Antonym

He/They 18 🇦🇺/🇫🇷 Marxist

[horsejuice]

[pattern-recognition]

every time I see a new picture of Che it’s like finding another holy grail. he never missed once. i know it was the 1960s but it feels like every photo of the man was taken with a friend’s phone camera

[spaghettioverdose-deactivated20]

[ofcarnivora]

But it's our's????

[mysharona1987]

The French really don’t fuck around.

[antonym58]

It’s a shame that the PCF are a bunch of parliamentary Eurocoms who couldn’t bring themselves to call for protests let alone any mobilisation

[tomatodisaster-deactivated20250]

“Communism takes long to explain” yeah dude it’s an ideology about radically reshaping society and most American high schools either haven’t taught it or worse have taught only silly anti communist fables so we’re gonna be here a fucken minute.

[memories-of-ancients]

Frog vessel, Moche culture, Peru, 200-500 AD

from The Dallas Museum of Art

[vintageeveryday]

Frida Kahlo was a famous Mexican artist and fashion icon who was known for painting self-portraits and wearing traditional dresses. Something that surprises many people is she spent much of her life wearing plaster corsets. Read more of the story here...

[batshit-auspol]

Here's our most requested item: Bob Katter's same-sex marriage speech, in all its unhinged glory

Follow for more Batshit Moments in Australian politics!

[txttletale]

this is a question that on other blogs would likely get me exploded with hammers but you seem nice and i swear im just genuinely just trying to understand, but do you have any thoughts on why marxist-leninists are so dismissive of anarchists?

first of all i'd like to preface that i think that marxist-leninists being dismissive of anarchists (and conversely anarchists hollering about evil tankies) is something that is much more common among Posters Online than among people of either political persuasion who are actually meaningfully involved in communist organization -- if 'anarchist' or 'Marxist-Leninist' is primarily an online identity to you, then you're likely to want to signal that identity by loudly and pointlessly disdaining a designated out-group -- if anarchist or marxist-leninst praxis is something you actually do, you will quickly realize, however much you disagree or even dislike the other tendency, that for most practical purposes you will be much served working together when it comes to any anticapitalist or antifascist action.

secondly i'd also like to add that i, personally, am much more tolerant of anarchists than most marxist-leninists even by the standards of actual organizing. i have mutuals, friends, and comrades who are anarchists -- while i believe that the differences between marxism-leninism and anarchism are irreconcilable in a revolutionary situation, i believe that in the vast majority of the world the situation is so far from revolutionary that there is no material or practical conflicts between marxist-leninists and what lenin called "the best of the anarchists". many anarchists have made incisive and useful critiques of capitalism and even of socialist projects (even though i think those critiques are weakened by the anarchist inability to provide a viable alternative).

all that out of the way, here are some problems that i (and other marxist-leninists) have with anarchists:

#1: class-blind & idealistic theoretical frameworks. a lot of anarchists tend to view political systems and articulate criticisms in terms of extremely abstract ideas about 'power', 'authority', and 'hierarchy'. this flattens a lot of substantially different class relationships into broad and inexact categories such as 'domination' -- the result of this is that anarchists lose sight of class relations and the material basis from which power emerges and is maintained. often they will psychologize these elements, explaining systems and the way they function by projecting a psychoanalytical framework onto the holders of power. i find these analyses usually produce incoherent and politically useless truisms. being based purely on ideals and not on materialism leads a lot of these anarchist suppositions to tie themselves into knots -- as engels said, "a revolution is the most authoritarian thing there is", yet many anarchists are revolutionary (supporting the violent seizure of power from the bourgeoisie) but viciously opposed to the DoTP (the violent maintenance of power over the bourgeoisie), with the imo totally incoherent rationale that the latter is 'authoritarian' while the former is not.

#2: individualism. anarchists are generally very concerned with 'individual freedoms' and the importance of the individual as a political unit -- as i often say on this blog, i deny the individual as a meaningful political unit. to me 'liberation' means the working class as a whole being able to live comfortably without the threat of death hanging over their heads if they fail to sell their labour -- 'freedom' is only meaningfully possible when there is a liberation of the working class in totality. in its worst manifestation, this leads a lot of anarchists to totally reject the concept of socially necessary labour or the need for labour to be organised at all (cf. this meme)

#3: the cult of spontaneity. anarchists (obviously) do not believe in centralised organisations. i think, frankly, this is silly, because centralised organisations are the only body capable of mobilizing the working class to mass action. without centralisation, it's impossible to coordinate and act in unison -- that is, to do the very things that make any revolutionary action feasible at all. the revolutionary strategy of simply waiting for the people to 'spontaneously' rise up and install communism because they have all separately decided to is one that's, quite simply, fantastical and has no basis in reality. this holds true for action that falls short of 'armed revolution' too -- to be effective and replicable, direct action needs to be planned, deliberate, and coordinated, and this just isn't possible without an organizing body.

