Barx

This is the problem with internet Bolsheviks you envision yourself as Central Committe members in 1949 at the height of the glory of the Soviet Union

I set my conditions for engaging and you seem uninterested in honoring them. Namely, that you reply to what I actually say and not go off in straw men instead, which is clearly just a pattern of dishonest guessed-at sectarian insults.

Please do your best to engage in good faith and in a comradely way.

A powerful way to get people to be receptive is to get them to like you and consider you a font of wisdom. This does not require pushing them, just being available and usually correct and a person they enjoy spending time with. I would recommend honoring their wishes and reading more so that you're ready when questions do come down the pipeline.

Also you don't need to convince them all by yourself as a first step. You could try to get them involved in events they would find worthwhile instead and let the radicalization happen socially. If they are borderline anarcho-syndicalist then maybe they'd want to support a picket line, for example. Maybe there are people looking for help on projects your friend would find interesting.

Hell yeah.

Cook them extra long to get softer hummus. If you are very dedicated to getting a perfect texture also remove the skins once cooked.

Mao had the means and ability but chose not to out of respect for the mass line.

YOUR BODY BETRAYS YOUR PROBLEMATIC HOT TAKE

"just as bad" as whom?

I am referencing your knee-jerk "both sides" rhetoric that pops up instead of even acknowledging the point I've made.

and which "false histories"

The ones I have already corrected you on, such as the Black Army "overperforming". It performed as well as any guerilla group under circumstances favorable to guerillas of the time, i.e. with sufficient support from the peasantry. Given how dramatically it ultimately failed, and its many faults, this is really a romantic characterization that doesn't do justice to anyone involved. Did they really overperform? How well "should" they have performed? Such ahistorical romantic characterizations, along with backstabbing narratives, are the main theme of "anti-Marxist" mythologies among self-proclaimed Western anarchists.

How many of these peasants were voluntarily taxed? How was that bayonette any different than the one weilded by Tsar Nicholas II? Was it because it was Red?

I'm unaware of anyone that is voluntarily taxed.

However, this is going in an oddly sectarian direction whete you are missing the point being made to go for a "both sides" attack. This is actually doing the thing my point is criticizing. Why do the Bolsheviks have to be "just as bad" in order for you to acknowledge falee histories? When did I suggest this was the kind of discussion I was having?

If you can trim your responses to a recognition of what I am actually saying instead of getting angry at the partisan in your head and projecting them onto me, I will continue engaging. Otherwise, I am not interested in feeding into this or playing around with your straw men.

I'm sorry like the Bolsheviks or the Whites didn't steal from peasants?

I am responding to your point about the Black Army "overperforming". They did well as a guerilla army with peasant support. They failed utterly when they left areas without peasant support and then instead depended on stealing from the peasants. They had weak to nonexistent supply lines beyond a peasant network in Eastern Ukraine and entirely alienated the cities that capitulated quickly to the Whites and openly accepted the Reds with almost no fighting. These are just the realities of their military successes and failures.

The Bolsheviks did not make their army reliant on the ad hoc theft from peasants. They instituted quotas and taxes to feed the cities and soldiers. Once they adopted a taxation model, conflict with peasants more or less disappeared, they just opposed early war communism's heavy handedness. The Bolsheviks used proper supply lines and it is unsurprising that they beat The Black Army who constantly formed and dissolved in response to pressures.

The Bolsheviks and the Whites literally stole people from the villages to fight in their armies under threat. Real you join our battalion or weremoved and murder your women while you watch then we kill you type shit. The Black Army was the only actual all-volunteer self defense force.

This is ahistorical, The Black Army also used coercion, but they did so ad hoc rather than to establish a stsnding army, famously using the misleading term, "voluntary mobilization" to declare the age range of able-bodied men that could not refuse service when called upon. Towards the end of their project, when such mobilizations were needed, trust and support from the peasants began breaking down because of this and related attempts at control.

This is a consequence of top down vs bottom up thinking. Literally see the part of my post about how the second industrial revolution created this mess to begin with. The city model is literally based in expropriation of the country-side from time immemorial and the second industrial revolution only made cities worse and more dependent.

