My sincere answer for why anarchists reemerged five years ago is that movements are social hierarchies and newbie teens don't want to compete for status in existing illegible/inaccessible spaces like Marxism, so they resurrected a dead/empty scene that had trappings of status.

Leftism exploded in social cachet for a variety of reasons, and newly minted leftists needed to slap an identity, a brand, a flag of status and association on themselves.

"Goldman did nothing wrong, Catalonia looked cool" is a quickie that requires no work or long acculturation.

For all of recorded history anarchists were like three old creepy white dudes no one cared about at the back of an IWW meeting. Sometimes they'd trick a kid or two for a couple years.

The reemergence of anarchists involved people completely disconnected and unrelated to prior anarchists.

When I first started hearing whispers of anyone under 50 actually defending Bakunin it was angsty white incels that couldnt find love. They weren't like getting this shit from contact w/ actual Bakuninites, they were inventing a new social milieu from whole cloth.

Sure, there were *some* points of transmission. A creepy professor schooled in standard creepy anarchist entryism gathered some students, got them to take over fb pages, etc. But mostly anarchists were just googling "what is anarchism" and grabbing random shit.

Anyway, this is why today's online anarchism is such an uniformed and contradictory grab-bag of bullshit. There's been some congealing as folks competed to show off what texts (in this previously dead space) they'd read, but mostly it's just social positioning.

This kind of thing happens EVERY time a movement gets a flood of new recruits. People flood in and want to grab high status immediately, are resentful of those already there, and clash over not wanting to learn or accept preexisting consensus positions they don't yet hold.

My go-to example of this in Occupy were kids who "not to brag but had been an anarchist now for OVER A MONTH" getting furious and yelling at longstanding Tankies that we were "fake Tankies who don't know anything!" because we weren't pacifists.

See also leftypol & the dirtbaggers. Folks get converted on one issue and then recoil about being expected to also learn / change their opinion on a variety of other topics. *Respecting pronouns?! Never! You olds are a joke! We're making a new movement with hookers & blackjack!*

Anyway, anarchists and their eternal tactics of parasitic duplicitous entryism are particularly effective online with kids who are freshfaced and have no deep AFK contact with radical/activist spaces. They basically ate 99% of meme pages on facebook and every subreddit.

Now did some of these people get hooked up with checks from the state department or something? Maybe. We've seen eg America funding Neo Nazis in Ukraine. But I think this is minor and is not responsible for the 2015/2016 anarchist explosion. Bernie did that.

I mean quite literally it was Bernie. In 2016 an activist group I was in was interviewing people looking to get involved and we found (to my comrades' shock) a number of fervent bloodthirsty anarchists. Looking at their social media they were THREE MONTHS into being anarchists.

I mean literally we're talking about people who had been Bernie Bernie Bernie liberals and then the moment prospects for further standing in that scene fell out with the collapse of his campaign they turned on a dime and got into Goldman did nothing wrong, Makhno's a hero, etc.

These kids had basically never done activism before and knew NOTHING but were fronting as longtime super serious radicals. They were astonished to learn we were all Tankies. They didn't know Tankies were real or 90% of the actual activist scene.

These kids who had again, three months prior been all about Bernie and had no fucking politics beyond a few Bernie videos they watched, were making posts to their social media praising Orwell snitching on Marxist-Leninists.

They were DESPERATE for belonging, status, identity, etc. Particularly that which could be gotten from behind a computer screen by joining like a discord or fb group or watching a few youtube videos.

Marxism was simply inaccessible by comparison.

Most of the Marxist movement had sneered at and avoided the internet (seen as an insecure tool of civilized alienation). Also it was illegible, most of the shit we expect you to learn/accept we don't even write down. And getting involved? We're terrible at helping folks join.

Marxist recruitment for decades had been primarily social / subcultural, with a fringe of super committed altruistic nerds who would persevere.

There was simply no recruitment machinery for randos who wanted to quickly join, learn shit, and gain standing via the internet.

(This is also related to why breadtube types tend to be so open to anarchists and/or slip further and further from Marxist mainstream shit and towards anarchist shit.)

There's a secondary thread in all this which is the amount of low-quality MLs that jumped ship to leftcom trash (because low-investment snotty status hierarchies in fb discussion groups). That's kinda the path by which anarchists made their way eventually to radlibism.

Academic status hierarchies are also related to why some anarchist went radlib.

These folks are also our fault because they usually had a very anemic knowledge of or exposure to substantive/contemporary/analytic anarchist theory, so radlib shit looked better.

This whole thread is about how anarchists are trash and you should become a principled Marxist-Leninist

My answer to this question is BOTH... https://twitter.com/Tinneddirt/status/1295142109729697793

Anarchism is inherently more diverse & decentralized and thus we are more condescending to outsiders because of fragile morality. Anarchism prioritizes individualism and thus doesn't get anything done. Also we're ultimately opposed to actually winning a revolution

But ALSO the Marxist movement got up its own ass. We derided the internet and avoided utilizing it effectively. We embraced illegibility as resistance, forgetting that accessibility is critical to winning people over. And we corrupted into playing internal status games.

Those internal status games meant people sneering at uneducated and very "liberal" newbs, gatekeeping people out just to maintain our eliteness. Not just gatekeeping in the sense of preserving hard won understandings and consensus agreements from erosion.

But my last thought:

Having more folks isn't necessarily good.

An effective movement does require some filters, eg stopping abusers and opportunistic grifters at the door.

The upside of anarchist is they draw away the shallow, status-driven individualist trash we never wanted.