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?
One other thing I’d like to add because I don’t think it’s been mentioned yet:
One of the main aims of imperial-core organizing should be to build a strong anti-war movement. A major focus of the US/western propaganda machine is to spends tons of resources manipulating public opinion to build support for its current and future wars.
Where do anarchists and Maoists stand on two of the west’s current primary enemies, Russia and China? Near-complete support for war on the basis of western chauvinism. Hell, If you check armed anarchist-dominated online spaces (such as /r/SRA), they’re all ready to join the US army to fight Russia.
Clearly US propagandists have gotten a return on their investment, and scored a major propaganda win, by turning the western anarchist movement (who were mildly anti-war during the bush era), into western crusaders for NATO.
Maoists (and liberals duped by western propaganda into thinking china is killing muslims just like their own countries are doing) also are serving the same role, but for the other US target: China.
An anti-war movement can only harm itself by opportunistically trying to “unite” with pro-war western chauvinists.
Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin were all pretty smart, and it should be noted that they all railed against Anarchism, and left-unity compromisers. Read through their arguments to learn why they did so.