Because I feel like I'm in one.
I believed in the necessity of a vanguard party for a long time, but...material conditions. If there were a well-defined leader—even of something like the protests in PDX—they would have already been imprisoned on trumped up charges or Fred Hampton'd. Likely the former at this time. Historical evidence suggests this is the case, as do present conditions. Based on how brutally we're seeing the police treat anonymous members of the antifascist resistance, it's getting really hard to imagine how it could be possible to have anything remotely resembling a leader, or even a party with a membership list and regular meetings.
I understand the implications the lack of a central organizing structure has on our ability to effectively resist the state, but because of how everything has played out so far it seems like this might...actually be working in our favor. At least, considering what's unfolded up to the present moment I have a hard time picturing it going better if we had defined leadership that the state was able to target right out of the gate.
There's also the fact that (at least I'm ready to concede this at this point) that the US in its entirety isn't going to undergo a socialist revolution backed by the masses, and that the most likely scenario heading in that direction is a balkanization with the emergence of something better as one of its fragments (most likely west coast/PNW). Such a something better would be more likely to (successfully) take the from of an autonomous region similar to Chiapas or Rojava, versus a traditional socialist state amidst a sea of late/post-war capitalism.
Finally, another thought regarding material conditions...who are the people out there at this very moment resisting the state? It's anarchists. No one, myself included, is effectively organizing any type of meaningful ML resistance to meet this moment, but there are folks out in the street fighting cops every single night. They are the ones doing the work, and all we can say about it is "hmm, sure looks like we are approaching revolutionary conditions". But...it's other folks doing the work, and we're sitting around hoping to cash in on it later.
I'm getting ready to jump ship.
I don't know about ML to anarchist pipeline specifically but there does seem to be an increasing trend of MLs who are realising the limits of their ideology and trying to find ways around it. For me I went from borderline Maoist to effectively a Leftcom. From my perspective ML as it exists today just seems really reductive, dogmatic and unnecessarily LARPy. Their defence of Stalin is really weak and their insistence that any and all non western aligned countries should be defended even from resistance from the general population is not great. They also tend to have a rather flexible definition of what 'socialism' means after decades of bastardiation of the term by Soviet and Chinese ideologues. As a result I see people calling Belarus and Venezuela socialist or that China 'is using capitalism to build socialism' which doesnt make sense at all.
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Yeah, but it's built on the marxist assumption that theres a single converging path of history that travels through capitalism to socialism.
But I think the more recent turn towards the idea that you can't draw those straight lines through history is more realistic. When we see people controlling the means to life on the long term in the modern day, it's almost never Marxists. China and Vietnam liberalized, Cuba is liberalizing. Venezuela has the communes, and is actively nationalizing and communizing, but is caught in a sort of quagmire.
I think where we're seeing the most success for long term socialism is in indigenous groups synthesizing modern discourses around socialism and gender equality with traditional social structures. The Wetsuweten and the Zapatistas are good examples that survive, but I think we also see this model nascent in the Berber Spring, the socialist movement in Bolivia, Standing rock, etc. Hell, even the Navajo are quietly keeping traditional pastoralism alive alongside their negotiations with the capitalist economy.
I think what we see with China is a new and more sustainable approach to capitalism. A needed counterweight to the US and Western Europe, but only that.
No, it's built on the assumption that the CCP can be powerful/authoritarian enough that when the time comes they can force the transition to socialism, long before state-capitalism destroys itself through its own contradictions.
That is very much the point of the CCP, because running capitalist contradictions to their end is a nightmare bloodbath of poverty, resource depletion, and civil wars.
The current posture of the CCP is a defensive one; they are holding on for mere survival against imperialist encirclement. That is why they are so authoritarian, because if the CCP falls, all that remains is pure unstoppable capitalism.
Look, I get that China isn't cute, but this is the brutal reality of what it takes to win. This isn't about having a nice little commune, it is about resisting the capitalist war machine on a global scale.
The reason those movements are successful is often just that they are not sitting on resources that the capitalists care about enough to crush them.
Belarus has fallen to imperialist hands not because of internal politics; but I suspect because the oil pipelines and recently expanded railways from Russia and China into Europe go through there.
And the country has so much publicly owned industry to be privatized and plundered.
Just look at the USA, a complete lunatic like Trump can be democratically elected. Average people cannot be trusted to act in their own interests when faced with imperialist and capitalist propaganda.
There can be no freedom until the USA, or even Russia, are weak enough to not overthrow whatever government they want.
I live in Europe and the anti-CCP sentiment here is just really bad. It is really bad, and totally detached from reality.
Whatever you want from China, it has to include deterring war with NATO, and avoiding an internal revolution such that the CCP can no longer safeguard the eventual transition.
Yeah there's definitely a certain logic to it, and there's definitely a lot of room for a position of being anti-china from the left (remember that even withing China/CCP there are left and right wings), but you don't get there by rejecting the idea of making liberal reforms as a necessary evil outright.
You are literally just agreeing with the neoliberals here. And no, the whole concept of lower phase communism was theorised by marx to solve this problem. He did not advocate using capitalism at all.
Europe and America also had significant elevations in quality of life during the industrial revolution. Are you going to praise them as well? Not only this but China doesn't exactly have the best record in terms of labor laws or social service provision.
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Read Marx
Yeah I had a brief infatuation with MLism, mainly just Lenin, but the more I read (and went back to Marx as well as modern writers) and organized with other people the more I felt like everything the modern ML groups were doing was extremely reductive. Since then I've gotten really into reading Marx as political theory, specifically towards a radicalization of republican democracy, and just identify as a Marxist, I suppose a heterodox one, and work with other Marxists in DSA. I still think Lenin had important things to say, but I see tension in the work that played out pretty poorly in the long run and I don't see working now. Been reading Luxemburg and some autonomist, and Marxist humanist stuff recently.
Still keeping my print of a 1918 death to world imperialism poster though, that thing is sick.
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this is the one Yeah I have big 36 inch nice print, got it from an old ISO fundraiser.
This just means you don't understand geopolitics or really care about western imperialism or understand how it works.
Bashing actually existing socialist states to advance socialism
Literally nobody is calling Belarus socialist. And Venezuela has been led by socialists for the last 17 years or so but it's obviously not a socialist economy, a revolution is needed to implement that. Nobody claims that Venezuela has a socialist economy.
It makes sense if you look at China's actions in the world and who they help out geopolitically and how their government functions and what happened to the Soviet Union, etc. anything beyond just "communist billionaires haha" memes.
No I think that a lot of MLs dont understand geopolitics and internal contradictions actually. Non western aligned countries are not in some united opposition to US imperialism, they will align with imperialism when it suits their interests and go against it when it doesnt, Syria and Iraq are good examples in this regard. Not only that but given the capitalist nature of these countries it is inevitable that they will enter crisis that will cause the proletariat in these countries to rise up and seek better arrangements. These movements are then co opted by western imperalists to install a regime that often times is worse than the previous one. As a result it is silly in my opinion to try to uphold some sort of anti imperialist united front which doesnt exist with countries that are not only unwilling to be anti imperialist, but actually cannot be due to the nature of their societies.
The onus is on them to prove themselves socialist according to Lenin's definition. If they have to revise Lenin along Stalins lines in order to declare themselves socialist then they arent upholding Lenin at all.
I have absolutely seen people say Venezuela has a socialist economy, is a DOTP etc. I have also seen people praise Belarus for having a welfare state as if that is something that is exceptional by european standards.
Chinas actions today are not those of a revolutionary state determined to crush capitalism. They are those of a bourgeois state trying to expand and secure its interests by being more benevolent than its competitors.