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?
My problem is how do we know we’re correct? This is the same framing the Gonzalists have “we have to destroy all the revisionists.” Doesn’t every tendency think they are the most correct? Sure I’m pretty certain ML is correct but wouldn’t a trot think they’re correct in the same way? Why are we so arrogant that we know everything? In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave Socrates says the one who escaped the cave would recognize the light as truth and the sun as it’s source, but what if the people who see only shadows feel just as certain?
we certainly shouldn’t believe that all our views are “correct”, but when you come across a person who claims to be a Marxist yet denounces all AES states with vague reasoning (especially China due to its immense importance), they’re not ready for cooperation on anything but domestic issues – they’re “Marxists” at home but liberals when it comes to foreign policy, and they need to be educated
I get that. Should we not try to work with them while trying to educate them more? I’m just wary of saying “we are 100% correct and we shouldn’t even care to work with anyone who differs from us.”
if it’s for a local issue, absolutely; someone who’s actually organizing is presumably serious about improving conditions at home, and I think they’ll be more likely to be open to good-faith discussion on AES countries
A pretty easy indicator here is that maoists foreign policy is indistinguishable from US imperialists, anarchists, ultralefts, western socdems, liberals… a complete denunciation of all AES states, from Cuba, to China, to the DPRK.
Maoists clearly fall into the camp of distorters of Marxism, as described by Engels and Lenin.