>>2682777Everything you said is spot on, but even lenin himself was inspired by nihilism. What is to be done is literally named after a nihilist pamphlet lenin read while in university. Though, the claim that Maoism's libertarian left presence has faded mistakes formal label for actual lasting influence. What occurred was not disappearance but transformation and disconnection from romanticizing past failures. Many anarchists and maoists shed explicit political identities not through defeat but through practical development and theory. The organizational intelligence generated in 1960s-70s experiments did not vanish; it dispersed, mutated, integrated into new theoretical forms that deliberately refuse the orthodox marxist and anarchist approach alike.
The observation of ex-IRA operatives supporting Greek anarchist hunger strikes and movements in the 2000s illustrates this precisely. These were not ideological tourists performing solidarity across camps; they recognized shared organizational practices; distributed coordination, cellular security, sustained pressure through social tension, praxis that transcended their formal political differences.
Contemporary praxis bears these traces without announcing them as a singular idea. The decentralized network forms that characterize effective contemporary organizing with horizontal coordination, temporary delegation, base area infrastructure, security culture all derive not from anarchist theory read in isolation but from the historical synthesis attempted in Mao-era experiments and subsequent revolutionary movements.
The apparent decline of both traditions is more of an optical illusion produced by a lack of a singular term used to describe the new approach. It almost seems as if there's no active anarchists and maoists left, with how invisible they seem in a sea of social conflict. Yet organizational intelligence has surely persisted, transmitted through practice, and ultimately developed through new theoretical languages that refuse the constraints of old labels.
What the libertarian left of the 1960s-70s attempted blending of coordination and autonomy, structure and fluidity, strategic patience and insurrectionary urgency..continues in forms that no longer announce themselves as Maoist or anarchist. The surprise is not that this presence faded but that observers still expect it to appear in the same recognizable form as the past.