this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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Anarchism
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Discuss anarchist praxis and philosophy. Don't take yourselves too seriously.
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If your action is to punch left, your output is to move the current situation rightwards.
This goes for both anarchists and lemmygrad types, who equally harm the collective movement by punching left at one another.
If the marxist brigades, (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine(DFLP), Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC)) in Palestine can prioritise the need for cooperation even with hamas in order to put up a resistance against oppression, we can all do the same when we have fewer reasons to fight.
https://youtu.be/90AAcSvJAl0
Sure, but there's a reason the anarchist presence on Hexbear haa dramatically waned over the years. Like how much is anyone actually valuing left unity while federating with an instance that memes about killing anarchists? A lot of the early drama came out of specifically ML's harassing people associated with anarchists, like that John Kerry shit, including accusations of an "anarchist cabal" (which to be fair remains extremely funny to this day).
And this exists alongside an attitude that left unity in fact is a waste of time, that communists and anarchists want fundamentally different things. And when you combine that with memes about anarchists being reactionaries and feds (oh, but not our anarchists!) and glorification of figures that killed a lot of anarchists and the occasional "anarchists get the wall" memes, like you can't be comrades with people who fundamentally see you as a problem to one day violently remove. There cannot be useful criticism without mutual trust, and I don't think there has been that trust in quite a while.
I'm not convinced.
Every single anarchist community singularly dedicated to anarchism off reddit has waned over the years. Hexbear has retained anarchists better than Raddle for example which has about 20 users left over.
Anarchists seem content to exist in spaces that aren't dedicated to anarchism, as offshoot spaces on the side of other content that latches onto them. This is a problem honestly because those spaces are almost always controlled by bougies rather than proles, if/when the left becomes a real threat those spaces will be shut down just like the marxist ones have been getting shut down on reddit lately. Antiwork got kneecapped by wreckers and bankers for a reason for example.
I don't believe this. I continue to believe that we want the same thing and disagree on the method of reaching it. I actually think we both fundamentally have the same criticisms of the socialist state even, there's a reason communists want a stateless society, we know states aren't good.
It's also my observation that most dedicated anarchist spaces seem gratuitously anti-ML in a way that Hexbear, at least, is not gratuitously anti-Anarchist. Granted, there are also places where MLs are needlessly anti-Anarchist and I'm sure there are anarchist spaces out there who are not as hostile to MLs, but if the comparison is Hexbear specifically then Hexbear is more neutral ground than most other leftist spaces.
That is very strongly evidenced by the OP itself, which only exists so anarcho-bidenists can fear monger to their fellow rubes about how the tankies want to shoot them, which there would be no impetus for if not for MLs in some spaces visibly calling for left unity.