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Title: Eradicate Left Unity
Author: ziq
Date: April 2021
Language: en
Topics: tankies, communism, anarchy, anticiv, China, USSR, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, history, left unity, entryism, third position, fascism, Hadza, Marx, Marxism, ideology
Source: https://raddle.me/wiki/leftunity

ziq

Eradicate Left Unity

Introduction

Behold the ministers of left-unity in all their glory!

“The only way to achieve revolution is to put aside our differences and

unite together as leftists and then after we overthrow capitalism we can

then debate on what form of government to replace it with.”

Leave it to a red preaching left-unity at us to not understand the very

first thing about anarchists: We want no form of government. This

mentality really sums up the absurdity of the entire left-unity moment.

“I don’t get why so many people try to distinguish Marxism and

Anarchism. Marxism is a vital part of Anarchist ideology.”

Um, no, it isn’t.

“I don’t think it’s a disservice to acknowledge (anarchism’s)

inspirations. Anarchism has taken many cues from Marx. It’s just a

fact.”

Bullshit. Nearly every point Marx made was ripped straight from Proudhon

and burdened with Marx’s authoritarian hokum, as I’ll demonstrate later

in this essay. Anarchy has no need or want of Marx or ism.

“As a libertarian socialist, I would much rather live in an ML state

like the USSR, North Korea or China than in this capitalist hellhole.”

It’s always easy to spot someone moments from casting away their

long-held superstitions against dictators and police states and signing

up with the red ministry. Life is so much easier when you put your faith

in a higher power that promises to bring you eternal salvation, to smite

all your enemies and create paradise on Earth for you and all

true-believers.

“Marx wanted a stateless, moneyless, and classless democratic society.

Anarchists want that as well. The difference lies in how we get there.”

Gah, that irksome creed of every insufferable red entryist.

“We’re all headed in the same direction, the difference is only how far

one is willing to travel. Someone might leave on the next stop, but

before that stop it might be beneficial to work together. Establishing

ideological purity that excludes our ML comrades hurts progress.”

Ugh... I feel dirty just quoting these internet commies and their

perverse people-conglomeration fantasies, but it’s the best way to

establish the purpose of this essay. This one’s going to cover a lot of

ground, from entryism and left-unity, to the origins of anarchy and

Marxism, to the ways we think about the community ideal and belonging,

to a lived anarchy that’s persisted in east Africa for centuries, and

finally the psychology behind the strange current of Han Chinese

nationalism that’s rising within the white settler-colonial left. Let’s

get started.

Exhuming The Left-Unity Corpse

The disturbing trend of self-proclaimed non-sectarian

libertarian-socialists and “anarcho-Marxists” that have been attaching

themselves to the anarchist discourse can be traced back with a straight

line to the proliferation of “left-unity” spaces.

Most of these spaces exist on cursed corporate portals like Reddit,

Twitter and Facebook, but they’ve also spread into meatspace. Currently,

one of the most prominent virtual left-unity spaces spawns from the US

social democrat “Chapotraphouse” podcast, along with assorted

inoffensive Reddit spaces led by r/breadtube, the “leftbook” corner of

Facebook and several Youtube personalities that start out identifying

with particularly milquetoast strains of red anarchism, but then

gradually embrace state-capitalist narratives before inevitably swearing

off anarchy altogether and doing round the clock propaganda for the

Chinese state and its incredibly successful strain of red fascism.

Self-hating settlers who accessorize themselves with various red fascist

tendencies infiltrate anarchist and socialist spaces on corporate

platforms and initiate left-unity policies that successfully ban all

criticism of their backwards conservative views. The more vocal

opponents of the new policy are quickly purged for breaking left-unity,

leaving a more passive audience who are ripe for indoctrination.

Then the propaganda starts. Endless authoritarian memes to normalize

gulags, guillotines, firing squads, violent struggle sessions against

anyone who resists social stratification, dictators and genocide. Tomes

of nonsensical ideological “theory” is then injected into the eyeballs

of alienated young settlers who, for obvious reasons, are starved of

cultural identity and belonging. The process ends when the targets are

thoroughly brainwashed and can now only see the world through the

increasingly warped tankie lens.

Once the transition to their new religion is complete, almost

immediately, any ideas that conflict with the writings of Marx, Engels,

Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Deng and Xi (never mind that they all contradict

with each other) create desperate cognitive dissonance in their minds.

So these pasty emotionally-stunted people angrily lash out at the

unindoctrinated for being “radlibs”, “western chauvinists” and

“imperialists” rather than risk parting with their new-found identity,

community and belonging.

Once the majority in the newly minted left-unity community are

comfortable joking about rounding up and killing “kulaks”, “anarchist

bandits” or more recently “Uighur terrorists” and quoting Chinese state

media to counter all the “imperialist western propaganda” from the

mouths of the various minority groups being imprisoned and enslaved by

the Chinese state (for their own good, they’ll insist), the shaming

campaign begins.

Anyone in the space who breaks with the red fash party line is lambasted

and ridiculed into submission. The remaining libertarians in the space

now find themselves hopelessly outnumbered by scornful white settlers

with daddy issues telling them they’re imperialist CIA stooges for

thinking the Uighurs maybe shouldn’t be put in concentration camps or

the Hong Kong and Tibetan people should get self-determination (watch

tankies insist Tibetans who don’t want to be ruled by China are fascists

and China is, in fact, saving them from themselves).

In order to not be shunned and purged by their peers, the anarchists in

the left-unity space adopt an obscene anarcho-tankie ideology that

allows them to maintain their affections for feel-good libertarian

philosophers like Chomsky, Bookchin and Kropotkin, while somehow fusing

the authoritarian third positionist fascist dogma enforced from the top

down by their chosen community.

