I've noticed something about anarchists that i find pretty funny: they'll praise marxist revolutions and revolutionaries AS LONG AS they dont actually succeed.
I've noticed something about anarchists that i find pretty funny: they'll praise marxist revolutions and revolutionaries AS LONG AS they dont actually succeed.
You'll see anarchists praising Rosa Luxemburg, who if they had actually read her writings -- they would see that she was very clearly one of the "authoritarian" socialists that they rail against so much.
You see them praise the Black Panthers, who were supported financially by the DPRK and aligned themselves with the Juche ideology of Kim Il Sung.
They even praise Thomas Sankara, who purged anarchists and arrested syndicalists.
If these people had succeeded, i have no doubt in my mind that anarchists would call them "tankies," they would call their experiments "capitalism with a red flag." And I also have no doubt in my mind that if the October Revolution, Chinese Revolution had been crushed, they would hail Lenin and Mao as proletarian heroes.
Aside from the what it is to be said by the already recomended text on western marxism and christianity by Jones Manoel on RedSails, which I find very fitting here, I have found out by experience that anarchists usually have a very strong tendency to romanticize the act of revolution in general, of sublevation to overthrow the existing hierarchies, and very little focus on what comes after, which is the organization of the new society that is to come.
Chances are that this lack of focus is the result of the development of an anarchist's conceptualization of a post-capitalist society falling an overwhelming majority of times in one of two fields: either authoritarianism (most of us have witnessed an anarchist accidentally developing the idea of vanguards in their search to defend their revolutions) or the most bizarre and impractical modes of production and self-defense that could be concieved, such as the idea that medicines and other highly complex products could ever be produced by individual people as a form of pastime.
This is, overall, too much hassle for the average western anarchist, who doesn't find the need to concern themselves with that simply because, for them, anarchism is just an aesthetic used as a form of expressing one's identity and individuality, and not as a project to work towards.
Edit: Grammar.