Yes, I know from a rhetorical perspective they're a bunch of jerks who do nothing but complain, but is there an actual takedown of their ideological notions? Because just saying they suck without further explanation makes it hard to dismiss them when they pop up. I don't agree with them, I just want to know why I shouldn't. Something about statues and logic and being chained in a courtyard with wind and all that. I'm not sure where to put this, sorry.
Problem is: leftcoms failed. They failed so hard that their movements were broken up and diminished before the fascists and neolib war hawks in the 30s-40s could deliver the final death blow. They failed so hard that Stalin had to stop sending them money and restructure the entire ComIntern to focus on Asia where real revolutions were happening.
To put it bluntly: they failed to capture the support of the proletariat by turning marxism into an orthodoxy, and pretty often ignored Engels contributions. And the intellectuals who survived after WW2 set the stage for post-marxist philosophy professors and art teachers to shit on AES states for the next 80 years.
He sent money to leftcoms?
It kinda depends on how you look at it and what year it was, because Euro Communist Parties were a mess and some of their core members were in multiple parties with various beliefs. Some were MLs, some were Leninists but not MLs, some were DemSocs trying to get their parties involved in the bourg govts, some had Anarchist sympathies, some were even Trade Unionists. To give an example: Otto Rühle was a Council Communist who joined the KPD for a year, went to the USSR for a Comintern World Congress, and then immediately split the party.
Yeah, people think that the Stalin era Comintern was some kind of lockstep ideological monolith, when really that was a post 1956 thing.
Thank you for the clarification!