My experience with anarchists since the start of this war has completely destroyed any faith I had in it being any kind of honestly held or principled ideology. It’s simply a set of excuses for liberals to pretend they’re progressives and nothing much more. Jumping from one American imperialist propaganda point to the next seamlessly, from Libya to Xinjiang, Taiwan to Ukraine. It’s just a right wing Libertarian’s idea of what a leftist is.
It doesn’t have much to do with anarchism though. Most of them just sound like “progressive” liberals with run of the mill racist and orientalist perceptions of Russia, China and the rest of the third world that Westerners have.
I think it kind of does have something to do with anarchists being unprincipled, and then easily swayed.
If someone’s an online anarchist, with no real community, no clear political line, and no interest in reading theory, then they’re going to be easily influenced.
I think you’re mistaken and reasoning backwards from the assumption that these are anarchists who re-adopted neoliberalism rather than liberalism who found anarchism to be the most appealing consumer-identity without really challenging most of their existing ideology or assumptions.
I think you’re mistaken in drawing a distinction between anarchists and liberals.
Like all things, there is variance. We know it is unfair to conflate all MLs with “patsoc” or red/brown types. Even if we still disagree with them, let’s have a little bit of charity for the good faith anarchists.
Good faith anarchists shot Lenin. They’re not on our side, and will side with liberals against us.
That’s not to say that they can’t be worked with on limited, real-life, praxis. They’re just not ideological allies.
edited to add: “We believe that the Anarchists are real enemies of Marxism. Accordingly, we also hold that a real struggle must be waged against real enemies.”.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1906/12/x01.htm
Vaush to his audience
Know exactly how the poor fella feels 😞.
Classic anarchist moment.
