
Anarchists Who Took the Commuter Train - iron0013
https://longreads.com/2019/04/16/the-anarchists-who-took-the-commuter-train/
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false-mirror
This was a really well written piece. I was expecting a typical caricature of
anarchism, but was pleasantly surprised. It is interesting how much history is
forgotten in the US left

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omegaworks
why snipe the left when your statement broadly applies?

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drb91
I would interpret left here in opposition to liberals, which have been much
stronger since Clinton came to power. See: Century of the Self.

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omegaworks
It's a mistake to conflate leftism and liberalism. The parent poster should
have made themselves clearer and avoided cheap shots.

My point stands. The case that history has been forgotten by the left, in
particular, is not made by false-mirror nor the article in question. It is
implied that the left has some unique amnesia.

For what purpose, we are left to speculate.

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smacktoward
_> The closer I got to New York, stands of pine trees gave way to warehouses,
vast troughs of commerce where tractor-trailers lined up to feed. A few miles
past the Joyce Kilmer Service Area..._

Either God or the state of New Jersey appears to have a pretty dark sense of
humor.

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moate
Resident of New Jersey. I can confirm the answer is both.

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wyclif
I'm conservative politically, but there's a lot to be said, I think, about the
written work of the smarter anarchists and those of a similar philosophy on
the continental old Left. I'm thinking of, say, Debord and Castoriadis.

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SolaceQuantum
_"...Steltonites didn’t hide their radicalism, raising a red fag on the water
tower (which angry locals climbed up and tore down)..."_

I... assume this is a typo? I had to reread a few times.

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brooklyn_ashey
and... why not a black flag anyway?

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Iv
Anarchists used the socialist red flag most of the time. They switched to
black flags when red flags became forbidden in protests e.g. in France after
the repression of the Commune. They used a loophole there: they said that this
was not a political symbol but a sign of sorrow and commemoration.

Later on, communists and anarchists would part ways, mostly during the Russian
revolutions even though some diverged earlier.

But make no mistake, there is very little ambiguity in most historical
anarchist movements: their ideals are socialists. The reason why a lot of them
they rejected communism was not because of their socialist ideals, but because
of the policies they implemented in practice, that were very authoritarian.
Anarchists were very early considered political opponents by USSR. Censorship
for instance is totally incompatible with anarchism.

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phillc73
Adding further detail in agreement.

While many people are aware of the anarchist influence and success leading to
the Spanish Civil War, much less well known is the large anarchist region
established in southern Ukraine fifteen years earlier, between 1917 - 1922.

This was centered around the figure of Nestor Makhno.[1] The armed forces
defending this area had great success defeating various White armies and were
allied with the Bolsheviks. Unfortunately, the Bolsheviks ultimately betrayed
and destroyed the Makhnovshchina.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestor_Makhno](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestor_Makhno)

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baud147258
In the Spanish civil war, weren't the anarchists (and other pro-republican
groups) also betrayed by the communists?

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ralusek
"Anarchism" is a completely useless term. On the surface level, it would
appear to mean "the absence of a state," and therefore effectively take the
form of anarcho-capitalism. In practice, however, most people that actually
identify as anarchist are far left authoritarian socialists who cannot help
but dance around whatever conception of a state they've described as being
anything but.

The utility of the term "anarchy" to mean "a nonexistent state" is actually an
incredibly useful label, as the next closest approximation to that definition
is probably the equally loaded "libertarian," so it's very unfortunate that
it's effectively made to be synonymous with "radical socialism" in practice.
We already have a descriptor for that: radical socialism. Why can't anarchy
just mean the absence of a collective mandate?

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claudiawerner
"Anarchy" as a word for what social anarchists mean (collective means of
production, abolition of capital) is what it originally meant - so did
"libertarian". Even Rothbard admits that the term was co-opted by
"anarcho"capitalists, and it does not mean anarchy at all for them.

Anarchy means "without rule", not merely "without the state". Please read up
on the history of anarchism. Further, it's worth learning how capitalism
without the state cannot exist in any meaningful sense. There are plenty of
anarchist authors you can read on this point.

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0815test
I don't think the "abolition of capital" is something that many anarchists
would find desirable, outside of anarcho-primitivism. The computer or device
you're using to post this comment _is_ capital. And the thing about anarcho-
primitivism is that it's at least a _consistent_ approach to having
"collective means of production" and the like, because collective, informal
decision making (without any "ruler"-like figures) only scales to groups as
large as a forager band or tribe, the largest of which are about 150 members.
Any larger than that, and you start to get powerful chieftains and "big men"
engaging in recognizable forms of politics to manage and expand their power.

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claudiawerner
That's wrong. Anarchists would argue that a computer, for instance, only
_becomes_ capital under the conditions which capital in general tends to
subsume things which can increase its value. Capital arises in the process of
circulation only, and circulation is inextricably linked with production (as
Marx proved by refuting Say in the first book of the Grundrisse). For
instance, non-scarce goods (like digital goods or books) only became capital
with the advent of copyright law. The computer I'm writing this on, as Marx
would say, is only potentially capital. I don't buy the idea that Dunbar's
number of 150 makes very much sense when we can also talk about federation and
the idea of communes.

