this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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Marxist-Leninist? Or do you mean which features?
I mean that some agitators use similar rhetoric (as in strong focus on class, pointing out state propaganda, militant tendencies, etc.) some even show anti imperialist patterns. I'm glad they exist. I just wonder because IRL, the anarchists I know have zero understanding of the capitalism-fascism contingency for example. The agitators mostly do know it and point it out imo which I like.
Anarchists are also socialists after all, so you will hear a similar rhetoric from them. The main difference is that for anarchists, state is the primary contradiction, rather than class.
Isn't the primary contradictions hierarchies in general, rather than the state specifically?
it depends. hierarchy is just a very abstract concept, so it is practically impossible to analyse + impossible not to have in a big enough org. most anarchists I talked to just focus on the state.
That is the reason mostly why i went from anarchism to classic socialism.
I read about anarchism and found huge hierarchies in local groups which were really aggressive when I pointed that out. That gave me the impression that its the same thing but less transparent and easily abused.
I'm sure that is not the case everywhere but thats when I noped out and went classic socialist, etc.
Read Tryanny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman
It is all about the exact phenomenon you describe, written by an anarchist
The absence of hierarchy does not mean the absence of structure. Conceptually, her work is not very rigorous. This is very common among American theorists who claim to be left-wing. Moreover, her theory seems to be seriously challenged if we are to believe the current social protest movements in Europe, in the dawn of surveillance capitalism, which, on the contrary, seems to be much more effective when they are spontaneous, decentralized, and horizontal (the french yellow vests, for example, a movement without structure which has freaked out the power in place like never before since perhaps the events of May 1968)
What has yellow vests accomplished through their spontaneous movement? I'm not French and haven't heard of anything coming out of those protests.
Either way, I'm sure dozens of organizations with hierarchy were involved in those protests, and that there were centralized, planned aspects within the movement just as there were spontaneous decentralized aspects
With pleasure! Thanks, comrade. :)
i have no idea what you mean by classic socialism
As in not libertarian socialism (which anarchists are described as in the anarchcist faq). The "dictature of the proletariat" thing. Maybe I'm mixing up terms here. Not sure.
You might mean Scientific Socialism, but someone else can correct me.