Tl;dr: He got a bit crazy in his later years, started a cult like commune and always had a bit of a blind spot for problems faced by BIPOCs etc.
Typical story of well known anarchist writers... ambiguous personalities 😅
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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One of the things I love about anarchist thinkers is that you don't have to pretend they were infallible idols. There's a little bit of mythologizing that goes on among anarchists, but most of us acknowledge that as a rule they were insufferable people naturally replicating the trauma they experienced from the political systems they lived under onto others. If someone is like "Bakunin was an antisemite" you can be like, "yeah, and fuck him for that. Fuck all antisemitism. But he hated the state most of all, so lets talk about why."
I don't think that's a good thing -- it has definitely been an obstacle in anarchist organizing, and we wouldn't say "Be careful with each other..." if we didn't need to be reminded. Maybe if there was an anarchist Mr. Rogers, we'd have automated transgender space luxury communism already.
No Gods, no masters also means no anarchist gods or masters.
Cool comment
Reminds me of something I heard someone say a few years ago (I can't remember who said it): Build statues of ideas, not people.
Lmao I need to learn more about this, what commune?
Well... it's probably a bit unfair to describe it like that. I was going by some unfavourable description of his later years in the ISE in Plainfield.
It's this potentially an instance of separating the work from the man? Picasso was a pretty shitty man, but recognized art. They could still be "correct," if there even is such a thing, but they didn't necessarily act according to their ideals.
I feel like his critique of is individualist anarchism is pretty weak and mostly argues against a straw man.
True
I feel like in his later years he spent too much time dunking on anarchists. I think there is a lot of good in Communalism but don’t necessarily think it needs to be in conflict with ideologies such as Anarchism. If you get rid of some of the fluff such as constitutions then it’s basically a way to organize an anarchist society and fits well with syndicalism. Communalism as a way to organize where we live and syndicalism as a way to organize where we work.