/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

anarchists when they succeed reinvent marxism
marxists when they succeed reinvent capitalism
capitalists when they succeed reinvent anarchism

A lot of your questions are just out of scope. Might as well criticize atheism for not having rules against rape and murder.

>>2831925
> Sorry if "the bosses and the state exploit the workers" is too vague for you
It is vague. How does this exploitation occur? What are its characteristics? What makes someone a worker and what makes someone a boss? These all need to be addressed sufficiently well to proceed.
> Most anarchists use the framework of class struggle and desire a dictatorship of the proletariat, they usually don't pretend it's all scientific though
What else is anarchism then based on if not on scientific methods applied to organization? How does this anarchist proletarian dictatorship differ from the Marxist one? From the Leninist?
> You'll find a mix of both, just like in china except the big bourgeoisie would be killed
I am asking a more fundamental question. Are anarchist for or against small production? Are they for large scale industry?
> Unions, social movements, popular education
Yellow unions? All unions? Every social movement? What is "popular education"?
> You can say the same thing about marxism given how revised to sunday it has been by billions of pseuds and opportunists, just the fate of old political movements
Not really. There are some fundamental texts from Marx and Lenin that outline the general idea. There's a communist manifesto that almost all Marxists in some part accept. Is there such a unified declaration of anarchist principles?
> Doing an insurrection and taking over is traditional enough for anarchists, they don't feel like they need to vote
How do you "do" an insurrection? How do you "take" power? What is "power"? I wasn't even close to talking about parliamentary politics, but it seems you, as most anarchist, make every politics equally bourgeois…

>>2831873
Left libertarian is here.

>1
Useless bullshit. There's nothing wrong with throwing out vague metaphysics from the 19th century.
>2
The core of exploitation is coerciveness and inequality of bargaining power.
>concepts like class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat
>as scientific tools
Lolwhat.
>3
>do they tend to favor small-scale production and some forms of private ownership
I do.
>How would they address the claim that anarchism is just bourgeois individualism turned on its head?
It's not a serious claim. Just an evaluation from a Marxist. The real claim would look like some inconsistency in the logic of the opponent. Your shit is just a cry 'I DON'T LIKE YOU'.
>4
>How do anarchists propose to organize and educate workers for class struggle while refusing participation in bourgeois political institutions?
In no way. I don't mind people participating in civil society and 'liberal democracy'.
>5
>How would anarchists respond to the observation that anarchism lacks a unified doctrine
There is such a thing and it's cool. Variety is the spice of life.
>6
I wouldn't.

>>2831948
Terrific bait, too perfect. 10/10

a significant chunk of leftypol marxists seem aggressively, proudly ignorant. The type to refuse to read anarchist's writings on a variety of subjects and then act like their own ignorance is a gotcha

>>2831978
>to read anarchist's writings
I can name Marxist writers that people should read and they more or less cover a more or less unified view of things. Can the same be said of anarchists? Is there any canon? This is like saying, oh, you're criticizing protestants, but you do not know the particularities of every sect. Well, yes, science requires abstraction and generalization, and I agree that I might make mistakes when doing these processes, so I would appreciate if you can you tell me at which point did I say something that's not in line with 'general' tendencies of anarchism.

>>2831978
>The type to refuse to read anarchist's writings on a variety of subjects and then act like their own ignorance is a gotcha
This is unfortunately most people, and not at all unique to leftypol.

>>2831873
1&2. Most early "classical" anarchists fully embraced Marx's analysis of exploitation and therefore saw no need to develop a separate theory in this respect.

3. Yes, anarchists are communists.
4. The proletarians don't need to be "educated for class struggle", struggling under the proletarian condition is a material fact of their everyday lives. Revolutionary minorities can only help them to understand why and encourage them to develop class autonomy. Participation in bourgeois political institutions is the role of would-be managers on the left wing of Capital, not communists.
5.The workers' movement has never had a unified doctrine. The Marxist milieu has always contained just as many internal contradictions and fragmentation as the anarchist milieu.
6.This "charge" is merely a product of your own Bernsteinite inclinations

>>2831873
>1. […] their analysis of exploitation has remained largely vague and general?
Because exploitation is indeed vague and general. The form of exploitation that a woman endures in the first world is not the same as what an indian worker living in the slums of Dubaï endures. Meticulously defining exploitation as XYZ conditions leads to the possibility of your theory being made obsolete despite its kernel of truth.

