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Ben Franklin is, like, the only founding father I don't think was utterly irredeemable scum
He was likely in a paedophile ring with Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson's 14 year old slave-turned-wife, Sally. (She refused to come back from France with her kids for a reason.)
like, yes, line his slave owning rapist ass up against the wall with the rest, but have a hell of a conversation first. the kind of epic stylish dirtbag that reminds us why libs think they have value.
I got curious cause I knew Franklin wasn't a plantation owner or anything, so I looked up his history. Apparently he had 7 slaves throughout his life, but later on he slowly transitioned to being an abolitionist. He was never on our guy John Brown's level, and was apparently kinda wishy-washy about full abolition, though he was the president of the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society. Doesn't look like it was enough to save him from the wall, but he can be in the middle of the line instead of right up front I guess.
Pretty sure he wrote multiple papers on why Germans were racially inferior to Anglo-Saxons and ruining the USA by immigrating over. Only in his latest years did he go "Oops, maybe they do work as hard as we do."
I stand by my inability to read. I don't think one should apply bourgeoisie politicians perspective to communist politics whole hog. Esp when people take 'standing together' to mean not engaging in honest struggle.
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.
The Popular Front in Spain in the 1930s?
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.
The Popular Front in Spain in the 1930s?
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 would say that was pretty successful.
Stalin didn't think so, the anarchists fucked everything up and every ML state took as line **since ** not to cooperate with anarchists anymore.
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.
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.
“The internet doesn’t matter” is a fascist narrative against the left. Of course the internet is important.
they don’t want people to take the internet seriously
they don’t want to be held to human standards on the internet, any threat to their virtual hate box provokes reaction, this is the last frontier for their open bigotry and they cherish it deeply
any sincerity is for “cringe SJWs”
We’re not on Reddit anymore. This is the fediverse. We can be normal people here instead of hateful ironic avatars.
I am a hateful ironic avatar because it is the only thing that staves off my desire to embrace the void.
I can sympathize comrade, but that has extremely bad vibes so I cannot upvote. Please take some time to reflect.
I will not. I have contracted vampirism and am no longer capable of reflection.
I have not. And due to an ancient family curse I am unable to try Molly.
The postmodernist guerrilla solidarity of our Shining Path organizations is even more empathogenic. We can even cure vampirism with it.
Come find us when you’re ready.
the thing is; left unity doesn't necessarily mean working in lock step. let the M-L's do what the M-L's are best at. let the anarchists do what the anarchists are best at. as long as we're all putting fascists up against walls, what's the actual fucking problem?
Well, a single party is a tactic. Anarchists can't scale up to a national level without organization, and at that point they aren't really anarchists.
Ultimately we should work parallel to one another and maybe even adopt each other's tactics. There's a lot MLs can learn from Anarchists on direct action, for example
Historically, anarchist groups scale up by federation.
Are you telling me Lemmy is anarchist?!
The difficulty with left unity is that there's no guarantee that people that step out of line wont suffer repercussions.
Basically anarchists are rightly afraid that MLs in power would mean persecution of anarchists. Same would be said of other marxists currents.
In earlier decades, I would've agreed. But the magnitude of what's ahead of us is going to require a complete restructuring of entire global supply chains.
I'm not making a tendency argument here, but there is an unquestionable need to do something massive, and quickly. Not only is that gonna require us, it's going to require, globally, hundreds of millions of people who currently don't agree with any of our tendencies.
i think we all believe in good logistics. I think redundancy and creating local independent infrastructure is as important as creating fun massive soviet style bullshit. and possibly more efficient in many cases.
I'm not sure you understand the extent to which Neoliberalism has completely reshaped production.
Even if your goal was to create mostly autonomous regions with independent infrastructure, which is anti socialist to some extent (what obligations do they have to the global proletariat now?), it would take decades of central planning to reach that point. We're just nowhere near it.
