Eradicate Left Unity

A Left Unity Flag

From Ziq's Patreon (by ziq)

Make Bands, Not Communities. Anarchy, Not Leftism

Introduction

"The only way to achieve revolution is to put  aside our differences and unite together as leftists and then after we  overthrow capitalism we can then debate on what form of government to  replace it with."

Leave it to a red preaching left-unity to not understand that anarchists want no form of government.

"I don't get why so many people try to distinguish Marxism and Anarchism. Marxism is a vital part of Anarchist ideology."

Um, no, it isn't.

"I don't think it's a disservice to acknowledge  (anarchism's) inspirations. Anarchism has taken many cues from Marx.  It's just a fact."

Bullshit.

"As a libertarian socialist, I would much rather  live in an ML state like the USSR, North Korea or China than in this  capitalist hellhole."

Go on then, who's stopping you?

"Marx wanted a stateless, moneyless, and  classless democratic society. Anarchists want that as well. The  difference lies in how we get there."

Gah.

"We're all headed in the same direction, the  difference is only how far one is willing to travel. Someone might leave  on the next stop, but before that stop it might be beneficial to work  together. Establishing ideological purity that excludes our ML comrades  hurts progress."

Ugh... I feel dirty just quoting these internet  reds and their perverse people-conglomeration fantasies, but it's the  best way to establish the purpose of this essay. This one's going to  cover a lot of ground, from entryism and left unity, to the origins of  anarchy and Marxism, to the ways we think about the community ideal and  belonging, to a lived anarchy that's persisted in east Africa for  centuries, and finally the psychology behind the strange current of Han  Chinese nationalism that's rising within the white settler-colonial  left. Let's get started.

Exhuming The Left Unity Corpse

The disturbing trend of self-proclaimed  non-sectarian libertarian-socialists and "anarcho-Marxists" that have  been attaching themselves to the anarchist discourse can be traced back  with a straight line to the proliferation of "left-unity" spaces.

Most of these spaces exist on cursed corporate  portals like Reddit, Twitter and Facebook, but they've also spread into  meatspace. Currently, one of the most prominent virtual left unity  spaces spawns from the US social democrat "Chapotraphouse" podcast,  along with assorted inoffensive subreddits led by r/breadtube, the  "leftbook" corner of Facebook and several Youtube personalities that  start out identifying with particularly milquetoast strains of red  anarchism, but then gradually embrace state-capitalist narratives before  inevitably swearing off anarchy altogether and doing round the clock  propaganda for the Chinese state and its incredibly successful strain of  red fascism.

Self-hating settlers who accessorize themselves  with various red fascist tendencies infiltrate anarchist and socialist  spaces on corporate platforms and initiate left unity policies that  successfully ban all criticism of their backwards conservative views.  The more vocal opponents of the new policy are quickly purged for  breaking left-unity, leaving a more passive audience who are ripe for  indoctrination.

Then the propaganda starts. Endless authoritarian  memes to normalize gulags, guillotines, firing squads, violent struggle  sessions against anyone who resists social stratification, dictators  and genocide. Tomes of nonsensical ideological "theory" is then injected  into the eyeballs of alienated young settlers who, for obvious reasons,  are starved of cultural identity and belonging. The process ends when  the targets are thoroughly brainwashed and can now only see the world  through the increasingly warped tankie lens.

Once the transition to their new religion is  complete, almost immediately, any ideas that conflict with the writings  of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Deng and Xi (never mind that they  all contradict with each other) create desperate cognitive dissonance in  their minds. So these pasty emotionally-stunted people angrily lash out  at the unindoctrinated for being "radlibs", "western chauvinists" and  "imperialists" rather than risk parting with their new-found identity,  community and belonging.

Once the majority in the newly minted left-unity  community are comfortable joking about rounding up and killing "kulaks",  "anarchist bandits" or more recently "Uighur terrorists" and quoting  Chinese state media to counter all the "imperialist western propaganda"  from the mouths of the various minority groups being imprisoned and  enslaved by the Chinese state (for their own good, they'll insist), the  shaming campaign begins.

Anyone in the space who breaks with the red fash  party line is lambasted and ridiculed into submission. The remaining  libertarians in the space now find themselves hopelessly outnumbered by  scornful white settlers with daddy issues telling them they're  imperialist CIA stooges for thinking the Uighurs maybe shouldn't be put  in concentration camps or the Hong Kong and Tibetan people should get  self-determination (watch tankies insist Tibetans who don't want to be  ruled by China are fascists and China is, in fact, saving them from  themselves).

In order to not be shunned and purged by their  peers, the anarchists in the left-unity space adopt an obscene  anarcho-tankie ideology that allows them to maintain their affections  for feel-good libertarian philosophers like Chomsky, Bookchin and  Kropotkin, while somehow fusing the authoritarian third positionist  fascist dogma enforced from the top down by their chosen community.

Uncritical support for every empire that competes  with the USA's, the insistence that anarchism and communism are one and  the same because "they have the same end goal", the claim that  anarchist communes and an ML state can co-exist in harmony despite a  mountain of historic evidence to the contrary, the attempt to whitewash  and obfuscate failed authoritarian concepts like the dictatorship of the  proletariat and the vanguard, the nonsensical belief that they can be  an anarchist and also a Marxist or even a Dengist... Suddenly they're  able to take wildly contradicting ideas and hack them together in order  to be accepted by the elitist red fash echo chamber they so desperately  want the approval of.

The conflicting ideas grow increasingly out of  whack the further down the rabbit hole the left unity space takes them,  and the ridicule they get for their remaining libertarian attachments  begins to eat at their ego, until finally they post "How I went from an  anarkiddie to a principled scientific analytical dialectic  Marxist-Leninist with Chinese characteristics" and the transition from  anarchy-curious to fully programmed red fascist shitlord is complete.

Perhaps all these conservative settlers calling  themselves communists are hoping to alleviate their white guilt in some  perfunctory way by identifying with ideologies that are little more than  shallow anti-Americanism: Denouncing their home imperial empire and  presumably all the power and privileges it lavishes them with (fat  chance), but spending their days on Reddit and Twitter stumping for  every competing imperial empire (China, Russia, Iran), no matter how  tenuous a connection the empire has to their supposed socialist  ideology.

Corporate platforms that give space to leftists  are always organized in a way that requires a rigid hierarchical  governance, giving the most power to the most senior moderators. As soon  as a small group is able to mount big enough struggle sessions to rise  to the top of the ranks of the virtual hierarchy, they're granted  complete control over the space forever and cement their power with a  quick purge of anyone who objects to the new management.

They'll find an assortment of ways to justify the  purges, including claims that the dissenters are "wrecking" the space,  that they're racist Sinophobes for objecting to China's treatment of  ethnic minorities, or that they're simply breaking the newly written  left-unity rules by being sectarian, divisive or anti-communist. Nine  out of ten people in the space will quickly adapt to the new status quo  so they don't risk losing their place in "the community". Because the  good of the precious community always comes first.

The truth is collectivists are all looking to be  led and dictated to and given a role to play by their masters, while  anarchy is all about telling people to think for themselves and reject  all authority.

