chapotraphouse

As a gentle bit of self-crit, here is a Hexbear Search of "anarchist" comments sorted by controversial. This was from before the downvote was removed, so it's mostly ancient history. In all of our defense, I see this pattern in every leftist space. It's in the air. There is a tacit enmity between the two camps that goes all the way back to Marx and Bakunin, reinforced by a long sorrowful history of mutual bloodshed. We pass on this trauma one microaggression at a time. It becomes learned behavior.

This clash is inevitable, because both camps represent a Thesis-Antithesis that needs to work itself into a Synthesis. Anarchists work from the bottom-up carefully because they are concerned with maintaining legitimacy in a context of many different/opposing interests. Leninists work from the top-down to (cross-)organize into large political blocks because they are concerned with effectiveness in a context of countering other large politically organized blocks. To a Leninist Anarchist spaces look chaotic and slow, while to an Anarchist Leninist spaces look stifling and coercive. We need both; effectiveness without legitimacy destroys itself, and legitimacy without effectiveness goes nowhere. The path towards that Synthesis starts with burying hatchets. A lot of our bad blood comes from conflicts that no longer exist in living memory and are not worth fighting over today.