I think it’s almost easier to just say you can safely ignore anyone using the phrase “counter-revolution” in the context of statecraft, because it’s an inherently subjective, unserious phrase with a heavy and chilling history of oppression. The Bolshevists were counter-revolutionary afterall. Debates over who is the righteous revolutionary and who is the “foreign provacateur” will always be circular, and will alway reduce to suppressing the agency of all opposition, be it real or synthetic. Anarchists are simply not in the business of suppressing agency, be it via linguistic gymnastics or otherwise.

Real social and political change will always be a project. It’s not “do the thing and then … Utopia.” As such it inherently needs to be built on a framework which embraces the idea of iterative progress, not one which treats it as suspicious by default.

Always good to see more refute of Marxist bullshit.

Easy to imagine a revolution as a sort of neatly abstracted game that can be won where the score is measured in control, difficult to imagine a better world being produced by a commitment to myriad future feats of imagination yet to exist in concrete form.

I liked the point by point rebuttal of the statist assumptions.

Excellent read. I’ve seen a few things from Andrew Sage before, but haven’t read much of it.

Finally. The whole “everything else is marxism-lite” has always kinda rubbed me the wrong way.

– Frost