This meme describes anarchists. Are you sure you know what the terms mean?
this post was submitted on 10 May 2025
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Many anarchists are also communists. So I’m not sure I follow.
The subset of communists that do not support a state-backed socialist transition and argue for direct implementations of communism are precisely (mostly) anarchists/libertarians, i think that's what they were saying, so this would be compatible with them being communists.
Not really. I mean yes Anarchists believe that the state inherently breeds authoritarianism and should not be seized but abolished. However, most Anarchists believe in horizontal systems of governance with no centralisation of power, which is different to communism.
Anarchists believe and they are correct, that Marxism, M-L ect are authoritarian and violent.
Communist is a broad word, and i think we have not the same meaning in mind.
To the very core, communism is to think that private property should be abolished. Marx was the most influential thinker of this, and we nowadays call 'communist' all the thinkers and movments that inherit Marx (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Trotsky, etc.). But anarchists also belong to the very root of communism, they just dont follow Marx (historically, they belonged to the First Internationale and were banned by marxists, with Bakunin as their main figure).
Horizontal system of governance can be communism in its broad sense if there is no private property. This explains some movments like 'libertarian communism', which are closer to anarchism than to marxism. But yes, if we equate communism and marxism, anarchists are no communists.
OP is talking about tankies and ML and how he doesn't like them, but the meme he posted doesn't describe those.
also
Anarchists are communists. No one thinks anarcho-capitalists are anarchist except themselves and those they've misinformed.
I'm agender
No one thinks anarcho-capitalists are anarchist except themselves and those they’ve misinformed.
How isnt anarcho-capitalism a form of ancarchy? Like there's no state, and if some company starts acting like a state, then its not anarchy anymore.
Anarchy isn't just "no state", is also non authority by force. Anarchic capitalists think that companies should rule and impose their will by force.
they think that companies should rule and impose their will by force.
at that point it isn't even anarchy though, that's just feudalism. its like a bunch of smaller states
Yup
It describes the tankie strawman of anarchists.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Marxist-Leninists describe their disagreements in terms that turn criticism of them into gibberish. I think it’s exactly what Orwell was writing about based on his experiences.
Nail on the head. There's a particularly active lemming from the tankie instances that always, and purposefully, devolves everything into arguing about everyone else using words incorrectly.
Name and shame
Cowbee!
Facts
I think this meme is referenced to this quote Orwell wrote after fighting for and living the revolution in Spain.
Except for the small revolutionary groups which exist in all countries, the whole world was determined upon preventing revolution in Spain. In particular the Communist Party, with Soviet Russia behind it, had thrown its whole weight against the revolution. It was the Communist Party thesis that revolution at this stage would be fatal and that what was to be aimed at in Spain was not workers' control, but bourgeois democracy. It hardly needs pointing out why 'liberal' capitalist opinion took the same line.
I need to read up on this. Spain in 1936 seems like one of those points in history that waaaaaay too much shit is quietly connected to. What little I know of it comes from For Whom The Bell Tolls
Textbook communism is an ideal utopia that can never be achieved.
Except for in Catalonia
Yeah, but that's just an attempt at something like communism. They didn't reach full communism.
And also Australia
Can you expand on that?
During the Spanish civil war, Catalonia was governed by the Marxists and the Anarchists. They dismantled the state and gave control of the government over to the trade unions. It wasn't perfect, but it was the middle of a war, and they were making progress every month. Until they were betrayed by the Marxist-Leninists.
They were Anarcho-Syndicalist and tbh we have never forgotten them. The collapse of the CNT was one of the greatest tragedies in human history.
So they failed to maintain control?
One of the only large-scale “communist” societies that worked, and it was promptly destroyed by authoritarians.
Stalin: It's going to be at least another hundred years before I can do communism
Catalonia: Yeah so it's been a few weeks and we're already doing communism. Come visit and shoot a Nazi!
Stalin: Fuck fuck fuck they're making me look bad. Uhhhhhhh destroy Catalonia!
Huh? You mean Catalonia in 1936-1937?
Fan of Chomsky I presume?
Read som marxism ABC.
Read som marxism ABC.
"Normal people are too stupid to achieve communism on their own, so they need to be guided by a vanguard party of corrupt yes-men led by a psychopath."
That'd be vanguardism. But that's a component of Leninism, which is itself subset of Marxism.
A part of a part of Marxism probably shouldn't be a working definition of the whole.