First right off the bat I’d like to start off and say I’m an anarchist nihilist. I’m not a Marxist or communist. I despise communism and I’m against Marxism. I have to say this frequently because I get accused of being a communist and Marxist by those ignorant of what anarchism is. Most people think all of anarchism is the same without realizing that there are different factions of anarchism within anarchist ranks. Not all anarchists are the same or belong to the same anarchist faction. The general public it seems doesn’t have the slightest clue what anarchism entails and largely only understands anarchism through government propaganda meant to demonize anarchists themselves.
The reason most people conflate Marxism and communism with anarchism is because Marxists or communists have hijacked the anarchist movement for some time now where this is the crux of the subject I’m making in this thread right now. I also want to illustrate how communists have backstabbed and violently persecuted anarchists all throughout history.
Before Marxism or Communism was a thing there was historical European socialism going on as far back to the 17th century. It was this original European socialism that Marxism or Communism was built upon. Marx merely took this original European socialist movement and built upon it. Marx caused quite a feud between himself and the traditional national socialists of his era (18th century) because he wanted an international revolution not just a nationalist one. Marx finished his Das Kapital and other works dying in the year 1883 within London, England thus giving birth to Marxism along with the rise of communism.
Years later it was 1917 and the first communist revolution of Russia appeared on the world stage. This is where our story of conflict begins between communists and anarchists.
Interestingly enough another institution in the United States was created in the same year of 1917 which called itself the Federal Reserve but we’ll have to save that conversation for another thread.
The Russian communists thought you needed a large socialist government in order to safely transfer into a communist society. The anarchists thought differently. They thought that if you would just do away with the government altogether and implement a direct democracy you instead could create independently free societies that way. From there on out these opposing ideologies would be at each other throats historically.
It didn’t help things either that an alleged anarchist by the name of Fanny Kaplan tried to assassinate Vladimir Lenin in Moscow, Russia in the year 1918.
This didn’t just start within the 1917 Russian communist revolution however as this sort of disputing argument originated from Karl Marx himself with Mikhail Bakunin at the first international within Hague, Holland 1872.
More on the 1872 First International.
With Mikhail Bakunin dying in Bern, Switzerland within 1876 and Bakunin loyalists expelled from the First International the Marxists were free to co opt the anarchist movement as their own with the Second International held within Paris, France 1889.
This would then mark the beginning of an anarchist hijacked movement by Marxists and communists the next 127 years.
After the Paris Commune (1871), Bakunin characterised Marx’s ideas as authoritarian, and argued that if a Marxist party came to power its leaders would end up as bad as the ruling class they had fought against (notably in his Statism and Anarchy). In 1872, the conflict in the First International climaxed with a final split between the two groups at the Hague Congress. This clash is often cited as the origin of the long-running conflict between anarchists and Marxists.
The Hague Congress was notable for the attempted expulsion of Bakunin and Guillaume and for the decision to relocate the General Council to New York City. The main resolutions passed, however, centred on committing the International to building political parties, aimed at capturing state power as an indispensable condition for socialist transformation.
From then on, the Marxist and anarchist currents of socialism had distinct organisations, at various points including rival “internationals”.
This split is sometimes called the “red” and “black” divide, red referring to the Marxists and black referring to the anarchists. Otto von Bismarck remarked, upon hearing of the split at the First International, “Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the Black and Red unite!”[10]
The anarchist wing of the First International held a separate congress at St. Imier, in September 1872, Switzerland. The anarchists rejected the claim that Bakunin and Guillaume had been expelled, and repudiated The Hague congress as unrepresentative and improperly conducted. Over two days, at Saint-Imier, September 15 and 16, 1872, they declared themselves to be the true heirs of the International (see Anarchist St. Imier International).
Bakunin’s programme was adopted, Marx was implicitly excluded, and the anarchist First International ran until 1877, with some early growth in areas like Egypt and Turkey.
The sixth Congress of the Marxist wing of the International was held in Geneva in September 1873, but was generally considered to be a failure. The Marxist wing hobbled on until it disbanded three years later, at the 1876 Philadelphia conference. Attempts to revive the organization over the next five years failed.
