>>2813559>>2813833>>2813835This sums up the biggest problem with anarchism that anarchists all face but are in total denial about.
Anarchists are obsessed with keeping their spaces and circles non-hierarchical, leaderless, structureless, and spontaneous. They refuse to resolve internal conflict on a political level and instead insist all conflict must be solved within the realm of the social. This means that they take things that are not nefarious and treat them as if they were nefarious. When someone in their circles is accused of something, they "resolve" it through shaming, shunning, spreading rumours and innuendos about that person, ruining their reputation online, and so on. Everything inevitably falls into one gigantic clusterfuck.
Let's think of an example here:
Tommy the anarchist is accused of sexually abusing Amanda the anarchist. Amanda tells everyone in the local anarchist collective about what Tommy did to her and demands they do something about him. However, Tommy is a very good organizer, does a ton of activism, and has the correct politics on everything, so the collective is a bit reluctant to remove him. Tommy's biggest supporter in the collective, Ashley, is having none of this and accuses Amanda of lying. She takes to social media and spreads rumours about Amanda being a cop, wrecker, closeted reactionary, TERF, Zionist, NazBol, doodoo head, whatever. Half the collective is now against Amanda. However, the other half believes Amanda and now spreads rumours about Ashley and tries to get her fired from her job. Pretty soon, the entire anarchist collective falls apart without ever truly resolving the issue of whether or not Tommy was an abuser and how to hold him accountable if he was. See what I mean?
Anarchists live in the myth that we can make crucial decisions spontaneously by coming together at a random time, forming a consensus, and then splitting off without any kind of formal structure. This is nonsense and they all know it. Hell, we can see this very clearly in the past 35 years of anarchist activism. Anarchists, by in large, have failed to metabolize the lessons of the 90s and early 2000s anti-globalization movement, mid-and-late 2000s Anti-Iraq War movement and finally Occupy Wall Street when American anarchism hit its climax. Specifically, that the masses of people are looking for structure, strategy and consistency. The above said movements were merely a boom-bust cycle of street protests that lacked any coherence or strategy: take to the streets, escalate (smash windows, set cars on fire), get arrested, pay the fine and bail out, rinse and repeat. Nowhere was there any real attempt to force immediate material concessions from the capitalist state.