Valbrandur

In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

• Michael Parenti

I am completely sure that China is indeed spending god knows how many millions in building more solar farms in a year than the US has built in their entire history so people like Jake from Minnesota can be convinced that China is actually a pretty cool place.

Do you people ever listen to yourselves?

The famously anti-soviet country of Belarus, unlike the extremely pro-soviet regimes of Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania.

A country goes far beyond one’s own surname.

Meanwhile, Eastern Europeans:

Thank you.

I know this all sounds like Mandarin to most of the userbase of this place (which I suppose to be mainly from the US and alien to the politics of places where big regional languages exist in the same space than even larger national languages), but it’s not only the attitude of some regular people but also of some major political forces. Just a few months ago, a far-right party in Spain vowed to shut down the Academy of Valencian Language if they ever reached power (something I suppose a linguist like you would never approve), under the excuse of its existence being “a threat to national unity”.

Nationalism: not even once.

I think you misunderstand what I am referring to. I am not talking about a wish to learn a language, but to consider languages as useful or useless in regards to their entire existence.

This is unfortunately not very uncommon in people of European countries who look down upon regional languages, stating that their existence or that learning them is useless (not for them only, but for anyone) just because you can already do the task of communicating with others through the national language (per example, considering the existance of the Occitan language useless because the people of everywhere where it is spoken can already understand French). This is done by people who not understand (or even worse, who don’t care about) the value that exists in language from a cultural perspective.

Thinking about different languages in the terms of “useful” or “useless” according to the number of speakers they have.

Edit: What I mean specifically is not for someone to want or not to personally learn a language, but if the existance in itself of a language is more or less valuable according to how many people speak it (per example and as I explained below, believing that Occitan’s existance is useless because there’s already French to talk to Occitan people with, who already understand it). Yes, this happens.

Nah what it shows is that I’m an incorrigible, smug, edgelord.

Good luck with your future trolling endeavours.

What moderation could you possibly be afraid of if your interpretation were to meaningfully change and turn into a critique of authoritarianism?

My interpretation consists on actually attempting to explain how North Korea’s apparatus works. I have no interest in critiquing “authoritarianism” (or in other words, the existance of a state) per se, as an idea of an entity above society and separated from it, independent of class struggle.

Or is it that such an interpretation would get you banned from lemmygrad and you don’t want to lose your cricket club?

That’s such a bizarre thing to say. The only thing it serves is to show you have absolutely no will to have a good-willed conversation.

You pretty much already gave the answer: Your interpretation wouldn’t change, or at least you can’t imagine it would.

No I did not, and you are putting words in my mouth here. I said I refuse to talk about the specifics of North Korea in this place. But if you insist, I’ll tell you that symbolism is meaningless by itself alone, and that a solid interpretation of a society can only come from a study of its structure seen from the lense of its history and its material conditions.

If you want a honest conversation without the restriction of moderation, once again, you are welcome to send me a private message. If not, there’s nothing else to say.

How would you analyse NK if it didn’t have hammers and sickles painted all over it?

I just… Told you I won’t. Not here, at least. Just by being here I am already dancing on the knife’s edge and, as this server very clearly states, authoritarian behaviour a bannable offense. I came here limiting myself to talk about history because I am not interested in breaking this place’s rules. If you still insist in hearing what I have to say you are more than welcome to send me a private message.

I did not send my first message to attempt to “convert” you or anyone into another ideology. My intentions were simple: to disprove the popular claim of MLs “betraying” revolutions by taking a closer look at the events that it refers to, and to show that past anarchist projects are equally guilty of engaging in authoritarianism once they see themselves out of idealist theory and into the field where they have to survive: all of it by taking a closer look at history. And, if not to actually manage to convince anyone about it, at least to encourage people lurking here to take a deep dive into the history of their own movement, something that we “tankies” are already forced to do because of constant confrontation but that anarchists usually don’t have to, being instead able to rejoice in a romantisized and adequately simplified version of the past, not having to worry about anyone ever bringing up the “dark” bits of their history.

You are welcome to attempt discussing it or (although I doubt it) agreeing with it. Yes, we could instead talk about the theory attempting to change each other’s minds in vain about either anarchism or marxism-leninism, but with due respect, that’s outside the scope of my initial intentions, and nonetheless I do not think that neither you nor I have any intent of perpetuating this discussion into eternity. And even if I wanted, attempting to discuss some subjects such as North Korea would eventually get me banned from this sever and have my comments deleted per this site’s rules.

