Thread by @PeterGelderloos

(Could my Marxist friends help me out with this one, because I feel like there's a pattern.)

#OtD in 1936, Durruti's column of armed workers marched out of Barcelona to take the key city of Zaragoza. They liberated much of Aragón in the first days but failed to take the capital.

In large part, this was because Communists and left parties made sure the anarchist militias, the greatest by number, didn't get weapons and logistical support even though this meant sabotaging the fight against the fascists.

Flash back to the beginning of the 20s when the International, effectively controlled from Moscow, began programmatically sabotaging workers' organizations they could not absorb, for example a worldwide network of dockworkers who leaned anarchist.

Flash back to 1872 when Marx engineered the expulsion of the majority of the delegates of the International & moved it to New York even though he knew that would mean its death, to keep it out of the hands of those who opposed turning the workers movement into a political party.

Or a couple years earlier when he cheered on the Prussian forces in the war against France, believing a decisive German victory would lead to the ascendance of his theory over the French theory (anarchism).

Or fast forward to today, when frustrated Trots and Marxist academics in the climate movement are declaring a war on anarchism and cheerleading for stronger states, at a time when peasant and Indigenous movements on the frontlines, antiracist rebellions, and liberation movements

from Chiapas to Kurdistan are decentering the state and an anti-authoritarian autonomous framework has largely been recognized as a key component of global solidarity.

Is this pattern relevant to you, and how do you interpet it?

When you build a theoretical framework, do you divorce it from the actions of those who develop the theories?
These are sincere questions, directed at comrades from whom I've learned a lot. In solidarity, p