Since scholarship on the International is heavily shaped by different assessments of the importance and the effects of the Marx-Bakunin conflict, different accounts emphasise different wings of the International and give different dates of its final closure (1876 or 1877).
The Second International was established in 1889 as a successor. Both anarchists and Marxists were involved in the new body in its early years.
The International Working People’s Association (the so-called “Black International”), an anarchist International, appeared in 1881, was mainly influential in the United States and Mexico, and gradually disappeared after the late 1880s.
At a congress in Berlin in 1922, the anarcho-syndicalists decided to re-found the “First International” as the International Workers Association. The IWA still exists.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interna … rnationals
I do not disagree with the history you are presenting,
Kropotkin
Interesting notable quotes by Mikhail Bakunin on Karl Marx and Marxism.
“I am certain that Rothschild for his part greatly values the merits of Marx, and that Marx for his part feels instinctive attraction and great respect for Rothschild.
“We have already stated our deep opposition to the theory of Lassalle and Marx, which recommends to the workers, if not as final ideal then at least as the next major aim – the foundation of a people’s state, which, as they have expressed it, will be none other than the proletariat organized as ruling class. The question arises, if the proletariat becomes the ruling class, over whom will it rule? It means that there will still remain another proletariat, which will be subject to this new domination, this new state.”
“e.g. the krestyanskaya chern, the common peasant folk, the peasant mob, which as is well known does not enjoy the goodwill of the Marxists, and which, being as it is at the lowest level of culture, will apparently be governed by the urban factory proletariat.”
“If there is a state [gosudarstvo], then there is unavoidably domination [gospodstvo], and consequently slavery. Domination without slavery, open or veiled, is unthinkable – this is why we are enemies of the state.
“… in the election of people’s representatives and rulers of the state – that is the last word of the Marxists, as also of the democratic school – [is] a lie, behind which is concealed the despotism of the governing minority, and only the more dangerously in so far as it appears as expression of the so-called people’s will.”
“So the result is: guidance of the great majority of the people by a privileged minority. But this minority, say the Marxists will consist of workers. Certainly, with your permission, of former workers, who however, as soon as they have become representatives or governors of the people, cease to be workers and look down on the whole common workers’ world from the height of the state. They will no longer represent the people, but themselves and their pretensions to people’s government. Anyone who can doubt this knows nothing of the nature of men.”
“But those elected will be fervently convinced and therefore educated socialists. The phrase ‘scientific socialism’ which is unceasingly found in the works and speeches of the Lasalleans and Marxists, itself indicates that the so-called people’s state will be nothing else than the very despotic guidance of the mass of the people by a new and numerically very small aristocracy of the genuine or supposedly educated. The people are not scientific, which means that they will be entirely freed from the cares of government, they will be entirely shut up in the stable of the governed. A fine liberation!
“They say that their only concern and aim is to educate and uplift the people (saloon-bar politicians!) both economically and politically, to such a level that all government will be quite useless and the state will lose all political character, i.e. character of domination, and will change by itself into a free organization of economic interests and communes. An obvious contradiction. If their state will really be popular, why not destroy it, and if its destruction is necessary for the real liberation of the people, why do they venture to call it popular?”
this all nice and dandy, but how about some ORIGINAL thinking,
Kropotkin
this all nice and dandy, but how about some ORIGINAL thinking,
Kropotkin
Are you familiar with the real Peter Kropotkin’s exile from Russia at all? I highly doubt it.
In Moscow and Petrograd the newly formed Cheka was sent in to disband all anarchist organizations, and largely succeeded.[11] On the night of April 12, 1918 the Cheka (secret police) raided 26 anarchist centres in Moscow, including the House of Anarchy, the headquarters of the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups. A fierce battle raged on Malaia Dimitrovka Street. About 40 anarchists were killed or wounded, and approximately 500 were imprisoned. A dozen Cheka agents had also been killed in the fighting. Anarchists joined Mensheviks and Left Socialist revolutionaries in boycotting the 1918 May Day celebrations. By this time some belligerent anarchist dissenters armed themselves and formed groups of so-called “Black Guards” that continued to fight Communist power on a small scale as the Civil War began.[12] The urban anarchist movement, however, was dead.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_Russia
Anarchist communists are all like, “We’re useful idiots serving a communist cause that has hijacked our movement [127 plus years] where if they were in power now more than likely we would be killed, imprisoned, thrown in a gulag, or put in a forced labor camp. It’s so very fucking trendy, fun, hip, and in vogue!”
