Why do you think it is that MLs & other authcoms are winning the hearts & minds of a lot of young leftists these days and anarchists aren’t?, & what could be done to change this?

class-struggle-anarchism:

haha “winning the hearts and minds”, I always think it’s an interesting choice when people take a concept directly from imperialist counter-insurgency and apply it to leftist organising – I mean at least pick an imperialist strategy that actually worked, that phrase was coined by the Brits in Malaya, popularised by the Americans in Vietnam, trotted out in Afghanistan and Iraq, and all the way along those darn hearts and minds just didn’t get won. 

My anonymous comrade, if you’re an anarchist, please don’t stress yourself out going around trying to win people over to anarchism. Leave that kind of thing to the trotskyists, and don’t worry about it. The hearts and minds of other people are not strategic objectives that you need to win, they’re not flags to capture, the revolution isn’t depending on you hitting your convert quota.

This idea of the militant as revolutionary salesperson is what makes talking to student lefties such a miserable experience, they see you as a potential recruit and will always steer the conversation in that direction (I know this because I was one, back in the day) It’s that fuckin ulterior motive always hanging in the air – like when doorstep evangelists ask you something innocuous, like if you believe in an afterlife. It’s not an honest interaction, you know what’s coming. Every time there’s an upsurge in working class activity in the UK, the SWP are there, pursuing a strategy specifically designed to milk the situation for as many new recruits as possible. It’s not smart revolutionary organising, its opportunistic parasitism and people hate them for it (among many other things, but let’s not get started)

It’s about what the objectives of your activity are, and thankfully, for us anarchists who are definitely not trying to build an ideologically correct vanguard party, our objectives don’t really demand converts. If you look at any of the areas of struggle where you’ll come across high concentrations of anarchists – militant antifascism, squatting and reclaiming public space, prisoner support and prison abolition, autonomous workplace organising, environmental direct action, tenants unions and housing stuff, whatever – “winning the hearts and minds of young leftists” for anarchism is not the goal, you don’t have to sign up to anarchist ideas to get involved with really any of it, and if you want you can get involved without people targeting you as a potential convert. 

For me at least, while we shouldn’t hide our ideas or be reluctant to talk about them, anarchism isn’t about convincing people of the correctness of a particular ‘line’’, if anything we just want to convince them to take direct action with us – and not because we share a political identity or set of opinions, but because we share an antagonistic relationship to capital and state. I’m a lot more concerned about the popularity of direct action as a means of class struggle than I am about the popularity of Anarchism. One thing I’m sure of is that we’d all be saying more interesting things to one another, in real life and here on tumblr.com, if nobody was trying to “win” anything.