Uncritical support for every empire that competes with the USA’s, the

insistence that anarchism and communism are one and the same because

“they have the same end goal”, the claim that anarchist communes and an

ML state can co-exist in harmony despite a mountain of historic evidence

to the contrary, the attempt to whitewash and obfuscate failed

authoritarian concepts like the dictatorship of the proletariat and the

vanguard, the nonsensical belief that they can be an anarchist and also

a Marxist or even a Dengist... Suddenly they’re able to take wildly

contradicting ideas and hack them together in order to be accepted by

the elitist red fash echo chamber they so desperately want the approval

of.

The conflicting ideas grow increasingly out of whack the further down

the rabbit hole the left-unity space takes them, and the ridicule they

get for their remaining libertarian attachments begins to eat at their

ego, until finally they post “How I went from an anarkiddie to a

principled scientific analytical dialectic Marxist-Leninist with Chinese

characteristics” and the transition from anarchy-curious to fully

programmed red fascist shitlord is complete.

Perhaps all these conservative settlers calling themselves communists

are hoping to alleviate their white guilt in some perfunctory way by

identifying with ideologies that are little more than shallow

anti-Americanism: Denouncing their home imperial empire and presumably

all the power and privileges it lavishes them with (fat chance), but

spending their days on Reddit and Twitter stumping for every competing

imperial empire (China, Russia, Iran), no matter how tenuous a

connection the empire has to their supposed socialist ideology.

Corporate platforms that give space to leftists are always organized in

a way that requires a rigid hierarchical governance, giving the most

power to the most senior moderators. As soon as a small group is able to

mount big enough struggle sessions to rise to the top of the ranks of

the virtual hierarchy, they’re granted complete control over the space

forever and cement their power with a quick purge of anyone who objects

to the new management.

They’ll find an assortment of ways to justify the purges, including

claims that the dissenters are “wrecking” the space, that they’re racist

Sinophobes for objecting to China’s treatment of ethnic minorities, or

that they’re simply breaking the newly written left-unity rules by being

sectarian, divisive or anti-communist. Nine out of ten people in the

space will quickly adapt to the new status quo so they don’t risk losing

their place in “the community”. Because the good of the precious

community always comes first.

The truth is collectivists are all looking to be led and dictated to and

given a role to play by their masters, while anarchy is all about

telling people to think for themselves and reject all authority.

The tankie route is much easier for people to take because it doesn’t

require real effort or self reflection. A prospective tankie just needs

to follow the program, parrot the propaganda, swallow the lies, never

dissent against party dogma, and they find automatic praise and

acceptance and are able to feel like members of an elite group of

“radicals” without actually doing anything radical or engaging in any

kind of self-reflection.

Anarchists ask much more of ourselves and we never rest on our laurels

or praise our associates for their obedience. We actually strive to

unmake domination in all its forms, kill every cop in our heads, turn

every social institution inside out, do anarchy in our lives at every

opportunity and tell anyone who tries to rule us in any way to fuck off

and die... That all takes a lot of fucking effort. Much easier to repost

gulag memes on 4chan all day and be showered with praise from your

fellow AK-47 enthusiasts.

While reds endlessly thirst for domination, bureaucracy and performative

politburo, spending their gloomy little lives bossing all their

deferential underlings around while promising them a magical revolution

some day if they just stick to the program, prop up dear-leader and

evangelize from the good book of Marx, anarchists are actually out there

in the world waging perpetual warfare on everything and anything that

would dominate us.

Left-unity is a deliberate ploy by disturbed groomers to indoctrinate

impressionable young minds into their authoritarian red fascist cult and

force them to abandon any dangerous individualist beliefs they might

have once held so they can be accepted within the collective’s rigid

hierarchy. Joe Commie can’t risk getting called a radlib or an

anarkiddie by members of the Soviet reenactment society for forming

their own thoughts or questioning daddy’s bullshit-laden narratives in

any way.

“Left-unity” has never been anything more than tankie doublespeak for

“obey us or be purged”. Don’t fall for it. Burn the space down before

you let the scum of the earth get their hooks in it.

Red Fash Entryism

“Entryism is a tactic whereupon members of a political group join

another group with the (often secret) intention of changing its

principles and plans.”

“Entryism provides a means for a small but determined group to leverage

their influence onto a larger sphere by using an infiltrated group’s

resources.”

Before the red fash brigade can cement their power and seize control of

a space to control the discourse, turning it into yet another boring

apparatchik congregation, they need to do a whole lot of good old

fashioned entryism.

Like any pious door-to-door missionary, once they’ve wedged themselves

into the building with some gentle inclusivity-pleas and cries that

they’re being oppressed by “sectarians”, it’s not long before they’re

moving towards the stairs and getting ready to start their climb to the

top floor where they can really let loose... Here are some examples of

entryists at work on Raddle.me; an anti-authoritarian and illegalist

space I founded:

“China has to put them in re-education camps because they’re terrorists,

they pose a serious threat to society. The party can’t let dangerous

people run around throwing bombs at schools, they have to maintain

public order, so if the Uighurs are going to keep doing terrorist

attacks, they need to be dealt with, it’s as simple as that.”

Is there anything a red fash enjoys more than casting ethnic minorities

as villains in their Chairman Übermensch fantasies? This entryist worked

hard to convince a site full of scumbag thieves and anarchists that the

state needs to protect public order from ‘terrorists’. The irony was

apparently lost on them.

Stay mad Western white libs. Accept facts that the only genocide

happening in China is against poverty and outdated transit. But keep

pretending that you’re against “all genocide” when you have literal

concentration camps at the border of your countries. If only you were

just as furious and took that much effort to focus on that than on

China. Supporting CIA-funded terrorism in Xinjiang is the epitome of

your white liberalism. China will keep winning and there’s nothing you

can do about it.