The tankie route is much easier for people to  take because it doesn't require real effort or self reflection. A  prospective tankie just needs to follow the program, parrot the  propaganda, swallow the lies, never dissent against party dogma, and  they find automatic praise and acceptance and are able to feel like  members of an elite group of "radicals" without actually doing anything  radical or engaging in any kind of self-reflection.

Anarchists ask much more of ourselves and we  never rest on our laurels or praise our associates for their obedience.  We actually strive to unmake domination in all its forms, kill every cop  in our heads, turn every social institution inside out, do anarchy in  our lives at every opportunity and tell anyone who tries to rule us in  any way to fuck off and die... That all takes a lot of fucking effort.  Much easier to repost gulag memes on 4chan all day and be showered with  praise from your fellow AK-47 enthusiasts.

While reds endlessly thirst for domination,  bureaucracy and performative politburo, spending their gloomy little  lives bossing all their deferential underlings around while promising  them a magical revolution some day if they just stick to the program,  prop up dear-leader and evangelize from the good book of Marx,  anarchists are actually out there in the world waging perpetual warfare  on everything and anything that would dominate us.

Left-unity is a deliberate ploy by disturbed  groomers to indoctrinate impressionable young minds into their  authoritarian red fascist cult and force them to abandon any dangerous  individualist beliefs they might have once held so they can be accepted  within the collective's rigid hierarchy. Joe Commie can't risk getting  called a radlib or an anarkiddie by members of the Soviet reenactment  society for forming their own thoughts or questioning daddy's  bullshit-laden narratives in any way.

"Left unity" has never been anything more than  tankie doublespeak for "obey us or be purged". Don't fall for it. Burn  the space down before you let the scum of the earth get their hooks in  it.

Red Fash Entryism

"Entryism is a tactic whereupon members of a  political group join another group with the (often secret) intention of  changing its principles and plans."

"Entryism provides a means for a small but  determined group to leverage their influence onto a larger sphere by  using an infiltrated group's resources."

Before the red fash brigade can cement their  power and seize control of a space to control the discourse, turning it  into yet another apparatchik congregation, they need to do a whole lot  of good old fashioned entryism.

Like any pious door-to-door missionary, once  they've wedged themselves into the building with some gentle  inclusivity-pleas and cries that they're being oppressed by  "sectarians", it's not long before they're moving towards the stairs and  getting ready to start their climb to the top floor where they can  really let loose... Here are some examples of entryists at work on  Raddle.me; an anti-authoritarian and illegalist space I founded:

"China has to put them in re-education camps  because they're terrorists, they pose a serious threat to society. The  party can't let dangerous people run around throwing bombs at schools,  they have to maintain public order, so if the Uighurs are going to keep  doing terrorist attacks, they need to be dealt with, it's as simple as  that."

Is there anything a red fash enjoys more than  casting ethnic minorities as villains in their Chairman Übermensch  fantasies? This entryist worked hard to convince a site full of scumbag  thieves and anarchists that the state needs to protect public order from  'terrorists'. The irony was apparently lost on them.

Stay mad Western white libs. Accept facts that  the only genocide happening in China is against poverty and outdated  transit. But keep pretending that you’re against "all genocide" when you  have literal concentration camps at the border of your countries. If  only you were just as furious and took that much effort to focus on that  than on China. Supporting CIA-funded terrorism in Xinjiang is the  epitome of your white liberalism. China will keep winning and there’s  nothing you can do about it.

The fact that this chucklehead is a white boy  from California, USA of course doesn't stop him from weaponizing his own  whiteness against a couple of people (non-western people of color, mind  you) who were concerned about China's self-admitted ethnic cleansing  campaign. The entire tankie defense for ML atrocities always seems to  come down to snarky shaming and whataboutism taken to the extreme.

"If there's actually a genocide happening, I find  it hard to believe the anti-Islamic GOP is the group that's most  concerned about Muslims in China. If there's actually a genocide  happening, I find it hard to believe that countries with large Muslim  populations aren't equally concerned, or even more concerned. If there's  actually a genocide happening, I find it hard to believe that China  still has almost three times as many mosques-per-worshipper as the U.S."

I find it hard to believe. If there's actually a  genocide happening. I find it hard to believe.  If there's actually a  genocide happening. I find it hard to believe. If there's actually a  genocide happening... They're not even subtle with the brainwashing.

ML states have done so many atrocities at this  point that I don't know why tankies bother denying it when a new one  happens. The USSR alone was responsible for the de-Tatarization of  Crimea, the genocide of the Ingrian Finns, the ethnic cleansing of  Poles, the mass gulaging and pogroms of Greeks, the deportation of the  Karachays, the deportation of the Kalmyks, the deportation of the  Chechens and Ingush (Aardakh), the deportation of the Balkars, the  deportation of Azerbaijanis from Armenia, the deportation of the  Meskhetian Turks, the deportations of the Chinese and Koreans, the  execution and deportation of Latvians, the expulsion of Germans from  Eastern Europe and the Holodomor famine that largely happened due to the  USSR's confiscation and export of all the grain stores in central and  eastern Ukraine, and preventing people from acquiring more food by  banning free movement.

Then there's communist Czechoslovakia's Romani  sterilisations, the Cambodian genocide, Bulgaria's "revival process",  Vietnam's Montagnard persecution, the Isaaq genocide in Somalia, the  Hmong genocide in Laos, the Gukurahundi massacres in Zimbabwe and the  mass starvation of anywhere between 15 and 55 million people that  happened in China during Mao's "Great Leap Forward".

At what point did tankies of the past switch from  denying one of their genocides to praising it and insisting it was  justified because the victims were kulaks? I give it 3 years, tops,  before this clown's narrative switches from "I find it hard to believe"  to "well, they were a threat to the revolution".

"Why is it that when I go to "tankie" internet  spaces I see genuine respect for other viewpoints and an interest in  discussing and working with everyone willing to unite against the ruling  class, but when I go to "anarchist" internet spaces all I see is a  bunch of punching left and people calling MLs fascists and so on?  Exaggeration of course, there are some actual principled anarchists in  these places, but the radlibs (that's all you fuckers who use the term  "red fash" by the way) clearly own the place."

This one's a self-proclaimed "anti-imperialist  anarchist" who thinks opposing China's genocide is disrespectful to red  fash. Brilliant bit of entryism that as usual tries to cast anyone who  pushes back against authoritarianism as "unprincipled" and uncooperative  and standing in the way of progress. Accusing us of "punching left" for  rejecting ethnic cleansing is the cherry on top of this turd cake.

"Do you not see the difference between calling  someone an "anarkiddie" and calling someone a red fascist? I'm not sure  why I'd need to explain this to you, but you realize a fascist is one of  the worst things you can possibly be, right? I hope I won't be  criticized for saying that I believe fascists should literally be  executed openly. Being a fascist is, in my mind, like being a child  molester or a murderer or a slave owner. It is something which  completely invalidates any right you might have to continue living your  life peacefully. To be a fascist is to be an active threat to all good  people in the world."

