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.
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.