The Popular Front in Spain in the 1930s? I would say that was pretty successful. I think the Sandanistas were also a broad left coalition, but not sure though.
I mean, this most definitely did not work out, not really because left unity is idealist, but more because class collaborationism with the "progressive" bourgeoisie is counterproductive for fighting bourgeois reaction and fascism.
But was that the reason it didn't work out? I mean, I feel like it really was a simple matter of fire power. The nationalists had the military plus a huge amount of support from Hitler. IIRC the Republicans could have stamped out the coup early on if the government had opened up the armory in Madrid to them sooner. Certainly, I don't think a disunited left would have been more successful in Spain at that time.
When is worst time to have a general strike, assasinate Catalonia's communist leader and to decide that you don't want "hierarchies" in your army because the tankies won't let you control the arsenal or how it is deployed (also because they brought it to begin with).
Yea, fundamentally that was the reason it didn't work out, the workers could have smashed fascism only through working class struggle for working class power. And there's no such thing as a united left when you're talking about unity across class lines.
Isn't this literally the most cited example against left unity by pretty much everyone involved? The SocDems got couped by the communists, Trots & anarchists executed by the communists from the anti-ML side, and the anarchists fucked up and sucked shit at fighting a war, and the SocDems didn't pursue any radical program from the ML side.
I was wondering if my memory was playing tricks on me but no. I mean there was cooperation at the early beginning but the CPC always had a different endgame and ultimately the anarchists sided with the Kuomintang or were absorbed by the CPC. Post revolution they also cooperated with China's enemies.
Chen took the Marxist position that human nature was shaped by social and economic structures, and criticized Ou for his anarchist beliefs that human nature was good and people would be controlled by their sense of shame. The tension with communists was increased by anarchist criticisms of the Soviet Union. Reports from disillusioned anarchists had a big impact, such as Emma Goldman, who had many friends in China, and the wife of Kropotkin, who circulated first-hand reports of the failures of Bolshevism.
A minority of anarchists, mostly from the Paris group ** had been involved in the Kuomintang almost from its founding** but the majority of anarchists, in keeping with their stated principles against involvement in the exercise of coercive authority, had declined to participate in this alliance ** The "Diligent Work-Frugal Study" program was one product of this collaboration of the anarchists with nationalists. **
The result of this last collaboration was Li Shizeng's creation in 1927 of National Labor University (Laodong Daxue) in Shanghai, which was intended to be a domestic version of the Paris groups educational program and sought to create a new generation of Labor Intellectuals who would finally overcome the gap between "those who work with their hands" and "those who work with their minds." The university functioned for a few years before the Nationalist government decided the project was too subversive to allow it to continue and pulled funding
The best known of these in the Western world is the Autonomous Beijing group, one of several groups responsible for organizing the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
The Popular Front in Spain in the 1930s? I would say that was pretty successful. I think the Sandanistas were also a broad left coalition, but not sure though.
I mean, this most definitely did not work out, not really because left unity is idealist, but more because class collaborationism with the "progressive" bourgeoisie is counterproductive for fighting bourgeois reaction and fascism.
But was that the reason it didn't work out? I mean, I feel like it really was a simple matter of fire power. The nationalists had the military plus a huge amount of support from Hitler. IIRC the Republicans could have stamped out the coup early on if the government had opened up the armory in Madrid to them sooner. Certainly, I don't think a disunited left would have been more successful in Spain at that time.
When is worst time to have a general strike, assasinate Catalonia's communist leader and to decide that you don't want "hierarchies" in your army because the tankies won't let you control the arsenal or how it is deployed (also because they brought it to begin with).
A. Before the war
B. During the war
C. After the war.
Yea, fundamentally that was the reason it didn't work out, the workers could have smashed fascism only through working class struggle for working class power. And there's no such thing as a united left when you're talking about unity across class lines.
Isn't this literally the most cited example against left unity by pretty much everyone involved? The SocDems got couped by the communists, Trots & anarchists executed by the communists from the anti-ML side, and the anarchists fucked up and sucked shit at fighting a war, and the SocDems didn't pursue any radical program from the ML side.
Stalin didn't think so, the anarchists fucked everything up and every ML state took as line **since ** not to cooperate with anarchists anymore.
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I was wondering if my memory was playing tricks on me but no. I mean there was cooperation at the early beginning but the CPC always had a different endgame and ultimately the anarchists sided with the Kuomintang or were absorbed by the CPC. Post revolution they also cooperated with China's enemies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_China#Hostilities_between_Chinese_anarchism_and_Chinese_communism
So where I was wrong is that Mao had broken with anarchists even before the CPSU did.