The fact that this chuckle-head is a white boy from California, USA of

course doesn’t stop him from weaponizing his own whiteness against a

couple of people (non-western people of color, mind you) who were

concerned about China’s self-admitted ethnic cleansing campaign. The

entire tankie defense for ML atrocities always seems to come down to

snarky shaming and whataboutism taken to the extreme.

“If there’s actually a genocide happening, I find it hard to believe the

anti-Islamic GOP is the group that’s most concerned about Muslims in

China. If there’s actually a genocide happening, I find it hard to

believe that countries with large Muslim populations aren’t equally

concerned, or even more concerned. If there’s actually a genocide

happening, I find it hard to believe that China still has almost three

times as many mosques-per-worshipper as the U.S.”

I find it hard to believe. If there’s actually a genocide happening. I

find it hard to believe. If there’s actually a genocide happening. I

find it hard to believe. If there’s actually a genocide happening...

They’re not even subtle with the brainwashing.

ML states have done so many atrocities at this point that I don’t know

why tankies bother denying it when a new one happens. The USSR alone was

responsible for the de-Tatarization of Crimea, the genocide of the

Ingrian Finns, the ethnic cleansing of Poles, the mass gulaging and

pogroms of Greeks, the deportation of the Karachays, the deportation of

the Kalmyks, the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush (Aardakh), the

deportation of the Balkars, the deportation of Azerbaijanis from

Armenia, the deportation of the Meskhetian Turks, the deportations of

the Chinese and Koreans, the execution and deportation of Latvians, the

expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe and the Holodomor famine that

largely happened due to the USSR’s confiscation and export of all the

grain stores in central and eastern Ukraine, and preventing people from

acquiring more food by banning free movement.

Then there’s communist Czechoslovakia’s Romani sterilizations, the

Cambodian genocide, Bulgaria’s “revival process”, Vietnam’s Montagnard

persecution, the Isaaq genocide in Somalia, the Hmong genocide in Laos,

the Gukurahundi massacres in Zimbabwe and the mass starvation of

anywhere between 15 and 55 million people that happened in China during

Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”.

At what point did tankies of the past switch from denying one of their

genocides to praising it and insisting it was justified because the

victims were kulaks? I give it 3 years, tops, before this clown’s

narrative switches from “I find it hard to believe” to “well, they were

a threat to the revolution so they had to go”.

“Why is it that when I go to “tankie” internet spaces I see genuine

respect for other viewpoints and an interest in discussing and working

with everyone willing to unite against the ruling class, but when I go

to “anarchist” internet spaces all I see is a bunch of punching left and

people calling MLs fascists and so on? Exaggeration of course, there are

some actual principled anarchists in these places, but the radlibs

(that’s all you fuckers who use the term “red fash” by the way) clearly

own the place.”

This one’s a self-proclaimed “anti-imperialist anarchist” who thinks

opposing China’s genocide is disrespectful to red fash. Brilliant bit of

entryism that as usual tries to cast anyone who pushes back against

authoritarianism as “unprincipled” and uncooperative and standing in the

way of progress. Accusing us of “punching left” for rejecting ethnic

cleansing is the cherry on top of this turd cake.

“Do you not see the difference between calling someone an “anarkiddie”

and calling someone a red fascist? I’m not sure why I’d need to explain

this to you, but you realize a fascist is one of the worst things you

can possibly be, right? I hope I won’t be criticized for saying that I

believe fascists should literally be executed openly. Being a fascist

is, in my mind, like being a child molester or a murderer or a slave

owner. It is something which completely invalidates any right you might

have to continue living your life peacefully. To be a fascist is to be

an active threat to all good people in the world.”

The same entryist goes on to insist we stop calling his comrades red

fascists because they’re not murderers and child molesters... Except

their daddy Stalin was both a murderer and a child molester. Mao too.

Oops, was that disrespectful of me? Sorry, comrade. I guess those

particular fascists don’t count because then you’d have to execute

yourself for praying at their altar.

If Marxist-Leninists don’t want to be called fascists they shouldn’t

stan for rulers who put gays and sex workers in gulags, displaced and

starved millions of indigenous people in order to colonize their land

(i.e. genocide) and murdered all their political opponents — including —

shock — anarchists. In other words, they should stop calling themselves

Marxist-Leninists.

You can’t detach a political ideology from its creators, and even if you

could, ML rulers continue to enact racist, homophobic and colonial

policies today, showing that modern MLs haven’t changed in any

meaningful way. And you certainly can’t expect anarchists to not think

of them as fascists when anarchists have been mass-murdered throughout

history by ML counter-revolutions.

“Anarkiddy” is a low-effort paternalistic insult and it makes perfect

sense that tankies would come up with it. It says a lot more about MLs

than it says about us. But “red fascist” isn’t a mere insult, it’s the

perfect description of what the modern Marxist-Leninist-Dengist is. A

fascist draped in red. And judging by how riled up they get when they

hear the term, it’s working as intended.

“If you’re not getting paid by the CIA to spread nonsense about its

enemies, you’re really fucking stupid.”

They’re starting to betray their true intentions here. A little strange

for an anarchist to be so angry that other anarchists aren’t willing to

kneel for the state with the most billionaires in the world, no?

“It simply does not seem to me that Xi is a man with total and

unquestionable power over his country. I’d need to see some good

evidence that this is, in fact, the case before I would believe it.”

I’m sure they’d be perfectly willing to consider all the evidence, after

all they’re a principled anti-imperialist anarcho-communist! Let’s see

what happens.

“How in the world am I supposed to engage you in a serious discussion

when you say absolute nonsense like “China has a dictator” lmao. Have

you ever in your life read a book??”

