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)
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.
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.
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.
That’s only scratching the surface. 6 of the original BLM activists from the 2014 Ferguson protests were found dead under “mysterious circumstances”. You can bet your ass the alphabet soup agencies worked overtime to COINTELPRO the fuck out of that movement.
It’s definitely not the left’s fault. Without constant fed involvement we would have been able to eventually organize a large movement successfully regardless of whatever tactics we used.
These are some causes that I think we as ML’s ought to adopt that I don’t see being adopted much:
Right to repair The bottom line of corporations has made products harder to repair and has gone beyond planned obselecence to using the state to restrict access to schematics and replacement parts for various machines to even requiring the manufacturer to approve any replacement of components of machines. This is a popular movement that we can capitalize on superstructure wise and undermine the base of profits to the corporations by depriving them of the profits of purchasing new goods all of the time. This is a popular position that I don’t think that only the libertarians should be capitalizing on.
the Privacy movement The USA has a stupidly almost unavoidable surveilence network and it seems that even in left wing spaces nobody really cares much about privacy. I don’t know how we can do revolution at the moment, but having the state and the corporations channeling all of that info through Palintir et al is info that we’d rather them not have. I’m frustrated by the number of people even with a supposedly revolutionary ideology have ambivilence towards the amount of data servieled on each and every one of us to scare us from revolutionary action. Privacy promotion should be normalized to give us the freedom to act in manners legal or illegal to improve the conditions of the working class.
the Landback movement On a moral level, settlers have made the lives of indigenous people a living hell and It is sensible to say that we owe them something. On a tactical level many of them stood up to prevent the DAPL. So much land is not being used in the USA and quite frankly, even in reform methods, it is not impossible to give the unused land to the natives with a stroke of a pen. Our ecological concerns of the capitalist means of food production are unsustainable but we have people with knowledge of the land that were able to live off of it sustainably in the past. Why not use their knowledge to grow food sustainably in these Bureau of Land Management lands? Their songs teach of the laws of the lands and how to treat them. These songs come from the people that lived on the land for centuries and culturally had a dialectical relationship with that ecosystem to live in a more harmonious manner than that of the settlers. I know we can’t necessarily bring everything back to the way it was but their insight would be helpful in building an ecosocialist future.
This comment is long enough.
I think regarding privacy it can feel insurmountable and so people give up. At least that’s pretty much how I feel. I do a few things but it seems like it takes a lot of time and sometimes money to keep up with it and use the proper applications. And as someone who is not super into tech it is very difficult to filter through the noise and figure out what concrete steps to take.
We need to make a collective approach to privacy, instead of an individualist one. Current attempts at obtaining privacy focus on individual means of separation from exploitative software, but this is doomed to failure. We need to instead focus on organizing to fight these kinds of software and practices directly.
“Is the strategy most socialist organizations in the US are using, in your opinion, a good one?”
The issue is 99% of the orgs operating in the US are not scientific socialist, they are either bourgeois socialist (socdem; CPUSA, SA, etc…), hopelessly idealist (looking at the Maoist insurrectionist adventurists, the Avakian cult, other related clowns), or appears legitimate in name and nature on the surface but when one looks deeper it becomes clear that they are ran by crypto-spook trotskyists (ANSWER, PSL). The 1 party I know of which is legitimate is not without it’s own issues and has survived 2 major attacks by the bourgeois state in recent years but is ultimately still not large enough to make a large impact (PCUSA). Others exist however are much smaller.
“What should be done about the sudden rise of socially reactionary beliefs and laws across the country?”
Paradoxically, this is work to be decided by a party. One can attempt to infiltrate both sides and attempt to mend the issues of relatability and respect using Marxist analysis and dialectical materialism, but without a party spearheading and coordinating this the results will be sporatic.
(repost as I accidentally deleted this)
relevant idea I had for what could work as a supplement to the organizing structure in the United States
My current hypothesis is that we need some kind of centralized organization that focuses on extremely short-term goals for building worker power, as a kind of transitory organization until the extremely sectarian nature of the US left either subsides or boils over. This organization would exist in tandem with other organizations, not requiring or enforcing specific political memberships besides what directly interferes with specific, short term goals decided by organization leadership to build the power of the proletariat (or long term goals which are specific, effective, and do not demand any kind of ideological purity besides a general commitment to building worker power). These goals would have to be decided by committed, scientific, socialists.