>2. […] How do anarchists explain the origins and development of exploitation?
Exploitation, broadly speaking, is simply when one individual is deprived of his agency, of potential self-realization, by external constraints imposed on him. This varies tremendously from which currents of anarchism you're interested in but the broad definition of exploitation under anarchism is closer to the concept of alienation from Marx than the economic definition of exploitation

>3. […] How would they address the claim that anarchism is just bourgeois individualism turned on its head?
Bourgeois individualism occurs when a member of the bourgeoisie realizes his alienation but doesn't escape the categories inherent to his social position. Libertarians are an example of bourgeois individualism, because they understand that the state or other institutions can hinder their individuality but they fail to grasp that private ownership of the means of productions or money are also imposef categories. They fail to do so because they've integrated so deeply the illusion of money that they cannot escape it and come to mistake self-emancipation for maximizing wealth

>4. How do anarchists propose to organize and educate workers for class struggle while refusing participation in bourgeois political institutions?
There's a difference between organizing to raise awareness and to commit political acts, and participating in bourgeois politics. In theory communists should have similar means of organizing because they shouldn't be participating in bourgeois politics. Anarchists usually have their own organizations and parties by which they vehiculate their messages

>5. How would anarchists respond to the observation that anarchism lacks a unified doctrine, elementary revolutionary teaching, or basic theory?
That's because the word "anarchism" is an empty signifier. It's like saying "socialism". Of course there won't be a unified doctrine for "anarchism", but there is one for communalism, for anarcho-communism, for anarcho-primitivism etc.

>5. […] How do they view the historical fragmentation of the workers’ movement often attributed to anarchist influence
Thank god anarchists did so because otherwise communism would only be known as the failed bureaucratic mess that was marxism-leninism. I don't think MLs actually understand how much they've fucked the movement lol

>6. How would anarchists avoid the charge that rejecting bourgeois politics in practice ends up subordinating the working class to bourgeois politics
I think that you're referencing a very specific type of anarchist methodology, popularized in the west, which consists essentially of "opting out" of society and to go live in the woods or something along the lines of that. This is not necessarily representative of the movement as a whole. Rojava and the Zapatistas didn't do this sort of actions, they were militarily trained and went around capturing cities. The sort of anarchism that you describe in the west occurs because class antagonisms are simply not that prevalent, to the point where a local population would willingly abandon the state for a new form of social organization. Therefore, it's not that opting out is the best strategy, but simply that given the material conditions in the west, you can't really declare war on the state without mass approval, which is something practically unfeasible to get.

>>2832007
Interesting, thanks for writing this up. I don't think I agree with some parts of what you said, but that's okay. I just want you to know your effort didn't go to waste.

>>2832005
>Most early "classical" anarchists fully embraced Marx's analysis of exploitation and therefore saw no need to develop a separate theory in this respect.
>Most
Name the minority

>>2832058
Tat is that you?

>>2832069
いいえ、私ではありませんよ（ウインク）

>>2831874
giga trvth tsar bomba

>>2832007
>Because exploitation is indeed vague and general.
Isn't the point of capitalistic production that exploitation is now in wage-work? That changes the entire MoP and society with it. Hardly 'vague' to describe something particular? I agree that you can stratify and categorize exploitation in many different ways, but at its core, wage-work is what has to be abolished? This is what makes capitalism possible, no? The kernel is the general, not the most particular, right?
>Exploitation, broadly speaking, is simply when one individual is deprived of his agency, of potential self-realization, by external constraints imposed on him.
Not to pull out Das Authority, but this definition means someone who depends on a timed process (like production) is exploited, because his agency is deprived for a couple of hours, or some set of time. How is this more useful than the wage-work outlook? Exploitation and alienation are different beasts, they are surely interconnected, as all things are, but capitalist alienation is a consequence of capitalist (wage-work) exploitation, they aren't, and cannot, be equal problems…
>They fail to do so because they've integrated so deeply the illusion of money that they cannot escape it and come to mistake self-emancipation for maximizing wealth
Isn't this just idealism + voluntarism at the end of your analysis?

The entire answer to 4. is a non-sequitur. Bourgeois politics means the politics the bourgeois state curates. I am asking: do anarchists refuse participation in bourgeois institutions on principle, or do they accept that they can be in certain circumstances used to advance the cause of socialism.