Looks like I hit a nerve and he’s gone full mask off. The strugglismo is

especially strong with this one, casting himself as the white knight in

charge of defending Xi Jinping’s honor by shaming strangers into

compliance with the party line on internet message boards.

“Go drink some more fucking kool-aid western chauvinist radlib.”

This back and forth I had with an entryist posing as an anarchist is

identical to 100 other perfectly telegraphed conversations with

entryists I’ve had. They’ll try to cast doubt on the narratives of the

ML state’s victims, insist their favorite ML dictators are actually

accountable, equitable and democratic, accuse you of being a lackey of

one of the USA’s alphabet agencies and finally label you a reactionary /

western chauvinist / radlib if you continue to resist their attempts to

gaslight you and normalize authoritarianism in the space.

No matter how meticulously sourced your citations are, they’ll reject

all of them as “western propaganda”. If you give them evidence from the

ML state itself, they’ll claim it’s being taken out of context or is a

mistranslation. There’s really no way to get through their thick armor

of sun-baked bullshit. I find it’s much more productive just to mock

them from the get go.

A couple of the quotes I opened this essay with were some red anarchists

insisting that the only difference between Marxism and anarchy is the

method we use to reach our supposed shared end goal.

That’s just it though, anarchists don’t have a final destination, we

embody an endless negation of authority. To assume there can be a neat

and tidy goal to anarchy would be to believe archy will just go away one

day, which would be a ludicrous proposition at odds with everything we

know about archy. As long as humans exist, so will Leviathan.

And when I say anarchists I mean anarchists, not milquetoast libertarian

socialists whose idea of praxis is posting bread memes on Reddit while

rubbing virtual elbows with their genocide-denying red fascist comrades

from the safety of their sterile gated condos in suburban USA.

Anarchists desire a lot more than socialists desire. We want to unmake

all forms of domination, not just economic and class-based domination.

That’s what makes anarchists stand apart from every other political

school of thought, and to pretend we’re just alt Marxists does a great

disservice to anarchy.

Anarchists demonstrably predate Marxists. Even if you only count

scholarly European men (as settlers will do) and not the centuries of

peoples all around the world living anarchically without naming it e.g.

the Hadza people in east Africa (a fascinating anarchistic culture I’ll

explore later in this essay).

Anarchy was not inspired by Marxism, in fact Marx was greatly “inspired”

by Proudhon; the first person to refer to himself as an anarchist, whose

work “What Is Property?”, which concluded “property is theft”, was

initially praised by Marx as “the first resolute, pitiless, and at the

same time scientific investigation and critique of private property”.

Marx really made his career shamelessly ripping off Proudhon’s earlier

work point by point, but piling on a thick authority sludge before

serving it up to the world as if he were presenting something new and

not just an authoritarian perversion of Proudhon’s ideas. Once Marx

found fame with his plagiarism, he then decried Proudhon as being

detestable; a bad economist, a bad philosopher, whose critiques were

worthless and unevolved.

From Springers “Why A Radical Geography Must Be Anarchist”:

“Marx, like Proudhon before him, argued that abolishing interest-bearing

capital was destructive of capitalism. Marx, like Proudhon before him,

differentiated between possession and private property and argued that

cooperatives should replace capitalist firms. Marx, like Proudhon before

him, argued that the working classes must emancipate themselves. Marx,

like Proudhon before him, regarded property as the subjugation of the

labor of others by means of appropriation. Marx, like Proudhon before

him, saw the cooperative movement as a necessity of transitioning away

from capitalism and thus recognized the need for communal land and

workplaces. Marx, like Proudhon before him, proclaimed the need for

‘scientific socialism’. Marx, like Proudhon before him, argued that the

state was an instrument of class rule, although they differed in terms

of whether or not a temporary proletariat dictatorship was necessary to

see it properly undone.”

Moving beyond the widely-repeated entryist lie that Marxism somehow

birthed anarchy, even the entire basis for left-unity; the idea that

anarchy is leftist, is also predicated on a lie.

The left / right paradigm has nothing to do with anarchy, really. It was

created in the days leading up to the French revolution, to

differentiate between those who supported the French republic (leftists)

and those who supported the French monarchy (rightists).

A politician in the états généraux who sat on the left side of the king

favored the republic, while those sitting on his right favored the

monarchy. Of course, neither side wished to abolish authority. Both left

and right were clearly in favor of the state, regardless of who got to

rule it.

To anyone not bamboozled by entryist swindlers and their doublespeak,

identifying as a leftist is a statement to the world that you support

nationalism, states, borders, a monopoly on violence, being ruled by

kings or presidents or central committees. Anarchists aren’t left or

right wing, we’re anarchists. We reject the power machinations of both

wings of government. We reject all authority.

The underlying assumption still persists in the minds of leftists and

rightists today that the whole spectrum of conceivable politics need to

be enacted through the state. Anarchists shouldn’t be placing themselves

on either side of the fucking king.

If anarchists know anything, it’s that nothing worthwhile can come from

the state and its bureaucracy, so why would any anarchists want to adopt

the left wing of the state into their politics? Why would any anarchist

want to fuse themselves with a legion of shitty genocide-fetishists in a

grotesque display of anti-authority and pro-authority unison?

Guess what happens when someone who purports to be anti-authority joins

up with an authority-happy group, helps normalize their politburo

posturing, their domination role-playing and amplifies their grotesque

messaging for them? They cease to be anti-authority. There’s nothing

anarchist about giving petty tyrants more power and a bigger audience.

From its inception, post-left anarchy has simply been a

course-correction to restore and revive anarchy by unweighing it from

the specter of authority (the left) that it’s been weighed down with by

a hundred years of settler colonial humanism.