The same entryist goes on to insist we stop  calling his comrades red fascists because they're not murderers and  child molesters... Except their daddy Stalin was both a murderer and a  child molester. Mao too. Oops, was that disrespectful of me? Sorry,  comrade. I guess those particular fascists don't count because then  you'd have to execute yourself.

If Marxist-Leninists don't want to be called  fascists they shouldn't stan for rulers who put gays and sex workers in  gulags, displaced and starved millions of indigenous people in order to  colonize their land (i.e. genocide) and murdered all their political  opponents - including - shock - anarchists. In other words, they should  stop calling themselves Marxist-Leninists.

You can't detach a political ideology from its  creators, and even if you could, ML rulers continue to enact racist,  homophobic and colonial policies today, showing that modern MLs haven't  changed in any quantifiable way. And you certainly can't expect  anarchists to not think of them as fascists when anarchists have been  mass-murdered throughout history by ML counter-revolutions.

"Anarkiddy" is a low-effort paternalistic insult  and it makes perfect sense that tankies would come up with it. It says a  lot more about MLs than it says about us. But "red fascist" isn't a  mere insult, it's the perfect description of what the modern  Marxist-Leninist-Dengist is. A fascist draped in red. And judging by how  riled up they get when they hear the term, it's working as intended.

"If you're not getting paid by the CIA to spread nonsense about its enemies, you're really fucking stupid."

They're starting to betray their true intentions  here. A little strange for an anarchist to be so angry that other  anarchists aren't willing to kneel for the state with the most  billionaires in the world, no?

"It simply does not seem to me that Xi is a man  with total and unquestionable power over his country. I'd need to see  some good evidence that this is, in fact, the case before I would  believe it."

I'm sure they'd be perfectly willing to consider  all the evidence, after all they're a principled anti-imperialist  anarchist. Let's see what happens.

"How in the world am I supposed to engage you in a  serious discussion when you say absolute nonsense like "China has a  dictator" lmao. Have you ever in your life read a book??"

Looks like I hit a nerve and he's gone full mask  off. The strugglismo is especially strong with this one, casting himself  as the white knight in charge of defending Xi Jinping's honor.

"Go drink some more fucking kool-aid western chauvinist radlib."

This back and forth I had with an entryist posing  as an anarchist is identical to 100 other perfectly telegraphed  conversations with entryists I've had. They'll try to cast doubt on the  narratives of the ML state's victims, insist their favorite ML dictators  are actually accountable, equitable and democratic, accuse you of being  a lackey of one of the USA's alphabet agencies and finally label you a  reactionary / western chauvinist / radlib if you continue to resist  their attempts to gaslight you and normalize authoritarianism in the  space.

No matter how meticulously sourced your citations  are, they'll reject all of them as "western propaganda". If you give  them evidence from the ML state itself, they'll claim it's being taken  out of context or is a mistranslation. There's really no way to get  through their thick armor of sun-baked bullshit. I find it's much more  productive just to mock them from the get go.

A couple of the quotes I opened this essay with  were some red anarchists insisting that the only difference between  Marxism and anarchy is the method we use to reach our supposed shared  goal.

That's just it though, anarchists don't have a  goal, we embody an endless negation of authority. To assume there can be  a neat and tidy goal to anarchy would be to believe archy will just go  away one day, which would be a ludicrous proposition at odds with  everything we know about archy. As long as humans exist, so will  Leviathan.

And when I say anarchists I mean anarchists, not  milquetoast libertarian socialists whose idea of praxis is posting bread  memes on reddit while rubbing virtual elbows with their  genocide-denying red fascist comrades from the safety of their sterile  gated condos in suburban USA.

Anarchists desire a lot more than socialists  desire. We want to unmake all forms of domination, not just economic and  class-based domination. That's what makes anarchists stand apart from  every other political school of thought, and to pretend we're just alt  Marxists does a great disservice to anarchy.

Anarchists greatly predate Marxists. Even if you  only count scholarly European men (as settlers will do) and not the  centuries of peoples all around the world living anarchically without  naming it e.g. the Hadza people in east Africa (a fascinating  anarchistic culture I'll explore later in this essay).

Anarchy was not inspired by Marxism, in fact Marx  was greatly "inspired" by  Proudhon; the first person to refer to  himself as an anarchist, whose work "What Is Property?", which concluded  "property is theft", was initially praised by Marx as "the first  resolute, pitiless, and at the same time scientific investigation and  critique of private property".

Marx really made his career shamelessly ripping  off Proudhon's earlier work point by point, but piling on a thick  authority sludge before serving it up to the world as if he were  presenting something new and not just an authoritarian perversion of  Proudhon's ideas. Once Marx found fame with his plagiarism, he then  decried Proudhon as being detestable; a bad economist, a bad  philosopher, whose critiques were worthless and unevolved.

From Springers "Why A Radical Geography Must Be Anarchist":

"Marx, like Proudhon before him, argued that  abolishing interest-bearing capital was destructive of capitalism. Marx,  like Proudhon before him, differentiated between possession and private  property and argued that cooperatives should replace capitalist firms.  Marx, like Proudhon before him, argued that the working classes must  emancipate themselves. Marx, like Proudhon before him, regarded property  as the subjugation of the labor of others by means of appropriation.  Marx, like Proudhon before him, saw the cooperative movement as a  necessity of transitioning away from capitalism and thus recognized the  need for communal land and workplaces. Marx, like Proudhon before him,  proclaimed the need for ‘scientific socialism’. Marx, like Proudhon  before him, argued that the state was an instrument of class rule,  although they differed in terms of whether or not a temporary  proletariat dictatorship was necessary to see it properly undone."

Moving beyond the widely-repeated entryist lie  that Marxism somehow birthed anarchy, even the entire basis for left  unity; the idea that anarchy is leftist, is also predicated on a lie.

The left / right paradigm has nothing to do with  anarchy, really. It was created in the days leading up to the French  revolution, to differentiate between those who supported the French  republic (leftists) and those who supported the French monarchy  (rightists).

A politician in the états généraux who sat on the  left side of the king favored the republic, while those sitting on his  right favored the monarchy. Of course, neither side wished to abolish  authority. Both left and right were clearly in favor of the state,  regardless of who got to rule it.

To anyone not bamboozled by entryist swindlers  and their doublespeak, identifying as a leftist is a statement to the  world that you support nationalism, states, borders, a monopoly on  violence, being ruled by kings or presidents or central committees.  Anarchists aren't left or right wing, we're anarchists. We reject the  power machinations of both wings of government. We reject all authority.

The underlying assumption still persists in the  minds of leftists and rightists today that the whole spectrum of  conceivable politics need to be enacted through the state. Anarchists  shouldn't be placing themselves on either side of the fucking king.

If anarchists know anything, it's that nothing  worthwhile can come from the state and its bureaucracy, so why would any  anarchists want to adopt the left wing of the state into their  politics? Why would any anarchist want to fuse themselves with a legion  of shitty genocide-fetishists in a grotesque display of anti-authority  and pro-authority unison?

