Okay comrade :)

Completely agree with this assessment.

I suggest you give a thorough read to these links (especially the FAQ, though its fucking long), because most questions are answered. If you want something shorter, there’s Anarchy Works by Gelderloos.

Ok, I’m genuinely not sure what you’re referring to here. Can you give some examples?

I’m referring to the constant throwing shit at anarchists for “not being successful” when MLs refer to the USSR - which quite literally failed at what it set out to do aka achieving a classless, stateless society - or even Sankara’s Burkina Faso as successful, when even most squats have longer lives.

The jist of what i mean is that what communists look as “unsuccessful” revolutions in, lets say, Spain, was actually very much successful on anarchist terms. Was it defeated? Yes, much like most Marxist revolution was as well. But anarchists are adamant that a revolution that succeeds to create a bubble where the state’s logic is nonexistent is a more successful one than one that makes compromises in order to survive (and then is defeated as well). I’ve seen this downplayed as anarchists want “good martyrs” or whatever but there is vast anarchist literature about how and why a compromising revolution will not bring about a classless, stateless society (just for example ive read Lenin and other Marxist literature and have never seen one compelling argument about how the state, whose number one function is to perpetuate its existence, is supposed to wither away, but thats a whole other story).

So in short, theres a different standard for a successful revolution for anarchists and marxists. And i can respect that. I seldom criticise China or any AES states now myself. As long as the tendencies are not standing in each others way, its completely possible for them to coexist. Most of the problems arise and imo most of the shitstirring starts (and i am very well aware that anarchists are very guilty in this) where we start to measure marxist projects with anarchist standards and vice versa. Which is why i think the OP is more harmful to the lazy kneejerk comment made here.

Nah, if you knew anything about “the material historical evidence of what anarchists achieved in over a century” than this post wouldn’t have born.

The second part i can agree with but the counter to that is actually educating yourself about anarchism, not slander.

The antisemitic pogroms and ‘fascistic elements’ are probably real and were widely reported on, and it’s a lot better of a rebuttal to Hungarian revolution arguments. The number of deaths that resulted is relatively low too, even the suppression of small communist uprisings like the Jeju uprising involved several times as many deaths, without even mentioning the extremes like the Jakarta method. Of course any amount of death is bad, and it should’ve been stopped pre-emptively and peacefully (e.g. reducing economic austerity, less de-Stalinization), but Kruschev was leading.

The reason of the pogroms not having as many victims is simple: They were heavily marginalized in the movement (as i also point out in the post you linked), which was mostly dominated by communists who wanted less soviet influence on hungarian domestic politics. There were workers patrols going around districts with houses marked for pogroms to protect them. Most of the people rising then hated fascists more then they hated the Rákosi regime and they were adamant that they are not looking to reestablish capitalist property relations. This is never mentioned by people like Aptheker.

There have been thousands of counterpoint to the same notion and you knew that if you ever engaged with anything about anarchism that wasn’t written 150 years ago by not anarchists.

It’s not thoughtful at all, it’s the same uninformed bs regurgitated by sectarian marxists who never ever engaged with anarchist literature at all lest they knew that On Authority is completely misrepresenting anarchist views of revolution, that has been debunked countless of times

It really is a litmus test on whether one is criticising anarchism in good faith whether they take a look at if there was an anarchist response to Engels at all or not (the other is whether one accepts that anarchist revolutions were actually successful on anarchist terms countless of times, just as marxist revolutions were successful on their terms countless of times), because most just assume that the argument ended then and there. I only included three links, but next time y’all are trying to “criticise” anarchists, take at least the minimum effort and write “on authority” in the searchbar of the anarchist library and engage what we are actually saying, not what Engels made up to be mad at.

That doesnt reveal shit. Hungarian Freedom Fighters is/was an NGO in the US formed AFTER 1956.

Your thoughts show that your knowledge on anarchism is fairly lacking.

That you took exception with the comment and not with the post is already a mask off moment

Yeah sure

Good to see my left unity comrades ripping the mask off

Me if i knew nothing about anarchism

Yeah what we need is more racist libs, we dont have enough.

That’s a good question. Let me tackle it from a different angle though - why do ex USSR/Warsaw Pact countries actively want to join NATO?

Fellow ex Warsaw Pact resident here.

They wanted to join NATO because after the dissolution of the USSR these countries were pushed into a deep economic crisis, to which one of the solutions, apart from relentless austerity programs was the privatization of the shit ton of public assets they had. Of course lots of western companies were in on this since for them these assets were really cheap and they had a lot of money. The city hall of the town i went to university to became a fucking McDonald’s.

Thing is, a lot of people didnt like this, not just the austerity, but the handing of domestic assets to western companies. And they were not even that wrong about it! In Albania, in 1997 a series of bankruptcies of asset managing companies (most western owned) who were basically scamming people who barely came into contact with capitalism, telling them theyll get 50% interest rates for their money, led to a brutal uprising where ordinary people were sacking military bases, setting up machine gun nests in the borders of cities and overthrew the government (after half a year of protests).

In the meantime Russia was led by well-known alcoholic, Boris Yeltsin, who doesn’t strike me as the napoleonic conqueror people make him out to be.

So why did these countries join NATO? Because they DESPERATELY needed the money, but western companies wouldnt invest in (exploit) them if they dont have insurances (troops that could be sent against the people anytime an Albanian-type revolt breaks out or an anti-western government come in power who would try to renationalize assets) that their investments (exploitation) runs as smoothly as possible. And it works. People like to say that “ackshually the living standards went up in Eastern Europe”, but they never stop to check that it only went up because the rich got richer, pulling the average up. The working class’ lives stagnated at best, except the social net around them is rapidly brought down. Older people are not nostalgic for socialism here because theyre becoming senile, but because they see every time that they go to a hospital that the increasingly privatized healthcare system is crumbling.

Don’t believe me? It’s fine. But i would suggest that you examine who the current pariahs are in NATO: Hungary, whose government has to rely in a lot of things to the cheapest due to a ravaged economy (both by corruption and privatization), so they rely a lot on domestic production and trying to hand off as little stuff to western corporations as possible (and still fail at it, hence why they are still intact), and Turkey, who makes no secret of wanting to standing on its own feet and not rely on western corporations.

They didn’t improve at all. The rich are better off, thanks to mass privatization of public property. For the middle/working class, quality of life stagnated at best.

Source: I live in an ex-soviet country.

What you call “reply with a wall of text and deflections” is 90% of the time well informed and sourced discourse, you just dismiss it cause you can’t argue with it.