The anthropologist Eric Wolf asserts that peasants in rebellion are natural anarchists.[15] After initially looking favorably upon the Bolsheviks for their proposed land reforms, by 1918 peasants largely came to despise the new government as it became increasingly centralized and exploitative in its dealings with the rural population. Marxist-Leninists had never given the peasants great credit, and with the Civil War against the White Armies underway, the Red Army primarily used peasant villages as suppliers of grain, which it “requisitioned,” or in other words, seized by force.[16]
Abused equally by the Red and invading White armies, large groups of peasants, as well as Red Army deserters, formed “Green” armies that resisted the Reds and Whites alike. These forces had no grand political agenda like their enemies, for the most part they simply wanted to stop being harassed and be allowed to govern themselves. Though the Green Armies have largely been ignored by history (and by Soviet historians in particular), they constituted a formidable force and a major threat to Red victory in the Civil War. Even after the party declared the Civil War over in 1920, the Red-Green war persisted for some time.[16]
Red Army generals noted that in many regions peasant rebellions were heavily influenced by anarchist leaders and ideas.[16][17] In Ukraine, the most notorious peasant rebel leader was an anarchist general named Nestor Makhno. Makhno had originally led his forces in collaboration with the Red Army against the Whites. In the region of Ukraine where his forces were stationed, Makhno oversaw the development of an autonomous system of government based on the productive coordination of communes. According to Peter Marshall, a historian of anarchism, “For more than a year, anarchists were in charge of a large territory, one of the few examples of anarchy in action on a large scale in modern history.[11]
Unsurprisingly, the Bolsheviks came to see Makhno’s experiment in self-government as a threat in need of elimination, and in 1920 the Red Army sought to take control of Makhno’s forces. They resisted, but the officers (not including Makhno himself) were arrested and executed by the end of 1920. Makhno continued to fight before going into exile in Paris the next year.[11]
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_Russia
The attempted Third Russian Revolution began in July 1918 with the assassination of the German Ambassador to the Soviet Union in order to prevent the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. This was immediately followed by an artillery attack on the Kremlin and the occupation of the telegraph and telephone buildings by the Left SRs who sent out several manifestos appealing to the people to rise up against their oppressors and destroy the Bolshevik regime. But whilst this order was not followed by the people of Moscow, the peasants of South Russia responded vigorously to this call to arms. Bands of Chernoe Znamia and Beznachaly anarchist terrorists flared up as rapidly and violently as they had done in 1905. Anarchists in Rostov, Ekaterinoslav and Briansk broke into prisons to liberate the anarchist prisoners and issued fiery proclamations calling on the people to revolt against the Bolshevik regime. The Anarchist Battle Detachments attacked the Whites, Reds and Germans alike. Many peasants joined the Revolution, attacking their enemies with pitchforks and sickles. Meanwhile, in Moscow, the Underground Anarchists were formed by Kazimir Kovalevich and Piotr Sobalev to be the shock troops of the Revolution, infiltrating Bolshevik ranks and striking when least expected. On 25 September 1919, the Underground Anarchists struck the Bolsheviks with the heaviest blow of the Revolution. The headquarters of the Moscow Committee of the Communist Party was blown up, killing 12 and injuring 55 Party members, including Nikolai Bukharin and Emilian Iaroslavskii. Spurred on by their apparent success, the Underground Anarchists proclaimed a new “era of dynamite” that would finally wipe away capitalism and the State. The Bolsheviks responded by initiating a new wave of mass arrests in which Kovalevich and Sobalev were the first to be shot. With their leaders dead and much of their organization in tatters, the remaining Underground Anarchists blew themselves up in their last battle with the Cheka, taking much of their safe house with them. Numerous attacks and assassinations occurred frequently until the Revolution finally petered out in 1922. Although the Revolution was mainly a Left SR initiative, it was the Anarchists who had the support of a greater number of the population and they participated in almost all of the attacks the Left SRs organized, and also many on completely their own initiative. The most celebrated figures of the Third Russian Revolution, Lev Chernyi and Fanya Baron were both Anarchists.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_Russia
K: and nice attempt at deflection… Do you have something to add to the thought
Kropotkin
In 1923 Victor Serge, after changing from anarchism to Bolshevism became associated with the Left Opposition group that included Leon Trotsky, Karl Radek, and Adolf Joffe. Later Gregory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev joined in the struggle against Joseph Stalin. Serge was an outspoken critic of the authoritarian way that Stalin governed the country and is believed to be the first writer to describe the Soviet government as “totalitarian”.