Guess what happens when someone who purports to  be anti-authority joins up with an authority-happy group, helps  normalize their politburo posturing, their domination role-playing and  amplifies their grotesque messaging for them? They cease to be  anti-authority. There's nothing anarchist about giving petty tyrants  more power and a bigger audience.

From its inception, post-left anarchy has simply  been a course-correction to restore and revive anarchy by unweighing it  from the specter of authority (the left) that it's been weighed down  with by a hundred years of settler colonial humanism.

Debunking the Community Ideal & Exploring a Living Example of Anarchy

The libertarian socialists (I refuse to call them  anarchists) who succumb to glaringly obvious entryism and embrace third  positionist ideology (without ever admitting it to themselves) largely  do so because they so value the idea of community, of being accepted and  embraced by the other members of their supposedly non-sectarian,  all-inclusive (so long as you obey an ever-expanding list of entryist  rules) hugbox of a community. Because to all reds, community-building  and comradeship is the very basis of their every ideological convulsion.

If the concept of community is authority-based  e.g. steeped in majoritarianism, then what good is it to anarchists?  Since at least 99.9% of all existing self-identifying communities and  even theoretical proposals for communities are beholden to states,  councils, committees, voter bodies and other forms of rulership, it's  safe to say the community ideal in itself is just another vessel of  authority.

If all organized communities on the planet can be  clearly demonstrated to be authority-based, then it's a safe bet that  the entire concept of community is authority-forming... By simply  looking at every example in the world today, you can bet with absolute  certainty that any forced grouping of people around the community ideal  is going to lead everyone involved through another abusive and torturous  adventure in archy.

The idea that a community can be without rulers  has never been proven. The few remaining free people in the world e.g.  the Hadza in east Africa ("Tanzania") don't live in anything resembling  what we know as a community. They're nomadic, have no leaders, no gods,  no rules, no crops, no property, no marriage, no parents (Hadza children  have full autonomy and essentially raise themselves), don't extract  anything from the land other than foraged food and are quick to remove  themselves from the presence of anyone who tries to rule them.

Anthropologist Frank Marlowe:

"The Hadza certainly are egalitarian (Woodburn  1979, 1982a). This does not mean that there are no individuals who would  like to dominate others and have their way. It is simply difficult to  boss others around. If a Hadza tries to tell others what to do, which  does happen now and then, the others simply ignore it; if he or she  persists, they just move to another camp. Of course, the bossy person  could follow them, but if people move to several different locations,  the bossy person cannot control them all at once."

I would suggest the reason the Hadza are so  successful at anarchy is because they have no attachment to the idea and  the ideology of community, and will split up and drift away from a band  of people without hesitation the moment the band ceases to suit their  interests. The word "band" I'm using here is especially relevant since  it's distinctly compatible with the concepts of anarchy. From  Britannica:

"By definition, a band was a small, egalitarian,  kin-based group of perhaps 10-50 people, while a tribe comprised a  number of bands that were politically integrated (often through a  council of elders or other leaders)."

The Hadza live in groups of as little as 2  people, but generally their bands consist of around 30 people. The  fascinating thing about Hadza bands is they can wholly consist of  children without any adult supervision, demonstrating how they learn  self-sufficiency and autonomy from other children from a very early age  rather than through their parents.

Here's the abstract of the journal "Evolution and Human Behavior Volume 41, Issue 1, January 2020, Pages 12-22":

"Teaching is cross-culturally widespread but few  studies have considered children as teachers as well as learners. This  is surprising, since forager children spend much of their time playing  and foraging in child-only groups, and thus, have access to many  potential child teachers. Using the Social Relations Model, we examined  the prevalence of child-to-child teaching using focal follow data from  35 Hadza and 38 BaYaka 3- to 18-year-olds. We investigated the effect of  age, sex and kinship on the teaching of subsistence skills. We found  that child-to-child teaching was more frequent than adult-child  teaching. Additionally, children taught more with age, teaching was more  likely to occur within same-sex versus opposite-sex dyads, and close  kin were more likely to teach than non-kin."

"The Hadza and BaYaka also showed distinct  learning patterns; teaching was more likely to occur between sibling  dyads among the Hadza than among the BaYaka, and a multistage learning  model where younger children learn from peers, and older children from  adults, was evident for the BaYaka, but not for the Hadza. We attribute  these differences to subsistence and settlement patterns. These findings  highlight the role of children in the intergenerational transmission of  subsistence skills."

Since the Hadza have no leaders or councils or  any concept of social hierarchy, including the parent-child hierarchy  libsocs like Chomsky are so fond of, "small bands of people" is really  the perfect way to describe how they live. I wish more anarchists would  gravitate towards forming temporary, transient bandings of people who  share common interests, rather than continuing their attempts to build  permanent, massive, alienating, authority-breeding "communities".

And perhaps the most important feature to their  anarchistic way of life is that the Hadza have no specialists, with  every Hadza skilled in everything they need to survive. This means  there's no division of labor and no systems or institutions are needed  to create these divisions.

If we're being honest with ourselves, the  division of labor and resources is what a community is founded around  inside civilization. Without the division that comes with specialism,  the Hadza are able to live in complete anarchy in small, unattached  bands of people. Marlowe writes:

"Each Hadza knows how to do everything he or she  needs to do and does not depend on others. Each man can make his own bow  and arrows, his poison, and his ax. Each man knows how to make fire,  how to track, and how to make pegs to climb baobab trees and get honey.  Each woman knows how to make her own digging stick, how to find tubers  and dig them up, how to build a house, and how to make her own clothes,  jewelry, and baskets or find gourds to use as containers for carrying  water or berries. Even when it comes to medicine, each adult man and  woman knows which plants to pick for different ailments."

Since the Hadza's anarchistic existence has no  similarity to anything thought of as a community today (sedentary,  hierarchical, complex legal systems, property-based, extractive,  patriarchal, overflowing with authority), it wouldn't make sense to call  their way of life a community. Another word would be needed that isn't  weighed down by centuries of domination, shame and conformity, because  the two ways of life simply have nothing in common. The closest  political concept that describes what the Hadza have is probably  Stirner's union of egoists:

"The union of egoists is a voluntary structure  formed by its members in their own immediate interests. This is a union  of self-confessed selfish people, which they leave as soon as their  interests are not being delivered."

Both "a band of people" and "a union of egoists"  are more descriptive phrases for living anarchy than a word as loaded  and authority-laden as "community".

A community comes with ideological baggage that  needn't exist, such as the perceived need to defend the  wholly-manufactured community from externalities (even to the point of  the loss of one's own life), to put the needs of the community above the  needs and desires of the individual and to more broadly collectivize  the people who form the community as if they're a singular, monolithic  body and should act in unison at all costs, regardless of the damage  this would inflict to their individuality and thus to anarchy.

Communities are often (always?) held together by  ideology, and like all the nonsensical ideologies the world is ruled  with, third positionism is showing itself to be a formidable  community-builder in the perpetually-online sect.

Third Positionism

It's important to note that since the  settler-colonial far-left have embraced Dengism or "communism with  Chinese characteristics" as they term it, the bar has really been  lowered to such an extent that their ideology has become harder and  harder to distinguish from the various forms of third positionist  fascism.

