I don’t know what it is, but I almost hate anarchist and other “libertarian socialists” more than I hate liberals and conservatives. They have a completely useless dead-end ideology. At least supporters of capitalism have the fact that it’s propped itself up for so long and is the dominant mode of production now as their victory, and obviously us Marxist-Leninist have the Soviet Union and other Marxist-Leninist states as our victories, but anarchist have absolutely nothing to show for over 200 years of their ideology existing. They’ve never seized power anywhere for more than a couple months. They’ve never been a powerful force in politics. They’ve never had a revolution of their own. And worst of all is that they’re all steeped in that classic western anti-communism. I swear to god most anarchist would rather every historic or current Socialist country be destroyed by the west and turned into some capitalist liberal democracy than to let the “authoritarians” or “tankies” or whatever stupid term they’re using now have power. Anarchist don’t even do fucking praxis anymore like they did in the 1800s and early 1900s, they just whine online and do electoralism. I feel like the only two reasons someone would even be an anarchist at this point is because either
A. They’re a hyper individualist to the same degree as right-wing libertarians but just like left-wing rhetoric.
or
B. They never kicked the heavy amount of bullshit propaganda people are fed about communism, but still like the idea, so they’ve settled for an idealistic version which has never existed and will never exist.
Clearly this isn’t an intelligent or thorough analysis of anarchism, and I’m not saying anything new in the slightest, but I just need to get my hatred for them out of my system somehow.
There are cool anarchists out there, particularly ancoms. And their criticisms can often be useful and valuable to process, and this can also work in the opposite direction.
The major problem is that Western self-labelled anarchists really shouldn’t call themselves that. I’m not even being overly strict. Most of them seem to have read nothing at all about the basics of anarchism and can’t tell the difference between the anarchist position that unjust hierarchies must be dismantled vs. the incoherent Western goofball idea that all hierarchies of all kinds are invalid and bad, like forming a committee to coordinate and decide on how to distribute supplies at an action.
This anti-knowing-anything-before-adopting-intransigent-positions-on-things is most characteristic of this Western “anarchist” tendency, which again, isn’t really anarchist at all. And it bleeds into everything they do and say, including the lazy repetition of anticommunist talking points and trying to do some of the dumbest things you’ve ever seen as actions.
Anyways I think the best remedy is to find some cool anarchists and have positive experiences with them. Have you ever worked with Food Not Bombs? They tend to have a mix of anarchists and commies and socialists/liberals at various stages of pipelining and they have a pretty straightforward mission that doesn’t usually lead to much infighting. It’s also something that is pretty easy to do even when you’re very tired from organizing.