There's such stupid fucking fetishization over calling yourself ML, Anarchist, Posadist, at least online, and it produces terribly shallow takes. I told someone on /r/communism101 to not be too dogmatic and to keep an open mind instead of "knowing what tendency to support" and I got insta-banned. As Brace and Liz once succinctly said, "Don't be a dork, just call yourself a communist." In that sense, my "tendency" is really just an amalgamation of every tendency I've read about, agreeing with and drawing from some more than others.
On the other hand - reading about 1917 and its contexts, reading Marx / Lenin / Trotsky / Kautsky / Luxemburg / Stalin / even fucking Kerensky if you want, it's an immensely useful thought experiment to test your own theory of change to see who makes the most logical sense, and how that squares up with your situation today. History is the most useful experiment we have. Treating it scientifically while taking into account the limitations of your own bias / context / class position is how you become an educated leftist. That's my opinion anyway.
There's such stupid fucking fetishization over calling yourself ML, Anarchist, Posadist, at least online, and it produces terribly shallow takes. I told someone on /r/communism101 to not be too dogmatic and to keep an open mind instead of "knowing what tendency to support" and I got insta-banned. As Brace and Liz once succinctly said, "Don't be a dork, just call yourself a communist." In that sense, my "tendency" is really just an amalgamation of every tendency I've read about, agreeing with and drawing from some more than others.
On the other hand - reading about 1917 and its contexts, reading Marx / Lenin / Trotsky / Kautsky / Luxemburg / Stalin / even fucking Kerensky if you want, it's an immensely useful thought experiment to test your own theory of change to see who makes the most logical sense, and how that squares up with your situation today. History is the most useful experiment we have. Treating it scientifically while taking into account the limitations of your own bias / context / class position is how you become an educated leftist. That's my opinion anyway.