Third positionists seek to establish monocultural  nation states built around the idea of supremacist racially-homogeneous  nationalism. The third position argues for a mixed economy (blending  elements of a market economy with elements of a planned economy) with a  dedication to eliminating weakness and "degeneracy" from society.

The third positionists claim to be opposed to  both communism and capitalism, while using ideas from both, typically  fusing reactionary right-wing cultural views with radical left-wing  economic views. The so-called third way is really no different than the  other two ways to run a society in practice, but has snappy new  branding.

Since tankies have updated their ideology to  center around the modern People's Republic of China: A state that openly  trumps privatization, free markets, landlords, banks, stock exchanges,  private healthcare, union-busting, billionaires, ethno-nationalism,  cultural genocide, expansionist colonialist armies, institutional racism  / homophobia, rampant economic imperialism overseas and  mass-incarceration.... It's become very difficult to distinguish how  their ideology is any different from the western neo-fascist system they  already live under.

So really, the imagination of the average  internet tankie has been so utterly colonized that they're unable to  envision any system that doesn't simply reproduce the USA's neo-fascist  empire 1:1 but with a different ethnic group at the helm.

But the Chinese state certainly checks all the  boxes on the list of third positionist fascism. A nation state with a  mixed economy, monoculturalism, racial homogeneny, Han supremacy, a  blending of capitalism and communism, conservative cultural values  (including bans on "abnormal sexual behaviors"). It's like a third  positionist wet dream.

So where did third positionism originate? The  term "third position" was first used by Terza Posizione, a short-lived  far-right movement founded in Rome in 1979 as a supposed third way of  running a society, claiming to be a middle ground between communism and  capitalism.

Much earlier, Strasserism evolved out of the  National Socialist German Workers Party in the 1920s and 30s and tried  to do the same thing. Unlike fellow party-member Hitler, who was avidly  anti-communist, they took the "socialist" part of the party's name  seriously and combined anti-capitalism and wealth-redistribution with  antisemitism and German nationalism.

In 1930s and 1940s France, a number of communist  and socialist parties splintered to create nationalist off-shoots .  These included Jacques Doriot's French Popular Party (from the French  Communist Party) and Marcel Déat's National Popular Rally (from the  French Section of the Workers' International).

The original National Bolsheviks in both Russia  and Germany had the same idea, believing socialism needed more blatant  nationalism and racism than it already had under Lenin and Stalin. In  the 1980s, the concept of third positionism was taken up by the  far-right, fascist political party National Front in the United Kingdom.  Today there has been a resurgence in third positionist fascism under  various labels, from modern nazbols to "national anarchism" to  neo-Eurasianism to (I argue) Dengism.

It's completely unsurprising that an ideology  founded by virulent racist and colonialist paternalists like Marx and  Engels would find support with so many racist nationalists. Here's part  of a particularly offensive Marx-Engels Correspondence from 1862 that  perhaps helps us understand why Marx felt the need to fuse all of  Proudhon's innovations with a heavy dose of authoritarian dogma, and why  so many racists are drawn to forming nationalist Marxist offshoots.  (Warning: Racial slurs ahead).

Karl Marx:

"The Jewish ni**er Lassalle who fortunately  leaves by the end of this week, has lost another 5,000 thaler in  speculation. I realize now that he - his head form and his hair growth  are evident enough - is a descendant of ni**ers, who joined Moses'  exodus from Egypt. The intrusiveness of this chap is also very  ni**erish."

Engels shared these white supremacist beliefs.  Here he is writing about Marx's Cuban son-in-law Paul Lafargue in 1887,  who Marx enjoyed denigrating as "the negrillo" and "the Gorilla." The  letter was addressed to Lafargue's wife, commenting on Lafargue's  decision to run for public office.

Friedrich Engels:

"Being in his quality as a ni**er a degree nearer  to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is  undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district."

Both Marx and Engels celebrated the USA's  conquering of Mexico, further showing that their support for equity  really only extended to white people in practice, and they were in full  support of white nationalism and colonialism.

Marx:

"Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?"

Engels:

"In America we have witnessed the conquest of  Mexico and have rejoiced at it. It is to the interest of its own  development that Mexico will be placed under the tutelage of the United  States."

Finally, here's an example of Marx's  antisemisism, which of course appeals greatly to the third positionist  fascists who see Marxism and fascism as being so compatible. Marx's  family had originally been Jewish, but his father swore off Judaism  before he was born and converted to Evangelicalism, to better integrate  himself into European society.

Marx:

"What is the worldly religion of the Jew?  Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. … Money is the jealous god  of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all  the gods of man—and turns them into commodities. … The bill of exchange  is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of  exchange. … The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of  the merchant, of the man of money in general."

Today, several third-positionist and Eurasianist  media outlets such as The Grayzone and Globalresearch.ca push fascist  propaganda that attacks Western empires but glorifies Eastern ones.

These media outlets are beloved by tankies  because their journalists deny the Uighurs are being ethnically cleansed  and attack Hong Kong protesters for resisting Communist Party of China  rule. Globalresearch.ca even has articles denying the holocaust, which  doesn't seem to slow down red fascists who lap up their pro-CPC,  pro-Assad and pro-Russia propaganda and spread it far and wide.

I'd suggest the only reason modern Dengist  tankies don't openly identify as fascists is because they've gotten so  much play historically out of casting fascists as their sworn enemy  after the rift that developed between Stalin and the Nazis following  their earlier gentleman's agreement to divvy up Europe between  themselves.

Every devoted ideologue needs a villain before  they can cast themselves as the only hero who can vanquish the great  force of evil. Hey, it worked for G. W. Bush with Saddam, and it's  working wonders for Xi Jinping with the Uighurs. Most of his citizens  and foreign devotees are convinced he's keeping them all safe from those  big mean social pariahs.

Indeed, the contemporary tankie is devoted to "Xi  Jinping thought", a pious and devoted sermoner who calls for his  congregation to have faith in the divinity of the good book, regardless  of how many lifetimes it'll take to bring about the holy rapture. Xi  Jinping:

"It is Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought  that guided the Chinese people out of the darkness of that long night  and established a New China. The consolidation and development of the  socialist system will require its own long period of history... it will  require the tireless struggle of generations, up to ten generations. The  fundamental reason why some of our comrades have weak ideals and  faltering beliefs is that their views lack a firm grounding in  historical materialism."

Ten generations. So if we do the math, with each  generation lasting 30 years, the communist rapture should be granted to  true-believers in approximately 300 years. But only if their ideals are  strong, their faith unfaltered, and they're grounded in the divinity of  hallowed historical materialism i.e. the necessity to "tirelessly  struggle" through centuries of ecocide, police brutality and genocide  inflicted on them by Xi and his successors. Don't falter from the  celestial path, comrades. Your salvation is near.

Deng and Xi's economic and social reforms have  succeeded where previous third positionist projects failed, mixing and  matching socialist, nationalist and capitalist / fascist elements as it  suits them. The party even goes as far as to declare Han culture as  being synonymous with Chinese culture, and punishes all the minority  cultures for not conforming to Han cultural supremacy.