Slaying the Community Ideal & Exploring a Living Example of Anarchy

The libertarian socialists (I refuse to call them anarchists) who

succumb to glaringly obvious entryism and embrace third positionist

ideology (without ever admitting it to themselves) largely do so because

they so value the idea of community, of being accepted and embraced by

the other members of their supposedly non-sectarian, all-inclusive (so

long as you obey an ever-expanding list of entryist rules) hugbox of a

community. Because to all reds, world-building and comradeship is the

very basis of their every ideological convulsion.

If the concept of community is authority-based e.g. steeped in

majoritarianism, then what good is it to anarchists? Since at least

99.9% of all existing self-identifying communities and even theoretical

proposals for communities are beholden to states, councils, committees,

voter bodies and other forms of rulership, it’s safe to say the

community ideal in itself is just another vessel of authority.

If all organized communities on the planet can be clearly demonstrated

to be authority-based, then it’s a safe bet that the entire concept of

community is authority-forming... By simply looking at every example in

the world today, you can bet with absolute certainty that any forced

grouping of people around the community ideal is going to lead everyone

involved through another abusive and torturous adventure in archy.

The idea that a community can be without rulers has never been proven.

The few remaining free people in the world e.g. the Hadza in east Africa

(“Tanzania”) don’t live in anything resembling what we know as a

community. They’re nomadic, have no leaders, no gods, no rules, no

crops, no property, no marriage, no parents (Hadza children have full

autonomy and essentially raise themselves), don’t extract anything from

the land other than foraged food and are quick to remove themselves from

the presence of anyone who tries to rule them.

Anthropologist Frank Marlowe:

“The Hadza certainly are egalitarian (Woodburn 1979, 1982a). This does

not mean that there are no individuals who would like to dominate others

and have their way. It is simply difficult to boss others around. If a

Hadza tries to tell others what to do, which does happen now and then,

the others simply ignore it; if he or she persists, they just move to

another camp. Of course, the bossy person could follow them, but if

people move to several different locations, the bossy person cannot

control them all at once.”

I would suggest the reason the Hadza are so successful at living anarchy

is because they have no attachment to the idea and the ideology of

community, and will split up and drift away from a band of people

without hesitation the moment the band ceases to suit their interests.

The word “band” I’m using here is especially relevant since it’s

distinctly compatible with the concepts of anarchy. From Britannica:

“By definition, a band was a small, egalitarian, kin-based group of

perhaps 10–50 people, while a tribe comprised a number of bands that

were politically integrated (often through a council of elders or other

leaders).”

The Hadza live in groups of as little as 2 people, but generally their

bands consist of around 30 people. The fascinating thing about Hadza

bands is they can wholly consist of children without any adult

supervision, demonstrating how they learn self-sufficiency and autonomy

from other children from a very early age rather than through their

parents.

Here’s the abstract of the journal “Evolution and Human Behavior Volume

41, Issue 1, January 2020, Pages 12–22”:

“Teaching is cross-culturally widespread but few studies have considered

children as teachers as well as learners. This is surprising, since

forager children spend much of their time playing and foraging in

child-only groups, and thus, have access to many potential child

teachers. Using the Social Relations Model, we examined the prevalence

of child-to-child teaching using focal follow data from 35 Hadza and 38

BaYaka 3- to 18-year-olds. We investigated the effect of age, sex and

kinship on the teaching of subsistence skills. We found that

child-to-child teaching was more frequent than adult-child teaching.

Additionally, children taught more with age, teaching was more likely to

occur within same-sex versus opposite-sex dyads, and close kin were more

likely to teach than non-kin.”

“The Hadza and BaYaka also showed distinct learning patterns; teaching

was more likely to occur between sibling dyads among the Hadza than

among the BaYaka, and a multistage learning model where younger children

learn from peers, and older children from adults, was evident for the

BaYaka, but not for the Hadza. We attribute these differences to

subsistence and settlement patterns. These findings highlight the role

of children in the intergenerational transmission of subsistence

skills.”

Since the Hadza have no leaders or councils or any concept of social

hierarchy, including the parent-child hierarchy libsocs like Chomsky are

so fond of clinging to, “small bands of people” is really the perfect

way to describe how they live. I wish more anarchists would gravitate

towards forming temporary, transient bands of people who share common

interests, rather than continuing their attempts to build permanent,

massive, alienating, authority-breeding “communities”.

And perhaps the most important feature to their anarchistic way of life

is that the Hadza have no specialists, with every Hadza skilled in

everything they need to survive. This means there’s no division of labor

and no systems or institutions are needed to create these divisions.

If we’re being honest with ourselves, the division of labor and

resources is what a community is founded around inside civilization.

Without the division that comes with specialism, the Hadza are able to

live in complete anarchy in small, unattached bands of people where

everyone owns the means of their survival. Marlowe writes:

“Each Hadza knows how to do everything he or she needs to do and does

not depend on others. Each man can make his own bow and arrows, his

poison, and his ax. Each man knows how to make fire, how to track, and

how to make pegs to climb baobab trees and get honey. Each woman knows

how to make her own digging stick, how to find tubers and dig them up,

how to build a house, and how to make her own clothes, jewelry, and

baskets or find gourds to use as containers for carrying water or

berries. Even when it comes to medicine, each adult man and woman knows

which plants to pick for different ailments.”

Since the Hadza’s anarchistic existence has no similarity to anything

thought of as a community today (sedentary, hierarchical, complex legal

systems, property-based, extractive, patriarchal, overflowing with

authority), it wouldn’t make sense to call their way of life a

community. Another word would be needed that isn’t weighed down by

centuries of domination, shame and conformity, because the two ways of

life simply have nothing in common. The closest political concept that

describes what the Hadza have is probably Stirner’s union of egoists:

“The union of egoists is a voluntary structure formed by its members in

their own immediate interests. This is a union of self-confessed selfish

people, which they leave as soon as their interests are not being

delivered.”

