Remove if against rules but need to be brought up. Admin of db0 seems to think everyone to the left of the db0 instance is out to kill/murder them. Then for some reason does more massive rants against cowbee.
Idk if should be in different comm but with this and their support of angry quoka user getting worrying
Makhnovian anarchists were highly idealistically aligned with a petty bourgeois agrarian base and actively opposed to prole city interests. Rather than find a way to bridge these interests into a coherent whole, they tended to just steal from industrializing cities and break shit, demanding the products of those industries but not paying for them. This was rationalized as being very anarchist, same as then not providing any food to those now further-impoverished workers.
At a basic level they just amplified a class antagonism between classes oppressed by the bourgeoisie rather than uniting them to create a lasting revolution and weakening this antagonism over time. Many of them literally just idealized agrarian life as being the only valid way of being of the people, and not coincidentally were the children of small landholders. Unsurprisingly, they constantly ceded ground to the bourgeoisie in the western regions, particularly industrializing cities, and had to repeatedly re-mobilize against a threat they could have more permanently ended if they weren’t solely focused on establishing and defending an agrarian-centric, parasitic, petty bourgeois “commune”.
This is also the antagonism that eventually led to the so-called “betrayel” by the Red Army, who was putting down the Whites for good. The Makhnovians just plain could not stop forcibly stealing from cities and destroying their materials to support their “communes” while letting the Whites rebuild in (alienated!) cities, threatening to destabilize the entire revolutionary project in what is now Ukraine. With the Red Army increasingly present in those cities, this led to repeated direct conflicts, with “anarchists” stealing from them and bombing their buildings or setting fire to their materials, often over an inventive idealistic froth like you see from db0. Being “anarchists”, who came into existence as militants just as often as they disappeared back to “the people”, it was also often conveniently impossible for the black army to promise to exercise discipline, even though they repeatedly did so when they actually wanted to, with highly hierarchical ranks and coercion. After hundreds of back-and-forths of escalations and false promises and excuse-making, the Red Army finally abandoned the pretense of being allies and rapidly crushed the Black Army. This is spun as some kind of sneaky betrayal by the Reds by Western chauvinistic “anarchists” that tend to just be embarrassed liberals rather than an expected outcome of constant provocation and intentionally escalated oppressed class contradictions.
I don’t disagree with what you’ve said here and I want to get back around to this comment to reply more thoroughly but in the meantime, in matters of the “betrayal” trope, this is the official communiqué that Makhno issued publicly upon signing a treaty with the Red Army:
…but this doesn’t gel with the current narrative of the duplicitous Bolsheviks and the persecuted underdog Makhnovist victims.
Yes, indeed. There is also a heavy dose of LARPing in the narrative, as if the white imperial core settler “anti-tankie” has so much in common with the small Ukrainian landholder’s son caught up in a world historical revolution and civil war. All one has to do is apply the label: “leftist”, “anarchist”, “collectivist”, “horizontalist”, and suddenly you share in their pain because you profess a completely non-acted-upon belief against capitalists and hierarchy. And through this alchemic transformation, you can be assured that your true enemies are actually other white imperial core leftists who profess an alignment with communist thought, and damn they’re gonna “betray” you, too! Truly aggrieved, aren’t they?
That’s the weirdest part to me that I’ve complained about for a while, that these people who have never faced the vaguest hint of a prospect of violence from communists except, in extreme cases, on the level and seriousness of a bar fight, talk about the reds murdering them like by calling themselves anarchists they are connected in a material way to these events, which are then transposed forward to the present circumstance. Them talking about cops brutalizing them makes perfect sense, because that’s a realistic possibility, but communists? Come on.
It’s reminding me of nationalist drivel about how neighboring nations are “eternal enemies” and so on.