I think, for the purposes of left unity, agreeing to disagree on certain topics is a life or death situation, not a personal decision. Either we unite or we die. If that means two entirely different socialist projects involving irreconcilable tendencies then we gotta find a way to make it work
We have history and precedent to work with-- something that the socialists of yesteryear did not have. We can see where we went wrong and try to take steps to fix it.
For one, I would not trust an anarchist org to prosecute any sort of long, sustained conflict with any state or non-state actor. A ML party, however, I would look twice at. Anarchists have far superior opsec, local intelligence, and direct action experience-- but all of that dries up if you go very far from the center of their community.
We can marry these two approaches for the purposes of fucking up capitalism, but only if people put down ideological purity and embrace the necessity of the moment. No more of this tankie/anarkiddie shit
Haha, have you met the Maoists? What kind of orgs do you think the Subcomandante Marcos hologram and the rest of the successful “anarchists” developed out of? Go read history again, from a left perspective this time, and look at who was and is a Maoist.
Maoist orgs that explicitly train cadres for guerrilla war and how to utilize a mix of anarchist and non-ideological forces when we move on each revolution. That’s where these revolutions all come from. This fact is suppressed heavily in the imperial core.
Have you all never examined who the Latin American guerrillas are, where they came from? Anarchists and Maoists are comrades, and often the same people.
we have anarchist groups here like Black Rose that are explicitly platformist, adopting something that in practice looks a lot like a party structure with democratic centralism and the delegation of authority by the organization to individuals. which way they'll tend once the full crisis develops is still up in the air but for now the situation isn't quite so black and white, even on questions of organization.
yea, that's the primary criticism they get from other anarchist groups, that they're really just leninist in practice, while ML/M groups regard them as an oddity as they don't pursue an explicitly Marxist line (though again, in practice it's hard to tell the difference as their actual praxis looks a hell of a lot like a Maoist mass line). my suspicion is that they'll end up a weird splinter group of some larger Maoist formation, but who knows. for the time being, they don't work with anyone but themselves, much like the Maoist groups they most closely resemble, so it will be interesting to see how it shakes out.
but yes, I agree with you that it's likely the space between anarchist and leninist lines won't hold through an actual crisis. and the people occupying this middle space will gravitate towards those two poles.
There are “real” MLs that are staunch anti-revisionists, and fundamentally want revolution. These are people with a lot of sincerity and love.
There are “fake” MLs that don’t care at all about revisionism. They fundamentally don’t want a revolution. They won’t tell you how to start one. They’ll attack you if you try to start revolution. All they want to do is relitigate the past of their long dead social-imperialist state. They want reaction. They are people with a lot of irony and hate.
They’re real, but they’ve been mislead by opportunist reactionaries (often sexual predators used as informants under new state-provided identities) who have been inserted by the counter-insurgency apparatus into the mainstream legal Communist parties over the last fifty years.
These informants are the same people the Red Guard have been hunting down.
Usually projection when levelled as an unfounded accusation, as always.
It’s very much a fed tactic for controlling informants: we’ve already pulled a few lib “organizers” in the 2020 riots and the same story came up repeatedly.
an outgrowth of the red scare, I think. COINTELPRO was very successful at making people see psyops everywhere, and predators have used that very successfully to cast their accusers as state operatives, wreckers, etc.. in practice, it's the abusers who are most likely to be compromised, however, and it's a broader conversation happening within actual formations (online discourse is, as always, mostly unmoored from reality).
What we are talking about is a matter of tactics. MLs and Anarchists have a lot to cooperate on
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I think, for the purposes of left unity, agreeing to disagree on certain topics is a life or death situation, not a personal decision. Either we unite or we die. If that means two entirely different socialist projects involving irreconcilable tendencies then we gotta find a way to make it work
We have history and precedent to work with-- something that the socialists of yesteryear did not have. We can see where we went wrong and try to take steps to fix it.
For one, I would not trust an anarchist org to prosecute any sort of long, sustained conflict with any state or non-state actor. A ML party, however, I would look twice at. Anarchists have far superior opsec, local intelligence, and direct action experience-- but all of that dries up if you go very far from the center of their community.
We can marry these two approaches for the purposes of fucking up capitalism, but only if people put down ideological purity and embrace the necessity of the moment. No more of this tankie/anarkiddie shit
Haha, have you met the Maoists? What kind of orgs do you think the Subcomandante Marcos hologram and the rest of the successful “anarchists” developed out of? Go read history again, from a left perspective this time, and look at who was and is a Maoist.
Maoist orgs that explicitly train cadres for guerrilla war and how to utilize a mix of anarchist and non-ideological forces when we move on each revolution. That’s where these revolutions all come from. This fact is suppressed heavily in the imperial core.
Have you all never examined who the Latin American guerrillas are, where they came from? Anarchists and Maoists are comrades, and often the same people.
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we have anarchist groups here like Black Rose that are explicitly platformist, adopting something that in practice looks a lot like a party structure with democratic centralism and the delegation of authority by the organization to individuals. which way they'll tend once the full crisis develops is still up in the air but for now the situation isn't quite so black and white, even on questions of organization.
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yea, that's the primary criticism they get from other anarchist groups, that they're really just leninist in practice, while ML/M groups regard them as an oddity as they don't pursue an explicitly Marxist line (though again, in practice it's hard to tell the difference as their actual praxis looks a hell of a lot like a Maoist mass line). my suspicion is that they'll end up a weird splinter group of some larger Maoist formation, but who knows. for the time being, they don't work with anyone but themselves, much like the Maoist groups they most closely resemble, so it will be interesting to see how it shakes out.
but yes, I agree with you that it's likely the space between anarchist and leninist lines won't hold through an actual crisis. and the people occupying this middle space will gravitate towards those two poles.
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There are “real” MLs that are staunch anti-revisionists, and fundamentally want revolution. These are people with a lot of sincerity and love.
There are “fake” MLs that don’t care at all about revisionism. They fundamentally don’t want a revolution. They won’t tell you how to start one. They’ll attack you if you try to start revolution. All they want to do is relitigate the past of their long dead social-imperialist state. They want reaction. They are people with a lot of irony and hate.
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Exactly. This is an imperial core op. The “tankies” here aren’t real.
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They’re real, but they’ve been mislead by opportunist reactionaries (often sexual predators used as informants under new state-provided identities) who have been inserted by the counter-insurgency apparatus into the mainstream legal Communist parties over the last fifty years.
These informants are the same people the Red Guard have been hunting down.
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Usually projection when levelled as an unfounded accusation, as always.
It’s very much a fed tactic for controlling informants: we’ve already pulled a few lib “organizers” in the 2020 riots and the same story came up repeatedly.
an outgrowth of the red scare, I think. COINTELPRO was very successful at making people see psyops everywhere, and predators have used that very successfully to cast their accusers as state operatives, wreckers, etc.. in practice, it's the abusers who are most likely to be compromised, however, and it's a broader conversation happening within actual formations (online discourse is, as always, mostly unmoored from reality).
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