Both “a band of people” and “a union of egoists” are more descriptive

phrases for living anarchy than a word as loaded and authority-laden as

“community”.

A community comes with ideological baggage that needn’t exist, such as

the perceived need to defend the wholly-manufactured community from

externalities (even to the point of the loss of your own life), to put

the needs of the community above the needs and desires of the individual

and to more broadly collectivize the people who form the community as if

they’re a singular, monolithic body and should act in unison at all

costs, regardless of the damage this would inflict to their

individuality, their autonomy and thus to anarchy.

Communities are often (always?) held together by ideology, and like all

the nonsensical ideologies the world is ruled by, third positionism is

showing itself to be a formidable community-builder in the

perpetually-online sect.

Third Positionism

It’s important to note that since the settler-colonial far-left have

embraced Dengism or “communism with Chinese characteristics” as they

more often term it, the bar has really been lowered to such an extent

that their ideology has become harder and harder to distinguish from the

various forms of third positionist fascism.

Third positionists seek to establish monocultural nation states built

around the idea of supremacist racially-homogeneous nationalism. The

third position argues for a mixed economy (blending elements of a market

economy with elements of a planned economy) with a dedication to

eliminating weakness and “degeneracy” from society.

The third positionists claim to be opposed to both communism and

capitalism, while using ideas from both, typically fusing reactionary

right-wing cultural views with radical left-wing economic views. The

so-called third way is really no different than the other two ways to

run a society in practice, but has snappy new branding.

Since tankies have updated their ideology to center around the modern

People’s Republic of China: A state that openly trumps privatization,

free markets, landlords, banks, stock exchanges, private healthcare,

union-busting, billionaires, ethno-nationalism, cultural genocide,

expansionist colonialist armies, institutional racism / homophobia,

rampant economic imperialism overseas and mass-incarceration.... It’s

become very difficult to distinguish how their ideology is any different

from the western neo-fascist system they already live under.

So really, the imagination of the average internet tankie has been so

utterly colonized that they’re unable to envision any system that

doesn’t simply reproduce the USA’s neo-fascist empire 1:1 but with a

different ethnic group at the helm.

But the Chinese state certainly checks all the boxes on the list of

third positionist fascism. A nation state with a mixed economy,

monoculturalism, racial homogeneny, Han supremacy, a blending of

capitalism and communism, conservative cultural values (including bans

on “abnormal sexual behaviors”). It’s like a third positionist wet

dream.

So where did third positionism originate? The term “third position” was

first used by Terza Posizione, a short-lived far-right movement founded

in Rome in 1979 as a supposed third way of running a society, claiming

to be a middle ground between communism and capitalism.

Much earlier, Strasserism evolved out of the National Socialist German

Workers Party in the 1920s and 30s and tried to do the same thing.

Unlike fellow party-member Hitler, who was avidly anti-communist, they

took the “socialist” part of the party’s name seriously and combined

anti-capitalism and wealth-redistribution with antisemitism and German

nationalism.

In 1930s and 1940s France, a number of communist and socialist parties

splintered to create nationalist off-shoots . These included Jacques

Doriot’s French Popular Party (from the French Communist Party) and

Marcel Déat’s National Popular Rally (from the French Section of the

Workers’ International).

The original National Bolsheviks in both Russia and Germany had the same

idea, believing socialism needed more blatant nationalism and racism

than it already had under Lenin and Stalin. In the 1980s, the concept of

third positionism was taken up by the far-right, fascist political party

National Front in the United Kingdom. Today there has been a resurgence

in third positionist fascism under various labels, from modern nazbols

to “national anarchism” to neo-Eurasianism to (I argue) Dengism.

It’s completely unsurprising that an ideology founded by virulent racist

and colonialist paternalists like Marx and Engels would find support

with so many racist nationalists. Here’s part of a particularly

offensive Marx-Engels Correspondence from 1862 that perhaps helps us

understand why Marx felt the need to fuse all of Proudhon’s innovations

with a heavy dose of authoritarian dogma, and why so many racists are

drawn to forming nationalist Marxist offshoots. (Warning: Racial slurs

ahead).

Karl Marx:

“The Jewish nigger Lassalle who fortunately leaves by the end of this

week, has lost another 5,000 thaler in speculation. I realize now that

he — his head form and his hair growth are evident enough — is a

descendant of niggers, who joined Moses’ exodus from Egypt. The

intrusiveness of this chap is also very niggerish.”

Engels shared these white supremacist beliefs. Here he is writing about

Marx’s Cuban son-in-law Paul Lafargue in 1887, who Marx enjoyed

denigrating as “the negrillo” and “the Gorilla.” The letter was

addressed to Lafargue’s wife, commenting on Lafargue’s decision to run

for public office.

Friedrich Engels:

“Being in his quality as a nigger a degree nearer to the rest of the

animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most

appropriate representative of that district.”

Both Marx and Engels celebrated the USA’s conquering of Mexico, further

showing that their support for equity really only extended to white

people in practice, and they were in full support of white nationalism

and colonialism.

Marx:

“Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy

Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?”

Engels:

“In America we have witnessed the conquest of Mexico and have rejoiced

at it. It is to the interest of its own development that Mexico will be

placed under the tutelage of the United States.”

Finally, here’s an example of Marx’s antisemitism, which of course

appeals greatly to the third positionist fascists who see Marxism and

fascism as being so compatible. Marx’s family had originally been

Jewish, but his father swore off Judaism before he was born and

converted to Evangelicalism, to better integrate himself into European

society.

