Like I think a central state is needed for the first phase of the revolution, but the more brutal aspects is something I just don't want to do, even if I understand why they did them?
Like I think a central state is needed for the first phase of the revolution, but the more brutal aspects is something I just don't want to do, even if I understand why they did them?
I agree with everything you've said about horizontalist organizing and have experienced the same both from occupy and CHAZ/CHOP. However I just don't believe that there's an alternative for any sort of popular insurrection type movement.
One of the key successes of Lenin was that they had among other socialist parties, a political party that was already a part of of the legislature that also happened to have a paramilitary wing. I highly doubt every action these paramilitary wings took were done by members of the centralist party or even really guided by them, chaotic protests and uprising will always have a horizontalist aspect to them by virtue of their size. Especially in contemporary western nation's, leadership is earned not given just because you call yourself a leader.
Overall, I think you need officials with political legitimacy who have governed some set of community organization for a long time to have ties to democratic centralist principals. But without that initial set of legitimacy, it very quickly ends up being viewed by outsiders as being nothing other than a LARP. At the CHAZ I saw people saying they made decisions by democratic centralism and literally no one gave a shit, but when Sawant and other established community leaders who are a part of democratic centralist organizations spoke, the movement very quickly picked up what they were offering as a reasonable strategy for things.
The point here is, if you're an ML/Trot and are a part of an ML/Trot party, your first goal absolutely needs to be establishing substantial amounts of respect and legitimacy within your community. Should you have that, you'd be incredibly successfully, but none of the existing ML organizations within the US have anywhere close to that level of legitimacy that they can command a movement predominantly driven by collective anger in general of the state of the world. Current elected democratic socialists also need to seriously consider abandoning their horizontalist approach and build a centralist organization to more effectively strategize.