Yay, a small win. Time to punch left.
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An infantile disorder
A principled anarchist would focus entirely on anti-capitalism and alternatives to state power.
At least wait until he fucks up to criticize him!
I don’t have much hope in electoralism or reformism but i’m not gonna shit on the guy until after he goes full AOC.
No, you need to understand, sabotaging the Spanish Republicans who were fighting Franco was based and that’s why Mamdani is going to betray his anarchist volunteers (I did not volunteer) and then I guess hunt down anyone who posts about being an anarchist on X.
It was actually cool and good to pillage cities in Bolshevik territory when you’ve got a truce with them, the problem started when the scheming reds betrayed the valiant Makhnovists and that’s going to be Mamdani’s playbook.
(Lots of anarchists do cool things currently and have done so historically, but the ones coming at you with this weird dogmatic aggrievement based on historical movements they have no connection to are usually referencing things like this out of context. The anarchist Scholem Schwarzbard was a hero and Makhno, a coward for trying to stop him.)
I’ve always wondered what anarchists are referencing when I head this. I still haven’t reached that level of historical knowledge.
What I mentioned is not an exhaustive list, but in terms of specific political movements, those are the two stories that I see most often, the “betrayal” of the Spanish anarchists (and Trots) who thought that a civil war with fascists was a good time for a revolution and therefore sabotaged their liberal allies (the Spanish Republicans, who the Communists were working with), and the betrayal of the Makhnovists who had genuinely been engaging in banditry on Bolshevik-controlled cities because, despite being very militarily effective, they (the Makhnovists) were not economically self-sufficient or really productive at all, and that’s before you factor in having maybe their whimsical monetary policy, because the root issue had more to do with relations of production.
I’m not going to pretend to you that anarchists have never been wronged by communists, whether in Spain, Russia, or elsewhere, but the specific examples that I usually see are instances where it would be more accurate to call the anarchists the “traitors,” but the communist retaliation is framed as the first shot. I am quite confident that you can go through the history of the Red Terror, of the post-Cultural Revolution crackdowns (and I mean under both Mao and Deng) and find much more genuine misdeeds, I’m just less familiar with these because they aren’t thrown in front of my face all the time like the stories I mentioned.
It should also be mentioned that even though I think Mao ended his career with some of the gravest betrayals of a political project that I have ever heard of, he and the CPC had facilitated various anarchist and anarchist-like projects from the interwar period until the unofficial end of the Cultural Revolution, and there wasn’t zero communist interference, but generally they had neutral or supportive relationships (with some communist factions being much more hostile, one going as far as assassinating a KPAM leader) until various factors (Japanese aggression, poor construction, etc.) caused them to fail. That and Mao’s crackdown ending the CR was mainly to stop country-wide gang violence, meanwhile the more substantial anarchist-like projects like the Shanghai People’s Commune were dissolved in a more orderly fashion as they didn’t perform as well as hoped and were deemed effectively to be left-deviationist.
Anyway, I wouldn’t ascribe a “level of historical knowledge” to myself, I just know some stories, and the accusations led me to read a bunch of different anarchist (and Trot) accounts until eventually I found bitter anarchists who nonetheless admitted to things like the Spanish anarchists sabotaging the Republicans. I encourage you to look up things on your own and treat what I have to say like a Wikipedia article, as mainly being a basis for further research at most. If someone would like to offer corrections, I am happy to hear them.
My real thesis is that these myths of aggrievement are just the Red Scare as processed by, well, another group of people who don’t seem to have more nuance in their accounts than the neoliberals and are therefore happy to have the same boogeymen following roughly the same logic. Besides the blatant revisionism, I’d respect it a lot more if the people in question were just more upfront about the fact that the substantial divide (where there is one, and that really depends on the anarchist) is about democracy vs autonomy, where the communists demand the continuous advancement of the former and anarchists the latter, and these two things are inevitably at odds.
There’s that phrase, if you’re not a cop then why are you doing their work. I extend it to anyone just opening nonspecific hundred year old sectarian bullshit for the hell of it. If you’re not scurvy, why do what scurvy does?
