were the aggressors, aggressively bleeding aggressive blood from our aggressive wounds. And we will continue to do so, because we're fools who believe that man can survive without a master, that husbands need not beat their wives, that parents need not abuse their children, that workers need no bosses, that citizens need no states, that we should live in our environment and not against it, that there is no need for borders, or money, or war.

When the communists get serious about revolution, then they can grasp ahold of the hand that has stayed outstretched since Marx wrote his polemic against Proudhon. Until then, the revolution will proceed as planned, without them.

This was longer than I intended. I just couldn't find a good place to stop until now."

#Anarchism #socialism #communism #marxism #libertarian socialism #leftism

0 notes