This meme describes anarchists. Are you sure you know what the terms mean?
Many anarchists are also communists. So I’m not sure I follow.
OP is talking about tankies and ML and how he doesn't like them, but the meme he posted doesn't describe those.
also
Anarchists are communists. No one thinks anarcho-capitalists are anarchist except themselves and those they've misinformed.
No one thinks anarcho-capitalists are anarchist except themselves and those they’ve misinformed.
How isnt anarcho-capitalism a form of ancarchy? Like there's no state, and if some company starts acting like a state, then its not anarchy anymore.
Anarchy isn't just "no state", is also non authority by force. Anarchic capitalists think that companies should rule and impose their will by force.
they think that companies should rule and impose their will by force.
at that point it isn't even anarchy though, that's just feudalism. its like a bunch of smaller states
Yup
I'm agender
When people say Communism had never been tried it's because communism is the end goal. It's the place we want to get to. A stateless, moneyless, classless society where everyone is truly equal. That's the ideal.
And Socialism is how we get there. Socialism is a scientific method of governance. It's not the insanity of "free-markets" nor is it the dictate of an autocrat. You need hospitals. You put the force of govt behind building hospitals and staffing them. You have a giant landmass so you need mass transit. You don't twiddle your thumbs waiting for the market winds to blow just right. You invest in building it. Because you need it. Because it's good for your people.
CATALUNYA TRIOMFANT
OUR LAND WILL BE BOUNTIFUL AGAIN
SO DESTROY THE ENEMY
THEIR CONCEIT HAS SENTENCED THEM TO DEATH
RAISE UP YOUR SCYTHES!
RAISE UP YOUR SCYTHES!
RAISE UP YOUR SCYTHES, DEFENDERS OF THE LAND!
Textbook communism is an ideal utopia that can never be achieved.
Except for in Catalonia
Yeah, but that's just an attempt at something like communism. They didn't reach full communism.
Can you expand on that?
During the Spanish civil war, Catalonia was governed by the Marxists and the Anarchists. They dismantled the state and gave control of the government over to the trade unions. It wasn't perfect, but it was the middle of a war, and they were making progress every month. Until they were betrayed by the Marxist-Leninists.
So they failed to maintain control?
Western leftism is plagued by a culture of purity. Only upholding failed projects, because they never actually had to contend with the messy realities of governance.
Agree ,
Oh, I fully support non-western communist movements, such as the Haudenosaunee. Do you respect the Haudenosaunee as communists, or am I about to hear a racist rant?
You could at least cite the Zapatistas, or something.
The Haudenosaunee might be considered 'primitive communism' though I think that's an unfair characterization, while I think Engles and Lewis Henry Morgan were ultimately correct in their broad assertions about origins of the family and class stratification, the particular focus on the Haudenosaunee was based on a lingering, erroneous, assumption that indigenous Americans were somehow more primitive, or existed in some 'state of nature'.
But it's even more of a stretch to assert that the modern Haudenosaunee, as a cultural and political entity are Communist in the modern political sense. There is no coherent Haudenosaunee sovereignty movement that also has strong anarchist or Marxist ideological convictions, akin to what we see with Neozapatismo.
But if you have a counter argument, I'd like to hear it.
They were Anarcho-Syndicalist and tbh we have never forgotten them. The collapse of the CNT was one of the greatest tragedies in human history.
One of the only large-scale “communist” societies that worked, and it was promptly destroyed by authoritarians.
Stalin: It's going to be at least another hundred years before I can do communism
Catalonia: Yeah so it's been a few weeks and we're already doing communism. Come visit and shoot a Nazi!
Stalin: Fuck fuck fuck they're making me look bad. Uhhhhhhh destroy Catalonia!
What? No, it's specifically Anarchists who want to speed run straight to communism. Marxists want to seize the state and guide it through a transitional stage (often called Socialism), which will end in the withering away of the state, and thus lead to Communism.
This was the whole nature of the split in the First International between Marx and Proudhoun.
To your point about Orwell, bringing up 1984 doesn't make a ton of sense here, as that's a book that is much more about fascism. Case in point, Immanuel Goldstein, the avatar of everything that Oceania opposes, is a man with a Jewish name.