A kind of meta-organization, which would share resources and important information about achieving it’s specific short-term goals, and would let the US left live on “life support” while we figure out exactly what’s going on.
I am concerned that this idea of mine is, however, fueled too much by the kind of pragmatism Lenin would despise. Or I may be being too worried, and the scientifically Marxist nature of the organization’s leadership would fix that issue
As far as the pragmaticism of which Lenin referred, that I’m afraid escapes me. I would recommend rereading the relevant works and if possible link it here and we can discuss it in relation to your idea.
As far as the idea itself regardless, it sounds like a pre-vanguard vanguard if that makes sense. I’m not sure how the logistics would function (getting several split parties to function when they are in fact split, this seems paradoxical to the necessitated existence of this proposed group).
Sectarianism happens because of disagreements on policy. If we can agitate on specific issues (optimally clustered together to ensure anti-imperialism etc) instead of entire, purist, ideologies, we could allow a large variety of radical people to organize together who would otherwise not
Example: Your average anarchist is
kind of annoying because they hate everythingopposed to forming a full on vanguard party. This is an issue, because most Marxist-Leninist want a vanguard party. Therefore two significant portions of the self-identified Left refuse to work together. It’s also dumb because they have the exact same short term desires and the planet is literally ending (climate change)If, instead of creating a party which expects everyone in it to have the same political views, we instead focus on specific things that are very important to everyone involved (such as unionization, social issues, anti-imperialism) and work as a “meta-organizer” by connecting different groups with information about actions and stances other groups are taking on those issues.
Or, put more eloquently, the reason parties are split is because of important arguments, but the actual individual beliefs of most (non-imperialistic) self-identified Leftists are the same for the near future, so there is no reason they could not work together anyways.
I agree on the general premise however I have 2 thoughts on the concept.
The anarchists are not anti-imperialist in practice, many have taken on the stance of pro-Ukraine “Russian imperialism”. This could be seen as an opportunity to educate them and it’s true many previously anarchists who have held reactionary stances have switched after being educated, however if this were reasonably obtainable it would have already been done. This is not to say it cannot be done, or that it is not worth doing, not at all, simply that it will be rather difficult and so that should be considered moving forward.
Uniting the left under the banner of anti-imperialism is good however I do not believe it should be our only goal. I believe working to build revolution should as well. There are many ideologies representing all workers and some of the middle class which benefit from anti-imperialist struggle (see rage against the war machine) however the middle class is incompatible with the struggle to liberate the working class of capitalist oppression. Uniting the left under anti-imperialism is likely to blend the 2 movements and ultimately hurt the cause of both as the contradicting class interests (between us and the bourgeoified middle class) are liable to cause great internal strife. Do you see my concern?
I (somewhat) agree with your first point, with the caveat that I think it is easier than you say it is. See this article, I believe the approach we have been taking to defeat US propaganda is non-materialistic and assumes that we can just say the right ideas at someone and then they will agree. Once we start adapting a more materialistic method to counteract propaganda (something which I believe would require already existing power), then we can see if anarchists are practically unredeemable or not (I am aware the writer of that article would probably murder me for citing it in such a context, but, uhhh).
The second is why I specified any such “meta-organization” would have to have multiple goals, and while it would probably be explicitly revolutionary, being too specific could lead to the sectarian splintering we’ve been seeing with most US parties and defeat the whole purpose of it
It would be possible to define something to pursue on top of anti-imperialism that would prevent the issue you mentioned. I would suggest a radical approach to anti-racism, systemic anti-racism, queer struggle, feminism, and anti-ableism, as well as opposition to the prison slavery system and support of labor.
This organization would, rather than unite the left under anti-imperialism alone, instead unite the left under a synthesis of the goals of those who are most likely to be proletarian in this country, and anti-imperialism
Instead of having a party with a strict ideology pre-defined for itself, it would be a meta-organization which seeks to tie together all of the disparate goals of the proletariat
The meta-organization element is essential. If a party were to be created under this principle, it would compete with the time and energy of other organizations. Optimally, the only significant labor the organization should require for organizing should be in organizing its own members, and by allowing members to be part of other political parties (and primarily spend time and energy in them) we could align and tie back together the struggles of these disparate parties into a singular force for the proletariat. A super-coalition.
Of course, this is all speculation and I have no idea if this would work. It seems more effective than just creating more ideological parties for the current US left, but even that I’m unsure of.
