this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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damn brb gonna tell xi to press the gommunism button thank you internet anarchist for showing us it was that easy, we just had to take a quick look at your list of successful revolutions to take inspiration from
We'd have more than two if it hadn't been for tankies stabbing us in the back. But go, go on, tell me how Makhno was a counter-revolutionary or something. Kulak? Or was it about not being able to tolerate a non-authoritarian alternative.
As to successful tankie revolutions... there's none. They devolved into either state capitalist tyranny, capitalist tyranny, or straight tyranny. Cuba and Vietnam don't count they were wars for independence from colonial powers first, communist second in Vietnam's case and in Cuba's fourth or fifth or something.
This is a phrase that keeps popping up in anarchist spaces but once you look at what it makes reference to it's... Simply not true? It's mostly used to refer to the Spanish Civil War, but one only needs to pick up a high school history book to learn that the May Days were a result of the anarchists attempting to antagonize the entirety of the Republican side by hindering war efforts, and not only the PCE or other Soviet-alligned communists, who held a rather small amount of power inside the Republican government.
If to not be authoritarian is a priority for you, reading Voline's accounts of his participation in the makhnovist movement should be enough to realize that his project is probably not the one you want to rally behind the most.
Just ignore the Zapatistas who are a current example of anarchism in practice.
And saying the Soviets held little power in the Spanish Republic is just a bald faced lie. The Soviets withheld supplies from non-soviet militias and actively damaged the war effort because they'd rather focus on garnering power than actually fighting fascists.
Their words, not mine. Yes, the Zapatista project has worked at their current scale and is doing well, I have no problems admiting that. That does not mean however that I think their methods would work on a larger scale, especially if they ever became a threat for imperial capitalism to be attacked with military force beyond attempting to contain them inside Chiapas as they have until now. As it happened to the USSR facing invasion during the Russian Civil War, as it happened to Cuba with the Bay of Pigs invasion and as it happened to Vietnam. And the Zapatistas do so too, as they claim that they are not driven by ideological purities and will adopt whatever it is that works for them.
I said that the PCE and the Soviet-alligned communists had a rather small amount of power within the Republican government, and that is not a lie. The PCE only controlled three ministries within the government during the May Days, which is the event seen as the "betrayal" that led to the anarchists' demise in Spain.
It is hard to work with abstract mentions, but I am willing to address this if you use more specific examples of Soviet sabotage of the war effort that I can look at and work with.
Edit: formatting.