In 1926, joining other Russian exiles in Paris as part of the group Dielo Trouda (Дело Труда, “The Сause of Labour”), Batko Makhno co-wrote and co-published “The Organizational Platform of the Libertarian Communists”, which put forward ideas on how anarchists should organize based on the experiences of revolutionary Ukraine and the defeat at the hand of the Bolsheviks.
Tolstoyans had problems with the Tsarist regimes, and even more so with the Bolshevik ones. By 1930, many Tolstoyans had to relocate to Siberia to avoid being liquidated as kulaks, but Stalinist police nevertheless arrested them, disbanded their settlements (such as the Life and Labor Commune which was converted into a state-owned collective farm in 1937) and sent them to labor camps between 1936 and 1939.
Voline.
In 1953, upon the death of Stalin, a vast insurrection took place in the labor camps of the Gulag. The prisoners of the Norilsk camp, after seizing control, hoisted the black flag of the Makhnovist movement to the top of the flag pole.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_Russia
K: and we have our answer… No thought or insights or real thinking, just
Kropotkin
In 1919 the anarchists played a significant role in the May 4th Movement which swept the country. It was at this time that the first Bolsheviks started organising in China and began contacting anarchist groups for aid and support. The anarchists, mistaking the Bolsheviks for allies & unaware of how the Bolsheviks had subordinated the Soviets to their party apparatus, helped them set up communist study groups – many of which were originally majority anarchist – and introduced the Bolsheviks into the Chinese labor and student movements. As Arif Dirlik states: “Anarchists also played a part in the founding of the first Bolshevik groups in China which would culminate in the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921, gradually to overshadow the anarchists, and to marginalize them in Chinese radicalism.” (Arif Dirlik in “Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870-1940 (Studies in Global Social History)”. More can be found in Dirlik’s “Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution” pages 199-206)
A minority of anarchists, mostly from the Paris group, had been involved in the Kuomintang almost from its founding; but the majority of anarchists, in keeping with their stated principles against involvement in the exercise of coercive authority, had declined to participate in this alliance. The “Diligent Work-Frugal Study” program was one product of this collaboration of the anarchists with nationalists. When the Kuomintang purged the CPC from its ranks in 1927, the small minority of anarchists who had long participated in it urged their younger comrades to join the movement and utilize the Nationalist movement as a vehicle to defeat the Communists and realise anarchism. This drew immediate opposition from those anarchist groups that were still functioning. But even those critical of this opportunism, however, eventually joined in – if only because doing so seemed to be the only remaining chance to make their movement relevant again and reclaim its lost momentum.
The result of this last collaboration was Li Shizeng’s creation in 1927 of National Labor University (Laodong Daxue) in Shanghai, which was intended to be a domestic version of the Paris groups educational program and sought to create a new generation of Labor Intellectuals who would finally overcome the gap between “those who work with their hands” and “those who work with their minds.” The university functioned for few years before the Nationalist government decided the project was too subversive to allow it to continue and pulled funding.
It had been acceptable for the anarchists to use government funding to promote anarchism as long as they did so in France, but when they began to do so at home, their “allies” were less than pleased. When the KMT initiated a second wave of repression against the few remaining mass movements, anarchists left the organization en masse and were forced underground as hostilities between the KMT and CPC – both of whom were hostile towards anti-authoritarians – escalated.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_China
Yes, everybody here knows you don’t like facts or discussing them.
