Please discuss! No uncritical sectarianism, bad faith arguments, etc.

Important questions:

  • Is the strategy most socialist organizations in the US are using, in your opinion, a good one? What else should they do?
  • As individual socialist, what do you think we should be doing? What groups are worth joining?
  • What should be done about the sudden rise of socially reactionary beliefs and laws across the country?

Reading posted by users:
Where’s the Winter Palace?, posted by @CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.ml, written by unknown author, I checked and could not find one on the article.

Conclusion from this text, that I think summarizes it’s premise quite well:

We believe that, in the U.S. in 2018, the truly important theoretical tasks have not been solved. We are in a period of a nascent socialist movement since the 2008 financial crisis. We should not be afraid of new ideas, and should look forward instead of harping on the 20th century. Without bending to reformism or adventurism, we must feel free to put everything back on the table and come to build strategy and theory through struggle.

(Emphasis mine)

  • iriyan@lemmygrad.ml
    1·
    1 year ago

    The true vanguards don’t need anyone to work with, they need anyone willing to work for them.

    A harsh admission of terms and concepts, but either you are with us or against us. Are you willing to do as we say?

    Ok, Ok, I am over stating the less obvious truth but nevertheless, in the real time/space geography/sociopolitical conditions one (collective entity) should examine the situation and how to best utilize resources to maximize the effects of specific goals.

    The issue of “fronts”.

    I find that many people stay confused about such things in this day and age. The clearest example of a front is antifascism, the not so clear ones are various social issues that may not easily be reduced to class issues, as women’s reproductive rights. Any labor related struggle is by default a class struggle, but things that may relate to LGBTQ/abortion/race/environment/nutrition … may not provide adequate class determinants to have clear lines with who to work with and who not to.

    In an ideal political environment collective entities would meet in the place of struggle for a certain issue, respect each other as equals and cooperate for a common cause. This is rarely ever witnessed. First of all the size of collective entities makes them less equal. An army of 600 leaflet spreaders and copiers can carry 2-300 pages each to the gathering or protest and distribute 10s of thousands of pages in a matter of hours. A collective that is made up of 8 people, can do insiginificant difference in such an activity. In the same manner, their opinion on something is heard less among the members of the front.

    Then there is the issue of the many different vanguards who antagonize each other for the hygemony within the front. This makes the climate less conductive. And this is on one issue they may agree on, or the reason to struggle for, and even see it the same way as the means to an end (not being the struggle itself but the political gains from participating in struggle).

    To add to all this confusion here comes the even more important one. Just because we (collective entities) met and worked together for this particular cause, does it automatically mean we should expand this collaboration or tolerance practice on other things, or is it issue specific? In the front many collective entities meet, but also are surrounded by individuals who are not affiliated with any collective entity, they are simply moved by the specific cause. They have no agenda, no reason to also meet in another front. But they form personal relationships with people who are affiliated with this or the other collective entity.

    All this is what a party needs to do, decide on how to handle all these matters, estimate the gains and losses from each activity and position.

    In terms of specifics to the US and the general left, from the moment where it was decided that all left organization failed to steer the BLM movement towards a true class movement and away from the reactionary matter of race, the left should have pulled out and let it drown. Instead the left stayed being part of a bankrupt movement that had no future without its potential to generalize to class. PLM, poor lives matter would have been political, BLM has, and will not, go anywhere. The question to be asked still is the left better off or worse off after BLM fizzled out? Did the entire US society shift further to the right? Is the neoliberal nightmare called Biden a product of this shift?

    Defund the Police: What reformist genius could have come up with this one? In the recent US reality, defund the police meant an increasing justification for the presence of paramilitaries to fill the gaps of the police underfunding. In many cases those paramilitaries (neo-fascists with an agenda) were glorified by media, helping the “public” identify more with a murder civilian than with those struggling against police brutality.

    This is almost the reversal of what happened in France with an initial conservative protest against fuel tax ending up having a worker’s yellow jacket as a flag and having very tight class determinants for which the state had to act brutally to control before it became a spark to light a fire.

    There are certain peculiarities and qualities of what we call the US, and how many levels does this construct have. The society, the internal local governing, the macro-economical interests layer, the global role as super-capital defender, and the various forms of repressive mechanisms this “thing” has in it. We still don’t have adequate theoretical tools to describe what exactly is the “US” and how does it differ from all other states/countries in the globe.

    • WithoutFurtherDelay@lemmygrad.mlOPM
      1·
      1 year ago

      I will get to the rest of this later, but I completely disagree with your first two sentences. I especially disagree with your assessment of the BLM stuff.

      The left cannot, and will not, ever find success by insisting that workers have to care about their cause. People, generally speaking, do not listen to insistence or abstract reason. Why should they? They’ve been duped and lied to by the United States government for longer than they can remember using those same things. When we, intentionally or otherwise, insist that the proletariat listen to us rather than the other way around, we are going to end up with no support and no power.

      The way we build power is by showing the proletariat that we are a functional method to get what they want.

      The BLM movement didn’t fail because we failed to generalize it, it failed because we failed to show how we were the best way to accomplish it’s goals.

      The challenges we face when trying to cooperate with other groups on fronts (such as queer liberation) are tactical issues to be faced. The purist vision of a vanguard is definitely not working and has historically never existed.