bunch of thread hijackers

Why would anarchists worry the powers that be? They're too disorganized and utopian to ever achieve power.

@ Putin

Try this one from Edward abbey.....

"Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners." (A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis en Deserto) : Notes from a Secret Journal, 1990)

Lonely are the Brave.

Yes, we can't entrust management to anyone, so nothing is managed. Unfortunately this "hardheaded realization" neglects the fact that governments are necessary for a functioning society.

Haven't 'collaborated' with anarchists for a decade now, I can tell you first hand they're sectarian, self-righteous, and would rather be morally pure than achieve anything.

Anarchism only was strong in areas of Europe that were relatively backward. It was an ideology befitting pre-industrial society.

Hobsbawm said it best.

"In brief, the main appeal of anarchism was emotional and not intellectual. That appeal was not negligible. Everyone who has ever studied, or had anything to do with the real anarchist movement, has been deeply moved by the idealism, the heroism, the sacrifice, the saintliness which it so often produced, side by side with the brutality of the Ukrainian Makhnovshchina or the dedicated gunmen and church-burners of Spain. The very [99] extremism of the anarchist rejection of state and organization, the totality of their commitment to the overthrow of the present society, could not but arouse admiration; except perhaps among those who had to be active in politics by the side of the anarchists, and found them almost impossible to work with. It is suitable that Spain, the country of Don Quixote, should have been their last fortress."

*having

Hobsbawm is an unreconstructed Marxist. Only he convieniantly forgets what the ultimate aim of Marx himself was. As we have seen power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely (e.g., the USSR).

Oh he's very reconstructed - he was a 'Euro-Communist' - social Democrat in Marxist clothing. Most of the so-called Euro-Communist parties ended up committing suicide, as they came up 'class struggle' for exclusively intellectual and cultural pursuits, and largely accepted bourgeois democracy. The Euro-Communists ended up backing Blair in the Labour Party (and even Gorbachov in the USSR), who dismantled any inkling of social democracy in that party.

And any way Marxists know better than anyone what anarchists and anarchism is like in practical terms. Anarchists conveniently forget that to achieve their revolution, they cannot depend on spontaneous consensus-based uprisings from the masses - or rely on gradiose individual acts of terrorism.

Anarchists can bitch about Marxism precisely because they've never had the burden of being in power.

And the ultimate aim of Marx could only be achieved once the enemies of socialism were defeated. Marx (and Engels) knew this well - as he was a commentator on the failed Paris Commune. It was this experience that led them to their support for the necessity of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and led them to savagely criticize anarchism.