>That's because the word "anarchism" is an empty signifier. It's like saying "socialism".
Better communism than socialism, and even then, the core of communism is i) abolish private property, ii) abolish the parasite state and replace it with the proletarian dictatorship. From the conversation here it seems i) is not something all anarchists agree on and ii) they do not accept the idea of proletarian dictatorship while agreeing to abolish the state.

>failed bureaucratic mess that was marxism-leninism
This is a very dismissive and childish take. Sorry I don't think this is a serious reply.

The sixth point is the only one I almost fully agree with out of what you've written.

>>2832111 (me)
>>That's because the word "anarchism" is an empty signifier. It's like saying "socialism".
>Better communism than socialism, and even then, the core of communism is i) abolish private property, ii) abolish the parasite state and replace it with the proletarian dictatorship. From the conversation here it seems i) is not something all anarchists agree on and ii) they do not accept the idea of proletarian dictatorship while agreeing to abolish the state.
Actually, no, I redact this point. This is practically solved through some kind of Internationale organization, which I know anarchists have.

>>2832111
>Isn't the point of capitalistic production that exploitation is now in wage-work?
You're presupposing a definition of exploitation here and localizing it in the mode of production.

>but at its core, wage-work is what has to be abolished?
>How is this more useful than the wage-work outlook?
The point to abolish is domination. Now, I agree that wage-labor is a form of domination, and thus requires its overcoming, but restricting yourself to wage-labor can make your theory redundant. For instance, how would you give power to the people in the chinese rural communes under Mao ? They didn't have wage-labor, yet were dominated. Simply abolishing wage-labor means nothing if you're reproducing domination under different forms. Bourgeois women can be dominated by their husbands and alienated from their potential, yet they do not get exploited under a wage-labor form. If exploitation is your only lens of analysis, you risk being unable to explain certain forms of domination.

>capitalist alienation is a consequence of capitalist (wage-work) exploitation
Not really, it's more that capitalism exhibits multiple form of alienations. But most importantly, alienation from species-being isn't based upon capitalism, it's based upon potentiality for self-realization.

>do anarchists refuse participation in bourgeois institutions on principle, or do they accept that they can be in certain circumstances used to advance the cause of socialism.
Anon the whole point of marx's critique of bourgeois politics is that they can't be used to advance the cause of socialism at a qualitative level. The "principle" you speak of is simply feasability and is not found within bourgeois politics

>This is a very dismissive and childish take
No I'm being entirely serious. Apart from Cuba, there exists no marxist-leninist state that hasn't reverted back to a capitalist MoP. The quasi-entirety of criticism directed at communism or alternatives form of organization is based on the soviet experience. Had we not had the very few anarchists experiments, we would literally have no easy counter-factual to hand for those saying "communism must inevitably fall into stalinism". You might not think that this is a serious matter, but the entirety of the movement since the 1970s has been oscillating between reformism or alternative forms of leninism precisely because the USSR fucked up so much. It's no wonder that trotskyists seethe so much at you guys given that you've essentially held the monopoly of "communism" despite very heavily distorting it.

>>2832141
>You're presupposing a definition of exploitation here and localizing it in the mode of production.
Capitalism and wage-work has become universal via de-colonization and market liberalization, sans a few lone states like DPRK. I'm not taking a definition and looking for an example, I'm looking at the most general 'exploitation' and defining the mode of production around it. The first is idealist, the second is materialist. There's no longer the Chinese rural commune you talk about. Closest you have are some indigenous peoples with some non-capitalistic society, but these are <1% of the entire world. Not to say they shouldn't be allowed to practice their lives how they please, but it is weird to build your worldview based on such a small, marginal, and disappearing community.

>The point to abolish is domination
Sorry, but what does this mean? Domination is a vague term. It can be a purely subjective feeling. Like you seem to know the words but then you don't know how to use them. <Bourgeois (?) women can be 'dominated' (?) by their husbands, and alienated from their potential (??)
Alienation from potential? This is a word salad.

>the whole point of marx's critique of bourgeois politics is that they can't be used to advance the cause of socialism at a qualitative level
What? This is not true at all. Later on as Marx's view of the state developed he came to the idea that what needs to be abolished is the bureaucratic-military state machine, not the state in its totality… the bourgeois institutions of no use will be abolished, not all institutions… And you are again not addressing the question: would an anarchist (party) ever participate in a bourgeois parliament? Communists would, for example, but not as a principle, but as a strat.

