I keep wanting to form some kind of housing cooperative for people seeking refuge from abusive situations, seeing as how there's currently fuck-all meaningful resources for adult survivors of childhood abuse. I know that despite this being completely nonviolent, legal, voluntary, and well-intentioned operation, that most people won't care or will actively support when some extremists decide to infiltrate and sabotage that effort. Manufactured consent and all. Why does nobody else do things like this? What has prevented the vast majority of other American leftists from simply crowdfunding their own communes, leaving the larger economy, and building their own means of production so that they aren't dependent on the rest of the world for permission to build systems of mutual aid?
Bro I'm just asking you to join us figuring out the right approach. You don't have to be defensive about the fact we don't have a vanguard party yet, but pretending that we can just keep doing what hasn't worked before is just not the way to go.
Neither is calling someone a liberal because they want to create a democratically run commune for people in need. That's way too much direct action for a liberal and requires a ton of work and any knowledge gained on living sustainably with a group of like minded people would be useful to any revolutionary group, especially when things are in flux post revolution when things will probably be very precarious. While it may not be building the revolution, there are things that can be done to support it: if everyone is busy building the revolution you'll starve to death after it happens
Calling attention to people's errors in thinking and inviting them to change their mind is often considered by communists to be a pretty important part of combating liberalism and generally a good thing.
I don't know what to call it if you think that I shouldn't critique a strategy Engels critiqued in the 1800s. Maybe I should just wish you luck with your own strategy.
I agree it's a good thing to discuss what can be done to create a revolutionary environment and to think about the pro's and con's of different kinds of actions. I don't think it's productive to dismiss something outright because there are historic critiques of such an action, especially in environment those critiques were not made in.
I'll admit I don't read as much theory as I should so I don't have primary knowledge, but I can't imagine that communists in history would call alienated folks seeking to live together and pool their skills and labor to support themselves in a system that has cast them aside counter revolutionaries. Especially if the alternative is to maintain ideological purity by living on the streets and accomplishing just as little for the revolution while also punishing their bodies and not gaining any useful skills for after a government is toppled and society becomes very different
Much of Engels' work drew directly on Lewis Henry Morgan as a primary source.
Between that and how we have made informative advances in biology and psychology and sociology, I will drag Engels day in and day out, thank you very much.
A vanguard party has failed many times, especially in the imperial core, where the capitalists in power have been absolutely running circles around democratic-centralist orgs for 80 years.
There's a big difference between "has not worked before" and "cannot work". You cannot make a universal argument based on critically limited empirical evidence.
The other thing about the vanguard party approach is that it demands proletarians to dedicate their lives to something that there's no guarantee they'll see the payoff from. It's the riskiest investment, with a low expected value. With the communization strategy, you erode the territory and reach of capitalism, and while there's still a big question of how to tie the whole movement together as a revolutionary force, this is a challenge rather than an impossibility.
I don't agree that "such activity [building communes] isn't building for the revolution". In fact I think that revolutions don't just happen because of "heightened contradictions", they happen because there are social networks in place and resources and capacities built up to make the push when an opportunity presents itself.
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I was being condescending not defensive. I'm well aware of the many failings of western leftism.
Fine, I'll bite. Who's "us" that I should be joining. What US leftist organization are you a part of that is currently figuring out the right approach?
I don't think there's a national organization that's figuring out the right approach, but everyone can be critical of what they're doing and try to push their orgs in the right direction or pull the best members into something better. I'm also not in the right location to work with them but I think the work of Dare to Struggle in New York is a step in the right direction and something for aspiring communists to learn from.
https://daretostrugglenyc.org/2022/12/25/summation-of-dare-to-struggle-fall-2022-jacob-riis-water-crisis/