Animal Farm, meanwhile, comes from Orwell's experience in the Spanish Civil War, where he was largely embedded with the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM). The POUM were more ideology diverse than history gives them credit for, but was largely composed of what we would today consider Trotskyists.
That experience, coupled with his experience as a journalist during WW2, unable to publish his trotskyist influenced criticisms of the USSR due to wartime state repression, ultimately lead him to write Animal Farm.
The Stalin analogue pig is named Napoleon in large part due to debates between MLs and Trotskyists about the nature of world historical revolutions, since their only point of comparison was France, which ended up with Napoleon in charge. Was Stalin a Napoleon of Socialism? Was that a necessary phase in these sorts of revolutionary processes? Things like that are what Animal Farm is gesturing towards.
All of that aside though. I think it's needlessly limiting to lop yourself off into an ideological box and say "Only my pet socialist experiment is the Real one!"
As Socialists, Communists, Anarchists, etc. Whatever our ideological convictions, we all have the same ultimate goal, and are apart of the same broad tradition.
I have stark disagreements with my Anarchist friends, but they're still my comrades, and I still respect many things about their commitment to direct action, and will defend their political projects, current and historic, to the hilt. Our struggle is ultimately the same, and we have much to learn from one another.
And that is why tankies cream their panties for dictators with imperialist ideas. Got it.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Marxist-Leninists describe their disagreements in terms that turn criticism of them into gibberish. I think it’s exactly what Orwell was writing about based on his experiences.
Nail on the head. There's a particularly active lemming from the tankie instances that always, and purposefully, devolves everything into arguing about everyone else using words incorrectly.
Name and shame
Cowbee!
Facts
I think this meme is referenced to this quote Orwell wrote after fighting for and living the revolution in Spain.
Except for the small revolutionary groups which exist in all countries, the whole world was determined upon preventing revolution in Spain. In particular the Communist Party, with Soviet Russia behind it, had thrown its whole weight against the revolution. It was the Communist Party thesis that revolution at this stage would be fatal and that what was to be aimed at in Spain was not workers' control, but bourgeois democracy. It hardly needs pointing out why 'liberal' capitalist opinion took the same line.
I need to read up on this. Spain in 1936 seems like one of those points in history that waaaaaay too much shit is quietly connected to. What little I know of it comes from For Whom The Bell Tolls
George Orwell was a snitch who ratted on communists to UK intelligence.
Read som marxism ABC.
Read som marxism ABC.
"Normal people are too stupid to achieve communism on their own, so they need to be guided by a vanguard party of corrupt yes-men led by a psychopath."
Ah tinfoil lib. Again read some marxism ABC
You mean history?
Oh here it comes, no true scottsman
I mean basic understanding of what words mean.
What does ABC mean? Its not a word in my native language
It's an English idiom. The alphabet is also called the "ABCs". As in "kindergarteners need to learn their ABCs". Americans refer to any kind of basic knowledge as ABCs, like "The ABCs of cell biology" - this would probably be identifying organelles in a textbook. "Marxism ABC" is a very bad attempt at using this idiom by someone who neither understands other cultures nor their own.
I get it now, thank you. I kindly accept any list of top "ABCs" (correct?) of what I am supposed to know, but going with wha?t I've read and my historical knowledge I doubt I'll learn anything new.
Thanks for the explanation!
It's a tankie saying that we need socialism before communism because some old white guy wrote it in a book.
Einstein said if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it. These tankies tell us to read the books instead of explaining what's in them, because they don't understand what's in the books. They're hoping we'll get as confused as they are and blindly go with what the old white guys said 200 years ago before any of their theory had actually been attempted in practice.
That's, uh, not how science works. That's how religion works. Reading ancient texts that the author got 100% on the first try is for religions. In science, we follow an iterative process of collective knowledge acquisition. The newest research is usually the most correct. We stand on the shoulders of giants and we see further.
Instructions unclear. I read maximum ACAB.
Maximum acab would be to understand state and revolution and act accordingly. There's a good book about that :)
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