Outright Lie
NSFWPrior context: bad-faith-acting anarchist سایهسار🏴 (@idkijustthibk) accused another person ( (• ˕ •マ.ᐟ ★ @Y40IFRQTTING ) of having “racist white savior mentality” because they had stated that “Most of the third world would likely still be colonies if not for the Soviet Union” [1] (even tho’ the usage of “likely” clearly indicates that they had acknowledged the possibility 3rd worlders could have liberated themselves without the USSR’s help).
Maluses:
Anarchists be anarchisting, yo (all authority is bad, even anticolonial authorities apparently).
Seriously, I do not understand the aversion to authority that anarchists have. Do they honestly think that they will survive the murderous nature of Western capitalism if anarchism actually becomes a threat to capitalism? How will they survive if they do not have a state or a vanguard party to concentrate their will into a potent weapon?
Anarchist thought on the state is a direct consequence of having no experience with a state that is honest and fair. Their only experience with states are capitalist states and so they wrongly conclude that any state must behave in an identical fashion. They aren’t wrong to be skeptical of the state given that it is a system built on coercion & domination but their proposed solution to simply abolish it immediately is naive and ineffectual. Makhno tried this in Ukraine and Trotsky crushed him without effort. If it hadn’t been the Bolsheviks it would’ve been somebody else. A stateless society cannot coexist with state societies; ergo a state must exist to safeguard the revolution until such time when it is no longer needed. Anarchists reject this reasoning and it’s why they keep failing. You can’t compete with state levels of power projection and organization without having a state. This is the explicit advantage of a state society: it can mobilize large numbers of people in a way that a stateless society simply cannot. This is why the U.S. abandoned the militia model for a standing army. It’s why feudal states, after centralizing, abandoned levies in favor of a standing army. It’s why Rome was able to conquer so much so quickly. It’s why the USSR lasted as long as it did and it’s why the PRC & DPRK still exist. It’s why the Zionist Entity is still around and why Iran hasn’t folded to U.S. aggression. Only a state can compete with another state.
It’s tempting to say that they don’t think at all, but really the problem is that they engage in magical thinking.
They think that they can organize a defense against reactionaries on some kind of purely voluntary and individual free association basis, which is the same plan they have for how to run an economy. This is because anarchism comes from a place of liberal, individualist thinking. It is a petty bourgeois ideology at its core that puts individual freedom at the center of the ideology, and any objective reality that is incompatible with that ideal has to be somehow handwaved or rationalized away. And part of it is just childish – in the literal sense, like children who don’t like being told to go to bed, do their homework or eat their vegetables.
You get into a lot of problems when you put ideology ahead of reality, and you start having to make up ever more convoluted cope in an attempt to try and reconcile the contradiction between the two. And this is the case with anarchists’ dogmatic hatred of authority and the state. It leads to some very strange conclusions when taken to the extreme, as we can see above. That’s why it’s important to take a step back sometimes and question your fundamental assumptions if stubbornly clinging to those assumptions has led you to adopting absurd and indefensible positions.
(Also, many anarchists you encounter online are just privileged white western teenagers, it’s not really worth it getting too upset about them; they are pretty irrelevant.)
Yeah, I do feel like anarchism is very utopian in its way of thinking (fighting a state through non-state means is a recipe for murdered flour, yet they expect to be making a cake?), but I wonder where the usage of “petty-bourgeois” in the sense of individualistic came from… I guess it comes from petty-bourgeoisie being characterized by individualism (I know from experience)?
I hear some anarchism-adjacent comments sometimes among non-anarchists, like conservatives being “against the state” (they are not really against it, but they argue like they are against it) in all aspects unless it benefits them; a consistent position of theirs would involve essentially arguing for anarchism out of logical necessity, but of course, since they do not actually criticize the state in any meaningful sense (just a state that actually provides services to the workers), they are not actually consistent, and are therefore not anarchists. I can definitely see the individualism present here being an expression of anarchism too (is it right to say it is an expression of anarchism, or a fundamental part of anarchism?).
Individualism is a very petty bourgeois value because of how the petty bourgeoisie as a class operate. They are small producers whose interest lies in essentially having complete freedom to operate as they wish. “Every man a king”/“small business tyrant” type of mentality. Which happens to align with anarchists’ disdain of authority and organization. The proletarian mindset on the other hand is much more focused on collective and organized labor. And the big bourgeois of course also clash with the petty bourgeois, because to them free competition by small producers is not in their benefit. They are interested in monopolistic consolidation and using the state to enforce their interests. So you see how the values of a class reflect the material interests of that class.
Dang, I saw that attitude in my dad already, but knowing about this honestly validates my idea that petty-bourgeois defenders of capitalism are focused on the individualism capitalism can bring them ;<.
How would liberalism bexome a threat to capitalism?
…? I typed anarchism.