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Remember that Anarchists were excluded from the Socialist International in 1889, an international conference of socialists, leftists and trade unionists. The exclusion of anarchists was the first item on the agenda.
Anarchism represents the real revolution, real change. Every other leftist ideology is a capitulation, each of them has a seed of corruption which makes the return of capitalism inevitable. Look at the USSR, look at China.
Only Anarchism is the long term path towards a peaceful world, a world without imperialism and exploitation.
Communists focus mainly on the working class not because they don’t care about queer liberation (so many leftcoms are trans to the point that its become an injoke), but because of historical materialism, the concept that it’s the mode of production and advancements within it that control our behaviors, and not “independent ideas”. The current mode of production that is capitalism depends on the nuclear family structure for reproduction, and queers go against that so the ruling class propagates anti-queer ideas as a result.
Stalinoid and Maoist revolutions (China, Vietnam, other AES countries, etc) weren’t proletarian and instead were explicitly class collaborationist and anti-imperialist (seen in Vietnam’s DOI, Mao’s On New Democracy, etc) often wearing red only to get protection from USSR which has been completely subsumed by the counter-revolution long ago. They would ban gay rights or heavily promote reproduction for expansion of the workforce for national interests precisely because their goal wasn’t to get rid of commodity production or go internationalist (Marxist position), but expansion of capital, be it state owned or otherwise which is the common interest of every bourgeois state.
The only revolution that didn’t result in this was October revolution in Russia, they were almost a hundred years ahead of it’s time in regards to things like women’s and gay rights, and mind you it was still far away from actually reaching communism which they never did due to the failure of going international and subsequent stalinist counter-revolution.
Sorry for a wall of text on this meme, but ts is nonsensical anarchist slander 💔
If every instance of AES except one is anti-queer, I think it’s very fair to say that queer communism isn’t a thing.
And it’s truly tragic to see so many fellow queers get suckered into ML and other forms when they historically oppress us, and seek to destroy any counter-culture or people who don’t fit in.
You do realize that ML is far from the only ‘communist’ currents, right? There’s many other currents such as aforementioned Leftcoms (especially Italian leftcom current, growing in size mainly due to ex-ML’s who decided to read Marx) who are highly critical of stalinism and it’s derivatives, and their blatant falsification of Marx, Engels and Lenin?
This includes the rejection of AES as a concept, given how the overthrow of a global mode of production has to be realized globally and not just within one nation, which results in keeping commodity production going for international trade and reproduce the behaviors and interests of capitalist bourgeois states (in other words, historical materialism again which is talked about extensively in Marx’s The German Ideology).
There’s a good video that talks precisely about this if you don’t care for reading theory, AES:Bound to Fail?.
For better or worse most places, ML have spent generations wearing an empty husk of communism. Puppeteering it, slaughtering actual communist to the point it is wrongly identified with them.
If you see people talking about communism generally, assume they mean ML. Because that’s generally what they’re talking about. Outside of close friends or those I’m well familiar with I wouldn’t discuss libertarianism or communism using those terms. But rather their underlying ideals and praxis. The terms largely are so poisoned outside academic discussion to be counter productive.
An-coms are fine as well as other non Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist/Dengist Marxist. If you value consent, and don’t seek to crush dissent under vanguard oppression. Its all good. But it’s going to take lifetimes of education action to remove the stains from those terms. But in the end, it’s the ideals that matter, not what they’re called.
So… then what is the historical materialist path to a global revolution? Each country, each province and city has some different mix of local conditions and ideological outlook. How are we to time things so it all happens at once? Say a place has the class consciousness, has the discontent with the status quo and the historical conditions that make revolution possible, are they just supposed to simmer on it until their neighbors catch up?
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Proletarian revolutions aren’t going to happen simultaneously, and they won’t always be successful. International revolution is most likely to start within one state, or a cluster of states, after which their main goal must be to expand the revolution, lead by example and provide guidance or military aid for states that are also undergoing revolutions. This isn’t guaranteed to succeed though, as seen in USSR where most revolutions abroad got extinguished by their national bourgeois, it having to take survival measures to preserve itself and alleviate poverty due to its isolation, then eventually succumbing to counter-revolution and subsequent stalinist nonsense.
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Revolutions cannot be delayed or for them to be “left to simmer” until perfect conditions arise, since no such thing can exist given uneven developments, different levels of influence national bourgeois have on proletariat and just different historical conditions in general. Proletarian revolutionary crises themselves are largely spontaneous, they happen with or without bodies of power (like councils, parties, etc) organizing them, and all these bodies can really do is choose whether to act upon the revolutionary crisis or not, as in whether to agitate and shape the existing class consciousness to be a fully communist one and/or taking leadership of the movement entirely and ensuring revolutionary success, etc. In other words, they can merely react, not will the revolution into existence.
after which their main goal must be to expand the revolution, lead by example and provide guidance or military aid for states that are also undergoing revolutions
so, AES?
