Why would communists not get along with anarchists? Communists are anarchists
Also it needs to be remembered that political parties are corporations
this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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What makes you think communists are anarchists? Communism takes democracy to its logical extent. Social democracy is where we govern as a community and we vote on everything that is anything. Laws get voted on and business gets voted on. Communism > the masses decide. Anarchism > I'll do what I think is good for me.
Both are without government
Anarchism > No government
Communism > people work together without classes (means no government because that would put people above others. Your idea of communism being the tyranny of the majority does not stand)
Communism is just a form of anarchy
No, communism is absolutely a form of government. There are elected leaders and policy is still passed. Arguably there is more bureaucracy than in socialist countries if real communism is implemented.
A leader would create class divide, it can’t exist
I think the problem of left unity is a symptom capitalism. Models of anarchism, communism, and socialism have wildly differing systems of social relations, organizing, governance, economics, etc. Even the sub-models in each of these categories have vast differences. But in our political discourse they're all compressed into the same box of the "left", because our prevailing system so dominates the narrative that these other systems are all erroneously viewed through a lens that presumes private property and redistribution of wealth vs no redistribution of wealth as the dividing line. Nevermind the hypocrisy of "redistribution of wealth," as corporations are speedrunning to unjustly pump virtually all forms of wealth into their coffers.
I remember when I was young and dumb and finding myself fascinated by the Venus Project and Zeitgeist Movement. The basic idea seemed so elegant and promising to me: we can use technology to solve our problems, to use technological progress to obsolete scarcity itself!. I tried to chat with people about it, and on more than one occasion somebody would just shut the conversation down with, "But that's socialism." That was the first time I realized something was very broken in our discourse, because it was like, yeah kind of technically, but it's also something very different from what we normally think of what socialism is.
That's kind of what a lot of these labels are, ultimately. Thought stopping cliches.
Marxism-Leninism explicitly calls on using technology to eliminate scarcity. That's what collectivized agriculture and mass electrification were for. Along the development pathway the leadership sort of forgot this because they ran into a lot of problems (not the least of which was an incredible amount of hostility from the capitalist powers).
In my view Zeitgeist was just an update on The State and Revolution, but somehow without the armed overthrow of the government. Like technology will somehow allow us to surpass our class antagonisms and ingrained social structures (eapecially militarism) without toppling the ruling elite. I think it turned out to be a naive view unfortunately.
Yeah, its hard to discuss with someone how the soviets could have worked but they hemorrhaged themselves with war cost when they've been taught "socialism=communism and communism bad". We can still be a republic but have economic socialism.
When I was an anarchist during the Bush years I remember telling an exceptionally crunchy gutterpunk they could use a shower. They accused me of being a Nazi telling them I wanted them to go to the gas chambers. They were then in a grant writing class I took the following summer.
I see this kind of dynamic playing out quite often in online debates about leftism.
Fuck leftist unity, if leftist unity means sacrificing the revolution for some some tyrant to twist class consciousness into a "dictatorship of the proletariat" im not playing along.
DEATH TO REACTION, DEATH TO DECEIT, DEATH TO TYRANNY
Left unity is a lie to use anarchist labor into making their own graves when the state-based socialists get into power.
This meme is from a movie based on the Kangoroo Chronicles books. Atleast the original german versions are quite funny
The People's Front of Judea vs the Fucking Judean People's Front
Anarchists have different goals than communists and use different means/strategies to achieve those goals while using different modes of organization. Just hating capitalism is not enough of a basis to just gloss over those things.
Apart from certain instances when the goals align like antifascist action, international solidarity or support of prisoners, why would working together / doing unity actually be beneficial to achieving anarchist goals?
Many communists would be ideologically open to working with Food Not Bombs. Many anarchists would work with a communist organization to promote universal healthcare.
I don't consider myself an anarchist, but in my personal experience, I see more anarchists practicing praxis. As a noob leftist, I'm going to see who is contributing to my community and help them out.
I suppose these are the "certain instances" you mentioned, but I feel like there are enough of these to comprise all the activism I personally am capable of. I'm studying theory. I listen when people talk about goals and how to restructure society, but I'll be happy if we can pass socialized medicine in my lifetime. We can worry about "after the revolution" when we come to it.
I was reading George Orwell’s hommage to Catalonia the other day and was just shocked by how brutal this was.
For context Orwell served in the POUM (anti-authoritarian marxists) in the spanish civil war against the facist-conservative-feudalist camp. However over time the liberal bourgeoisie and the Stalinist side of the republic (anti-facist forces), allied themselves together and started brutally repressing the Anarchist and Anti-Stalinist Marxist Factions. They basically handed the victory over to the facists by purging the left.
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