It's clear to me that this latest breed of  tankie, the communist-with-Chinese-characteristics or Dengist, both  within China and without, has fully embraced the mythical third position  between communism and capitalism that in actuality is just far right  nationalism with a state-controlled economy. So in a word, fascism.

Fascism Was Never Defeated

"Fascism is a form of far-right, authoritarian  ultra-nationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible  suppression of opposition, as well as strong regimentation of society  and of the economy."

The only thing that's really changed about global  fascism since the second world war is it has adapted to no longer  require one-party rule, instead turning the two-parties of western  neoliberal democracies into separate wings of the same (fascist) party.  Everything else is the same.

Two party rule is still a dictatorship for all  intents and purposes, but with rotating reps who all represent the same  political class. The rich fund both parties and their candidates to buy  their allegiance regardless of which flag-waving stooge's turn it is to  sit in the big chair.

The billionaire class as a whole is the new  dictator form, while the presidents, ministers and governors are just  there to create spectacle and keep the peasantry convinced they have a  say in the political process when they vote for one of the dictator  class's two pre-approved showmen.

Charles Koch is the supreme ruler of the fascist USA empire.

China, on the other hand, still matches up with  the original unadulterated definition of fascism since it's far-right  i.e. extreme nationalist, nativist and authoritarian. It has an  unabashed dictator i.e. the Paramount Leader of China, who  simultaneously holds the positions of head of state, government, civil  and military offices of the highest order within the party.

It has a forcible suppression of opposition in  the form of re-education camps, outlawing of protest, institutional  rape, mass-censorship, an intricate government propaganda system and  staggering numbers of political prisoners. It has strong regimentation  of both society and economy: The state has long acted to purge anything  that doesn't meet with strict hetero-normative Han-nationalist ideals,  even outlawing LGBT representation online, and maintains an iron grip on  the economy to the point of putting government officials to work full  time inside at least a hundred big corporations.

Fascism is also always corporatist in nature,  which the CPC certainly embodies with its forced class collaboration  between worker and employer, and the way it structures its whole economy  around the growth of the corporations, which serve to grow the state  and its imperialist expansionism.

The party's corporatism has all the usual  features including useless employer-controlled unions and a staggering  1.5 million-member police force which springs into action during any  class conflict, using its monopoly on violence to uphold the interests  of the bourgeois class and violently put down the workers.

China is implicitly a fascist nation in the most  traditional sense, meeting every word of the original definition, with  the power in the hands of the head of state seemingly for as long as he  wants it.

While the USA, due to its rotating two-party  democracy, is better described as neo-fascist, with both parties serving  the fascist billionaires who really rule the nation. But even China  purports to be democratic much like the USA does, so the distinction is  barely there... Xi Jinping calls China a "whole-process democracy".  Democracy is really a meaningless monicker when it's so easy to  obfusciate what the democratic process actually achieves. Plenty of  lifelong dictators around the world claim to be democratically elected  and will have anyone who says otherwise shot dead.

So the only tangible difference I can see between  the two fascistic nations is the Chinese head of state is positioned  above China's billionaires on the hierarchy, and has no qualms about  retaliating against them when they break with the party line, while the  USA head of state is wholly subservient to the billionaire class and  serves at their pleasure.

Some will argue that unlike previous fascist  genocides, the Uighur genocide is motivated by economics, which it is,  but it's just as motivated by religious, cultural and ethnic  considerations. The party's propaganda depicts Uighurs as a crazed,  seditious out-group striving to destroy China and its (Han) culture from  within, and bring about the country's collapse, which is really exactly  how the Nazis depicted the Jews. And this isn't even the first time the  party has engaged in ethnic, cultural and religious erasure - they've  been doing it in Tibet for decades.

Ideologues like to rebrand things every so often  because their ideas start to look ridiculous after decades of failures,  so fascism and Marxism-Leninism become third positionism, and seem more  respectable for a while, at least until more failures and atrocities  mount. Got to hide that power level while you can I suppose.

As I mentioned earlier, third positionist  ideology is likely embraced by goofy American and European  settler-colonizers so readily because they have a lot of deep-seeded  guilt stemming from their empire's colonization of the world and they  lack the imagination to envision real alternatives to their status quo.  It's far easier for them to seek an alternate strongman ruler to root  for against their own strongman ruler than part entirely with the tight  comforting security blanket a strong and charming ruler offers them.

After all, their fave ruler has a complex  multifaceted plan to one day gift them a glorious utopia - in China's  case, a series of succeeding 5-year plans playing out over at least the  next three centuries... And how can they resist the warm mushy feels  that such strong regimentation and structure gives them? How can they  doubt daddy when his big promises for a master plan make them feel so  giddy and safe?

Being a communist-with-Chinese-characteristics  means they're not like all the other basic white settlers living with  them in the Koch dynasty. When they log onto Twitter and flood their  followers with neo-fascist conspiracy blog posts proving just how much  the terrible Uighurs deserve to be erased, they get one step closer to  that beautiful rapture where all the chosen ones float to Marx's  communidise and the reactionary unwashed heathens are left to rot in  anarcho-hell.

Tankies will always insist they need to build a  strong one-party capitalist state because their daddy Lenin said so.  They're convinced they need an almighty state so it can one day "wither  away" and allow communism to bloom, because just look at how all those  socialist states in history withered away! Look at Russia, look at  China, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Bulgaria, Syria, Burma, Libya, North Korea,  Angola, Bangladesh, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, Poland, Mozambique,  Romania, East Germany, Hungary, Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Albania...  All socialist states that withered away into communism, right? Lenin was  fucking prophetic eh?

More than a hundred years later, tankies still  cling to the same bankrupt ideology that has failed catastrophically  more times than anyone could have imagined. So the source of my endless  befuddlement is: Why do so many self-proclaimed anarcho-communists and  libertarian socialists see these people as their allies? And then end up  joining their third positionist cult after some gentle entryist  prodding?

To tankies and their red/black advocates I say  put down those blood-soaked books and face reality. Your amazing worker  paradise, the reward for your century of struggle isn't coming. You can  kill all the kulaks, all the community-wreckers, all the anarchists, all  the left-communists, all the ethnic minorities, all the gays, all the  thieves, all the ungrateful unionists, all the muslims, you can pile all  their reactionary revisionist terrorist infantile heretic bodies high  and light massive meatsack bonfires all over the landscape, and you  still won't get your glorious communist utopia where everyone who hasn't  been murdered, lobotomized or gulaged gets to be equal, resource-rich  and fancy-free.

Look at the world around you. Look at the rapidly  collapsing inferno we've inherited from the slippery bearded ideologues  of decades past. Your daddy Lenin was wrong, Stalin was wrong, Mao was  wrong, Xi is wrong, all your big strong men whispering sweet nothings  into your ear while they impregnated teenagers, orchestrated peasant  massacres and stripped the lands they ruled bare were wrong.