This is just like when Lenin was elected mayor of Saint Petersburg and had all the twitter anarchists sent to gulags for calling him a tankie. It was shortly before being elected president of Russia. He just kept promising to freeze the rents and the people were fooled.
patterns everywherelol lmao
to be thrown under the bus you needed to help in the first place
methinks they might have a bit of a martyrdom complex
is he an actual leftist or a succdem?
i don’t expect him to get on tv and say hamas did nothing wrong but to come out swinging with “october 7th was a war crime and israel has a right to exist as any state does” already shows capitulation or at the very least lack of actual leftist politics. wouldnt most leftists agree no state “has a right to exist”? ESPECIALLY when that “state” is literally an ethnonationalist military occupation? why did he need to say that? i could even excuse calling oct 7th a war crime, which i dont agree with personally and i can even see how someone running for office could say something like that just to appease the cameras. but they have a right to exist? why say that?
i know absolutely nothing about him. for all i know he could be the most well read marxist on earth who has written books my stupid ass could never understand. but that just rubbed me wrong
October 7th was a war crime though. Perpetrated by Israel.
Mamdani has been very explicit and consistent in saying Israel has “the right to exist” as “a state with equal rights” (which he currently does not view it as being). That’s why he keeps getting badgered about the “Jewish state” question and he has never said it has “the right to exist as a Jewish state”.
Obviously, he does not believe what we do, but the logical implication of his beliefs are functionally the replacement of the existing Israeli government with one that is not apartheid.
Also there were many warcrimes committed on Oct 7th by Hamas, though in all likelihood Israel committed more in pursuit of the Hannibal Doctrine and so on. I don’t think it’s a great point to dwell on, and Hamas is still obviously the superior side, but he is correct.
someone consistently saying something bad doesnt make it good lol
as for the war crimes claim, i wont comment on supposed war crimes being committed by individual members of hamas because we don’t know what’s true or not about that day. what we do know is the act its self was not a war crime, it was an act of resistance. to reduce it down to the actions of the individuals is not something i want to get into because as someone who was born in america in lived here most their life i cant say i can really put myself in their shoes.
someone consistently saying something bad doesnt make it good lol
He has consistently denied Israel’s “right to exist” as an ethnostate, that’s my point. If you believe that means opposing the Israeli government completely, I agree with you and he probably does too. He recognizes, as should you, that supporting an apartheid state’s hypothetical right to exist if it didn’t have apartheid is immaterial in terms of supporting it with apartheid and is a reasonable tool for reorienting the conversation toward who is supporting apartheid and who isn’t.
what we do know is the act its self was not a war crime, it was an act of resistance.
There were several prongs to the attack, some of which were on military bases and those were not war crimes that we know of. Other prongs amounted to just attacking normal families and killing people, men, women, and children alike. We do not know the true extent to which this happened because Israel has systematically made this information impossible to determine. But saying they committed war crimes is not a condemnation of the broader movement. The Haitian Revolution involved some pretty severe war crimes, and it is still better for it to have happened than for it to have not happened because it still repelled France and freed countless people from slavery.
the entire idea that we’re supposed to discuss war crimes supposedly committed by a population of people who live in a concentration camp is absurd to me so im just gonna drop out of this convo
nothin but respect for my fellow worm tho
You mention marxism earlier, but this is a very moralizing framing. Yes, the Palestinian people, including the membership of Hamas, has been brutally victimized past most living memory. There is no contradiction in being both a victim and – to a lesser extent that we should not allow to eclipse our view of the former – a perpetrator. If there was a breakout from Dachau and the people breaking out deliberately executed children in the later stages of their short-lived freedom, they have committed a crime. That doesn’t mean we condemn even that specific group as people who should be left in the camps, or even that the project they were engaging in was a bad thing overall, it just means that there were also misdeeds involved.
