cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/2139382
It seems most cross tendency engagement devolves in to fights between leftcoms/anarchists vs AES supporters or “Dengists” vs Maoists. Anyone can point at each other and say “they started it” and avoid responsibilities. We agree on 90% of stuff but Anarchists decide to randomly call us tankies and we feel the need to defend ourselves or else look like we lost without an argument. Likewise we make memes about Anarkiddies and write texts denouncing them and they feel the same. Among scientific socialists we see China as an ally and an example to learn from while Maoists want to call out “revisionism.” There seems to be a contradiction between the history of different socialist experiments and disagreements not really mattering to our own conditions and those experiments also being vital learning experiences for us.
It’s strange to think about how we pretty much agree with Patsocs on more than almost any other tendency yet they are almost useless because they don’t understand the basic dialectical method and why have our positions beyond aesthetics and thus cannot understand the basic material conditions of this country.
We can keep trying to bring more people into our own sects and hope they do work for our own type of socialism irl, but if we’re so divided how can this happen. Of course we should all just log off and do things irl, but then some will fall into the trap of either larping or just helping their own friends without the wider goal of revolution.
We all need to remember that the feds let us speak because we spend all our time bickering. How can we unify as a revolutionary left? There are projects irl for trying to find unity as scientific socialists like ChunkaLuta, but it would be nice to be able to do the same online. In a way I’m just wishing everyone could just listen to revleft and everything could work out, but what can Lemmygrad and hexbear do for this vision?
This is something I think about a lot actually. Even on the rez we ended up having a small struggle session about AES/revisionism but at least that was fruitful and everyone came away with better understanding of each others' perspectives and some development of our own.
Online it's very difficult to have productive struggle sessions and develop a coherent sense of unity because you're interacting anonymously through text only, and so it's easier to forget the person on the other side of the keyboard, or to simply retreat from a disagreement, or an entire community rather than challenge one's own views.
Hexbear has had some small success on this because we cultivated a pretty tight knit community of people that care about one another genuinely as comrades regardless of our minor disagreements here and there.
That said I think both lemmygrad and hexbear are probably about as good as you're going to find for this online and it's just a process of calling out the worst takes and being patient when its clear someone is just misguided or misinformed, but still coming from a place of good faith.
aimixin on left unity
"Left unity" is pointless. If you have a total of 5 leftists in your country, it doesn't matter if they all unify, they're still powerless. People seem to have this delusion that if only Marxists and anarchists stopped fighting, they could come together in countries like the US and take power, but in reality, this is more likely to be the result.
It's also completely backwards. No revolution has been carried out by only class conscious communists. Communists have to learn how to appeal to the masses, and the masses then have to support it. This is the problem, the highly class conscious communists will always be in small numbers, and will never have the numbers on their own, even if they all unify together.
Historically, the socialists and communists that come to power are rarely even the result of "unity", but it's always one specific section overtakes everyone else by storm. That's because some organization figures out a way to rally the masses, and once you get the masses on your side, all other organizations get in line or get destroyed.
The problem is not lack of left unity, but lack of any organizations that have figured out a way to rally the masses. Nobody has figured out how to overcome all the anti-communist brainwashing and to have a message that appeals. It's only been successful in colonized countries but not in the colonizer countries.
People who act like there's some simple solution that we're just all too stupid to see, like, "if we just all stopped fighting we'd win the revolution!" are not appreciating just how difficult the problem is. The reason communists have not succeeded in colonizer countries is not because they're all missing something "so simple", but because the problem is fucking hard, and they have a mountain to climb.
I don't know who aimixin is, but I think this is a pretty bad take. Sure, left unity isn't a magic bullet. We won't have communism tomorrow just because we stop fighting. We do need to convince a larger mass to work with us. But you know what? It's a lot easier to write off the person at work raving about anarcho-lenin-trotsky thought as just some lunatic if they're the only one. If you double the amount of communists, each one has to convince half as many people. This line of logic presents the idea that a group of 5 people is as able to effect change as a group of 500, and that's simply not true unless you buy into great man theory bullshit. You don't need to cede trans rights in order to convince a grand total of 4 people, certainly, but cutting out a quarter of us because of what color we'll paint our rocket ships after establishing FALGSC is stupid and counterproductive. I genuinely cannot believe a communist would be unable to see the power and necessity in solidarity.
I just don't think it's valuable to be sectarian, at all. What does it achieve?
When an anarchist space wastes time shitting on marxists it becomes almost indistinguishable from an anticommunist space. This serves the right.
