this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2024
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Anarchism
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It would take a huge amount of space to do those 4+ things justice. I'll share in some of them but I think it would pretty quickly be something deserving its own thread or maybe just some reading recommendations.
Re: Kronstadt, calling that a betrayal is just incorrect. First, they launched a mutiny directed at the Bolsheviks ("no Bolsheviks in the Soviets", so the lines went), of course the Bolsheviks would act in opposition. It was a direct, oppositional fight, not getting stabbed in the back. In addition, part of the "betrayal" narrative depends on characterizing the Kronstadt mutiny as emerging from those who had fought at Kronstadt for the October Revolution, as in, it was the people who fought and died alongside Bolsheviks for freedom who were later jailed and killed by them. But this is also largely inaccurate. The Kronstadt sailors mutinying drew heavily from new recruits from the south that had never been part of Kronstadt during the revolution, they were building their own structures (many of them questionable) using the principles they learned from the diverse ancom traditions in the south. I recommend reading contemporary accounts and items as close to the Soviet archives as possible.
Re: Makhnovschina, this one really requires reading heavily, to get a sense of the oppositional forces. It is, of course, much easier to justify a betrayal narrative here given the repeated alliances and breaking of alliances, the Red Terror, etc. These were people who fought side by side against the Whites, there is no doubt, and the Bolsheviks went to war against the Blacks and heavily oppressed them. My gut inclination was initially to say it was simply a mistake, a wrong. But if you delve more deeply into the specifics of operations, what the realities meant on the ground, it becomes clearer that this was not simply a revanchist attitude by the Bolsheviks, but a direct, material opposition due to the need to feed the workers in cities. This is why the Red Army faced no resistance in the cities and why the Black Army's entire operation was deeply interlinked with the peasantry, namely a petty bourgeois peasantry premised on isolation and, oddly, frequent entitlement to the products of the city, which the Black Army often stole in order to support the peasant communes run by their mayors. Rather than bridge this divide, the Black Army greatly exacerbated it, worsening starvation conditions. And this was not limited in impact just to the region of Machnovschina, as it had long been an exporter of grain to the north. This did develop into a sectarian fight, though it was also not simply The Reds breaking alliances to attack The Blacks. As autonomous groups, subsets of The Blacks often declared agreements to be over sporadically and took up arms and killed of their own volition. So if we call it betrayal, I would say a qualified one.
Re: Spain I would ask you to be more specific.
Re: IWW that publication is a lengthy polemic about every perceived grievance they could muster, and mostly not about the IWW at all, including the inaccuracies about Kronstadt that were belabored without merit until the opening of the archives. I don't know what you would want me to do with it except to suggest reading extensively and not relying on pamphlets. Every polemical claim requires investigation and specifics.