>the entirety of the movement since the 1970s has been oscillating between reformism or alternative forms of leninism precisely because the USSR fucked up so much
This is the kernel of truth in your post. I don't agree with how you got to the point or the conclusion you draw from it, but I don't want this to become a debate about merits of state socialist and anarchist organization for the umpteenth time.

>>2832551
>Capitalism and wage-work has become universal
It has except it's not the only form of domination exerced nowadays. There are just multiple levels on which domination is applied. What do you think contradicts most a woman's self-emancipation in the third world (~35% of the global population), her patriarchal domination engrained in her society, or her local work as a cleaning lady for the local bourgeoisie ?

>Sorry, but what does this mean
Alienation = being stripped off something by external factors.
Alienation from potential = being stripped off your potential (i.e. being more satisfied with your work, having more control over your own life etc) by external constraints (like the wage-labor form but not exclusively).
Domination = a control of your freedom imposed on you by other people

>he came to the idea that what needs to be abolished is the bureaucratic-military state machine, not the state in its totality
What does "state" mean to you ? Do you think anarchists want to abolish any social organization ?

>would an anarchist (party) ever participate in a bourgeois parliament?
Again this is a redundant dichotomy because participation in the state through electoralism will never bring about an anarchist revolution (or a communist one too)
But yes, if somehow in an alternative universe the control of the political power could simply be won through elections then yes, anarchists would.

>This is the kernel of truth in your post
What ?

>>2831936
reality is vague. subatomic particles can't even have their position and velocity known at the same time, and existentially they are excitations of a universal substrate. will you fight or perish? That is the question.

>>2831874
>anarchists when they succeed actually implement marxism
>marxists when they succeed become capitalists
ftfy

>How would anarchists respond to the criticism that, over 150 years of organized anarchist thought (from Bakunin and the International in 1866 onward, or even Stirner before that), their analysis of exploitation has remained largely vague and general?
Don't care, exploitation is something I feel and intuitively understand.
>How do anarchists explain the origins and development of exploitation? And how would they account for the evolution of society without relying on concepts like class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat as scientific tools?
The origins of exploitation lie in the development of agriculture/civilization, and the stratification of society that emerged through that. Since then, class conflict has been a definitive factor in the "progress of history", yes.
>Are anarchists generally committed to social ownership of the means of production, or do they tend to favor small-scale production and some forms of private ownership? How would they address the claim that anarchism is just bourgeois individualism turned on its head?
Social ownership is good as long as it empowers each individual to govern themselves and directly manage the affairs of their life/labour, if it fails at that then it can be swiftly discarded. Anarchism is different from "bourgeois individualism" in that an anarchist wants to be that absolute authority over their own life, whereas liberals tend to go on about 'rights', 'laws', 'equality', 'private property', etc. Essentially liberalism only permits freedoms within the confines of what it deems acceptable, as does Christianity, monarchy, feudalism, among others.
>How do anarchists propose to organize and educate workers for class struggle while refusing participation in bourgeois political institutions? How would they avoid offering what critics call one‑sided, disconnected fixes, especially when global coordination seems necessary and anarchism’s individualist tendencies may undermine it?
I don't really care about organizing the working class, it should be obvious by now that socialism will never happen in your lifetime.
If anything, the best way to "organize" would be to build pockets of life outside of hierarchical society, and to slowly expand these more and more. "Build the new world within the shell of the old", as it were.
>How would anarchists respond to the observation that anarchism lacks a unified doctrine, elementary revolutionary teaching, or basic theory? How do they view the historical fragmentation of the workers’ movement often attributed to anarchist influence, and what can be learned from the short‑lived anarchist “state‑like” experiments?
That's the point of anarchism. It isn't dogmatic, it's about individual freedom and self-empowerment.
I personally think that the history of the state-like experiments shows us why syndicalism is flawed, but I'd need a lot of time to expand upon that.
>How would anarchists avoid the charge that rejecting bourgeois politics in practice ends up subordinating the working class to bourgeois politics—all under the guise of being “above” or “outside” traditional political action?
It is the fault of the workers for allowing themselves to be led and exploited, I have no interest in waiting on the masses before I can be free. This is something they'll have to figure out on their own.

