After seeing a megathread praising Mao Zedong, an actual mass killer, and a post about a guy saying “99% of westerners are 100000000000% sure they know what happened in ‘Tiny Man Square’ […] the reasons for this are complex and involve propaganda […],” I am genuinely curious what leads people to this belief system. Even if propaganda is involved when it comes to Tiananmen Square, it doesn’t change the atrocities that were/are committed everywhere else in China.
I am all for letting people believe what they want but I am lost on why one would deliberately praise any authoritarian system this hard.
Can someone please help me understand why this is such a large and prominent community? How have these ideals garnered such a following outside of China?
EDIT: Thank you to everyone who has responded! This thread has been very insightful :)
See this is why I’m an anarchist and not a state socialist. Like I’m not “squishy” about violence, but I don’t think that the state is an optimal or even suboptimal-but-certifiably-good way to liberate the masses. States are just not practical for what anarchists want to achieve.
That would be a scathing indictment of anarchism if that was the result of an anarchist revolution. I’m not interested in building “big” “powerful” societies; I want to build networks of consensual, decentralized, sustainable, free communities. Anarchists and Marxist-Leninists have different metrics for success.
Just to be clear: Marxist-Leninists are not state socialists, in the sense that it’s not an end goal. Socialism before the withering away of the state is a transitional measure that’s considered necessary by MLs while classes still exist in the world, and therefore class warfare.
What is your timeline for creating this consensual, decentralized, sustainable, free community and how does it compare to the timeline on ecological collapse? When an already extant “big powerful society” such as the US comes to knock you over what do you propose to do about it that won’t require you to establish a disciplined military of your own?
ASAP. In the here and now. Don’t mistake anarchism for moderation or flippancy. I am honestly not sure if worldwide anarchism can be realized faster than the climate crisis, but in my view it has the best shot out of all the existing plans.
IMO in the here and now, part of anarchist praxis needs to be organizing defensive militas, frankly in a way that aesthetically might resemble a military, but is in practice informed by anarchist principles and goals. Anarchists need to wage actual war against the bourgeoisie and world governments. Frankly, we need our ideas to be more widespread and accepted by the masses, i.e. numbers — a reality that, in my view, equally affects all communist struggles, and no ideology can overcome. IMO, militias should be formed for specific purposes, disbanded as soon as their mission is complete, and only exist subject to the people they claim to defend.
The need to disassemble and then reform your military inbetween each action doesn’t strike you as an extreme limitation? Just how fast do you think you can pull a militia together if you want to do it from scratch in response to each case of capitalist aggression? I agree that both our movements would need much greater numbers in order to challenge the west militarily but I don’t see how an anarchist force could maintain those numbers if they had them when you only ever want to field completely green, newly formed units. Seems like your just feeding shelter cats to coyotes.
It is, but I think it’s a necessary one. But also, I do want to be a bit more concrete about what constitutes an “action”. I’m really thinking that “liberation of region X” is an example of an action, so it is possible to have militias standing for many years. Honestly…no, I really don’t want to see militias lasting any longer or getting any bigger. And that is a feature, not a bug.
I mean I’ve never gone to war before, but can’t we train people to be “generically” good at fighting so that we can form and reform units in finite time? I.e., how to use firearms, basic urban and wilderness survival, basic tactics, and how to be part of a unit? Because yeah, it would be a bad move to just throw complete rookies into battle with no training.
Sure individual veterans of many different militias would accrue individual military knowledge but no amount of individual knowledge is sufficient on its own, there is also a need for institutional knowledge. Leadership must have an intimate understanding of the force which it leads. Effective logistical practices must be developed. Long term relationships with other allied forces must be cultivated. All of this is achieved through the repeated iteration and refinement of military institutions over many subsequent conflicts. These necessities cannot be liquidated and reformed at will.