By Cake Boy

How the leftist anarchist movement in this country turned to dust.

In the 19th century, the leftist anarchist organisation was a syndicalist movement, connected to the unions, the working class, and the antimilitarists. It was a serious political force.

In the 1980s, there was an anarchist squatters’ movement. This was somewhat serious, but already, signs of sectarianism and insanity arose.

In the 90s, anarchism was somewhat connected to the environmentalist movements. But it was extremely marginal.

In the 2010s, the culture war in the West started. This was during the # MeToo and BLM periods. During this period, a small communist party arose that even got into parliament. Slowly, the anarchist movement became a sort of clone of this party. Members of this party also became part of the anarchist movement. Anarchism started to mean fighting against cultural conservatism. A rainbow replaced the red in the red/black flag.

All kinds of clashes happened within the movement/cult over issues around race, gender, sexual orientation, and the use of words, in this period.

During this period, many intellectuals left the movement, causing a brain drain. As we know, the woke/communist culture has a strong anti-intellectual side. Intellectuals tend to ask questions and be critical, which the woke can’t accept.

Also, many people started to make fun of the movement. A socialist called it the party for children, the party for adolescents. The movement was indeed a shameful mess of sadness.

Why did anarchists turn to woke themes (for lack of a better word)? Why did they turn their so-called movement into an anti-conservative front?

The tactics of social anarchism are too hard to put into practice. If you look at what Mahkno did, what did Malatesta do? These things are not possible in this country at this time. Farmers don’t take their land, factory workers don’t take over their factory, people don’t create federations, and people don’t stop paying taxes. Anarchist events attract ten people, not thousands. Even squatting is more or less impossible during this period.

This means that the so-called anarchist movement is just a toothless tiger. So, what did they do? They rebranded their movement. They fight for the goals that are accessible to them. An anarchist goal of them is: more Queer representation. Or, no sexist movie posters. Or, more transgender bathrooms. These ‘anarchists goals’ are goals they can reach, because the neoliberal status-quo doesn’t care about it. Their goals are ‘social revolution’ and ‘more queer representation’. So they fight for queer representation, and forget ahout the social revoliution, for now.

Many young women in the modern anarchist movements like these kinds of woke topics. Think of the artist named ‘No Bonzo’. She shows us what anarchism is to her—playing children, dancing little lambs, sweet fathers and mothers, trans woman, etc. A feminine fantasy world. Nothing wrong with all of this, but it has nothing to do with politics anymore. It’s an adolescent subculture, using some old political symbols and slogans.

Modern anarchists are very critical of other leftist parties. But they have no reason to be this arrogant, because their so-called ‘movement’ is just a children’s playground.

So, in the core, it’s about people living in bad faith—people who want to be more radical than social democrats but don’t know how. They don’t want to be seen as fake, so they bring up a new form of ‘radicalism’. This ‘radicalism’ is more than the whole woke package. They get into woke because anarchism isn’t really possible in the current political/geopolitical context.

And they get into woke, to fight against their Christian parents, who don’t like gays and rainbows, etc. Anarchism is then (mis)used as a sort of anti-Christian vehicle (we already saw this in the 90’s when the anarchists here made a lot of anti-Christian punk songs) (I have never been very much anti-Christian, or anything, so I never really got this).

I think the only real social anarchists in the West are the ones who went to Rojava to defend it. That’s an actual leftist anarchist praxis. The ones that stayed in the west, to talk about Queer toilets and TERFS, could as well joined the democrat party.

Than people ask me, what am i doing? I never called myself a social revolutionary. These leftist anarchists did.

Something about conservatism: for now, Western anarchism means being anti-conservative. But, as we have seen, when you put Bookchin’s theory into practice, it houses both progressives and conservatives, Muslims and feminists, Christians and socialists. Municipalism is an organisational theory. It’s a theory created to deal with coordination problems.

So what killed the so-called anarchist movement in the West?

People who live in bad faith (we can’t realise our anarchist goals, but we don’t know how to deal with this, and we won’t talk about it)

The brain drain/anti-intellectualism. Other movements have a scientific bureau and debate evenings. The anarchists don’t have this. They don’t need it because they think they already know everything. They have found the truth; other people should listen once.

Literally retarded people, who take a lot of space, and who can’t be corrected.

Can the social anarchist movement be a force again, in the West? I don’t think so. It has damaged itself too much. It has such a bad reputation among the population. Nobody wants to join the ‘anarkiddies’ as people tend to call it. If social anarchism arose again, it would be in the third world, the Middle East, South America, etc. Places where a culture war won’t scatter everything, and where the questions are about life or death.