No, think USSR immediately after October revolution and Lenin actively making contact with communists abroad and having back and forths of tactics and advice, and preparing the red army in case a proletarian revolution abroad needed assistance.
AES on the other hand does the opposite, staying state capitalist or even introducing free markets by choice, with the primary goal being commodity/wealth accumulation to compete/work with capitalist states better, and internationalism being left secondary if being considered at all outside national interests. In other words, it’s just capitalist development wearing red most often for geopolitical reasons (like aligning with USSR and being able to nationalize western buildings for instance), not spreading revolution.
I guess, but in present conditions, could Cuba or China or Vietnam or whomever really do that without the United States decrying it as imperialism and using it to justify military escalation?
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With this comment it seams like you are saying that all communists are MLs. This was the most prevelent faction due to the spread by the Soviet Union, however communism as an idea existed before Stalin and Lenin and even Marx. There is much difference between communist schools of thought, the difference between AES states and a lot of communists is likely as large as the difference between a lot of anarchists and anarchocapitalist ideas
I’m still pissed about the Bolshevik antidemocratic takeover. There was something magical happening there. Even if the Soviets weren’t as evil as the propaganda says - and they weren’t - they brutally suppressed an actual, real-life people’s movement, which was organically finding solutions in a moment of post-Imperial euphoria. The cynical fuckers thought it wasn’t good enough because they didn’t, after all, trust the people.
Well, good job in believing anti-communist liberal narratives I guess. Truly Bolsheviks just fell out of the sky in 1917 and took everything over undemocratically with 0 support and didn’t trust “”“the people”“” (which is literally a bourgeois narrative, there’s no such thing as unified people in a nation, as class divides them).
Can you point me to a source then? I’d be happy to be wrong. I know the Bolsheviks had a lot of popular support, but they did not win the elections.
How does an anarchist system prevent the oppression of minorities? If the whole idea is that people should rely on eachother for mutual aid, but that association should be entirely voluntary, nothing stops a cishet majority from excluding queer people.
In order to protect any minority from a majority you need some kind of systemic power structure in place that can punish or at least disincentize people from discriminating, even when they are part of a majority group.
My own take:
Also its important to see anarchy not as an utopian society where every problem already has an answer. Sadly shitty things will still happen and assholes will still be assholes. Regarding discrimination based on a minority identity, I think an anarchist society atleast gives the oppressed minority the best chances to deal with it, as there is no central power that they have to overcome, they themselves should have similar access to ressources and people having a general libertarian mindset.
Also I would hope people would have acxess to education that made them realize that discriminating against for example queers is absolutely hurting themselves somewhat
In order to protect any minority from a majority you need some kind of systemic power structure in place that can punish or at least disincentize people from discriminating, even when they are part of a majority group.
In your example this power structure would be the first thing the cishets would want take over to opress queers. This would be so much more powerful to oppress minorities than anything they would have in a potential anarchist future.
When did MLs get a monopoly on the word communism?
Generally? Roughly 100 years ago in many places. The perversion of libertarian at least here in the west was largely a product of the last 50 years.
In the end though, the ideas are what resonate with people. Not the nouns you collectively refer to them with.
Well my question was rhetorical. I don’t concede the word “communism” to MLs, just as I don’t concede the word “democracy” to the liberals. Exactly because there are important “ideas that resonate with people” in those conceptual constellations that I am not willing to let go.
Oh, by all means, don’t let go. But also, don’t cling to them so tightly it gets in the way of implementing the ideas. Because it’s the ideas that will rehabilitate the terms once they understand them.
Communism, capitalism, authoritarianism, libertarianism. They are all fancy $50 words the average person doesn’t know or have time for. Tell them that landlords are useless assholes. The only people you’ll likely have push back at that are the landlords. Tell them that they shouldn’t have to be governed/taxed by hierarchy insulated, unanswerable elites who’ve never lived here. In the US Midwest you will absolutely ironically get pedophilic fascist enabling magats cheering at that. The ideas are popular, even if the terms aren’t.
This again. In real life, almost every anarchist is communist.
Hmm I think this is might be different based on which part of the world. I think there are many anarchists out there that dont call themselves a communist.
If “queer communism” is oxymoronic, “queer anarchy” ought to be redundant, but the reality is that neither of these are true