If you wish to add anything else about our initial topic, you are welcome to do so and I will listen and respond adequately. If not… I’d say it’s been a pleasure talking. You are a well read person, I will give you that.

Just ignore the Zapatistas who are a current example of anarchism in practice.

Their words, not mine. Yes, the Zapatista project has worked at their current scale and is doing well, I have no problems admiting that. That does not mean however that I think their methods would work on a larger scale, especially if they ever became a threat for imperial capitalism to be attacked with military force beyond attempting to contain them inside Chiapas as they have until now. As it happened to the USSR facing invasion during the Russian Civil War, as it happened to Cuba with the Bay of Pigs invasion and as it happened to Vietnam. And the Zapatistas do so too, as they claim that they are not driven by ideological purities and will adopt whatever it is that works for them.

And saying the Soviets held little power in the Spanish Republic is just a bald faced lie.

I said that the PCE and the Soviet-alligned communists had a rather small amount of power within the Republican government, and that is not a lie. The PCE only controlled three ministries within the government during the May Days, which is the event seen as the “betrayal” that led to the anarchists’ demise in Spain.

Soviets withheld supplies from non-soviet militias and actively damaged the war effort because they’d rather focus on garnering power than actually fighting fascists.

It is hard to work with abstract mentions, but I am willing to address this if you use more specific examples of Soviet sabotage of the war effort that I can look at and work with.

Edit: formatting.

You know it’s kinda rich of you to refer to, of all people, Voline. If he was critical of Platformism guess what he had to say about Bolshevism. Even before Trotsky tried to have him killed.

I am not talking about Voline’s personal opinions on neither platformism nor bolshevism, but on his accounts on the makhnovite project. I do not know what is your definition of tyranny since, as you implied, ideas amongst anarchists vary quite a lot. However, if you consider that the actions taken by state socialist projects to ensure their survival are tyrannical, I suppose you would too consider tyrannical the anti-mennonite massacres perpetrated by the black army after Eichenfield, the existence of a 200-men personal bodyguard corps (the Black Sotnya) for Makhno or the closure of the Bolshevik revolutionary committees of Alexandrovsk and Ekaterinoslav and threats of arrest and execution of its members, which ensured that the only speech that enjoyed of freedom in Makhnovia had to be anarchist-alligned. Acceptable? You will say if yes or no. Anti-authoritarian? I’d beg to differ.

…somehow you also ignored the two successful ones. I kinda wonder whether you even know which I’m talking about.

Rojava and the Zapatistas, I presume. The Zapatistas have already declared publicly and explicitly that they are not anarchists and that they reject such label, so there is not much else to say. Rojava on the other side is one project that anarchists in my area began to detract from after they began collaborating with the US army, but even then there exists fair criticism of it and accusations of repressing minorities by closing down Assyrian schools. Don’t misinterpret me: despite its faults I do have a generally positive view on Rojava, but I do not think it is the paragon of non-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian virtue that western anarchists generally set as the bare minimum.

You have not addressed my comments on the anarchist actions in the May Days during the Spanish Civil War, but I will not assume malicious intent from your part.

Also, if you bother answering at all I’d like you to give an example of a revolution of yours that didn’t end in tyranny. Shouldn’t actually be that hard for a tankie as you don’t think tyranny is bad, so why not admit it that there’s none?

I have no bad faith in this discussion, and I would like to ask you to do the same. We do not think that “tyranny is good”: we think that the state is needed for a revolutionary project to survive as much as it is its fate to disappear as class contradictions do too. We are dialectical materialists: even if we wanted somehow the state to persist, the march of history would do away with it nonetheless, and we would have to accept it.

To answer your question: I am, again, not aware of what do you consider tyranny, but I have found most anarchists to be pretty accepting of Sankara’s Burkina Faso and admit that its pros outweight the cons.

We’d have more than two if it hadn’t been for tankies stabbing us in the back.

This is a phrase that keeps popping up in anarchist spaces but once you look at what it makes reference to it’s… Simply not true? It’s mostly used to refer to the Spanish Civil War, but one only needs to pick up a high school history book to learn that the May Days were a result of the anarchists attempting to antagonize the entirety of the Republican side by hindering war efforts, and not only the PCE or other Soviet-alligned communists, who held a rather small amount of power inside the Republican government.

But go, go on, tell me how Makhno was a counter-revolutionary or something. Kulak? Or was it about not being able to tolerate a non-authoritarian alternative.

If to not be authoritarian is a priority for you, reading Voline’s accounts of his participation in the makhnovist movement should be enough to realize that his project is probably not the one you want to rally behind the most.