Joker look back at your posts in this thread. You really haven’t started a discussion or made any kind of point, or offered any insight, you’ve just linked to stuff that every college freshman has already read.
Joker look back at your posts in this thread. You really haven’t started a discussion or made any kind of point, or offered any insight, you’ve just linked to stuff that every college freshman has already read.
I’ve made my point with the thread utilizing historical facts. You taking the side of Peter Kropotkin is a new low even for you but not surprising at all.
Excerpts from the Spanish Civil War and how communists sabotaged anarchist movements there.
As the anarchist militias achieved success after success ground was being lost on other fronts. Saragossa, though, was not taken and a long front developed. The militia system was blamed for this. The Stalinists said the workers were undisciplined and would not obey orders. They accused the anarchists of being unwilling to work with others to defeat the fascists.
Of course this was nonsense. The anarchists continually called for a united war effort and even for a single command. What they did demand, though, was that control of the army stayed with the working class. They did not believe that establishing a united command necessitated re-establishing the old militarist regime the officer caste.
It is a common lie that the militias, supposedly undisciplined and uncontrollable, were responsible for Franco’s advance. All who saw the militias in action had nothing but praise for the heroism they witnessed. The government made a deliberate choice. It chose to starve the revolutionary workers of arms, it decided that defeating the revolution was more important than defeating fascism.
In December 1936 Pravda declared “As for, Catalonia, the purging of the Trotskyists and the Anarcho-Syndicalists has begun, it will be conducted with the same energy with which it was conducted in the USSR”.
Here is what Krivitsky had to say about the activities of the GPU in Spain, the decision to establish it having been taken at an emergency conference in Moscow on September 14th. “The GPU had its own special prisons. Its units carried out assassinations and kidnappings. It killed in hidden dungeons and made flying raids. The Ministry of Justice had no authority over the GPU. It was a power before which even some of the highest officers in the Cabellero government trembled. The Soviet Union seemed to have a grip on loyalist Spain, as if it was already a Soviet possession”. (In Stalin’s Secret Service p. 102)
The aim was to eliminate revolutionaries. Anybody who dared to speak out against what they were doing could be the next to suffer. Nin, the leader of the POUM, was murdered by the GPU as was Camillo Berneri, an Italian anarchist who was critical of the CNT leadership. He published a paper, Guerra di Classe, which argued for a revolutionary war against fascism. He was murdered by so called ‘socialists’ for his principled revolutionary position. In July 1937 60 members of the CNT `disappeared’, a term used then as now for those killed by the secret police, though today it applies to the dictatorships of Latin America.
english.illinois.edu/maps/scw/anarchist.htm
It was the May Days in Barcelona in 1937 that effectively marked the end of the anarchist social revolution in Spain. Factories and services under anarchist inspired workers’ self-management were attacked by Republican and Communist forces while they did battle with the anarchist militias, and several prominent anarchists were murdered, including Camillo Berneri and the Libertarian Youth leader, Alfredo Martinez. The CNT leadership negotiated a truce with the Republican government rather than engage in a “civil war” within the civil war. Hundreds of anarchists were killed in the fighting, and many more were imprisoned. The Socialists and Communists, unsuccessful in having the CNT declared illegal, forced them out of the government and continued their campaign of “decollectivization” and disarmament of the anarchist groups.
Given this disastrous turn of events, Abad de Santillán had second thoughts about the CNT’s policy of collaboration. By April 1937, he had already ceased being a member of the Catalonian cabinet. The following year he denounced those “anarchists” who had used their positions within the movement “as a springboard to defect to the other side where the pickings are easier and the thorns less sharp,” obtaining “high positions of political and economic privilege.” The CNT-FAI’s participation “in political power,” which he had also once “thought advisable due to circumstances, in light of the war,” had demonstrated “yet again what Kropotkin once said of the parliamentary socialists: ‘You mean to conquer the State, but the State will end up conquering you’”
robertgraham.wordpress.com/2015 … 1936-1939/
