this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
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This clearly illustrates that anarchists are not capable of organizing in effective ways that can protect their ideology. The same way anarchists ended up losing to Bolsheviks, they end up losing to capitalists, and fascists. What Bolsheviks achieved was to build a socialist state that was able to defend itself and greatly improve the lives of the working majority. Anarchists simply aren't capable of doing that as the past century has shown beyond all doubt.
USSR was the first ever attempt at building socialism at scale, and while it may have collapsed, other socialist projects live on today and continue to improve lives of over a billion people on this planet.
You're using the same argument capitalists use to dismiss socialism, namely that socialism clearly doesn't work because all socialist projects ended in collapse or continue in a state of poverty. This is, in essence, victim-blaming. Just as socialism struggles under the oppression of capitalist hegemony, anarchism struggles under the oppression of both capitalists and statists.
What Bolsheviks achieved was the betrayal of all who fought for the liberation of the proletariat. If power had gone to the Soviets as the Bolsheviks promised then the USSR would not have collapsed under the weight of its' contradictions. You speak as if the USSR only repressed the forces of reaction, but it also repressed the very same workers it claimed to support when they tried to claim the worker control of the means of production they were promised.
What I'm pointing out is that all ideologies compete with others. That's the reality of the world. If Anarchists are not able to defend the way they want to organize society then their ideology ends up being trampled by others. That's the world we live in. Calling this victim blaming doesn't change the material reality of the world.
The difference between anarchists and communists is that the latter actually managed to build functional societies, and to effectively resist capitalism. Anarchists failed to do that, and the reasons for why anarchist approach fails time and again are well understood now.
Repeating nonsense over and over will not make it true.
This is an idealist position that's divorced from realities of the world. USSR existed under siege from global capitalism throughout its whole existence, and that was the reason it was organized the way it was.
The Bolsheviks' had the ill-gotten might to push their agenda, but might does not make right. The Bolsheviks lied to and used the anarchists to achieve what they did, but anarchists have learned from their past mistakes and will prove you wrong.
Capitalist aggression did not make necessary the regressive views on social issues and science the USSR had (which resulted in famine), nor the widespread corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency of state officials. You cannot simply excuse all flaws of the USSR by blaming global capitalism.
No amount of moralizing will change the fact that anarchists fail to organize effectively time and again. If anarchists actually learned anything then we'd see that put into practice. The lack of any actual achievements is the elephant in the room here.
Yes, it absolutely did as anybody with even minimal historical knowledge would know.
This is getting repetitive and we're just talking past each other so let's just agree to disagree about the USSR. I just want to make the point - which I hope we can agree on - that the revolution wouldn't have been successful without political pluralism within the ranks, and no future revolution will either. Dismissing the contributions of anarchists will only harm your cause.
Revolutions require a critical mass of people to come together, and sometimes people who have different vision for the end goal find opportunities to work together as Bolsheviks and anarchists did. Lenin wrote extensively on the subject of when alliances should be formed. MLs don't have a problem working with anarchists, recognizing that there are common interests and that a time may come where such alliances may need to be rethought. The hate largely comes from the side of anarchists who refuse to work with MLs and spend their time trying to discredit the accomplishments of existing socialist states.
It's also worth noting that the reality in the west today is that both MLs and anarchists are an insignificant political minority. If the current system does end up collapsing in the near future, then fascism is the most likely outcome. While the left bickers, the right is rapidly growing in power in vast majority of western countries.
You have been discrediting the accomplishments of anarchists while I have been acknowledging the accomplishments of marxists.
I agree, but remember this conversation was started because you were insinuating that anarchists never accomplished anything.
I've been pointing out that anarchists have not managed to put their ideas into practice on any appreciable scale while Marxists have done this. Ultimately, what I'm telling you is that anarchists need to show how they can actually make their ideas work and withstand the challenges that they face in the real world. This is a problem that anarchists have not been able to solve in my view.
You say that it's the fault of Bolsheviks that anarchists didn't get their way in USSR, but there's no reason to believe that anarchists would've fared any better against the capitalist invasion that followed in 1918, or against the nazis a couple of decades later. In fact, the centralization of power that you decried was ultimately what allowed USSR to rapidly industrialize and come out victorious in WW2.
Meanwhile, I completely agree that the socialist projects that Marxists managed to build are not without their own problems. Yet, I think they are a strict improvement over capitalism as imperfect as they may be. My view is that the threat of fascism is very real and that it grows by the day, and in face of that the left should focus on using tools that have been proven to defeat fascism in the past.