Anarchism as a whole doesn't have a single theory of exploitation.

Marxism is defined by its analytical tools (hismat, diamat, critique of political economy etc) but to get any detailed theory of how a revolution would be carried out you need to get to specific schools of thought like council communism or Leninism.

Anarchism works in the reverse that it is defined by its theories of how a revolution is to be carried out but is as a whole agnostic on detailed analytical tools, and you have to look for specific theorists for this. Most anarchists are materialists, but there are idealists anarchists for example.

> Are anarchists generally committed to social ownership of the means of production

Yes, those that call themselves anarchists and aren't should be bullied and disregarded

> How do anarchists propose to organize and educate workers for class struggle while refusing participation in bourgeois political institutions?

Build a dual power. Build structures that are genuinely useful to normal people like unions, coops, mutual aid groups, local assemblies. Make it so they are radical, scalable and accessible.

>>2834264
>>How do anarchists propose to organize and educate workers for class struggle while refusing participation in bourgeois political institutions?

Why do people think just anarchists do this? This is exactly why Juche is one of the only forms of Marxist-Leninist thought that doesn't have a party in the USA. Western Juche thought tends to favor self-reliance and autonomy from organizations that aren't forged from the relationships built in the heat of the workers insurrection. I don't get why so many self-proclaimed Leninists today are so deeply anti‑Lenin. The well‑read, active, communist anarchists ya know the ones who actually move, are closer to the revolutionary spirit of Lenin than any suit and tie leader of the CPUSA / ACP will ever be. What Lenin was doing in his time was experimental, bold, reckless in the best sense, and way ahead of the population's comfort zone. He was forged in the same nihilist currents that produced insurrectionary individualism and the propaganda of the deed. Lenin did not work within bourgeois institutions for social change. Most of you have liberal praxis with communist imagery. You need to stop that, and awaken your revolutionary spirit.

Communist praxis is what the anarchists do. You see an empty building? Take it. Friends are hungry and there's hoarded food in the neighborhood? Take it. No rights at work? Experiment. Find a way to seize them. Don't be afraid to fail. The only reason so many people think all revolutionary action belongs to anarchists is that the modern "Leninist parties" have been thoroughly infiltrated and captured by the CIA and its NGO auxiliaries. Any action that could actually build the workers insurrection over time is denounced as "anarchism" or "adventurism," which in turn makes people think anarchism just means "revolutionary communist." So a Marxist refuses a police dispersal order and lights a barricade? Suddenly, in the eyes of the revisionist, she's an anarchist.

Modern Marxist‑Leninists are pussies compared to the old guard. They've spent decades tailing the Democratic Party, denouncing anyone who fights back, and purging anyone who reads Mao or suggests genuine praxis. Their rejection of Maoism isn't a principled stand; it's a sign that their praxis is already libbed up beyond repair. They've traded the vanguard for a seat in the spheres of political power. Lenin would despise them. The anarchists, ironically, are the ones keeping his spirit alive, not the NGOs who use his name to sell news papers.

>>2831873
>How do anarchists propose to organize and educate workers for class struggle while refusing participation in bourgeois political institutions?


There are hundreds of not thousands of schools across South East Asia that exist outside the state, are nonprofit and are part of community networks that place grads in rural communities as farmers pastors teachers and health workers

Not anarchism in your Anglo box category where you think everyone has to have read 19th century theorists to BE anarchist, but actually existing anarchy

>>2834391
>He was forged in the same nihilist currents that produced insurrectionary individualism and the propaganda of the deed. Lenin did not work within bourgeois institutions for social change.
Stop peddling this myth. Lenin was a Kautskyite till 1917.

>>2834456
>>Myth
>>Kautskyite until 1917

The poverty of contemporary leftist thought is a failure of method. Too many revolutionaries have internalized the logic of the very commodity form they claim to oppose, ideologies are treated as brand loyalties, theoretical shifts as insurance policies (“I was with X, then I switched to Y in 1917”). This is the spectacle colonizing the last refuge of critique. Ideas are not levels in a video game. There is no “unlock” moment, no final boss of theory, and shifts in an individuals development as a revolutionary are not like switching brands or products. To think so is to reduce revolutionary materialism to a consumer choice and that is liberal idealism of the most vulgar kind.

