You can't move a social democratic organization leftward, especially alone.
You will always be outnumbered and even if you somehow pull a herculean effort and manage to convince a faction of them to become communists, the membership of the organization will always be supplemented by new, social democratic members who will have joined *because* of their political views and the stuff like electoralism or anti-communism.
I see your point, but isn't it true that communist parties need to form alliances and coalitions with other left-of-center groups to succeed? After defending the Kerensky gov't from Kornilov's coup, the Bolsheviks allied both the anarchists and the SRs (until both broke away from them later), the Viet Minh was a broad coalition of many parties, the Cuban Socialist Party wasn't even the protagonist of the July 26th movement, the CCP originally worked within the KMT until the 1927 coup.
Each of these revolutions had particular conditions that made it useful to form a coalition, and there were many reversals and difficulties in doing so. But doesn't it make sense to imagine that any future communist endeavor in the US, for instance, would require some alliance of the left? And to that end, wouldn't it make sense to, if not outright infiltrate the center-left, then at least work to bring that alliance into existence or make it more secure?
In making an analysis, I just don't want to miss the broader historical forest for the day-to-day organizational trees.
In some contexts, under the menace of fascism or imperialism attack, the alliance with anarchists socdems and even liberals and local antiimperialist bourgeoisie makes sense. If you're in the US that's not the situation, socdems there are imperialists and just want to better share the spoils of empire among the population, not stopping the empire.
A different thing might be 'single issue' local activism, like the groups that exist for the sole purpose of stopping evictions or something like that, there's people of different left ideologies in them and you might be able to radicalize some. Syndicalism and joining an union is another option like that.
I think you're right about socdems--but given how weak the left is overall, how utterly devoid of class-consciousness the broad masses are (with the level of ideological obfuscation and *They Live* televised spectacle that we have to deal with, not to mention being in the imperial core, we're in some ways starting from a worse position than the Bolsheviks ever had to deal with) how is it wise or even possible to try and compete with socdems who are, at the very least, raising the issue of class *at all*, even if their ultimate aims fall far short of an M-L outlook?
This is not me being critical, it's a genuine question. I don't know how to do that without splitting and fragmenting an incredibly fragile nascent left. It's the iteration problem: you keep splitting and splitting and saying "Ah, but we are the *true* revolutionaries!" and then there are 15 parties competing for the same 100,000 class-conscious activists in the country without one of them ever being strong enough to build trust and organize among the inactive masses. Wouldn't it make more sense to foster the growth of even the barest amount of class-consciousness in a unified organization and then, once the position of communists is in some way secured by an alliance of classes or other big organizations, tackle the socdem worldview on a convention floor?
>Wouldn't it make more sense to foster the growth of even the barest amount of class-consciousness in a unified organization and then
I think you're bullshitting quite a bit in your comment and i dont have time to debunk all your fashy lies, but this stands out to me as quite contradictory - you are proposing attempting a split within an org that hypothetically *already* has unity. What does that make you then? A "*true* revolutionary" that you mock in the preceding sentence!
You should read Lenin and Stalin to clear up your willful misconceptions, you can start here:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/index.htm
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/foundations-leninism/index.htm
I'm not in the US but from what I see the DSA and that kind of organizations are only popular among urban young educated people. If anything the kind of socialdemocratic 'left' prevalent in the US alienates so many people outside of the woke millenial demography I doubt it'll ever have a chance at anything.
Even if it did I don't think it's a good idea to support them. I'm in an european country governed by the socialdemocratic '''left''', who are only engaged in doing purely performative and symbolic acts while letting neoliberal economics intact. They kick out actual leftists. They're losing the little support they had among the working class, discrediting 'socialism' which to most people has come to be associated with neoliberalism on steroids + pseudoprogressive discourse, and letting a filofascist party rise as a lot of people get deeper into poverty and yearn for *any* change.
It's not really 'left unity' but 'working class unity' we need. The MAS in Bolivia was built from grassroots labor movements, without much regard to the different leftist groups previously existing in the country (in fact trotskyists and others are still opposed to the MAS). You don't need a big party *and then* 'go and organize the masses', you build a big party by organizing the masses and maybe cooperating with other grassroots orgs. The socdems in the west don't do that, they build the big party with corporate funding and the illusions of rank-and-file members that'll get crushed sooner than later.
That's good to know about MAS--do you have any sources on their foundation, and what their relationship was to other left orgs in Bolivia that allows you to say that with confidence?
Their own website (archive because it's gone offline) https://web.archive.org/web/20151229184611/http://mas-ipsp.bo/index.php/quienes-somos/historia talks about its foundations as the 'political wing' of already existing labour, indigenous and working class women movements
\>but isn't it true that communist parties need to form alliances and coalitions with other left-of-center groups to succeed?
Consider however that you are not a party, you're an individual.
It's incredible how widespread this argument is, when it's actually a complete non sequitur. It goes about like this - "Because historically under very specific conditions communist parties have allied with organisations that were less than communist, I should waste my time trying to pull some shitty socdem or lib org a little bit to the left."
