I guess I’ll give it a try. Thanks for being patient.

Thank you for being willing to engage sanely in the first place. <3

I looked at it, it seemed mostly vanilla, had good servers, didn’t have defederation drama like lemmy.world, thought it’s cool.

I’d be open to move to a “leftist” lemmy instance, but as a staunch anarchist I’m not really compatible with lemmygrad or hexbear.

I am sorry for being agressive. I mostly assumed you thought the same things as the person you were quoting. I appreciate that you at least admit you aren’t well read enough, that’s more than most people I talk to.

I’m happy to receive some recs I can follow up on.

I really appreciate this too. Thank you. I think as a direct expanding on what I’m talking about, this essay is very good:

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anark-the-state-is-counter-revolutionary

It’s available on video form too, but the video doesn’t have citations.

Here’s a good rebuttal of On Authority:

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/london-anarchist-federation-the-problems-with-on-authority

A modern and a classical reading on how anarchists view authority and power:

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anark-power

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mikhail-bakunin-what-is-authority

I would like to link to this article, it goes deeper into the anarchist conception of authority. TL;DR: These are pointless definition wars. All anarchists are fundamentally against the same thing, it’s just that some prefer to not describe it as “authority”

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/london-anarchist-federation-the-problems-with-on-authority

To counteract this common narrative… https://archive.ph/GnQtp#selection-483.18-483.151

Here are FBI MLs too, which actually existed: https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/167878

How is this a debunking of anything? You are merely correcting technicalities as if anarchists didn’t know about them. It’s obvious that the Makhnovists and the Bolsheviks could never agree on anything, and I’ve never met any anarchist who thought the alliance was not temporary or even that it could last.

The facts still are that anarchists helped the USSR survive yet the USSR destroyed them once they were no longer useful. I do think that using this event as a blanket statement to “never ever work with statist leftists of any kind no matter what” is a bit silly given how much time has passed and how different the situation is. However its still an useful piece of history. Especially because they had that same behaviour throughout their entire lifespan - of crushing or abandoning any socialist movement that weren’t 100% aligned with theirs.

Look, I agree that it’s dumb to call yourself a socialist and have zero respect for most attempts at socialism, especially when your critique doesn’t come from anything serious but just parroting of cold war propaganda. I agree that these countries weren’t literally the devil, nor fascist, not “pretending”, that’s all fine.

But it’s still so dishonest of MLs to dig for quotes and smugly boastbout how “libertarians never succeed”. Even if we completely ignore all the very explicit and deliberate attempts at sabotage anarchists had to endure from their statist “comrades” (which we shouldn’t but we always casually seem to be forced to do in the name of “unity”), it doesn’t change the fact that vanguardist revolutions have all been incredibly flawed too.

You all are very often willing to recognize your failures, most of the people like you I have talked to seem to agree that at some point the revolution was “hijacked”, usurped, corrupted, lost aim, usually coinciding with a figure they don’t like taking over the revolutionary government and messing things up.

The supposed “strong state that crushes all opposition” being taken over by the reformist opposition and then the capitalist one in the case of the USSR and Leninists. The market reforms of Deng in the case of China and Maoists. But you all never seem to ask yourselves the question “Why was that allowed to happen?”. Why am I supposed to put my trust in some authoritarian bullshit solution specifically justified as a means to protect the revolution when it failed at doing so? Why do you have to be so smug and condescending at me for not trusting in things that didn’t work?

Why do you instead of learning from the mistakes in your methods that most of the time you yourself recognize and trying to come up with new ideas and systems for the current age, insist on still clinging to material analysis of the world of a hundred years ago as the gospel, the sole undying and absolute truth on how to Make Socialism, merely saying “it’ll totally work right this time” instead? Why do you insist on mocking and “”“dunking”“” on anyone who refuses to do that?

They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted.

This is all completely false. It genuinely is just lies. You can disagree with the explanations, but to claim there literally aren’t any is just ignorance and a complete lack of good faith. Look, if you’re a socialist in the internet, you probably have dealt with confidently incorrect liberals whining about strawmen that you don’t believe, because they haven’t read anything about it - and it’s probably been incredibly frustrating. So why do you never think twice before doing the same thing with anarchists?

I’m always told to read Lenin and a ton of authoritarian essays and I always do in good faith, but it’s extremely rare for me to ever be afforded the same honour, and then all the conversations I have end up with people telling me shit like this and me having to explain anarchism 101 to them because they genuinely don’t actually know anything.

No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

I am also always told to be charitable and nuanced about the failures and mistakes of vanguardist revolutions, but no one ever has the same honour with anarchist ones.

Yeah no, fuck this. If you’re an anarchist and you go offer your life for a state, you’re not an anarchist at all, no matter how horizontally you say you’ll do it.

Do note that CrimethInc are post-left dudebros, they have some good essays but a lot of what they write is very dumb and sometimes vehemently anti-communist.

A lot of people make the claim that individualist anarchism is right wing because they just don’t know what it’s actually about and think it’s some kind of philosophical anarcho-capitalism. But I’ve never met someone who read Renzo Novatore and thought he was right wing at all. Edgy? Extremely so. Kinda dumb? Honestly I think so too. But right wing as in in favour of the reaction and the capitalist class, no way.