When a communist space wastes time shitting on anarchists it becomes insufferably up itself, any good points they have on theory or other things become hard for anyone to listen to because they're insufferable about it. And they learn a sort of insufferableness from one another and carry it into any conversations with anarchists where they inevitably alienate themselves from people they NEED to work with. In particular a lot of communists will even admit to having been anarchists first, so it's just hurting their recruiting pool. This all serves the right.
What's worse is that these things also give wreckers an EASY method of fucking with us in the online space. And they do, routinely. You've all seen the number of liberals and fascists in leftist spaces doing work.
None of this helps the left.
It is far more effective to build a united front around anti-sectarianism. It cuts out wasted time, builds bridges and less time wasted on this shit is more time spent learning or pushing back against the right.
In the communist spaces the insufferableness needs to be pushed back on. In the anarchist spaces the nationalism needs pushback. The quantity of nationalism I've seen among people calling themselves ""anarchists"" over Ukraine is hilarious. They're not anarchists and need to be pushed out or ridiculed until they become real ones. There's a real white chauvinism in both spaces too that needs dealing with but it's more present in the anarchist spaces where significantly less theory is read or discussed.
Shared spaces and moderation teams that actively prevent sectarianism achieve this.
Offline none of this shit happens because people are just more likely to not be assholes to each other offline with the social rules and such.
It is every socialist's and anarchist's duty to learn how to be less of an asshole to each other. Be an asshole to libs. Treat each other like comrades.
This includes when a socialist/anarchist is being an asshole to you. That's the most difficult lesson to learn.
There's an exception for when they're being ridiculously reactionary towards others and making the space unsafe/unworkable, but IMO that's the only reason. Like... kick out transphobes, patsocs, etc and please call them names. But some nerd is being a casual Western chauvinist? That's a good opportunity to educate either them or the people around them rather than take the bait to have a much sillier fight.
"It’s strange to think about how we pretty much agree with Patsocs on more than almost any other tendency"
Kinda weird if true
Fuck I had a whole thing written up then upvoted and it deleted it all.
In short because I don't want to rewrite everything, there's a couple of 'marxist take havers' over on lemmygrad who cannot possibly be a leftist in any other space than online since once you have to organize you'll inevitably have 'Distorters of Marxism' so the 'Take havers' have the same dynamic as the PatSocs, shopping around some takes see who bites but not really doing or accomplishing anything.
Something something woof had to yell at a grad type who tried to pull that shit over here and the person wasn't even in an org.
Bunch of other stuff maybe I'll rewrite, watch this space.
"shopping around some takes"
"Something something woof had to yell at a grad type who tried to pull that shit over here"
I understood everything except these, you think you could explain it in simpler/different terms?
Like this whole thing is a good primer I think.
https://hexbear.net/post/697637?scrollToComments=false
Has woofwoof91 yelling at people and it also has the 'workshopped takes' on display. I refer to stuff like this 'Distorters of Marxism' and in the thread on lemmygrad . Like to me there's functionally no difference between doing some weird quote mining so you can justify your take with absolutely wrong quotes to throw around and PatSocs trying to tie the founding fathers to marxism or shit like that because people like Marxist George Washington or some shit like that.
I don't know I think the main reason why I guess they think 'left-unity is impossible' is because they've never walked side by side a comrade, doesn't matter if someone is an an-com, anarchist, marxist or whatever everyone is walking together against capitalism but I guess armchairs are much comfier.
I mean the kind that pretend to be the most principled MLs (PCUSA, MWM), not someone like Haz or Maupin.
I think most of the rev-left is in sync when they're considering what they actually can influence. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that for the most part the Western left has been crushed or defanged or otherwise rendered insignificant. It's hard enough to effect (affect?) any change within your own apartment building, let alone your street, let alone your borough, let alone your city, let alone your province, let alone your country- certainly there's extremely little you can do to influence a different country on a continent that's an ocean away.
As a leftist within the imperial core, whether you think there's an ongoing Uyghur genocide or you think the CCP is giving them the best possible lives, you have the exact same amount of influence over their futures: absolutely none. I'm all for internationalism, but we need to be honest about where we are right now. You've got to think and act local before global action is anything other than a fantasy.
When it comes to issues effecting their municipalities, I think most ancoms and MLs would be in agreement. We can start infighting when we get actual power, until then all the slap-fights are ultimately just about aesthetics. Knock it off and actually do something to help the underclasses within your reach.
secterianism is highly ineffective , theoreticly we only ever get a problem after the revolution and thats also a easy Fix ,given that only one side is ideologly allowed to use statepower.
You could start by not banning people for having takes you think are slightly bad or whatever.
Banned @Serdan@lemm.ee from the community genzedong@lemmygrad.ml reason: repeatedly describing the "Holodomor" as a man-made famine
just a discussion about wikipedia, eh?Spouting nazi propaganda is going to get you banned from a left space
I get where you're coming from, but that would be predicated on the idea that the user with the bad take would be willing to learn and admit fault. I see roughly a 1out of 5 success rate with that here.
