You’ll see anarchists praising Rosa Luxemburg, who if they had actually read her writings – they would see that she was very clearly one of the “authoritarian” socialists that they rail against so much.
You see them praise the Black Panthers, who were supported financially by the DPRK and aligned themselves with the Juche ideology of Kim Il Sung.
They even praise Thomas Sankara, who purged anarchists and arrested syndicalists.
If these people had succeeded, i have no doubt in my mind that anarchists would call them “tankies,” they would call their experiments “capitalism with a red flag.” And I also have no doubt in my mind that if the October Revolution, Chinese Revolution had been crushed, they would hail Lenin and Mao as proletarian heroes.
Another thing I find hilarious with Anarchists is that many of them are huge EU supporters. Turns out they’re totally fine with centralization and large unelected bureaucracies in practice. These people are just LARPing.
Can’t say I’ve seen this among anarchists… Any examples?
My personal experience talking about the EU with people like @[email protected]
To be fair he seems to be somewhat unconventional, even most online anarchists are not openly bootlicking imperialist institutions like that.
He’s a bit more honest about it, but vast majority of anarchists support NATO to the hilt right now. When push comes to shove anarchists are just liberals LARPing.
Sure
It is easy to support failed attempts because then they can imagine that this time those folks would have done things “perfectly” or in other words, the way the person imagining it would have done things. Without any of the messy details of having to work in the real world with real conditions.
Why put the Black Panthers in here? 🤨
The Black Panther platform, as I understand it, was:
- We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
- We want full employment for our people.
- We want an end to the robbery by the Capitalists of our Black Community.
- We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
- We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present day society.
- We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
- We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.
- We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
- We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black Communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
- We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.
The Juche platform is:
- We must give our all in the struggle to unify the entire society with the revolutionary ideology of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung.
- We must honor the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung with all our loyalty.
- We must make absolute the authority of the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung.
- We must make the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung’s revolutionary ideology our faith and make his instructions our creed.
- We must adhere strictly to the principle of unconditional obedience in carrying out the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung’s instructions.
- We must strengthen the entire party’s ideology and willpower and revolutionary unity, centering on the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung.
- We must learn from the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung and adopt the communist look, revolutionary work methods and people-oriented work style.
- We must value the political life we were given by the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung, and loyally repay his great political trust and thoughtfulness with heightened political awareness and skill.
- We must establish strong organizational regulations so that the entire party, nation and military move as one under the one and only leadership of the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung.
- We must pass down the great achievement of the revolution by the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung from generation to generation, inheriting and completing it to the end.
The Black Panthers were complimentary of the DPRK, and had warm relations with them:
I don’t think your quote is a summary that really shows what the BPP might’ve liked about Juche:
The Juche idea was created on the basis of such a practical requirement of the Korean revolution. The revolution is a struggle to meet the masses’ desire for independence by enlisting their strength. It is a struggle of the masses to free themselves. When they are armed with the revolutionary idea and united into an organized political force, the masses can emerge victorious in the revolution. The duty of revolutionaries is to go among the popular masses, masters of the revolution. to educate, organize, and inspire them to a struggle. The revolutionary forces, too, should be trained from among the masses, and all problems arising in the revolutionary struggle should likewise be resolved in reliance on their wisdom and strength.
(On the Juche Idea - Kim Jong-Il p7)
I italicized the bit that stood out to me as most like the BPP.
The DPRK is mostly viewed pretty well here, btw. It’s not an insult or a smear to align the Black Panthers with them. It’s a compliment.
The DPRK is mostly viewed pretty well here, btw.
Why is that?
Aside from the what it is to be said by the already recomended text on western marxism and christianity by Jones Manoel on RedSails, which I find very fitting here, I have found out by experience that anarchists usually have a very strong tendency to romanticize the act of revolution in general, of sublevation to overthrow the existing hierarchies, and very little focus on what comes after, which is the organization of the new society that is to come.
Chances are that this lack of focus is the result of the development of an anarchist’s conceptualization of a post-capitalist society falling an overwhelming majority of times in one of two fields: either authoritarianism (most of us have witnessed an anarchist accidentally developing the idea of vanguards in their search to defend their revolutions) or the most bizarre and impractical modes of production and self-defense that could be concieved, such as the idea that medicines and other highly complex products could ever be produced by individual people as a form of pastime.
This is, overall, too much hassle for the average western anarchist, who doesn’t find the need to concern themselves with that simply because, for them, anarchism is just an aesthetic used as a form of expressing one’s identity and individuality, and not as a project to work towards.
Edit: Grammar.
