Socialism is based on the socialization of production, which is something anarchists reject.

I don’t reject socialising production. Maybe postleft nerds do, but I don’t. If other lower-class people want to socialize production (which is becoming increasingly inevitable) then I can accept that.

Regarding Lenin’s frustrations with anarchism, it is important to compare his rant with other comments that he had about us. For byspel:

Very many anarchist workers are now becoming sincere supporters of Soviet power, and that being so, it proves them to be our best comrades and friends, the best of revolutionaries, who have been enemies of Marxism only through misunderstanding, or, more correctly, not through misunderstanding but because the official socialism prevailing in the epoch of the Second International (1889–1914) betrayed Marxism, lapsed into opportunism, perverted Marx’s revolutionary teachings in general and his teachings on the lessons of the Paris Commune of 1871 in particular. I have written in detail about this in my book The State and Revolution and will therefore not dwell further on the problem.

Regarding idealism:

Anarchists are more concerned with morality than actual concrete reality. They have the liberal mindset that the political and economic system is merely a reflection of the beliefs and ideas of that society and has no connection to the society’s material conditions, and therefore to change a political or economic system, all that is necessary is changing people’s ideas.

Because of this, they think building a utopia merely requires imagining that utopia in your head and convincing everyone else of it, and by extension, any country that has failed to achieve a utopia has only done so due to a moral failing on their part. They think the reason every single socialist experiment failed to achieve some imagined utopia is because of moral corruption, that the leadership was just evil and immoral.

I won’t deny that many of us suffer from this erroneous thinking. I myself saw an anarchist on r/anarchism101 fantasizing about how the anarchist future would look, and it was somewhat embarrassing to read. That being said, nobody—not even a state socialist—is immune to this thinking; I am reluctant to call it a structural defect in anarchism. It is more like a consequence of how capitalist society frustrates us.

Many anarchists will propose some economic system outside of markets and economic planning, what they call the “gift economy”. They don’t propose this system because they arrived at it objectively through a rigorous analysis of the development of capitalism as Marxists arrive at their understanding, no, they propose it because it sounds morally good to them.

This may be true in some cases, but we can recommend a gift economy because that is how humans managed their goods amongst each other in prehistoric—and thus more natural—times. Of course, whether most other lower-class people effect a gift economy or not is something that I cannot possibly decide for them.

The problem is, a gift economy fundamentally has no way to balance resources. If I could take whatever I want without expectation of returning sufficient materials, you would inevitably have huge shortages in the economy.

I doubt it.

Shortages are avoided in market systems

Heh.

it’s riddled with nonsense and contradictions.

Me too, thanks.

Anyway, I am not entirely unsympathetic to this rant, but I can’t completely agree with it either. I myself have been very frustrated talking with other anarchists before, and I get the feeling that you dug up this old topic because recently another anarchist said or did something to piss you off, so you were in the mood for a rant. I’d be angry, too. That said, the rant that you have shown us has not really told me anything that I had never seen before either.

My position towards the people’s republics remains a type of anarcho-pacifism, and even then, Imperial America as well as its allies are much bigger concerns.