Think about like the average car. It has components from easily like a dozen countries, and those components come from a dozen countries of their own. Even the final parts aren't made and assembled in the same place. How could you possibly localize that? The knowledge transfers alone would require higher organization. Let alone the investment, construction, training, etc.
This is not about recreating the Soviet system, but realizing that any left project going forward has to be very big and very serious, or it will just essentially be adapting left aesthetics to climate apocalypse, and be wiped out by the likely Feudal dialectic that emerges from that.
big doesn't mean centralized. more duplication of the means of production hurts nobody. the logic of networks and the logic of sieges both apply. even if you can't cover all your needs from redundant local sources, you're still just a little more able to resist. a little more able to protest when you get your key life saving meds or dietary staples from non-capitalist sources. a little harder to siege a city like you KNOW is about to happen when there are a thousand hydroponic farms in basements and bullet manufacturing facilities in bedrooms. the fascists are good at fighting mirrors, and, where possible, we should not rely on the logistics of capitalist tyranny.
you also don't have to trust as many parties this way. even if some centralized production of shit like really complex drugs and electronics still occurs.
Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will die or live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution. Pass on the torch. Join us, give up your life for the people.
— George Jackson
What we are talking about is a matter of tactics. MLs and Anarchists have a lot to cooperate on
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.
Exactly. This is an imperial core op. The “tankies” here aren’t real.
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).
Thankfully we may not have to wait so long.
In conclusion our model shows that a catastrophic collapse in human population, due to resource consumption, is the most likely scenario of the dynamical evolution based on current parameters. Adopting a combined deter-ministic and stochastic model we conclude from a statistical point of view that the probability that our civilisation survives itself is less than 10% in the most optimistic scenario. Calculations show that, maintaining the actual rate of population growth and resource consumption, in particular forest consumption, we have a few decades left before an irreversible collapse of our civilisation (see Fig. 5). Making the situation even worse, we stress once again that it is unrealistic to think that the decline of the population in a situation of strong environmental degra-dation would be a non-chaotic and well-ordered decline. This consideration leads to an even shorter remaining time. Admittedly, in our analysis, we assume parameters such as population growth and deforestation rate in our model as constant. This is a rough approximation which allows us to predict future scenarios based on current conditions. Nonetheless the resulting mean-times for a catastrophic outcome to occur, which are of the order of 2–4 decades (see Fig. 5), make this approximation acceptable, as it is hard to imagine, in absence of very strong collective efforts, big changes of these parameters to occur in such time scale.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63657-6.pdf
Um ackstually if you join any organization which isn't composed 100% of dedicated Orthodox Marxist revolutionaries who have memorized every single word of Capital then you are no better than the capitalist reaction and deserve to be shot, checkmate radlibs
That’s projection. The “orthodox” Red Guards you are imagining are actually very heterodox, and generally people that are forgiving and “large of spirit”.
We’re also the “no book worship” people. Everybody makes mistakes, comrade.
I'm not making a joke about Red Guards or Maoists here, I'm just referring to the kind of extremely online LeftComs who refuse to join any organization or labor unions because they are all tainted by "liberalism" or "leninism" and instead like to make twenty post long twitter threads about what this one phrase in Capital really means
Basically this.
Soo whats the centrist position between left unity and irreconciliable sectarianism?
This shit doesn't really matter that much irl. Get off your computer and go outside. Get active in a group if you like what they're doing. Bickering over this shit on the internet is stupid
IDK. There's some trots, anarchists and ultras fanning the flames of neo-cold war propaganda right now. Kind of hard to "unify" when that's the case.
Doesn't really mean anything online anyway lol.
Mariátegui said, "We are living in a period of total ideological war. Those who represent force for renewal cannot, either by accident or chance, unite or merge themselves with those who represent conservatism or regression. There is a historical abyss between them. They speak different languages and have a different understanding of history.”
"I think we should unite the like-minded, and not those who differ. We should bring together those whom history wants together. There should be solidarity between those of whom history requires solidarity. This, it seems to me, is the only possible alliance. A common understanding with a precise and effective sense of history.”
