Makes you wonder why the most committed anarchists would go to the Ukraine to fight if they weren’t really anarchists in the first place.
If the anarchists were really as disorganised as this article paints them to be, any adventurist would have had much better luck finding their way to the front through virtually any other route than as an anarchist.
Notice the unfalsifiable orthodoxy that kicks in in the editorial note, immediately dismissing any anarchist who joined the Azov Battalion or the OUN as being a false anarchist since joining with fascists disqualifies your from being an anarchist. That’s very convenient and all but the lack of self-crit shown in this article is astounding.
This article really is just paragraph after paragraph defending (literal, swastika-waving) neo-Nazis, with hardly a single critical word said about them. If an “anarchist” or “leftist” is ever this close with card-carrying fascists and feels the need to speak up for them, something has gone very, very wrong.
Did you notice how, time and again, the narrative emerges that the anarchists were too disorganised and that they kept on stepping on their own dicks to disastrous outcomes?
Instead of organising, they set up a squat and started doing mutual aid in a warzone which, unsurprisingly, didn’t last.
And then, at the end of the article which was written in 2022, they finally state:
Anarchists are now trying to create horizontal grassroots ties in society, based on common interests, so that communities can address their own needs, including self-defense. This differs significantly from ordinary Ukrainian political practice, in which it is often proposed to unite around organizations, representatives, or the police. Organizations and representatives are often bribed and the people who have gathered around them remain deceived. The police may, for example, defend LGBT events but get mad if these activists join a riot against police brutality. Actually, this is why we see potential in our ideas—but if a war breaks out, the main thing will again be the ability to participate in armed conflict.
This article was released at the time of the Russian special military operation commencing.
The war was already at their doorstep in 2014 and it took them 8 years to pull themselves together and to decide that they should start laying foundations within the community to prepare for war, all the while fascist paramilitaries are crawling all over Eastern Ukraine.
Given that I’ve heard literally zero about any anarchist militias in the Ukraine since this article, I can only assume that the weeks of preparation they must have put into developing links into the broader community never ended up bearing fruit.
The war was already at their doorstep in 2014 and it took them 8 years to pull themselves together
This is a bit unfair. They’re anarchists, they would have been 10 years old are most when the war started.
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.
