this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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GenZedong
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I agree with all that, and I'm never going to discourage anyone from working with other people whose goals are compatible with your own.
I think the issues with anarchism aren't with the goals which are largely compatible with ones that MLs have, but rather with the methodology. Vast majority of people who subscribe to anarchism mean well, but often reject effective methods for organizing and effecting change at scale.
For example, I find the rejection of authority to be highly problematic when it comes to building an effective movement. It's simply not possible for large groups of people to organize and to keep long term consistent goals in absence of centralization. You end up with many fractured groups each having their own idea pulling things in different directions, and a movement rife with opportunists. This is precisely what we see happening with western left at the moment.
There needs to be a consistent vision and some form of a vanguard whose job it is to ensure that all the different groups are pulling in the same direction. There also needs to be a common theory of change that everyone understands in a similar enough way to work together effectively.
In my experience, anarchists often tend to make the mistake of assuming that majority of people naturally shares their ideas, and if current system could somehow be torn down then we'd naturally enter an anarchist utopia. Of course, the reality, is that if the current system did happen to collapse, then it would be groups that have good organization that will end up coming into power. If the left fails to become disciplined then it will be the right that takes over.
Just to defend the vast majority of people who subscribe to anarchism a little, ime huge amount of self proclaimed anarchists don't have particularly strong opinions on methods for organizing or effecting change at scale, mostly because a lot haven't done much organizing. In my experiences with anarchist types they're pretty flexible on the methods part just because it's nice to do anything for a change and doing basic organizing in the maximally anarchist fashion can just get exhausting.
Granted i'm mostly talking abt like new to leftism anarchist by default types but the anarchists who're ideologically committed to the point of opposing all centralization in organizing bc authority are overrepresented online and irl MLs are incredibly unlikely to even have a chance to work with them.
For sure, anarchism is far less stigmatized in the west and therefore it's natural for left leaning people who fall out of the mainstream to get interest in anarchism. I suspect that a lot of people who start seriously thinking about what it takes to effect systemic change end up moving closer to ML point of view later on.
that's def what happened to me, a huge turning point for me was participating in an small group with a very anarchist structure and seeing all the issues that creates, and eventually finding myself in the small group of de facto leaders doing evil unaccountable centralism bc of a combo of social cachet and being one of the few ppl to actually bother showing up to meetings. coming across The Tyranny of Structurelessness was an unpleasant literally me moment. ragging on ML organizing for not being democratic enough made a lot of sense until everyone's silently democratically decided you're responsible for everything or else the whole thing falls apart