That is not about bottom-up vs. top-down thinking at all, it is about class and subclass interests. A commune expropriating from starving city workers is not "bottom up", it is actually a fairly authoritarian theft carried out using relative material wealth and self-sufficiency. And it would have led to a self-destructice system, it was a key weakness predicated on a romantic chauvinism, of serving the people from whom they largely emerged and found support and then needing a left-sounding way to justiy the mistreatment of workers.

The city model is literally based in expropriation of the country-side from time immemorial

The city model has always depended on agriculture but the extent to which it involved expropriation is something that has varied substantially historically. There is a degree to which Western chauvinist just-so stories try to generalize the violences of Western Europe as all-encompassing truths, missing the variety of humsn organization that has occurred under similar circumstance. Ironically, the observation I hust shared is common among anarchist historians and anthropologists.

and the second industrial revolution only made cities worse and more dependent

Yes, city workers were dependent on food from peasants. And Makhnovschina's strategy was to hang them out to dry, to have their communes become theoretically insular and autonomous. But of course this was contradicted by the necessity of their frequent thefts from the cities. It was a romanticization, not a full reality. The peasants were also dependent on the cities for industrial goods and weaponry, they just wouldn't die of starvation and malnutrition as quickly as the city workers. They would have been overrun by the White Army in a few years without an industrial base.

The Bolsheviks bathed the country sides with blood, and sure they had to, but lets not pretend there was some grand greater good, it's because the Bolsheviks had nothing to actually offer the country side.

There was, of course, a grand greater good of feeding industrial workers and soldiers, securing an industrial base to fight off the rest of Europe, and the continued functioning of society in general past short-sighted views of a non-sustainable commune.

Furthermore lets cut the bullshit okay? This is just devolving into a typical argument cycle and I'm just going to end it here. Whenever this line of argumentation comes up people who cannot understand or admit to the faults of the Bolsheviks (and I'm not saying Makhnovischa was faultless here at all), are all trying really fucking hard not to say "It was OUR PROPERTY." All you're arguing about is who rightfully owned those things that the Black Armies took are we not?

Actually I was speaking of the material reasons the Black Army had military successes in some ways and not others and how they did not find a realistic synthesis of peasant and worker interests and that this led to a direct conflict with Bolsheviks for material reasons, not just old stories about theoretical disputes and the various other romantic mythologies of "backstabbing", which is what ignorany online "anarchists" obssess over.

To be honest, I think I was very clear on that.

We can talk about the negatives of how each army and society conducted itself, but I'm not going to have a typical black-red rules lawyering property dispute with you. It's pointless, stupid, and unbecoming. I don't believe in private property.

If the topic is sectarian "anarchism" you should expect to hear critiques of sectarian "anarchism". Endlessly rehashing a false understanding of Marxist "betrayals" is a fundamental element of sectarian "anarchism".

Intel has gone full bean counter mode, they are financialized around the world and back again trying to coast on legacy systems and monopoly power. They pocketed the CHIPS Act cash, mostly turning it into financial shenanigans rather than productive capacity.

In theory they could turn it around but it's difficult to know how precarious their operation is, it jist has all the warning signs that it could be taken out by vultures.

A cup of coffee with high quakity beans is around 30 cents per cup in materials in the US. If emplotees average 2 cups per day for an 8 hour workday it amounts to around an 8 cents per hour raise.

Of course, companies also believe that coffee improves productivity, so it us usually factored in as a cost-saving measure by the nerds controlling production. It's only one you get yo self-defeating bourgeois dictator levels of petty that anyone starts to even care about somehow cutting coffee costs.

smdh where us the biweekly pizza party?

As with all Western Leftism, it is impprtant to understand that most people who identify with any label probably haven't even read the basic canon associated with it and are just going off of vibes. And that online Western Leftists also bring with them an insufferable internet debate bro villification culture where they join affinity groups to crap on everyone else (not jist anarchist affinity groups!).

This is how you get very real irl situations like where a self-described "anarchist" calls everyone that criticizes with him a cop but then physically threatens people if they are in any way disruptive. Or where a self-described "anarchist" constantly delays trivial decisions because they aren't being made "horizontally" enough, i.e. by consensus of every member of the group in 5 hour meetings every day. And why an irl anarchist has to explain the most basic anarchist theory to both of these Kinds of Guy, who are also the most sectarian Kinds of Guy.