The historical Lenin cannot be fitted into the straitjacket of a modern party line. Those who attempt to scrub the nihilist fire from his formation are engaged in hagiographic revisionism. Lenin himself did not hide his roots. The title What Is To Be Done? is not a coincidence; it is a direct homage to Chernyshevsky’s nihilist novel, a text that depicted revolution as a total negation of the existing order, a refusal of compromise, a leap into the unknown. Lenin’s older brother, Alexander Ulyanov, was not a footnote; he was a a revolutionary inspired by the early nihilist conspirator hanged for attempting to assassinate the Tsar. That event was not a minor biographical detail; it was a material rupture, a underlying trauma that forged Lenin’s will to struggle. To dismiss these facts as “mythology” is to refuse to see how revolutionary consciousness is actually produced. That is through fire, not through seminar alone.

Nihilism, properly understood, is not an end but a dialectical tool. It is the hammer that shatters bourgeois morality, the morality of property, of deference, of assimilation into society, of “responsible” reform. Once the fragments are cleared, what remains is the raw material for a new kind of will, the will to power of the working class, the will to self‑reliance, the will to destroy and to build. This is precisely the insight we wish to push here, that the masses, when stripped of their ideological chains, and awakened, are capable of becoming masters of their own destiny. through the conscious, collective act of negation and creation.

>>2834468
>Chernyshevsky’s nihilist novel
Chernyshevsky was a utopian socialist being he was part of the pauperized aristocracy and WITBD is a practical call to spread narodnik propaganda. Rakhmetov is not a nihilist character. Quite the opposite, he is a man of very high principles.
+ terrible ai slop, try using your own words, I'm just replying because some unlucky anon might take you seriously

>>2834472

Cry harder, revisionist. The Russian nihilist movement was unpolished ore from which Russian revolutionary Marxism was smelted. Flawed as it was, without those nihilists and their war against the Tsar, there is no Lenin. No Bolsheviks. No October. This is the conclusion anyone who properly analyzes history comes to.

And even the Black Panthers understood this. A full century after Nechayev penned the Catechism of a Revolutionist, they republished it in 1969, being the first to publish it's English translations in the USA. The key founders of the panthers carried a copy on them, with mao's red book, including Huey P Newton.

>>2834462
Sasha U. =/= Vladi U.
It's more likely Lenin was so rabidly anti-adventurism because he wanted to dissuade peeps from going down the same dead end path as his older bro.
You're right that context is important and it's erroneous to look at the debates of those times from the perspective of contemporary ideology cheerleaders, but one of these days you're going to have to make a qualitative leap and assume the necessity of complete rupture with Leninoid Kautskyite thought. You can do it fam.

>>2834474

Who cares what the panthers did. Black Panthers were hot headed larping adventurists who deviated from the CPUSA line. Look how that ended killed, jailed or long, sad lives of addiction and poverty. The end result of nihilism.

>>2834474
>Flawed as it was, without those nihilists and their war against the Tsar, there is no Lenin.
Okay? What point are you trying to make? Without Bakunin there is also no Marx? Yeah, some things are reactions to other things?

>>2834474
>The Russian nihilist movement was unpolished ore from which Russian revolutionary Marxism was smelted.
Not really. Emancipation of Labor was influenced mostly by western (SPD) ideas. Again, Lenin was a Kautskyite up to 1917.

>>2834484
>Not really. Emancipation of Labor was influenced mostly by western (SPD) ideas.

The objection, while factually pointing to the influence of the SPD on the Emancipation of Labour group and Lenin's pre‑1917 alignment with Kautsky, mistakes a quantitative influence for the qualitative rupture that defines Leninism. Materialist dialectics does not deny the importation of Western Marxist theory into Russia; it demands an analysis of why that theory was received so violently and what pre‑existing subjective conditions allowed it to take root in a semi‑feudal empire. The answer is the nihilist tradition.

The Marxist historian Vladimir Brovkin confirms that "Lenin was the product of the nihilists, materialists, and propaganda by the deed of the 1860s and 1870s". His professional revolutionaries were not merely a copy of the SPD; they were an adaptation of the conspiratorial Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) to industrial conditions. Again, Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done?, a foundational text of Russian nihilism, was an “enormous impact” on Lenin, whose own pamphlet borrows the title. These are Lenin's own words.

