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What is with the lemmy community's deep fear or tankies? (hexbear.net)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/chat@hexbear.net
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There's dozens or harassment communities, if you say anything that's not pure, weapons grade condemnation of anything USSR or AES nuts accusations start getting levelled.

Internet communists have to be like the most irrelevant political bloc in the world. Even if you take the stance that everyone is hoping for a return of purges that's still just a completely irrelevant group. Most people I've seen being accused of tankyness is are more nuanced.

Wtf is going on. I thought it would settle down after the reddit migration faded.

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[–] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

anarchist who respects state socialism

Could you elaborate on this position more? It's obviously pretty uncommon among self-described anarchists. Or maybe if you have a piece you can reference that lays out a decent approximation of your view.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Sure. Given the numerous benefits that the people’s republics have offered the working masses, it logically follows that showing them violent resistance or hostility would only alienate others from anarchism. In this respect, I am anarcho-pacifist: violence against a bourgeois state is probably inevitable, but it would be very counterproductive against a people’s republic (or a similar phenomenon like the BRV). Therefore, decentralisation and the disuse of state institutions are phenomena that other communities are going to have to be persuaded to adopt through example, if we can demonstrate a good enough example.

    Many anarchists refer to the Red Army’s suppression of the Makhnovshchina as evidence that state socialism naturally excludes anarchists. Now, I have mixed feelings on the Makhnovshchina: it had some good accomplishments like redistributing land to poor peasants, but it was also too willing to collaborate with the rural petty bourgeoisie, so it is not my favourite example of anarchism. That aside, if the Makhnovshchina had been more cooperative with the Bolsheviki then I think that it is at least plausible that the Free Territory would have survived longer. After all, the Bolsheviki never hunted down Apollon Karelin, and Freetown Christiania is surviving despite its uneasy relationship with the bourgeois state, so I am reluctant to believe that the violence between anarchists and state-socialists all came down to fatalism or structural defects. Per Paul Avrich:

    According to Emma Goldman, Makhno’s object was to establish a libertarian society in the south that would serve as a model for the whole of Russia. Interestingly, Trotsky once noted that he and Lenin had toyed with the idea of allotting a piece of territory to Makhno for this purpose,[8] but the project foundered when fighting broke out between the anarchist guerrillas and the Bolshevik forces in the Ukraine.

    To keep it succinct, though, I am anarcho-pacifist towards the people’s republics.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    If they could put up with it, I think anarchists could play a really important role in a DOTP. As long as they're willing to accept broad direction from the state, they could be the leading edge of communization.

    For example, a DOTP in the US would immediately nationalize all agricultural land held by owners over a certain scale. A big chunk of that would remain heavily mechanized but centrally managed, to ensure continued mass production of low-cost food. But large pieces of that land would be designated for the establishment of agricultural communes, and I think anarchists could take a central role in those communes given their propensity for commune building an prefiguration. Receive state support and capital to get started, innovate new social and agroecological techniques, and eother directly handle the distribution of surplus food to adjacent communities or turn surplus over to the state for centralized distribution. The rate of communization is going to be almost entirely dependent on how many people want to do that, and so prefiguration through anarchist communes becomes an incredibly powerful tool encouraged and supported by the state rather than a longshot struggle against a hostile state and economic system. If the anarchists can go out and make effective, healthy, collective communities, the state can promote that model for more people to adopt.

    This is just one example of how I think a DOTP and anarchists can productively collaborate, there are definitely others.

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