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[–] 16 points 1 year ago (29 children)

many anarchists used to be members of authcom communities because they found it interesting. i don't think what our worldviews were when we were young defines who we are

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  • [+] 26 points 1 year ago (21 children)
  • [+] -10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Ok, I'm on it:

    When they were founded

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  • [+] -14 points 1 year ago (17 children)

    "Kill all Jews" and "kill all kulaks" have both killed enough people that this is a distinction without a difference.

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  • [+] 29 points 1 year ago (7 children)
  • [+] -10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Then why did the Soviets kill so fucking many people? And don't get me started on our old friend Mao Zedong. The pursuit of socialist ideals under vanguard parties has caused enough mass murder across enough regimes that it's part of what you sign up for under authoritarian communism.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    The 1930s famine was a combination of dramatic weather problems in pre-industrial agriculture, kulak's killing their livestock and burning their grain in order to resist collectivization, and mismanagement. The Communist Party of Ukraine hid how bad the famine was getting from the politburo, which made the problems even worse as it delayed aid. It wasn't intentional, and after the 1930s famine the USSR was food secure outside of World War II, when the Nazis took Ukraine (the USSR's breadbasket) and intentionally attacked farmland.

    Mao faced similar issues with famine, large-scale weather problems coupled with mismanagement. Neither famine was intentional, so framing it as "mass murder" erases that once both countries industrialized, life expectancy doubled as compared to pre-famine, pre-socialist conditions. Famine was just incredibly common before industrializing farming, and the communists, when in power, provided high quality healthcare and land redistributiob, education, etc.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    Kulaks were not a “people,” they were owners of private property, specifically farmland, who had serfs work the land. They lived off of the exploitation of others. They were the feudal rough-equivalent of the petit bourgeois class. So of course they weren’t going to embrace socialism or land collectivization, or having to work a day in their lives.

    This is what happens to all of us who’ve lived a lifetime of anti-communist propaganda. Unless you take the time & effort to go back and examine all of that received wisdom, you’ll continue believing that Kulaks were a people genocided by the evil Slavic Bolsheviks. And then we have to—as patiently as we can muster—explain the same basic things to people over and over again.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Not the same, dude.

    Like, nit necessarily good, but not the fucking same.

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  • [+] -7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

    There are plenty of important differences, but "will not lead to mass death and forced labor, including along ethnic, religious and national lines" is not one of them. I get your instinct to want to say it is, but the number and scale of genocidal or genocide-parallel crimes committed under Stalin speaks for itself.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Im not in favor of either, but they are not remotely the same. Even the ethnic and cultural aftershocks are different.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I mean, I made my case in my comment chain with _cryptagion, so if you believe my characterization is wrong can you provide an explanation of why?

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Is that true? For what value of “many”? My impression is that—in the Anglosphere anyway—“auth” communists who once were anarchists is even more common. We’re fed a lifetime of anti-communist propaganda, and comparatively little ant-anarchist, and I think that people seldom arrive there along a straight path.

    I’d like to see a breakdown of anarchists per capita by country. I think it’s predominantly a Western movement, but I don’t have data to back that up.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    comparatively little ant-anarchist

    "comparatively" doesn't make it actually little. Assuming they don't think you're unserious, walk on a street and tell someone you're an anarchist and they'll think you're a terrorist. Tell them you're a {insert popular alt-right party here} member and they'll just think you're weird and avoid you. Tell them you're a communist and they'll probably have a tamer response thinking you're just deluded. You're not gonna arrive at anarchism along a straight path either.

    I think it’s predominantly a Western movement

    "West" has a lot of definitions; let's just say Global North. The places where anarchist movements hold the most power (hah) are probably areas of Spain—Global North indeed—and the Global South's Rojava and Chiapas, under the DAANES and Zapatistas respectively.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Minor tidbit, the Zapatistas directly and explicitly reject the label "anarchist," they see their own movement as organic and self-driven more than anything. Not saying you can't use them as an example of anarchist-adjacent structures, but they quite clearly dislike the term being applied to themselves.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    That's true. It's also worth noting that since they are states that hold power, they obviously all have some distance from anarchism, the ideology against power and states.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I mean, that also applies to the Spanish anarchists as well, who employed labor camps and had some degree of hierarchical structure. At the end of the day, anarchists do have to make compromises with what authority they consider valid and what they don't. I'd say the Spanish anarchists had their own "state" as well, and this applies to all anarchism in historical example. There's a difference between the idealized, perfect anarchism, and the anarchism forced to reconcile the need for some hierarchy, especially when defending itself from outside forces.

    Ultimately, while they reject the label of anarchist, the Zapatistas do have a fairly horizontalist approach, which is why I said they can be considered when discussing anarchist-adjacent structures, their merits, and any problems they may run into.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Not sure this is a sizable dataset, but I can be added to the pile of anarcho-communist -> Marxist-Leninist. It took far more reading and research to overcome my anti-AES bias than it did to accept anarchism as an alternative.

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