Class Struggle Anarchist 🔻

Why are parts of the extreme left suddenly mourning the USSR? Because the whole package of anti-Zionism, rage against workers parties and left Democrats, anti-humanism and "disarm Ukraine" leads to the question of alternatives. You either design one from scratch that can never be realised (cf Benanav in NLR) or you accept "really existing" socialism was better than capitalism. Problem is, it was worse and that's why it collapsed. Male life expectancy was falling in the USSR long before it ended - and yes the price paid for neoliberalism was high and tragic - but the reason the USSR fell apart was that Brezhnev's "solution" to stagnation was to create sectoral and national bureaucratic empires - ie a communist national bourgeoisie in waiting. And the reason for stagnation was that Stalinist planning cannot compete with, or even produce, an economy based on services and information technology. So the catastrophe was forced collectivisation and the resulting famine, the mass murders of the Great Purge and the acquiescence of the Russian working class in these atrocities. But the whole arc of tragedy - from dissolving the Constituent Assembly in 1918 to the crime and chaos I encountered in Moscow in January 1992, can be traced to one monumental act of stupidity: in The State & Revolution Lenin (a lawyer!) insisted that, in a proletarian dictatorship, there can be no law. A fundamental revision of the term as understood by Marx. The Roman Republic invoked "dictatorship" 92 times but in each case reversed it as the law demanded. Hal Draper showed was is this concept of a lawless dictatorship that is the root of Bolshevik self destruction. Allan Weeks showed (and I trace this in more detail in Reds) how he derived this from the first Russian Blanquist, Pyotr Tkachev. The Bolsheviks were warned by everybody - Mensheviks, anarchists, left-social democrats, Left SRs, Luxemburg, Kautsky... but they ignored the warnings. And here's the relevance to today's ultra left shitshow. The people mobilising Soviet nostalgia take the same attitude to human rights as Lenin did to law - they have no means of creating a state that can pursue social justice, they reject the idea of democracy (another Lenin 101 idea) and have decided that the only way forward lies through the acceleration of global catastrophe - and since there is no Soviet Union and the working class lacks agency, China, Iran, their terrorist proxies and global south authoritarian states will have to do the job. At least when there was a proletariat with class consciousness Leninism was a plausible fantasy. Today it's a conceit. One Labour councillor has more power to make change than 00s of masked-up people hyperventilating about decolonisation theory. Same goes for any social activist prepared to work through horizontal and directed network campaigns, and any trade unionist who understands the power of affiliation to Labour. We are all more powerful than the Red-Browns. Basically neo-Stalinism is inculcating the politics of despair among those who embrace it, so it's no wonder they become Soviet nostalgics. And the worst of them - the late Domenico Losurdo and his fans - no longer bother denying the crimes of Mao and Stalin; they justify them on grounds of "economic development". That, in turn, is why they have declared war on "Western Marxism" - whereas the Brezhnev-era USSR tolerated it and Dubček embraced it. All traces of Marxism's origins in liberalism and the Enlightenment have to be eradicated (along with its debt to anarchism) - so that the Nazbols can parade around with Hamas and IRI flags and Soviet memorabilia. Finally why do the Red-Browns command so much attention? Answer: Their milieu is awash with PRC, Russian and IRI cash/reward mechanisms. The anarchists, democratic socialists and genuine Greens they wish to "eradicate" are by contrast generally skint.

Two years ago, Naomi Guzman doused her father in lighter fluid and tried to set him on fire, then broke into a church and threatened a priest with a knife. She was found incompetent to stand trial and released. Today, she abducted a toddler and stabbed him before she was shot and killed by police.

the Mensheviks were annoying like you

AOC has privately been “fuming” over the left’s criticism of her as she contemplates running for President “Unfair and counterproductive for the progressive movement” One liberal strategist said that AOC has “lamented that the left was not there for her, that they are never pleased” (Via Axios)

TRITA PARSI: If JD Vance is right that the U.S. went in demanding zero enrichment, then of course this blew up. That was Israel’s red line, not Trump’s original red line of no nuclear weapons. Push for surrender, and you guarantee escalation.

In our interview Evan says “anarchism needs to be eradicated as an ideology” because it promotes an infantile “notion of an ethical solidarity of all peoples against all regimes,” equating “imperialist, Jewish supremacist, or white supremacist formations,” and “anti-imperialist state and national movements in the periphery.” Full conversation will be published on YouTube soon.