It's been a hundred something years of broken  promises and bald-faced lies from every one of your heroes, going all  the way back to the day grand-daddy Marx connivingly expelled the  anarchists from the International for daring to object to his  authoritarianism. Yes, the man who first ripped off, watered-down and  relabeled anarchist ideas also perpetrated the original entryist purge  against anarchists... And history has been repeating itself ever since.

How about learning from history's mistakes  instead of repeating them in an endless loop hoping for a different  result? No, Xi's successor in the year 2321 isn't going to give the  workers a rapturous reward when he decides the time is finally right to  abolish capitalism. He'll live in a fucking palace on a pile of gold and  diamonds. Xi's disgusted by you. All your daddies are disgusted by the  filthy peasants that kiss their boots and beg for table scraps. He'll  give you a piece of his pie when hell freezes over. People who possess  ultimate power over 1.4 billion people don't wake up one day and decide  to slice their wealth up into equal pieces and share it with everyone.  It has never happened and it will never happen.

Authority strangles everything in its path.  Building your society around authority and domination does not create  anything but more fascism with a dozen different labels, each cruedly  stuck on top of the other.

There will never be a global communist society  because communists will always find ideological enemies around every  corner. You can't murder them all and you can't bend 7 billion people to  your will, so stop fantasizing about reshaping the world in the image  of some dead tyrants who told some big beautiful lies to their wide-eyed  subjects a century ago.

You have no power to control the tides, whether  you pray to Koch or Xi. Your ceaseless entryism (especially your wildy  successful campaign for left unity) will keep growing your base, but all  you're really doing in our spaces is indoctrinating people that were  already wholly constituted of 100% pure horseshit. You can keep them.

There are 34 Comments

Exquisite venom! Can't disagree with much here.

Questions tho, how much of this "threat" of the tankie internet is a phantom or an astroturf campaign? How many of these keyboard zealots are sad, powerless creatures when you actually lay eyes? Is it mostly LARPing?

How similar is it to special agent Alexander Reid Ross' "eco fascists" and the red brown narratives?

These have some basis in reality. Obviously the real CCP has an army of goons and agents, albeit a small one compared to NATO power. A friend of mine got sent a cheerful death threat meme by some little tankie dork. "Haha anarchists! We'll kill you next." He thought he was being playful or something.

But this kid was not very impressive up close, you know? Twitchy and needing a shower. Incel vibes... kicking his ass would have only depressed me.

Although the authors vent their hatred for Marxist-Leninists and China in vulgar language, at their core, the authors are on the level of Chinese leftists born and uneducated in the 1960s, who sometimes act like liberals and sometimes like Trotskyists or Maoist rebels during the Cultural Revolution. The moronic mindset is always mixed with many toxic ideas, from Kant, to conservatives, from highly politicized discourse, to the most vulgar catharsis, they always bring to mind many dregs. This has forced me to stay away from such an environment. In any case, no matter who the enemy is, inferiority cannot overcome the enemy.

in particular:

"I don't think it's a disservice to acknowledge (anarchism's) inspirations. Anarchism has taken many cues from Marx. It's just a fact."

Bullshit."

actually nah it's NOT bullshit! Anarchism, marxism, and leftism are bed-fellows in a sense: Why do you think post-leftists talk a lot about maoism but very little about hitler? Because the left and anarchists are kinda like that nit-picky married couple that argues a lot over incredibly pointless things but then have hot sex at night.

Also, crime thinc. and bob black's anti-work pieces are pretty much a different way of expressing marx's thoughts about how the proletariat is alienated from the stuff it makes. The best part of marx in my opinion...

i agree the left-unity invitation is stupid and we should divorce ourselves from the practice of left activity (for example, anti-fa) but in the end there's no left unity to "eradicate", anarchists will always have a little more in common with the left than with the right wingers, so here's the silly stuff in the piece, i'm sure there are gems...

"anarchists are kinda like that nit-picky married couple that argues a lot over incredibly pointless things but then have hot sex at night."

I don't have this privilege, sorry.

But maybe that explains why I ain't too obsessed with talks about Post-Leftism...

The only crowd of leftoids I know are a kinda polycule too, and they're dominated by 2-3 narcissist dudes with a lot of Left cred who're also discretely with the police. They're also a petty bourgie caste of course, and never invite anyone outside of their privileged circles. A few beautiful somewhat individualistic women in their midst, but always compromised to the local version of The Man, one way or another. So not much choice but to keep to myself, as getting too cozy with any of them means sexual harassment/abuse call outs a few weeks/months later, coz I ain't one of the top dicks.

to tell you the truth that's just my speculation about the left as gleaned from talks on here and readings from LBC, aragorn's! talks on identity politics etc.

What your saying sounds correct, those fucking Marxists with their libraries and declawed cats...lol. Fuck that! I got a kitty, i'd NEVER declaw her!

A lot of my experience with the left (not the same type of left we are talking about here with upper-middle-class marxist nerds who have no sense of humor) more or less just comes from reformist activism, not very radical stuff but me and my friends were a type of leftist who liked chompsky and ranted about capitalism lol.

I remember i did get to hang out with some middle-class rag-tag anarchist kids when i was in late high school and early college. They played shitty folk punk in a park, were into primitivism and stealing, smelt like shit and dressed like shit. They also were id-pols feminists and had serious drinking problems, bragging about being able to survive in the woods but it's all bullshit they're just poor middle class background people with their super lame "drop out" collectivist lifestyle. I'm so glad that they didn't like me at all...lol. I did fuck around with this girl from the scene and she was pretty much the coolest one and last i checked she thought they were all idiots and she went on to do her thing...man did i fuck that up, i had such a good thing going with her, lol...

yeah, anarchism & marxism both developed in dialogue & conflict with each other; each was influenced by the other, sometimes in adopting or adjusting the other's positions & sometimes in rejection of same. denying that anarchism has "taken cues" from marxism (and marxism has from anarchism) is a gesture towards an ideal of ideological purity that a) seems to be the sort of thing ziq claims to be against, b) obscures the actual history & processes behind the shifts in anarchist theory over time, and c) is simply not true in any way.

I think the framing of Marx and Engels as racist, while correct, is disengenous in this essay because it ignores anarchism’s own dark history of racism, from proudhon to bakunin to Goldman and the black army’s progroms we can see similarly vile bigotry, sometimes even directly related to anarchist ideology such as with bakunin who says the reason a centralized state is bad is because it required a central bank that is run by Jews. I encourage the author of this essay to look into Anarchism’s history and recognize its hands are quite bloody as well, even if it is less than authoritarian ideologies

“...such as with Bakunin who says the reason a centralized state is bad is because it requires a central bank that is run by Jews”.

lol, based!

During that era in Europe what Bakunin said was true, and he said that not as a racist but as a realist.

one of the best attacks on the 'left unity' scam i've ever read. cheers

i should start writing essays where i quote at length from people i disagreed with on the internet. like the good ol' days, on phpBB boards..

i dont know who's supposed to enjoy this, except for people who've been following along with raddle arguments (unless i just tapped out too soon, and that tapers off). a shame, because i usually appreciate ziq's thoughts even when i dont strictly agree.

