Dialectical

Dialectical wrote

To blame Marxism because we have yet to achieve full communism is illogical. It takes a lot of time to defeat the reactionary elements in society and to educate the masses so that they may be properly prepared for the next stage in the class war that will eventually lead us to communism. First we have to overthrow communism and establish a Marxist state through revolution, something that has eluded us in the West. Only then can we begin to prepare for communism.

I suspect you are hung up on aesthetics and on looking the part, but not really doing the work to understand class dynamics and material conditions. You have to read, read, read if you ever hope to create communism.

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Dialectical wrote

You're going to blame "Leninists" (lol) for the failures of the anarchists??

According to Bolloten (1961, pg. 51) one anarchist youth journal said:

For the Revolution to be a fact, we must demolish the three pillars of reaction: the church, the army, and capitalism. The church has already been brought to account. The temples have been destroyed by fire and the ecclesiastical crows who were unable to escape have been taken care of by the people.

Syndicalist journal Solidaridad Obrera said:

The oppressed people put to the torch whatever dens of obscurantism and deception they found in their path. Churches, convents, centers of reaction, whatever smacked of incense and darkness, have been set ablaze.

The churches in all the villages have been set ablaze. Only those buildings that could be used for the benefit of the people have been kept, but not those that were a serious danger after burning. Many churches have been converted into communal warehouses as well as into garages for the antifascist militia.

The Collective Letter of the Spanish Bishops put the number of chapels "demolished or completely sacked" at 20,000.

Bolloten cites Antonio Montero's Historia de la persecución religiosa en España, which gives the names, places, and dates of assassination of 6,832 religious personnel. This is backed by several other sources (ibid. #56).

Prominent anarchist Diego Abad de Santillán said:

We do not wish to deny that the nineteenth of July brought with it an overflowing of passions and abuses, a natural phenomenon of the transfer of power from the hands of the privileged to the hands of the people. It is possible that our victory resulted in the death by violence of four or five thousand inhabitants of Catalonia who were listed as rightists and were linked to political or ecclesiastical reaction. But this shedding of blood is the inevitable consequence of a revolution, which, in spite of all barriers, sweeps on like a flood and devastates everything in its path, until it gradually loses its momentum.

The way the "anarchists" operated was not actually different than other left-wing groups. The "anarchists" held political office, they forced military conscription, they outlawed "wasteful and bourgeoisie" luxury items like tobacco, coffee and alcohol.

The primary cause of the failure of anarchism in the 20th century is due to your ideology running counter to how human society operates and completely lacks any coherent legal theory.

It amazes me that anarchists can claim to be anti-authoritarian or substantially different from real communists. The economy in Catalonia was just as "authoritarian" as that in Mao's China or Stalin's USSR. Farmers only "voluntarily joined" cooperatives as they knew they would be labeled fascists and shot if they refused.

Albert Pérez-Baró, a CNT militant and a leading participant in the collectivist movement in Catalonia, describes the initial economic confusion: "After the first few days of euphoria, the workers returned to work and found themselves without responsible management. This resulted in the creation of workers' committees in factories, workshops and warehouses, which tried to resume production with all the problems that a transformation of this kind entailed. Owing to inadequate training and the sabotage of some of the technicians who remained, many others had fled with the owners, the workers' committees and other bodies that were improvised had to rely on the guidance of the unions. . . . Lacking training in economic matters, the union leaders, with more good will than success, began to issue directives that spread confusion in the factory committees and enormous chaos in production. This was aggravated by the fact that each union . . . gave different and often contradictory instruction."

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Dialectical wrote

They murdered people, burnt down churches, outlawed and prohibited many goods.

How do you explain any of this as not being "authoritarian"? Their programs were not much different than the programs of Marxists like Lenin.

There was forced conscription in both Ukraine and Spain. There were also "anarchist" politicians in both societies. Also, anarchist military leaders placed themselves above the laws they themselves invented and troops roamed about plundering and pillaging from the peasantry.

And most importantly, production dropped when anarchist workers seized the factories.

Bolloten via Caplan describing the coops crying for a bailout by the Spanish state:

Both in Catalonia and in the rest of Republican Spain, this situation created grave economic problems for the CNT collectives. So desperately did some of them require funds that Juan Peiro, the Anarcho-syndicalist minister of industry, openly recommended intervention by the central government, having received in his department eleven thousand requests for funds in January 1937 alone.

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Dialectical wrote

I tried to downvote you but instead it upvoted and now it won't let me downvote.

Anyway, you shouldn't dismiss everything I said so haphazardly. If you go through point by point you can see it is all 100% true.

  1. Treating politics like a quest for an identity is foolhardy. Either you want to overthrow the capitalists or you don't. The only way to do it is through Marxism.

  2. Marxism is a science. Why would anyone deny it? Dialectical materialism even influenced the ways fields of study like biology, physics, and engineering were pursued in the USSR.

  3. Anarchism has been shown to be a petite bourgeois pursuit by countless Marxist thinkers. Anarchism only hinders socialist revolutions. This youtube video will help you understand as a short introduction, but to truly overcome your condition, you will need to actually read Marx, Lenin, Mao, Stalin and other Marxists.

https://youtu.be/MxSE3R6nxdY

  1. When we seek solutions to the problem of capitalism, for someone to settle on "anarchism" as a solution would require them to have a petite bourgeois mindset. There's no way for someone who understands dialectical materialism to then see "anarchism" as a solution to capitalism. Rather, it is a furthering of the reactionary capitalist agenda. You must develop an understanding of the material conditions in this society. The concept can be applied on various scales to apply dialectical analysis to all sorts of contradictions within capitalist society. This is the science behind Marxism, something "anarchism" completely ignores in favor of liberal feel-good platitudes.
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Dialectical wrote (edited )

You have to grow out of this liberal way of seeing things....

Understand this:

Your entire approach is to treat very serious political issues like some needy teenager's identity quest.

There's Marxism, which is a science proven correct on multiple occasions and developed by the historical class struggle, and there's "anarchism".... A juvenile petite bourgeois fantasy that has never been implemented because it's a foolish bit of idealism for middle class white kids who fear violence and would sell out any revolution to the fascists in an instant to avoid losing their trust funds.

If you can't see the difference between these two inherently opposed things, it is likely because you're petite bourgeois in reality.

Come to communism.lemmy.ml if you want to really learn about politics. This place is for ridiculous liberals who think politics is about stealing pokemon cards/makeup, spray painting bad words about the police, and sharing pointless memes about feminism and sexuality.

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