this post was submitted on 23 May 2026
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Most anarchists are not online, or at least not active online. There's an inherent defiance in anarchist circles against imperial / extractive technologies like computers, which is less common in leninist circles where cybernetics has been assimilated (eg. under Allende, or in science fiction like Asimov). To be fair, i have met quite a few leninists who were profoundly techno-critical and did not wander on online forums.
So there's already this biased sample explaining things a little. But "non existing anarchist forces" in the 3rd world is a stretch due to your information bubbles. Can't say they're exactly thriving and on the verge of destroying the State, but there's strong anarchist communities in Sudan, Chile, Syria, Chiapas, Indonesia…
Didn't the Zapatistas disavow anarchism or otherwise deny they were anarchists or was that just hearsay?
Zapatismo has influences from Marxism-Leninism, but is primarily an original indigenous movement that rejects the labels of Marxism-Leninism and anarchism. They've stated that they cannot be constrained to foreign ideas, essentially.
And everyone likes to ignore that in favor of using them for their argument's ><
Yep, it's unfortunate.
I never once seen ML's claiming Zapatistas for Marxism-Leninism, but anarchists are doing this constantly.
I have seen both. In fact I've seen a anarchists and a ML arguing which one they were with each other.
There's certainly elements of both in the zapatista movement. But « claiming » people from one's computer would be a weird, colonial state of mind.
Not entirely correct. The zapatista movement is not an anarchist movement, nor is it a marxist movement (it's a zapatista movement). But to say they « disavow » anarchism is a stretch. See also A zapatista response to « The EZLN is not anarchist »: « There are anarchists in our midst, just as there are Catholics and Communists and followers of Santeria. We are Indians in the countryside and workers in the city. We are politicians in office and homeless children on the street. We are gay and straight, male and female, wealthy and poor. What we all have in common is a love for our families and our homelands. What we all have in common is a desire to make things better for ourselves and our country. None of this can be accomplished if we are to build walls of words and abstract ideas around ourselves. »
Still, there are a lot of anarchists in Mexico, not just Chiapas. But in Chiapas, too.
As QinShiHuangsSchlong pointed out, the Zapatistas explicitly reject anarchist labeling. You can point to them for their horizontalism (at the same time, they have hierarchy and centralization), but they are primarily an indigenous led movement with their own, original ideology. They see labeling them as "anarchists" as the imposition of western framing on their distinctly indigenous movement.
I explicitly did not name the zapatistas. But you are correct there are different aspects to their movement, with the peasant communities being more horizontal, and the EZLN being more hierarchical.
One thing common among most of these examples is that right wing forces carried mass genocide of communists in these countries.
That's technically correct. However, you seem to imply that repression against « communists » is not repression against « anarchists ». It definitely is. One could argue there's repression against anarchists without repression against communists (though i would say that's wrong because many of the deported/executed « leftists » under Lenin were not anarchists) but i've never heard a single make the opposite argument.