So, there is at least one strain of Western "anarchism" that is just selfish people with no interest in theory or history or what anarchism even means but who enjoy the idea of maximizing their own autonomy and aesthetic without thinking about how it impacts others. And these folks will gladly go after anyone they label "authoritarian", which ends up being anything from a major state bureaucracy to literally having a bed time (like quiet hours at night so they don't wake others).

There is also a strain of Western "anarchist" that does begin reading, though not very much and from a selective canon. They do not read in a capacity that produces self-criticism or compares perspectives, but instead treat it more like an in-group romantic mythology of valiant political failure. These "anarchists" often become doomers and declare revolution impossible. They are the most guilty of sectarianism, as every single one of their major "histories" is about telling a false story of how everything was going great until "the Marxists" screwed them over, eliding several important details and basically just promoting the most sectarian people of the past to the exclusion of everyone else. IRL these folks are basically indistinguishable from the know-nothings, they engage in the same antics that force anarchists to correct them because they are bring embarrassing and counterproductive. This is because they are only theoretically anarchist, they spend their political time constructing a utopian view and gaining a false sense of their own correctness and run into irl situations where they actually have no idea what they are doing. Most of these people don't do anything at all irl and along with the know-nothings these are the people who dominate online "anarchist" spaces that are so viscerally, yet ignorantly, sectarian. I think of both of these groups as people that are arrogant, they simply don't read the basics of what would be needed to form their opinions, and their "tendency", if you can call it that, never pushes them out of that ignorany comfort zone. It is unsurprising that it is in such solidarity-free contexts that you get fed-like behavior.

To try and explain why these groups can exist, we should ask why they are not taken over by the sentiments of anarchists that do read and understand and why they are not rapidly redirected to other tendencies. The most important differentiators are (1) whether a person does irl orgsnizing and (2) whether a person reads critically and sufficiently.

Re: irl work, anarchists that do irl organizing work are generally not as interested in sectarian infighting, they are trying to increase the capacity of their projects and will work in coalition to do so. They simply do not think of Kronstadt or whatever when it comes time to raise funds for a mutual aid event. They are busy doing anarchist things, not dedicating their political lives to internet rage. And because they prioritize work over pointless sectarianism, they tend to also moderate their stances due to exposure to good peoplr that are MLs or Maoists etc. IRL anarchists are not free of sectarianism, but it is less unrealistic and dominant. So the online "anarchists" that overreoresent sectarian "tendencies" reflect an atomization, they are people who understand politucs as a form of self-discovery and expression and black team vs. red team, which is to say, a fundamentally bourgeois framing cultivated by who controls the online venues and wider cultural hegemony.

Re: reading, to be honest the Western Left is all guilty of this. MFers need to fuckin read holy shit. The number of people who think they have earned the right to explain things to others despite never reading the material? I swear to God this is most self-described commies and anarchists and socialists. And they often whine about it, too, as if they couldn't possibly take 30 minutes per day out of their internet rage time on their infinte knowledge source device to instead understand the basics of the world-historical project they claim to be forwarding and representing. This is part of the same atomization, though. People in irl orgs often have reading groups and social pressure ensures that some baseline of reading is achieved and this applies to both anarchist and commie formations. Even with that, there is a need to shed liberal ideas around what it takes to have an accurate understanding of something, as Westerners are all taught arrogance and egoism when it comes to politics. Reading properly requires undoing several layers of psychological defenses, of defensiveness itself, of creating spaces where saying, "I don't know" is fine for new members and where the flipside, of people pretending to kniw while providing the worst takes you've ever seen, are overcome by those who develip correct takes and have organized accordingly. Fundamentally, that is also driven by attempting to create good irl organizations. If you spend your time figuring out how to grow and develop your organization, you end up trying to create these spaces and developing each other theoretically. And you also learn that sometimes you need to excise toxic people that are not yet far enough along in their journey to respond to this kind of serious organizing.

I haven't talked much about theoretical differences or historical grievances, or tge First International, etc because I think this largely misses the reality of what Western Leftists, including the majoriry of sectarian "anarchists" are doing. They are more shibboleths for identities and squabbles, stand-ins for a more basic problem of social organization and socialization itself. They are rarely real theoretical disagreements. It's nice when they are, don't discount the value of constructive criticism by comparing to anarchist positions and vice versa, but that is really just plain not what is actually happening 9 times out of 10 that someone online says they love Kropotkin.