You are correct that Lenin cited Kautsky as the ultimate authority in the pre‑war period, and that his organisational theory developed out of this period. This was the stage of absorption. Lenin consumed the SPD model, but the nihilist fire in his belly, the utter contempt for all legal niceties, the willingness to operate outside the law, the belief that a determined minority could impose its will on history, meant he could never be contained by it. When the SPD collapsed into chauvinism in 1914, many of the nihilist revolutionaries had later emerged as the Bolsheviks. The Black Panther Party understood this history, which is why they ended up being the first American publisher of Nechayev’s Catechism of a Revolutionist in 1969 citing it as a "program for 'merciless destruction'"

To put it in more simple terms, The Western influence on the Emancipation of Labour group is the theoretical aspect of lenin's development; the nihilist tradition is the practical and subjective aspect. Without the nihilist pre‑condition (the "unpolished ore"), Lenin would have remained a second‑rate Kautskyite professor. Without the Western Marxist import, the nihilists would have remained stuck in anarchist individual propaganda of the deed. The revolution occurred when the nihilist will seized the Marxist science and bent it to the material conditions of Tsarist Russia.


>>2834482
>>Okay? What point are you trying to make? Without Bakunin there is also no Marx? Yeah, some things are reactions to other things?

Read closely, my points are plain. This isn't about one thinker "depending" on the other and Marx and Bakunin did not require each other's subsequent developments to forge their revolutionary paths. They came from the same fountainhead of the Young Hegelian networks of the 1830s and 1840s. Both were shaped by the post Hegelian cauldron, Feuerbach's inversion of theology, and the call to a "philosophy of practical action" and from this shared matrix, they went on to elaborate their own distinct, but parallel, revolutionary philosophies. Their philosophical starting point was identical, Hegel, Feuerbach, and the Hegelian Left. The young Bakunin was as much a figure of the Hegelian Left as the young Marx, both absorbing its dialectical spirit, its materialism, its drive to negate the old order. They were born from the same kindling. That is what I would say.

The core problem is that most leftists even those steeped in Marxist theory misunderstand nihilism. They conflate it with despair, with passivity, with the abandonment of meaning. This is a bourgeois caricature. In reality, nihilism is not an ideology but a negation. It is a tool, a scalpel that can be turned inward to excise the spooks of liberal morality, bourgeois sentimentality, and reformist illusion from the revolutionary subject. The result is not a hopeless individual but a stronger, more conscious, and more willful individual who can engage in collective struggle.

Friedrich Engels himself recognized this. In a November 1844 letter to Marx, Engels wrote that he was "entirely in agreement" with Max Stirner's radical egoism, praising "the noble Stirner" and suggesting that his dialectical egoism could serve as a "point of departure for communism." Stirner's philosophy, Engels argued, was essentially dialectical materialism turned inward, the same logic of contradiction and negation applied to the self rather than to society. When you strip away the spooks of God, State, Humanity, and Morality, what remains is the Unique, the creative nothing. And that Unique, in its raw self‑interest, recognizes that cooperation with others is the only way to achieve its own power. This is not a retreat from communism; it is its psychological precondition.

I have seen this process work in practice. Nihilism, properly wielded, can erode the liberal baggage that weighs down many anarchists; the moralism, the faith in "justice and democracy", the horror of power. When that baggage is cleared, what emerges is not a liberal reformer but a will to power, the will of the worker to become master of their own conditions. This is precisely why so many illegalist anarchists, who had already rejected bourgeois law and morality, ended up as Bolsheviks. Victor Serge, who participated in the Bonnot Gang's expropriations, later joined the Bolshevik revolution and became a committed communist. He did not abandon his hatred of the state; he recognized that the Bolshevik seizure of power was the most effective negation of the state yet achieved.

Nihilism, then, does not have to be the enemy of Marxism. It can be it's psychological complement. It clears the ground so that the revolutionary subject can be built without the illusions of bourgeois sentiment.

>>2831873
This is from the organizational anarchist perspective.

1. Exploitation is irreducibly political as well as economic, and the state coproduces class relations rather than merely reflecting them. Kropotkin, the FARJ, Graeber/Wengrow all provide materialist grounding for this.
   
   
2. Hierarchy preceded class. Conquest, gerontocracy, and coercive authority came before stable surplus appropriation. Social development is explained through expansion of voluntary association and contraction of coercion, built prefiguratively rather than seized through a transitional state that will never wither.
   