Hard to admit anything when you get banned in the middle of a conversation.
Banned @Serdan@lemm.ee from the community genzedong@lemmygrad.ml reason: repeatedly describing the "Holodomor" as a man-made famine
More
than 
To be fair they're both lol. And they're claiming to be the one true leftist.
They're defending wikipedia from communists, talking about Holodomor, whining about being banned and they're telling me to touch grass
Edit: they just pulled one of your favorite redditor techniques - calling me crazy and that they hope i get help
Edit: they just pulled one of your favorite redditor techniques - calling me crazy and that they hope i get help
That shit is so. Fucking. Exhausting. They can cry crocodile tears for pretentious Broadway musicals, but actual compassion for anyone not as privileged as themselves is foreign and strange.
Oh, you didn't grasp the beauty of Hamilton? You probably wouldn't, because you're clearly mentally ill, which is bad and makes you inferior to me. Is there a parent or legal guardian you can call? I hope you get help, i really, really do
This is the part where you get asked for examples and provide absolutely none.
Like, what do you expect a socialist space to do in order to keep it socialist? Allow it to be overrun by liberals and fascists? Lmao. How do you think liberal spaces remain liberal?
I was in the middle of a conversation about pros and cons of Wikipedia when I got banned on genzedong.
Liar
Banned @Serdan@lemm.ee from the community genzedong@lemmygrad.ml reason: repeatedly describing the "Holodomor" as a man-made famine
Nice self portrait
Saying you're a socialist while supporting NATO is peak 🤡
Blatantly bad faith.
I've been seeing posters for a local revsoc group, so I guess I really should just do that and disengage from all this terminally online nonsense.
Have fun accomplishing nothing
Cool, go defend wikipedia with them. Accomplish something real like that
CIA are literally the biggest editors on the site. The only people that eyeroll this are the western chauvinists and white supremacists that support their actions to revise history and paint a very specific narrative on every single topic to the benefit of american interests. Go fuck yourself, your ban was well deserved.
CIA are literally the biggest editors on the site.
I'm dying to hear your explanation of what this means in practice
In practice it means the US imperialist narrative is rampant on every single page, and that the byzantine rules system of wikipedia they have helped build advantages full time employed people from their organisation because the average person simply does not have the time to understand how to navigate it. It means real journalists get labelled untrustworthy while fake mainstream media """journalists""" better described as propagandists or influencers get trusted on everything no matter how many times they're proven incorrect. It means pages like Azov's get rewritten piece by piece to remove references to their nazism. It means pages about war crimes the cia dislikes get deleted, etc etc.
What the fuck do you think it means? That a bunch of people whose principle jobs are disinformation, destroying democracies, doing assassinations against leftists, funnelling money to fascists and performing torture have the interests of the world at heart? Fucking idiot. They have the interests of the american state and american SUPREMACY at heart, which represents white supremacy on the global stage. Your support and defence of them represents your supremacist brainworms
.
Depends on the take. At some point, there's gotta be some thing, some goal, some idea that you don't compromise on.
I was in the middle of a conversation about pros and cons of Wikipedia when I got banned on genzedong.
Apparently the thing they don't compromise on is Wikipedia being a CIA front.
Banned @Serdan@lemm.ee from the community genzedong@lemmygrad.ml reason: repeatedly describing the "Holodomor" as a man-made famine
You were spouting nazi propaganda so fuck off
I would also have described the Irish famine as man-made, but part of the conversation was about whether the term makes sense at all.
I thought the Nazi line was that it was genocide?
In the context of an encyclopedia the points that matter are:
- Is it a meaningful distinction, and
- Is it applied consistently
Both were part of the conversation.
Btw, I've been a socialist my entire life. Immediately alienating people for not having fully formed perfect opinions on every subject is some real echochamber bs.
You support Wikipedia and NATO
Sure, you're the one true leftist
oh shit, you're one of those guys on reddit who goes to people's profiles and presses the "get them help and support" button
I have never in my life done that.
You must be one of those people who make completely baseless assumptions about others so you can feel superior.
I was implying that he's a pathetic man-child. Given that he's called me a Nazi, I think that's perfectly fair.
"You disagree with me so you are incoherent and mentally ill. You need to be off the internet, unlike me. I'm so not mad that I got banned for defending wikipedia that I'm now whining about it and misrepresenting why i got banned. A totally not too online behavior. You're waaaaay too online for pointing all this out.
I hope you get help"
I was in the middle of a conversation about pros and cons of Wikipedia when I got banned on genzedong.