The opposition to the idea that people need to be perfect victims to deserve support does not need to produce the inverted extreme in which we must take victims as being perfect by merit of being victims. No, they don’t deserve their victimhood and they should be supported in their fight, but that doesn’t mean they get some kind of blank check that every individual action in that process is to be regarded as justified. You’re seriously going to talk yourself into Gonzalo-style terrorism with this set of assumptions.
i said i was done with this conversation but you made a lot of unfair assumptions about me and my views so let me say it like this;
the entire framing of “war crimes on october 7th” is ridiculous and it has absolutely nothing with my supposed rejection of the “perfect victim” narrative. it has to do with the entire framework of calling something a war crime being completely fake. the laws to punish “war crimes” do not apply to israel, the US, or their allies. israel’s existence is a war crime. what israel has been doing for 80 years is a war crime. october 6th was a war crime. october 5th was a war crime. i will not condemn the actions of people living in those conditions under western settler colonialism with the frame work those very nations dont apply to themselves. the entire discussion only goes to serve the us and israel in their genocide.
hamas is not at war with “israel”, they’re defending themselves from violent invaders who view them as subhuman and treat them as such. they can not commit a “war crime” as defined by western powers who are themselves committing war crimes and worse with impunity while crying “war crimes”
fuck all that.
i think he’s an actual democratic socialist, not just a succdem. i know it’s weird but there is a difference, even if a demsoc is basically just a market socialist with direct democratic characteristics
ive got little issue with democratic socialists but i do have a big issue with succdems (liberals) so let’s just hope he’s the former. i did see that quote where he advocates for worker ownership over the means of production which is promising
yeah i think that’s what sets him apart.
instead of “workers share the means of production with capitalists in a slightly more equitable way that we promise we won’t roll back as soon as possible, pinkie swear” of the succdem
I don’t think calling some actions on Oct 7 a war crime is reactionary, early in the war Hamas offered to prosecute and/or deliver to the Hague any of their fighters found breaking the Geneva Conventions if Israel agreed to the same. (Israel did not agree to do the same). But the whole “right to exist” thing is also a slimy question with no answer that makes you look normal, either you are a liberal dog and believe that nation-states have more rights than people or you’re a third worldist-maoist-anarchist that thinks the very concept of a border is fascism (in the eyes of the media/voters), it’s like ‘abolish the police (and divest their functions to other more suited organisations)’ getting twisted by reactionaries to mean ‘abolish all policing, everything is legal, murder is good now’.
to be clear i didnt say it was reactionary to say that oct 7th was a war crime, it was the “right to exist” part i had an issue with. i dont believe oct 7th to have been a war crime but i understand why someone running for mayor would say that and i understand how they could even interpret international law to come to that conclusion, if their analysis was lacking a lot of material and historical context (ie, if you occupy a people for 80yrs and ethnically cleanse them then lock them all in a concentration camp, and hold a music festival right next to that concentration camp, i dont really see how in that context you can call what happened a war crime)
but again the actual issue i had was, he could have said that and not said israel has a right to exist, even if he claims “as a secular state”, which even that is a liberal delusion. the entire point of israel is contradictory to any claim that it could ever be secular
a secular “israel” without genocide or apartheid would be a completely different country so maybe that’s the politically correct to say the modern state of israel doesn’t have the right to exist
saying israel can exist as a secular state with equal rights is like saying water can exist as a dry liquid. i think your reading of it being a politically correct way of saying it has no right to exist is a lot more charitable than i’m willing to be as someone who knows nothing about this dude and can only look at his words.
it would just be Palestine. maybe some nagano accords will happen and it’ll still be called israel by some losers idk.
Corrosive solipsistic individualism masquerading as anarchism
Crypto-paleoconservative bullshit spits
corrosive poopshittic sigmavidualism masquerading as anarchism.
shitto-glupeoconservative hullshit cums
me, identifying patterns: the people who usually do bad stuff are in charge, now mamdani is in charge so he will do bad stuff
I’m saying this as an anarchist, shut the fuck up. Just shut the fuck up, we all want the same fucking things.
But those same things that I want use different arcane terminology!
i haven’t heard Mamdani’s opinion on the destituent assembly and that’s kinda sus tbh
THAT SHIT WAS OVER A CENTURY AGO. LET IT GO MAN
Nothing says Western Leftist more than relitigating conflict from generations past as an excuse to not do any actual praxis
Sounds about white lol. I was listening to a RevLeft episode where Breht & Zoe Baker, who is an anarchist scholar doing her PhD on anarchism, started bickering about the Bolshevik/Anarchist thing and it’s like…Shouldn’t y’all be intelligent enough to know that we are not in Russia during the Revolutionary period and that conditions are very different? What is even the point?
Is this
or leftist infighting? You decide!The left is just all FBI agents so both really
the first one