   
3. Social anarchists, the dominant organized tradition, are committed to social ownership. The bourgeois individualism charge has some force against Tucker's descendants. It has no force against the tradition that built the CNT, which was explicitly anti capitalist and working class in composition.
   
   
4. The refusal is of electoralism, not politics. Unions, councils, direct action, and general strikes are political practice of a different kind. Coordination at scale is achieved through federated horizontal structures the CNT proved this works. Democratic confederalism is the most developed contemporary attempt to scale it further.
   
   
5. Anarchism lacks unified doctrine is intentional. Anarchism covers everything from primitivists to syndicalists. The relevant question is whether specific anarchist tendencies have coherent theory, and platformism and especifismo definitely do. The Dielo Truda Platform was written precisely to address theoretical incoherence after the Makhnovshchina's defeat. The Spanish collectives and free territories of Ukraine weren't organizational failures they worked. They were destroyed militarily by fascist armies and Soviet betrayal, not by internal collapse.
   
   
6. The dichotomy between "participate in bourgeois politics" and "have no politics" is false. Social insertion, which is embedding within unions, councils, and mutual aid networks is a political practice. The Leninist alternative's track record isn't better. The vanguard becomes the new ruling class. The last century of evidence confirms this.
   
   

These were shorter answers. So if you have more questions/critiques ask away.

>>2831936

>It is vague. How does this exploitation occur? What are its characteristics? What makes someone a worker and what makes someone a boss?

A worker is someone who must sell their labor to survive because they don't own productive resources. A boss is someone who owns productive resources and therefore can extract surplus from those who do the work. Exploitation occurs through this structural relationship not through individual bad behavior but through the wage relation itself. It's the same basic analysis as Marx. The anarchist addition is that the state isn't just a tool of this class relation but co produces it. For example, enclosure, legal enforcement of property, suppression of horizontal institutions are all state functions that make capitalism possible.

>What else is anarchism based on if not scientific methods?

Materialist analysis of power structures rather than a teleological stage theory. The disagreement with Marxism isn't about method, it's about whether history has a predetermined destination requiring a transitional state to get there.

>Are anarchists for or against small production, large scale industry?

Social anarchists favor collective ownership and management of large scale industry through worker councils and federations. Not small production as a romantic ideal, not state ownership, but direct worker administration.

Yellow unions? All unions? Every social movement? What is "popular education"?

Revolutionary unions. Which are ones built to develop worker power toward abolishing the wage relation, not to negotiate better terms within it. The distinction matters because business unions and yellow unions are explicitly designed to contain exactly the kind of disruption that creates revolutionary conditions. Popular education means political education developed from within the class rather than handed down by a vanguard. This includes study circles, reading groups, internal organizational education. Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed is the most developed theory of this.

Is there a unified declaration of anarchist principles?

The Dielo Truda Platform (1926) for platformists, written by Makhno and others after the defeat of the Ukrainian free territory specifically to address the problem of theoretical incoherence. The FARJ's Social Anarchism and Organisation for especifistas. Neither is as widely read as the Manifesto but both are coherent programmatic documents that serious organizational anarchists actually use. The difference is that Marxism's unity comes partly from having a party that enforces orthodoxy while anarchism's diversity reflects a principled rejection of that enforcement mechanism, for better and worse.

>How do you do an insurrection, take power, what is power?

Power is the capacity to shape the conditions of collective life. You don't "take" it like seizing a building, you build it through institutions that people actually depend on and that operate outside hierarchical control. When those institutions are strong enough that the state cannot function without their cooperation, that's when revolutionary transformation becomes possible. The Spanish CNT didn't take power in 1936, it had built enough institutional power that when the fascist coup came, workers could simply take over the factories and run them.

I attended the first smack a white boy event, where we disrupted the crimethinc anarchist confrence in our neighborhoods which were facing gentrification, ask me anything.

>>2838506
>Materialist analysis of power structures rather than a teleological stage theory. The disagreement with Marxism isn't about method, it's about whether history has a predetermined destination requiring a transitional state to get there.
Are you the same anon spamming the board about Marxist teleology?

>>2838561
link?

>>2838561
No though I've only posted in the other anarchist thread to show the social anarchist perspective