I’m running around in leftist circles a lot since beginning of last year. I first got introduced to socialism through anarchism [stereotype alert] started to read and went pretty straight to communist and then ML pretty recently. The shoe is still new but it fits very well so far.
Whenever I bring up socialism and communism (let alone ML), I get a lot of flak from other leftists and especially from anarchists. Yet, I feel like a couple anarchist agitators sound like MLs just cosplaying. It would make sense as anarc kids are totally open for socialist ideas if one lets out the “science” part which irritates me a lot.
Does anyone have similar experience or is able to explain?
Btw pls let me know if this is inappropriate to ask. I dont mean to offend anyone.
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. :)