A-Infos (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: Polar Blast - The Objections: Taking the Critics Seriously (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Any serious political philosophy must engage with its most serious 
critics, and anarcho-communism has attracted serious criticism from 
multiple directions. It would be dishonest to simply ignore these, and 
the anarcho-communist theory of freedom is strengthened, not weakened, 
by engaging with them directly.
The most common objection from the liberal centre is that 
anarcho-communism is utopian, that human beings are, by nature, too 
competitive, too self-interested, and too inclined toward hierarchy for 
a free communist society to be sustainable. This objection has been 
rehearsed so many times that it has acquired the status of common sense, 
which should itself be a reason for suspicion. Arguments that naturalise 
the existing order, that present capitalism and the state as the 
inevitable expressions of human nature, are performing ideological work, 
dressing historical contingency up as biological destiny.
The anarcho-communist response is not to deny that human beings are 
capable of self-interest, competition, and cruelty, obviously they are. 
It is to point out that human beings are equally capable of solidarity, 
cooperation, and care, and that which tendencies predominate is a 
function of the social conditions people live in rather than of fixed 
human nature. A society organised around competition, scarcity, and 
hierarchical authority will tend to produce competitive, acquisitive, 
authoritydeferring people. A society organised around mutual aid, 
abundance, and collective self-governance will tend to produce different 
kinds of people, with different habits and values. This is not naive 
optimism, but it is a reasonable inference from both historical evidence 
and social psychology.
The most serious objection from the Marxist-Leninist left is that 
anarchism is incapable of mounting an effective challenge to capitalism, 
that without centralised organisation, without a vanguard party, without 
the seizure of state power, revolutionary movements will be defeated by 
the organised force of the ruling class. The history of the twentieth 
century, on this reading, is a history of anarchist failure and Leninist 
success. It is a serious argument, and the anarcho-communist owes it 
more than a dismissive rebuttal.
Let us be honest about the defeats, because honesty is more useful than 
defensiveness. The most advanced anarchist experiment of the twentieth 
century, the Spanish Revolution of 1936-1939, centred on the CNT-FAI and 
the collectivisations in Catalonia and Aragon, was crushed. Workers had 
reorganised production on genuinely free and communal principles. 
Millions of people were governing themselves without bosses, without 
police, without the mediation of a party or a state. And they lost. They 
were attacked by Franco's fascists, bombed by Hitler and Mussolini, and, 
critically, actively undermined and ultimately destroyed by the 
Stalinist forces that were nominally on the same side. The anarchist 
currents in the Russian Revolution were similarly suppressed when the 
Kronstadt sailors who demanded real soviets rather than Bolshevik 
management were massacred by the Red Army in 1921. The Makhnovist 
movement in Ukraine, which organised genuinely libertarian communism 
across a vast territory during the civil war, was eventually annihilated 
by the same Red Army that had briefly allied with it against the Whites. 
These are not footnotes, they are the central events of anarchism's most 
serious confrontation with power, and they ended in defeat.
The honest anarcho-communist does not get to simply say, well, the 
Leninists cheated. That is true, but it does not resolve the question. 
If your politics cannot survive being betrayed by its nominal allies, 
that is a political vulnerability, not just a moral complaint. The 
question the defeats force on us is whether the anarchist commitment to 
non-hierarchical organisation, to prefiguration, to refusing the seizure 
of state power, is compatible with the level of coordination and 
discipline that confronting a militarily organised capitalist state 
actually requires. This is an open question, not a settled one, and any 
anarchism worth taking seriously has to live with its difficulty rather 
than explaining it away.
The Leninist successes, meanwhile, deserve honest assessment rather than 
easy dismissal. The Russian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, the 
Vietnamese resistance to American imperialism, these were not nothing. 
They represented genuine popular mobilisations against genuine 
ruling-class power, and in several cases they won, at least militarily. 
The anarcho-communist counter-argument is not that these were not real 
movements or real victories, but that the regimes they produced were 
not, by any meaningful measure, free communist societies. They were 
state capitalisms managed by party bureaucracies that quickly became new 
ruling classes, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but the 
dictatorship over the proletariat, exactly as Bakunin had predicted in 
the 1870s. The ends were profoundly shaped by the means. The Leninist 
model achieved revolutionary seizure of state power and then produced 
states indistinguishable in their basic structure of domination from the 
ones they replaced.
This is not a peripheral failure, rather it goes to the heart of what 
freedom requires. There is also a question about what we are comparing. 
The Leninist critique holds Kronstadt and Spain up against the Russian 
and Cuban revolutions and declares the score obvious. But this 
comparison has a selection bias: it is comparing the outcomes of 
revolutionary situations, moments of acute crisis where the question of 
armed force was decisive, rather than the full range of social and 
political transformation.
The anarchist contribution to working-class history has not only been in 
the dramatic ruptures. It has been in the labour organising of the IWW, 
in the culture of the CNT, in the free schools and cultural centres of 
Catalan anarchism, in the mutual aid networks that sustained communities 
through crisis, in the feminist politics that Goldman and de Cleyre 
developed decades before the mainstream left took seriously the 
connection between personal and political freedom. These contributions 
are harder to count as victories on a military ledger, but they have 
shaped how people organise, resist, and imagine alternatives in ways 
that continue to matter. Perhaps most importantly, the Leninist critique 
assumes that the only relevant question is whether anarchism can win 
against capitalism in direct armed confrontation, now, in the conditions 
of the existing world. But the anarchocommunist vision of social 
transformation is not primarily about a single decisive revolutionary 
rupture followed by the administration of state power. It is about the 
long, unglamorous, often dispiriting work of building free institutions 
in the present, developing the capacities for self-governance that a 
free society requires, and creating, within and against the existing 
order, the social relations and practices that make another world 
possible. This is a different conception of what revolution looks like. 
It is harder to measure, less cinematically satisfying, and more 
compatible with the actual complexity of social change. Whether it is 
sufficient to the scale of what we face is a question the twenty-first 
century is in the process of answering.

https://thepolarblast.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/to-be-free-together.pd
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en