#4: repeating imperialist talking points. now this is not true of all anarchists -- there are lots of principled anti-imperialist anarchists in the world. however, there are also a lot of anarchists who will engage in borderline apologia for US imperialism, who will parrot lines about 'dictators' and 'totalitarian regimes', who refuse to oppose US imperialism because 'all states are the same'. this ultimately (in the most charitable interpretation) stems from #1, where the choice of whether or not to oppose US imperialism is seen mostly as a personal idealistic moral choice (decide What Is Good and What Is Bad) rather than a material choice about what political action can be taken. and of course there are many valuable critiques to be made of the USSR's many failures, and some of these critiques have been made by anarchists -- but some anarchists will descend to Black Book of Communism levels in an attempt to get one in on a strawman of 'Stalinism'

if you want a more detailed in-depth criticism of anarchism from a marxist-leninist perspective that i mostly agree with, this medium article is fantastic. but these four reasons are the main ones i -- while not dismissive of anarchists -- am not an anarchist and generally disagree with anarchist theory.

[palominocorn]

Y'all, if you wouldn't reblog from someone with a swastika icon (and why would you do that), then don't reblog from someone with a hammer and sickle icon. It's really that simple.

I know it's tempting, as people who have never lived under the USSR, to assume that everything you learned about the horrors that happened behind the Iron Curtain was just capitalist propaganda, but as someone whose family lived it? It was worse than what high school social studies taught you.

The hammer and sickle is a symbol of state terror. Of genocide. Of bigotry. Of too many abuses to list. It's a symbol drenched in fear and blood and pain.

And it's not a symbol that you can reclaim. We, the survivors and descendants of the communist bloc, are the ones who decide whether we can turn it into a symbol of resistance, and we have decided: no. The wounds are too raw and the fear is too deep.

To the people actually affected by the hammer and sickle, it is still a symbol of violence. Put it down. Leave it be. Let us recover.

[antonym58]

CIA

[maeo-png]

making another post about this bc the petition is still up

Residents of NSW Australia may be able to self-identify their gender on legal documents! If you’re a NSW resident please sign <3

LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY - Signing ePetition - Allow transgender people to self-ID their legal gender

The petition is live until the 17th of August :]

[logorrhea5mip]

[antonym58]

It’s kind of interesting that all the anarchists/demsocs/eurocoms who endlessly shit on ‘tankies’ don’t think about how most active and large scale Marxist movements in the world are; A: Mostly in the “third world” or imperial periphery B: predominantly M-L or similar variations, AKA people that these ‘new-left’ types would consider ‘tankie’

Conversely, many marxists in the “first world” or imperial core are anarchists, demsocs (if you can call them Marxists) and eurocoms. These same western Marxists insist against the ‘dogma’ of ‘tankie’ ideology, and treat it as authoritarian and fundamentally wrong. In this way, some of the western ‘white saviour’ complex shines through indirectly by denigrating these Marxists in the imperial periphery, who are the most active in the world, as being wrong.

Eurocommunism and democratic socialism most especially originates from a position of relative privilege to that of the conditions in the ‘third world’.

Besides, Engels wrote a whole fucking book about why utopians, which includes demsocs and anarchists, are wrong. You don’t know better than a Naxalite or Argentinian Trotskyite, so get off your high horse.

[vigilantsycamore]

*inhales*

Ok. You're 17, so I'll do my best to calmly explain what's wrong with this post, instead of reacting react to this the way I would if you were a 30-something dictator stan

First, let's just clarify what the word "tankie" actually means, because just as there's a myth that "TERF" is "a slur for the only real feminists" there is also a myth that "tankie" is "a slur for the only real socialists." This is false. The term tankie started as a way to describe those western leftists who supported the Soviet Union; these days it refers to a predominantly-western group of leftists who attempt to whitewash the USSR's history and defend any state geopolitically opposed to the USA - even if it's an extremely right-wing government. And example of tankies would be the Marxist-Leninists in western countries who harass Ukrainian refugees and uncritically repeat Putinist propaganda about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Second, anti-authoritarian leftists don't "endlessly shit on tankies". We criticise them, certainly, for their dicrator apologia and their west-centric biases. And some of us do get pissed off at them - of course we do, you'd get pissed off at someone engaging in genocide denial and calling you reactionary for opposing imperialism. Especially when a lot of us are from countries that suffered, or are still suffering, under the dictatorships that Marxist-Leninists tend to defend, and whenever we try to explain this we get talked over about our own history.

Third, your use of Marxist instead of leftist is puzzling, especially since as you yourself point out, a lot of the movements you talk about here aren't Marxist. Marxism is not the be-all and end-all of leftist thought, and in fact the left should move on from it.

