- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
https://www.codepink.org/march18
Nationwide protests shot off on the 18th and 19th. Did you see any coverage?
The revolution will not be televised. RATWM is a fascist maneuvering and nothing more, attempting to recoup some of the brewing anti-war sentiment back into supporting capitalism and by extension imperialism. Libertarians, pedo “communists”, and outright fascists? We don’t fucking need them and I find it frustrating when people seem to think we do.
RATWM was televised because it was backed by money. Dirty, bloody money coming from the likes of the Paul political dynasty. Their pathetic little gathering was not the revolutionary moment some people seemed to imply it was. It was a farce. The people will rise up and they won’t need ghoulish demagogues to pay them to.
I think we shouldn’t reject any anti-war initiative no matter which side it comes from. Ultimately anything that weakens and discredits the imperialist war machine is beneficial to the revolutionary cause. This doesn’t mean we join forces with reactionaries, but that we don’t actively fight against any initiative that for whatever reason advocates against NATO and its global warmongering, even when some very shitty people are involved who have a much different agenda than ours. Let them do their thing while we focus on our task which is to build our own principled working class anti-war, anti-imperialist movement. Wasting our energies denouncing reactionaries who are cynically trying to co-opt popular anti-war sentiments not only weakens the anti-war cause, it also discredits us in the eyes of the masses and is a boon to the reactionaries. If we think we can do better than them and build a more effective anti-war front (and i think we absolutely can because we are coming at this from a principled perspective and not from political opportunism) then we should just do it and not knock other anti-war voices down.
This might be an unpopular opinion but i say it because i really think we have to learn to think and act more strategically and resist the liberal impulses we may have for virtue signaling and purity tests. It is to the benefit of the class enemy that we waste our time constantly criticizing but never actually doing.
I agree that an ideological struggle between two ostensibly anti-war ‘movements’ is more of a distraction than a benefit, as the principle contradiction is empire and we should be able and willing to unify around that common cause.
I take umbrage with some comrades’ pleas to attend gatherings that I believe are rotten from top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top. There likely exist more than a couple of well-intentioned individuals or even groups that will tag along and organize with the fascistic “anti-imperialists” and they should not be forgotten or discounted as potential allies.
I feel that for some reason principled MLs seem to understand that CPUSA constantly tailing and coordinating action with the Democrats is a failing effort and one that ultimately leads to not entryist success but the subsumation of the capital-C Communist movement into a political farce that does nothing outside of the paramaters of what their more powerful masters want them to do, so nothing outside of the confines of bourgeois legality. It turns a revolutionary party into a lame duck reformist party and more communists will be lost to democrats than vice-versa. So why do some call for us to actively participate in a “movement” that is so obviously astroturfed by the fucking Libertarian Party? While not as powerful as the democrats or the republicans, the Libertarians represent first and foremost bourgeois interests, including the military industrial complex. They will turn on temporary revolutionary allies immediately, and they will not be as kind as the democrats (who already literally kill us).
I don’t know. Maybe I’m off-base. But genuine anti-imperialism is already attracting huge swathes of people, of proletarians. It’s a work-in-progress, but it is working to a noticeable extent. Perhaps not fast enough, but that’s another issue.
My position is that we need not necessarily participate in anti-war initiatives organized by reactionaries, but we also should not oppose or denounce said initiatives (of course in all other contexts we should continue to ruthlessly criticize and fight against those reactionaries!) since that does not benefit us in any way. We should build and organize our own anti-war front just as Lenin advocated for communists to build their own party and not join bourgeois ones. Communists must not allow themselves to be subsumed into either liberal or reactionary politics, we must remain separate and advance our own revolutionary and unapologetically proletarian, class conscious views and agenda because no other groups will. Occasionally we can work with non-communist groups on an issue by issue basis but that is purely tactical.
I think I agree with your position, thank you for the valuable input comrade.