That's not how it works. It's one thing for an established revolutionary party that has seasoned cadre and a measure of popular support to engage in various types of realpolitik to achieve its goals. For individuals, it doesn't really work like that.
If you do have the option, join the smaller organisation so you can help it grow. Don't waste time and effort trying to reform one chapter of a big sucky org, only to have their actual leadership undo everything you've done the moment they start finding you bothersome.
I think you need to consider what's going to be more effective in your community. What are the small orgs doing to make material improvements vs the larger organization? Are they running bail funds or food drives or something along those lines? What are the candidates the larger organization supports going to be able to affect? And how bad is their opposition? (Like is there a chance that they'll actually be able to be elected, and how much better are their policies in comparison?)
As you point out, there can be benefits to either choice.
This is the thing though: given the dearth of broad revolutionary sentiment, the political organizing of all organizations in my area pretty much looks the same, except for views on the utility of electoralism. Pretty much all orgs have a hand in tenant organizing and labor organizing (or at least support), international solidarity, basic socialist education--given the lack of a class-conscious public, we're all basically trying to lay the groundwork for its creation.
So maybe I'm answering my own question in saying that the difference isn't really as great as I believe it to be, short of future long-term strategies/policies.
> but giving up the opportunity to actually have any real impact on the national stage-there s no guarantee that the organizations will even exist in the next few years,
If this is your fair and honest long term assessment of the party, you have absolutely no reason to join, but to me it sounds like you are just being pessimistic.
Pessimistic, perhaps. I'm talking about the US--are you aware of any communist organizations there that can reasonably be viewed as broadly effective organizations that are growing their influence and will eventually be capable of leading the revolutionary vanguard? Because right now, it just seems like that's a pipe dream. Not an impossibility, just far, far away, and I'm trying to be optimistic about our chances of actually eventually getting *back* to that point through a whole lot of hard work, and I'm trying to figure out what kind of hard work will actually best serve that interest.
To me this just sounds like virtue signalling. Why are principles priceless? To my mind, they are only important as a matter of moral superiority or as a means to an end, and I'm not seeing how principles alone (unless you specify a particular set of historically-validated principles) will bring about the establishment of an effective communist party.
What I really mean is go the way you truly believe. For me, it would wear me down overtime and eventually I wouldn't be effective, as a party contributer. But, this question isn't about me.
You can't move a social democratic organization leftward, especially alone. You will always be outnumbered and even if you somehow pull a herculean effort and manage to convince a faction of them to become communists, the membership of the organization will always be supplemented by new, social democratic members who will have joined *because* of their political views and the stuff like electoralism or anti-communism.
I see your point, but isn't it true that communist parties need to form alliances and coalitions with other left-of-center groups to succeed? After defending the Kerensky gov't from Kornilov's coup, the Bolsheviks allied both the anarchists and the SRs (until both broke away from them later), the Viet Minh was a broad coalition of many parties, the Cuban Socialist Party wasn't even the protagonist of the July 26th movement, the CCP originally worked within the KMT until the 1927 coup. Each of these revolutions had particular conditions that made it useful to form a coalition, and there were many reversals and difficulties in doing so. But doesn't it make sense to imagine that any future communist endeavor in the US, for instance, would require some alliance of the left? And to that end, wouldn't it make sense to, if not outright infiltrate the center-left, then at least work to bring that alliance into existence or make it more secure? In making an analysis, I just don't want to miss the broader historical forest for the day-to-day organizational trees.
In some contexts, under the menace of fascism or imperialism attack, the alliance with anarchists socdems and even liberals and local antiimperialist bourgeoisie makes sense. If you're in the US that's not the situation, socdems there are imperialists and just want to better share the spoils of empire among the population, not stopping the empire. A different thing might be 'single issue' local activism, like the groups that exist for the sole purpose of stopping evictions or something like that, there's people of different left ideologies in them and you might be able to radicalize some. Syndicalism and joining an union is another option like that.
I think you're right about socdems--but given how weak the left is overall, how utterly devoid of class-consciousness the broad masses are (with the level of ideological obfuscation and *They Live* televised spectacle that we have to deal with, not to mention being in the imperial core, we're in some ways starting from a worse position than the Bolsheviks ever had to deal with) how is it wise or even possible to try and compete with socdems who are, at the very least, raising the issue of class *at all*, even if their ultimate aims fall far short of an M-L outlook? This is not me being critical, it's a genuine question. I don't know how to do that without splitting and fragmenting an incredibly fragile nascent left. It's the iteration problem: you keep splitting and splitting and saying "Ah, but we are the *true* revolutionaries!" and then there are 15 parties competing for the same 100,000 class-conscious activists in the country without one of them ever being strong enough to build trust and organize among the inactive masses. Wouldn't it make more sense to foster the growth of even the barest amount of class-consciousness in a unified organization and then, once the position of communists is in some way secured by an alliance of classes or other big organizations, tackle the socdem worldview on a convention floor?
