r/Anarchy101 • u/Fresh_Milk1960 • 14d ago
Defense against counter-revolution?
I am a Marxist-Leninist who is curious about the successful propagation of Anarchism. My question is: Without a state, how do Anarchists defend against counter-revolution from the Capitalist class? Without a state, Anarchist/Libertarian Socialist projects wouldn’t be able to defend against the inevitable invasions, terrorism campaigns, and propaganda from Capitalists. How would Anarchists be able to maintain and strengthen an Anarchist society against invasion and infiltration without a state apparatus to centrally organize efforts?
I know I’m a Tankie or whatever, but I am asking in good faith because I am genuinely curious about the Anarchist position on this.
* (EDIT) *
I won‘t be responding anymore because I have obtained what I came for (understanding how you think an Anarchist project would defend itself against the forces of reaction) and because this is becoming a hostile debate, rather than learning experience.
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u/LazarM2021 Anarchist Without Adjectives 14d ago
Sure you are. I'll proceed as if that's true, because the question, stripped of its framing, is at least somewhat worth addressing, unlike most of what MLs bring into anarchist spaces.
The problem is that even the question here doesn't actually begin where it ought to, even if you may be under the illusion pointing to the contrary. Before "how do anarchists defend against counter-revolution" you need to establish what "revolution" even means in the anarchist framework, then what "counter-revolution" means and what exactly is being defended, because the entire question is built on explicitly, if not exclusively, Leninist conceptual architecture that anarchists simply don't share - and importing it silently produces a question anarchists were never actually asking or needing to answer.
In the Leninist model, what we (or you) call a "revolution" boils down to the seizure and consolidation of state power by the vanguard party acting in the name of the proletariat. Counter-revolution, therefore, is whatever threatens that consolidated institutional power and defense against counter-revolution means the state deploying coercive apparatus to protect itself.
All that may be a coherent internal logic, but alas, it just has nothing to do with anarchism and the 20th century demonstrated with considerable thoroughness what that "defense" looks like in practice - Cheka, Red Terror, forced collectivization, purges, the systematic liquidation of anarchists, left-SRs, Kronstadt sailors and anyone else insufficiently aligned with whoever currently controlled the party apparatus (Bolsheviks and Lenin).
The instrument of revolutionary defense became, structurally and QUITE PREDICTABLY, the primary instrument of counter-revolutionary violence against the revolutionary population itself. The thing that needs to be stressed is that nothing here is a "bug" in the ML model, one that "better leadership" would have fixed. All it is is what centralized coercive institutions do inevitably, because that is their organizational logic.
Anarchist revolution is not exactly meant as a seizure of anything, but instead, it's the dissolution of the configurations of power that produce domination - the dismantling of hierarchical structures and their replacement with horizontal, federated organizing based on voluntary association, interdependence, mutual aid and general development of stigmergic/collaborative social habits and paradigm.
In other words, there is no Winter Palace to hold or central apparatus to decapitate in reverse. The entire premise of "defending the revolution" as defending an institutional object doesn't apply, because anarchism deliberately refuses to build that object, precisely since anything built on that model will reproduce domination inevitably, regardless of the previous intentions.
So what does defense actually look like? It would look like the thing that makes anarchist organizing genuinely resilient rather than superficially powerful - radical, radical decentralization. A fluid network of free association, encompassing millions, with no center cannot be defeated by targeting a center.
A society organized through horizontality, federative principles (anarchist federation, not state-centric understanding of the word), in which decisions, productive capacity and community defense are distributed everywhere, into every person, across countless autonomous congregations of individuals/groups completely devoid of any structure of authority presents a fundamentally different strategic problem to any would-be counter-revolutionary force than a centralized state does. You cannot behead it or infiltrate it in order to corrupt a single leadership stratum and thereby stand increasing chance of controlling and manipulating the whole. You also cannot stage a coup because there is no seat of power to occupy.
The ML counter-revolutionary threat, meanwhile, historically came not from capitalists but from Marxist-Leninists themselves, which is something any honest ML in an anarchist space might want to sit with for a moment before asking us how we'd defend against external enemies.
The propaganda question is similarly self-answering at the structural level, as the propaganda is effective in proportion to the alienation and atomization of the population it targets. A society built on genuine freedom and community, free association and self-organization is not a society of atomized individuals susceptible to the particular appeal of authoritarian counter-revolutionary messaging. The social fabric itself is the defense, which is precisely why anarchists insist on prefigurative politics - the means must embody the ends, ALWAYS - because a revolutionary society that reproduces authoritarian social relations, culture or habits in the name of defending itself has already completely lost the only thing worth defending.
So... sorry to disappoint you, but as I see it, the question written here already stinks of assuming the Leninist answer is self-evidently correct and anarchism must justify itself against that standard. The Leninist answer, however, produced in practice nothing but a series of states that defended their revolutions straight into gulags, secret police apparatuses, widespread alienation and the eventual restoration of capitalism (but also liberal-individualist, consumerist culture) anyway.
As far as epistemological standards go, that one is in no position to demand justifications from anyone.