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?
Honestly, I don't want it to be a revolutionary vehicle for the whole system, I'd rather just help people escape -- and if we can prove firsthand that mutual aid works and we can insulate society against manipulation and power grabbing, maybe normal people would see it as a possibility for once. I think our country is bound too tightly by its shared cultural mythology to do anything meaningful. Expecting to fix the whole world, seems to me like a fool's game. Even while people recognize the abuses of the economic upper class, their minds are closed to understanding the cultural upper-class, composed of successful psychopaths and their sycophants leading everyone else by the nose. Such a culture cannot be fixed, you can only help people escape and survive until everyone else's illusion collapses sufficiently for them to adapt to the danger they were unwilling to see, which may not even be possible on a large scale in today's world.
You would have thought 10 years ago, that if everyone learned the most powerful people in the country, the ones who lead politicians, were involved in CSA / trafficking, everyone would lose their shit and force the system's hand to at least assert this one basic moral expectation -- right? Turns out that is not the case. They can manufacture consent for everything up to and including that. It's a lost cause at that point. There is no future in trying to convince people who don't wanna be convinced or helped imho
Reading the article, it looks like the main criticism is that this sort of work doesn't directly help the revolution. If you're planning to do this just to help people you should be fine, it probably won't help bring about communism but you will be helping real people that need help and need it now.
But if you agree that such activity isn't building for the revolution and still decide that's what you should really be spending your time on, then you are a liberal.
Well not all of us can be as pure a leftist as you are. I look forward to seeing your progress in building communism.
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/
I don't think so? If revolution turns out to be unfeasible due to the speed of modern technological advancement fueling pre-existing power structures, and betterment by reform is off the table due to the mounting power of propaganda, leftists need to be more creative about their praxis. Creating a lifeline for migrants and refugees to get back up on their feet and live within an economically democratic community seems like the only praxis that can help anyone, based on what I've seen.
I think arguing that revolution is impossible so we should just focus on helping right some of the most egregious wrongs, also counts as liberalism...
We can work towards revolutionary change, but the fact is your entire life will go by and you will never see a real revolution. Waiting for revolution is the leftist equivalent of waiting for the day Jesus returns to earth.
No offense but I really hate that comparison. The 20th century isn't that long ago and a lot of those revolutionaries and attempted revolutionaries wrote a lot about their experiences. There's very little "we got Jesus to come back and here's the lessons we learned" writing from the last 150 years.
"There are symbolic elements, which have become ingrained in Western Marxism, that were smuggled in as contraband from Christianity."
This article was difficult for me to read when I came across it, and gave me a lot of grappling to do.