Marx:

“What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his

worldly God? Money. … Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of

which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man—and

turns them into commodities. … The bill of exchange is the real god of

the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange. … The chimerical

nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of

money in general.”

Today, several third-positionist and Eurasianist media outlets such as

The Grayzone and Globalresearch.ca push fascist propaganda that attacks

Western empires but glorifies Eastern ones.

These media outlets are beloved by tankies because their journalists

deny the Uighurs are being ethnically cleansed and attack Hong Kong

protesters for resisting Communist Party of China rule.

Globalresearch.ca even has articles denying the holocaust, which doesn’t

seem to slow down red fascists who lap up their pro-CPC, pro-Assad and

pro-Russia propaganda and spread it far and wide.

I’d suggest the only reason modern Dengist tankies don’t openly identify

as fascists is because they’ve gotten so much play historically out of

casting fascists as their sworn enemy after the rift that developed

between Stalin and the Nazis following their earlier gentleman’s

agreement to divvy up Europe between themselves.

Every devoted ideologue needs a villain before they can cast themselves

as the only hero who can vanquish the great force of evil. Hey, it

worked for G. W. Bush with Saddam, and it’s working wonders for Xi

Jinping with the Uighurs. Most of his citizens and foreign devotees are

convinced he’s keeping them all safe from those big mean social pariahs.

Indeed, the contemporary tankie is devoted to “Xi Jinping thought”, a

pious and devoted sermoner who calls for his congregation to have faith

in the divinity of the good book, regardless of how many lifetimes it’ll

take to bring about the holy rapture. Xi Jinping:

“It is Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought that guided the Chinese

people out of the darkness of that long night and established a New

China. The consolidation and development of the socialist system will

require its own long period of history... it will require the tireless

struggle of generations, up to ten generations. The fundamental reason

why some of our comrades have weak ideals and faltering beliefs is that

their views lack a firm grounding in historical materialism.”

Ten generations. So if we do the math, with each generation lasting 30

years, the communist rapture should be granted to true-believers in

approximately 300 years. But only if their ideals are strong, their

faith unfaltering, and they’re grounded in the divinity of hallowed

historical materialism i.e. the necessity to “tirelessly struggle”

through centuries of ecocide, police brutality and genocide inflicted on

them by Xi and his successors. Don’t falter from the celestial path,

comrades. Your salvation is near.

Deng and Xi’s economic and social reforms have succeeded where previous

third positionist projects failed, mixing and matching socialist,

nationalist and capitalist elements as it suits them. The party even

goes as far as to declare Han culture as being synonymous with Chinese

culture, and punishes all the minority cultures for not conforming to

Han cultural supremacy.

It’s clear to me that this latest breed of tankie, the

communist-with-Chinese-characteristics or Dengist, both within China and

without, has fully embraced the mythical third position between

communism and capitalism that in actuality is just far right nationalism

with a state-controlled economy. So in a word, fascism.

Fascism Was Never Defeated

“Fascism is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultra-nationalism

characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition,

as well as strong regimentation of society and of the economy.”

The only thing that’s really changed about global fascism since the

second world war is it has adapted to no longer require one-party rule,

instead turning the two-parties of western neoliberal democracies into

separate wings of the same (fascist) party. Everything else is the same.

Two party rule is still a dictatorship for all intents and purposes, but

with rotating reps who all represent the same political class. The rich

fund both parties and their candidates to buy their allegiance

regardless of which flag-waving stooge’s turn it is to sit in the big

chair.

The billionaire class as a whole is the new dictator form, while the

presidents, ministers and governors are just there to create spectacle,

hold back any and all threats to the system and keep the peasantry

convinced they have a say in the political process when they vote for

one of the dictator class’s two pre-approved showmen.

Charles Koch is the supreme ruler of the fascist USA empire.

China, on the other hand, still matches up with the original

unadulterated definition of fascism since it’s far-right i.e. extreme

nationalist, nativist and authoritarian. It has an unabashed dictator

i.e. the Paramount Leader of China, who simultaneously holds the

positions of head of state, government, civil and military offices of

the highest order within the party...

It has a forcible suppression of opposition in the form of re-education

camps, outlawing of protest, institutional rape, mass-censorship, an

intricate government propaganda system and staggering numbers of

political prisoners. It has strong regimentation of both society and

economy: The state has long acted to purge anything that doesn’t meet

with strict hetero-normative Han-nationalist ideals, even outlawing LGBT

representation in the media, and maintains an iron grip on the economy

to the point of putting government officials to work full time inside at

least a hundred big corporations.

Fascism is also always corporatist in nature, which the CPC certainly

embodies with its forced class collaboration between worker and

employer, and the way it structures its whole economy around the growth

of the corporations, which serve to grow the state and its imperialist

expansionism.

The party’s corporatism has all the usual features including useless

employer-controlled unions and a staggering 1.5 million-member police

force which springs into action during any class conflict, using its

monopoly on violence to uphold the interests of the bourgeois class and

violently put down the workers.

China is implicitly a fascist nation in the most traditional sense,

meeting every word of the original definition, with the power in the

hands of the head of state seemingly for as long as he wants it.

While the USA, due to its rotating two-party democracy, is better

described as neo-fascist, with both parties serving the fascist

billionaires who really rule the nation. But even China purports to be

democratic much like the USA does, so the distinction is barely there...

Xi Jinping calls China a “whole-process democracy”. Democracy is really

a meaningless moniker when it’s so easy to obfuscate what the democratic

process actually achieves. Plenty of lifelong dictators around the world

claim to be democratically elected and will have anyone who says

otherwise shot dead.