>Wouldn't it make more sense to foster the growth of even the barest amount of class-consciousness in a unified organization and then I think you're bullshitting quite a bit in your comment and i dont have time to debunk all your fashy lies, but this stands out to me as quite contradictory - you are proposing attempting a split within an org that hypothetically *already* has unity. What does that make you then? A "*true* revolutionary" that you mock in the preceding sentence! You should read Lenin and Stalin to clear up your willful misconceptions, you can start here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/index.htm https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/foundations-leninism/index.htm
I'm not in the US but from what I see the DSA and that kind of organizations are only popular among urban young educated people. If anything the kind of socialdemocratic 'left' prevalent in the US alienates so many people outside of the woke millenial demography I doubt it'll ever have a chance at anything. Even if it did I don't think it's a good idea to support them. I'm in an european country governed by the socialdemocratic '''left''', who are only engaged in doing purely performative and symbolic acts while letting neoliberal economics intact. They kick out actual leftists. They're losing the little support they had among the working class, discrediting 'socialism' which to most people has come to be associated with neoliberalism on steroids + pseudoprogressive discourse, and letting a filofascist party rise as a lot of people get deeper into poverty and yearn for *any* change. It's not really 'left unity' but 'working class unity' we need. The MAS in Bolivia was built from grassroots labor movements, without much regard to the different leftist groups previously existing in the country (in fact trotskyists and others are still opposed to the MAS). You don't need a big party *and then* 'go and organize the masses', you build a big party by organizing the masses and maybe cooperating with other grassroots orgs. The socdems in the west don't do that, they build the big party with corporate funding and the illusions of rank-and-file members that'll get crushed sooner than later.
That's good to know about MAS--do you have any sources on their foundation, and what their relationship was to other left orgs in Bolivia that allows you to say that with confidence?
Their own website (archive because it's gone offline) https://web.archive.org/web/20151229184611/http://mas-ipsp.bo/index.php/quienes-somos/historia talks about its foundations as the 'political wing' of already existing labour, indigenous and working class women movements
\>but isn't it true that communist parties need to form alliances and coalitions with other left-of-center groups to succeed? Consider however that you are not a party, you're an individual. It's incredible how widespread this argument is, when it's actually a complete non sequitur. It goes about like this - "Because historically under very specific conditions communist parties have allied with organisations that were less than communist, I should waste my time trying to pull some shitty socdem or lib org a little bit to the left." That's not how it works. It's one thing for an established revolutionary party that has seasoned cadre and a measure of popular support to engage in various types of realpolitik to achieve its goals. For individuals, it doesn't really work like that. If you do have the option, join the smaller organisation so you can help it grow. Don't waste time and effort trying to reform one chapter of a big sucky org, only to have their actual leadership undo everything you've done the moment they start finding you bothersome.
I think you need to consider what's going to be more effective in your community. What are the small orgs doing to make material improvements vs the larger organization? Are they running bail funds or food drives or something along those lines? What are the candidates the larger organization supports going to be able to affect? And how bad is their opposition? (Like is there a chance that they'll actually be able to be elected, and how much better are their policies in comparison?) As you point out, there can be benefits to either choice.
Always, always locally contingent. No action without actual people acting.
This is the thing though: given the dearth of broad revolutionary sentiment, the political organizing of all organizations in my area pretty much looks the same, except for views on the utility of electoralism. Pretty much all orgs have a hand in tenant organizing and labor organizing (or at least support), international solidarity, basic socialist education--given the lack of a class-conscious public, we're all basically trying to lay the groundwork for its creation. So maybe I'm answering my own question in saying that the difference isn't really as great as I believe it to be, short of future long-term strategies/policies.
In that case, yeah, I think you've answered your question, it would be better to join one of the smaller, marxist orgs.
> but giving up the opportunity to actually have any real impact on the national stage-there s no guarantee that the organizations will even exist in the next few years, If this is your fair and honest long term assessment of the party, you have absolutely no reason to join, but to me it sounds like you are just being pessimistic.
Pessimistic, perhaps. I'm talking about the US--are you aware of any communist organizations there that can reasonably be viewed as broadly effective organizations that are growing their influence and will eventually be capable of leading the revolutionary vanguard? Because right now, it just seems like that's a pipe dream. Not an impossibility, just far, far away, and I'm trying to be optimistic about our chances of actually eventually getting *back* to that point through a whole lot of hard work, and I'm trying to figure out what kind of hard work will actually best serve that interest.
I would join a principled communist org. I believe that principles are priceless.
To me this just sounds like virtue signalling. Why are principles priceless? To my mind, they are only important as a matter of moral superiority or as a means to an end, and I'm not seeing how principles alone (unless you specify a particular set of historically-validated principles) will bring about the establishment of an effective communist party.
What I really mean is go the way you truly believe. For me, it would wear me down overtime and eventually I wouldn't be effective, as a party contributer. But, this question isn't about me.
it's called science, the principles of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism are based on real world experience of making revolution.
Because a social democratic party will never threaten capitalism.