"I am a revolutionary. But I believe that men who think clearly and definitively will be able to understand and appreciate each other, even while struggling against each other. The political force with whom I will never reach an understanding is the other camp: mediocre reformism, domesticated reformism, hypocritical democracy."
We adhere to this. We are not sectarian, nor are there any actions on our part that indicate that. What no one can demand of us is that we march into the swamp. Lenin taught us: if someone decides they want to head into the swamp, they have the right to do so, but not to call upon us to go into the muck with them. Lenin said, we must follow our steep and difficult road all the way to the summit, or, in other words, we must face the enemy's fire, but we will continue to advance. We are not, then, sectarians or dogmatists. We are simply communists, and we adhere to those wise words of Mariátegui. And what's more, we demand that those who claim to follow Mariátegui really follow him, and that they prove it.
It's a police state only in the sense that all states are police states lol. That's the fundamental nature of a state
So what's your point? Nobody is claiming that the PRC is a utopia. It is a state born out of a prolitarian revolution, dealing with all of the contradictions of trying to improve the lives of it's people under a dominant global capitalist order.
Do you actually have a contribution to make theoretically or do you just like pointing out the obvious?
You think all it takes is "demanding better"? Lol. Whatever.
And the purity testing circlejerk continues.
But sure, lets just ignore the marxists that were the ones lining up anarchists against the wall no?
Gee I wonder what made those anarchists be anti-bolshevik. Surely they could've tried to build a free territory without interference from the red arm.... oh wait no they arent allowed to.
Comrade, you’ve been stuck in a psyop by the revisionists. Nobody here wants to hurt anarchists. Those that do are simply not real communists, they’re fascists trying to infiltrate and subvert our community.
That tankie-anarchist thing is the op. Real communists study the entire history and certainly don’t call themselves tankies and try to uphold Beria.
I’m eating Fuzzy Peaches right now and haven’t worn socks since March. Those “red fash” who have been bullying you are not me and are not most of the community. Go ask the wreckers what they think of Anarchists.
I mean. If anarchists are trying to act in the interests of the global bourgeoisie by trying to overthrow a prolitarian state that's already struggling against the forces of reaction, what happens happens.
Exactly. Best case, the PRC is working towards socialism and has a good argument that a communist state could not survive in current material conditions.
Worst case, they are a social democratic state opposed to US hegemony.
Either way, why would anyone who is on the left be supporting what is clearly a build up to a new cold war?
Exactly. Plus people act like there's been no changes to Chinese politics over the last 30 years, even though Hu Jintao and Xi have both reasserted the authority of the party over business interests and, particularly over the last 10 years, embarked on a campaign to root out corruption of party officials with ties to business interests.
Neither Hu Jintao or Xi Jinping are "Dengists."
Would you be surprised to learn that the same revisionism and misunderstanding of the materialist dialectic that lead the Soviets to ruin (and conflict with the anarchists, who are absolutely comrades) now carries on in their orgs and is not only tolerated but promoted by the state?
That’s what these official orgs in the West are. They’re the revisionists that survived the Sino-Soviet split by being the groups that stood behind Khrushchev and liberalization. They have a very broken ideology, and still create antagonistic conflicts between comrades on the left.
Don’t trust the “tankies”, the real far left in the West are not and have never been artless, joyless internet fash pushing a stale 1950s version of reactionary “Marxist-Leninism”. The real far left are artists, postmodernists, critical theorists, and Anarcho-Maoist revolutionaries.
Every time left unity as a concept gets brought up in a multi tendency group, the spirit of Cop takes over the souls of a few people who immediately undermine it with shit throwing.
Like... soon?
How long are we talking? Is there a line? How much does it cost to get on the "Guest List"?
Seriously, though, the "Lined up and shot" thing is happening with or without left unity. What are we gonna do with a unified left? File FOIA requests?
