Edit for clarity: I’m not asking why the Tankie/Anarchist grudge exist. I’m curious about what information sources - mentors, friends, books, TV, cultural osmosis, conveys that information to people. Where do individuals encounter this information and how does it become important to them. It’s an anthropology question about a contemporary culture rather than a question about the history of leftism.
I’ve been thinking about this a bit lately. Newly minted Anarchists have to learn to hate Lenin and Stalin and whoever else they have a grudge against. They have to encounter some materials or teacher who teaches them “Yeah these guys, you have to hate these guys and it has to be super-personal like they kicked your dog. You have to be extremely angry about it and treat anyone who doesn’t disavow them as though they’re literally going to kill you.”
Like there’s some process of enculturation there, of being brought in to the culture of anarchism, and there’s a process where anarchists learn this thing that all (most?) anarchists know and agree on.
Idk, just anthropology brain anthropologying. Cause like if someone or something didn’t teach you this why would you care so much?
I am an anarchist - anarchists (as far as a monolithic ‘anarchists’ exists) do not hate communists. Anarchists are likely to disagree with some aspects of Marxist-Leninist ideology - they may even hate some aspects of it. But they do not hate communists - many of them would even identify as communists. Essentially all anarchists and communists share the same common end goal - a moneyless, classless, stateless society. Anarchists and MLs disagree on the implementation details - the best way to reach our goal.
The question as to why an anarchist would come to be in opposition to the ML approach for implementing communism - it’s not really about an “information source”, it’s just application of ideology. It would require the creation of a hierarchy. If the anarchist believes that hierarchy to be unjustified, then they will oppose it.
I couldn’t really point to any sort of individual source for my ideology. I came to realise over time that the one common thread that exists for all forms of oppression is power over others - wherever one group has held power over another group, oppression has occurred. If we want to prevent oppression, the answer emerges: get rid of as many imbalances of power as possible.
An anarchist knows that the risk of having a transitional state is that those empowered by the state will abuse that power to betray the people and the revolution. How likely that risk is, and whether it’s viable (or even possible) to achieve communism without a transitional state is the most important aspect which will define how (un)willing the anarchist would be to work with marxist-leninists.
Hope this helps, happy to answer any other questions you have about anarchism.
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2021/10/15/cointelpro-fbi-anarchism-disrupt-left/
Thr answer is always CIA
New anarchists are brought up in lib society, with its attendant hatred of the USSR. They’d have to go quite far out of their way to give MLs a fair shake.
Anarchist here. You don’t get taught to hate MLs, you just get exposed to a lot of MLs making aggressive and ill-informed arguments against anarchism and it gets on your nerves.
I don’t hate Lenin either, even though his writing is full of the same sort of thing, and I don’t particularly disagree with him about much. I think tankie vs anarchist is mostly a disagreement about definitions tbh.
You’re taught to hate communism by society, this is undeniable. I’d bet very few anarchists’ first impressions of communists is from arguments
Yeah, but anarchism is a type of communism. It’s not like society teaches you to hate Marxism-Leninism but not anarcho-syndicalism. You aren’t going to become an anarcho-communist but still hate other branches of communism because society told you to communism is bad.
Yeah no, theres unlimited propaganda against ML states (Cuba, PRC, USSR) that never had to be done against Cataluña or anarchic-syndicalism. It’s why it’s easier to go from liberal to radical liberal than from liberal to Marxist. And personally, tons of self identified “ancoms” buy into the exact same propaganda about “totalitarian regimes,” pulling a “neither Washington nor Beijing” stance because they “aren’t real communism”