Fourth, it's ironic that you accuse the critics of tankies of having a western savior complex when that is far more applicable to the way that western Marxist-Leninists talk about non-western countries. Despite a proclaimed opposition to the west, they consider themselves, as theory-reading westerners, more enlightened and knowledgeable than history-reading non-westerners. Even M-Ls from non-western regions like Latin America center all world politics around western countries and display extremely patronising attitudes towards non-westerners who dispute their claims.

We're not the ones arguing that every protest in a country whose government doesn't like the USA is a CIA psyop; or that every single atrocity committed by those governments was actually fabricated by the USA and the victims/survivors of those atrocities are actually paid actors, reactionaries, and people who deserved it.

Finally, while I have my criticisms of anarchists, and do regard their end-goal as unlikely to come to fruition, democratic socialism isn't utopian. It simply calls for a socialist economy and a democratic form of government, both things that already exists. Heck, democratic socialist governments have come to power before, including in non-western countries like the ones you hold up as a bastion of Marxist-Leninism, and they managed to do a pretty good job despite USAmerican efforts to undermine them. By contrast, Marxist-Leninism specifically aims to establish the communist utopia of a "classless, stateless, moneyless society" via a transitional period of benevolent dictatorship - and incidentally, benevolent dictatorship does not exist.

[antonym58]

1. The general gist of what you’re saying is telling me that your experience of people who use ‘tankie’ is different to mine. From my experience, most people use tankie just use it against any M-L. I also greatly dislike all the annoying fuckers who defend Putin, but there are plenty of M-Ls who don’t support the bullshit that is multipolarity.

2. It’s not dictator apologia to give a more nuanced explanation of what happened under previous socialisms.

3. That’s fair, I just don’t like the idea of leftism and rightism, it seems pointless to lump all ‘progressive’ people together, everyone from social democrats to posadists.

4. That’s exactly how I see many demsocs in the west, endlessly slapping M-L with the ‘authoritarian’ sticker which just so happens to be the historically most successful model of leftism in the third world.

5. Not all M-Ls do this.

6. Democratic Socialism is not just the establishment of a socialist democracy, because that is also the case in M-L. DemSoc more so describes the process in which socialism is established, that being through democratic struggle in the capitalist system. Such an approach is fundamentally utopian, Engels wrote a whole book about utopian and scientific socialism. As did Lenin, and the DemSoc idea has been proven to be a failure in cases such as Allende’s Chile. While this was not necessarily Allende’s ‘fault’ it still provides an example as to why nations like Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos and more decided to go with the model which would provide immediate security for the revolution.

7. You seem to misunderstand what ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ means. It is not a dictatorship of one person, but of a whole class. Most people today live in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, where the whole system is run by and in the interest of the bourgeoisie. Dictatorship of the proletariat is simply making the roles reversed. In addition, most leaders of M-L states were not dictators, democracy was ever present within them. I have my own gripes with vanguard party rule, but leaders like Joseph Stalin did not govern alone. Even the CIA admits this.

[lago-morpha]

Anarchism or Socialism? - J.V. Stalin

[antonym58]

As much as I have my issues with anarchists, they are not the main enemy, especially not the AnComs, the main enemy is the bourgeoisie, that’s how the class struggle works

[radiofreederry]

[ithacanradio]

why does it always gotta be "oh im a communist but not like those marxists leninists-" we had this debate. in the 1800s. in fact marx AND lenin wrote about it: you are either for some nebulous idea of communal living that gets you nowhere OR you realize that you have to start from the current material conditions, and organize, and the organization has to be centralized for it to work and you have to study a lot and also act in group because going to protests on your own is just perpetuating an individualist ideology. they were saying marx was outdated in 1915!! guess what happened two years later. like you can incorporate all you want from feminism and queer theory and even anarchy but at the end of it all. only one line of action can bring about revolution, has revolution as its objective and has in fact done so before. it's marxism leninism. you have just been conditioned to think it's outdated so you wouldn't use the only weapon that actually works! people cant afford to eat and the west's quest to maintain economic hegemony is pushing us into ww3 and you will not use the concepts of plusvalue, imperialism, and political party, why? because the ruling class told you identity politics are more modern?

[mfdumm]

anti romani prejudice still being this prevalent in europe is so heartbreaking and sickening. we barely learned anything about them in school, there arent many efforts for reparation or at the very least apology after the atrocities europe executed against them, and there is still so much negative stereotyping prevailing, not to mention the systemic discrimination they still face to this day in sections such as housing and medical care.

i am not romani, but its just something i noticed that european leftists barely acknowledge. there is still so much prejudice we all need to unlearn. we are failing the romani people with our silence and its time we properly include them in our fight for justice for all.