So the only tangible difference I can see between the two fascistic

nations is the Chinese head of state is positioned above China’s

billionaires on the hierarchy, and has no qualms about retaliating

against them when they break with the party line, while the USA head of

state is wholly subservient to the billionaire class and serves at their

pleasure.

Some will argue that unlike previous fascist genocides, the Uighur

genocide is motivated by economics, which it is, but it’s just as

motivated by religious, cultural and ethnic considerations. The party’s

propaganda depicts Uighurs as a crazed, seditious out-group striving to

destroy China and its (Han) culture from within, and bring about the

country’s collapse, which is really exactly how the Nazis depicted the

Jews. And this isn’t even the first time the party has engaged in

ethnic, cultural and religious erasure — they’ve been doing it in Tibet

for decades.

Ideologues prone to entryism like to rebrand things every so often

because their ideas start to look ridiculous after decades of failures,

so fascism and Marxism-Leninism become third positionism, and seem more

respectable for a while, at least until more failures and atrocities

pile up. Got to hide that power level while you can I suppose.

As I mentioned earlier, third positionist ideology is likely embraced by

goofy American and European settler-colonizers so readily because they

have a lot of deep-seeded guilt stemming from their empire’s

colonization of the world and they lack the imagination to envision real

alternatives to their status quo. It’s far easier for them to seek an

alternate strongman ruler to root for against their own strongman ruler

than part entirely with the tight comforting security blanket a strong

and charming ruler offers them.

After all, their fave ruler has a complex multifaceted plan to one day

gift them a glorious utopia — in China’s case, a series of succeeding

5-year plans playing out over at least the next three centuries... And

how can they resist the warm mushy feels that such strong regimentation

and structure gives them? How can they doubt daddy when his big promises

for a master plan make them feel so giddy and safe?

Being a communist-with-Chinese-characteristics means they’re not like

all the other normie white settlers living with them under the Koch

dynasty. When they log onto Twitter and flood their followers with

neo-fascist conspiracy blog posts proving just how much the terrible

Uighurs deserve to be erased, they get one step closer to that beautiful

rapture where all the chosen ones float to Marx’s communidise and the

reactionary unwashed heathens are left to rot in anarcho-hell.

Tankies will always insist they need to build a strong one-party

capitalist state because their daddy Lenin said so. They’re convinced

they need an almighty state so it can one day “wither away” and allow

communism to bloom, because just look at how all those socialist states

in history withered away! Look at Russia, look at China, Cuba, Zimbabwe,

Bulgaria, Syria, Burma, Libya, North Korea, Angola, Bangladesh,

Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, Poland, Mozambique, Romania, East Germany,

Hungary, Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Albania... All socialist states

that withered away into communism, right? Lenin was fucking prophetic

eh?

More than a hundred years later, tankies still cling to the same

bankrupt ideology that has failed catastrophically more times than

anyone could have imagined. So the source of my endless befuddlement is:

Why do so many self-proclaimed anarcho-communists and libertarian

socialists see these people as their allies? And more often than not end

up joining their third positionist cult after some gentle entryist

prodding?

To tankies and their red/black advocates I say put down those

blood-soaked books and face reality. Your amazing worker paradise, the

reward for your century of struggle isn’t coming. You can kill all the

kulaks, all the community-wreckers, all the anarchists, all the

left-communists, all the ethnic minorities, all the gays, all the

thieves, all the ungrateful unionists, all the muslims, you can pile all

their reactionary revisionist terrorist infantile heretic bodies high

and light massive meatsack bonfires all over the landscape, and you

still won’t get your glorious communist utopia where everyone who hasn’t

been murdered, lobotomized or gulaged gets to be equal, resource-rich

and fancy-free.

Look at the world around you. Look at the rapidly collapsing inferno

we’ve inherited from the slippery bearded ideologues of decades past.

Your daddy Lenin was wrong, Stalin was wrong, Mao was wrong, Xi is

wrong, all your big strong men whispering sweet nothings into your ear

while they impregnated teenagers, orchestrated peasant massacres and

stripped the lands they ruled bare were wrong.

It’s been a hundred something years of broken promises and bald-faced

lies from every one of your heroes, going all the way back to the day

grand-daddy Marx connivingly expelled the anarchists from the

International for daring to offer an alternative to his

authoritarianism. Yes, the man who first ripped off, watered-down and

relabeled anarchist ideas also perpetrated the original entryist purge

against anarchists... And history has been repeating itself ever since.

How about learning from history’s mistakes instead of repeating them in

an endless loop hoping for a different result? No, Xi’s successor in the

year 2321 isn’t going to give the workers a rapturous reward when he

decides the time is finally right to abolish capitalism. He’ll live in a

fucking palace on a pile of gold and diamonds just like all the rulers

before him.

Xi’s disgusted by you. All your daddies are disgusted by the filthy

peasants that kiss their boots and beg for table scraps. The only way

you’ll get a piece of his pie is after you kill him and pry it from his

ivory dentures. People who possess ultimate power over 1.4 billion

people don’t wake up one day and decide to slice their wealth up into

equal pieces and share it with everyone. It has never happened and it

will never happen.

Authority strangles everything in its path. Building your society around

authority and domination does not create anything but more fascism with

a dozen different labels, each crudely stuck on top of the other.

There will never be a global communist society because communists will

always find ideological enemies around every corner. You can’t murder

them all and you can’t bend 7 billion people to your will, so stop

fantasizing about reshaping the world in the image of some dead tyrants

who told some big beautiful lies to their wide-eyed subjects a century

ago.

You have no power to control the tides, whether you pray to Koch or Xi.

Your ceaseless entryism (especially your wildly successful campaign for

left-unity) will keep growing your base, but all you’re really doing in

our spaces is indoctrinating people that were already wholly constituted

of 100% pure horseshit. You can keep them.