"Since at least 99.9% of all existing self-identifying communities and even theoretical proposals for communities are beholden to states, councils, committees, voter bodies and other forms of rulership, it's safe to say the community ideal in itself is just another vessel of authority.

If all organized communities on the planet can be clearly demonstrated to be authority-based, then it's a safe bet that the entire concept of community is authority-forming"

This is faulty logic. Let's deploy it in another way:

"Since at least 99.9% of all human life and even theoretical proposals for communities are beholden to states, councils, committees, voter bodies and other forms of rulership, it's safe to say the human life in itself is just another vessel of authority."

You all disparaging community sound like the avant-garde of technocracy which inherently wants to isolate us. Plus, it sounds like a lonely bummer. Do you folks not have friends you're trying to live and figure out life with? How sad.

I capitalized the word you left out of your translation ---"Since at least 99.9% of all human life and even theoretical proposals for communities are beholden to states, councils, committees, voter bodies and other forms of rulership, it's safe to say the LEFTIST human life in itself is just another vessel of authority."

What exactly does leftist mean? Things you dont like?

I see it as using centralized political power to combat other concentrations of power, usually economic. Sharing and communalism has nothing to do with it.

To me its democratic socialism. I don't actually hate them, they annoy me. They mean well but are dull and boring. I prefer them to neo-nazis and fascists though. Yes, it has nothing to do with sharing or communalism, which the Amish do well.
Anarchists aren't haters in real life, only online.

but do want to point out that using the word "community" for a group of people/friends we're trying to figure things out with, seems a bit disingenuous. community means a lot of things, most of them sold to us by politicians of various stripes, but any definition that i might agree with is something other than a group of friends etc. if anything community the word is meaningful because it is different from friendship (not as easily cast aside as many friendships are, for example).
fwtw.

yeah, when I'm not just being critical of someone using the word in a dishonest way (which is often), I tend to think of it like everything beyond my groups of friends and their groups of friends and the overlapping social circles, once they ... weave together, too big for any one person to know everyone else?

left unity is important. you can pick and choose who and what ideologies are acceptable and its reasonable and valid to not want to associate with Marxist-Leninist and tankies but anarchist alone wont do shit lmao
most people who start up mutual aid programs and write about mutual aid programs are maoists.
if you'd actually wanna help people through community and mutual aid you'd accept left unity.

Maoists? More like Dryoists, cringe bois make my bussy dry like a desert.

Desert? More like invitation to dessert, anarchists can get a piece of this cake.

Mutual aid projects started by christians outnumber those started by anyone on the left a hundred to one.

Charity and Good Works are religious obligations (for some christians) that maintain/enforce the hierarchy and divisions between those who give and those who receive. Mutual aid erases those divisions with the implicit understanding/hope/practice that giving freely will continually be paid forward and might even come back around. Without the possibility and/or potential of getting something at some point from someone, there's nothing mutual; such giving is charity. The social and interpersonal dynamic is totally different. Fuck your moralizing.

so the word choices that christians and anarchists/leftists/"maoists" (let's just say super-leftists as an all-encompassing term) use when they have these projects are totally different, but both Christians and the other groups typically maintain a "helping the oppressed" type of narrative to motivate and justify what they do. While Christians are not really helpers of the oppressed in a serious sense, overall they see material society as being misleading and evil and the folks who come to them are just misled and need some sort of guidance. Some Christians even share sympathy with the same ones that the aforementioned do: the people of color, the proletariat, the down-and-out, etc.

This is not to say Mutual Aid is a patronizing thing from the get go, but when you consider the people who usually start these projects...and all their implicit biases, and lack of interest in terms of starting friendships and more familial communities with those they "help"...

Except the actual IRL mutual aid projects I've seen always turn out to be another, more de facto, kind of charity.

Local food banks distributing food or local liberal artist "coops" making masks under Covid is what's been labelled as "mutual aid". But you see in there the same old division, between privileged inner circles having insider contacts or resources to do this stuff and "aid" the needy people.

This is the Church right there. Always the same petty bourgeois bunch of goodwill liberal leftoids, who got their fridges always full with goodies as they know where to get them, so they to some volunteer or paid work for nonprofits to redistribute the surpluses (or nasty non-vegan/non-organic shit they not gotta eat).

And yes, like the other said, the Church is to be seen as an ultimate badass example for "mutual aid", as they achieved a whole fucking lot through the centuries, yet still that was supporting a relation of subservience to a priest class and in the case of the ROC their ultramontanism (another form of imperialism).

So to mutual aid there is something truly anarchistic to oppose. But as a first, instead of spoiling it I'll let you guess it and wait for the crickets, just to see if you're for real. Or not!

(No it's not "smashy-smashy", or even "land projects")

I brought that point up less to say that christians help people's immediate needs more than leftists, or that most mutual aid projects are ideological charities (though both are true) and more to say that that kinda shit happens all the time. That the world is way too big and "the left" is way too small to have to hang out with concentration camp fanboys while serving chili to people whose names you have no intention of remembering. If anything, I think truly MUTUAL aid is only possible without ideology and I can think of several examples of it in action just in my apartment complex.
Dont look to existing politics for hope, let alone the flavorless stew of anarchism, stalinism and scandinavian capitalism that we call "the left". Its had all the opportunity and exposure it could ever hope for to go viral and change shit since the day Trump won.

concept, except mutual aid has more of a "pozzy" connotation, whereas reciprocity is more neutral or philosophical, the latter is like a personal and non-religious karma. In terms of real life action, one of the major issues with anarchist mutual aid is the entanglement with institutions.

I think this whole thing can be improved if anarchists genuinely are trying to be friends or get to know the people they are helping in a serious way...but in a more standard situation your gonna find moralism, the savior complex, reddish dogma and political correctness, etc.

God bless the Christo-Anarchists they will pass through the needle-eye and make it to heaven amen!

Ending left unity does not mean that anarchists can't work with leftists on contextually appropriate projects or discourses. I also think they should look beyond traditional leftists discourse like, say, libertarian rightists and some other non leftist discourses. This is what being post-ideological is about.

Very similar to how I feel about the left or even Idpoids, I'm merely making a pragmatic critical analysis of the archaic worship of obsolete ideological narratives and the loss of individuality this faith in leaders assumes.
I welcome their contributions to the anarch's pursuit of wisdom.

i agree with ziggy on this one. isolationism and dogma an anarchist do not make. i just like to make sure i - and anyone else i am dealing with - am clear on what we agree on, and what we disagree on.

All that Ziq writes about state socialism (really state capitalism in practice) and Marxism-Leninism (Stalinism, including orthodox Trotskyism) is true. So is their reference to authoritarianism even in Marx's Marxism. Anarchism has nothing in common with these.

But there has also been a libertarian-autonomist tradition in Marxism (whether we agree with it or not), from William Morris to C.L.R. James and the council communists. And there has been a tradition within anarchism which has agreed with aspects of Marxist theory (such as its political economic analysis of how capitalism works) from Bakunin onward. Unlike Ziq, I and others think that anarchists can learn much from aspects of Marxism, without agreeing with its statist, centralist, and authoritarian program.

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