The left’s main vulnerability is splitting and infighting. We are terrible at it. This is known.

To build revolutionary change, a revolutionary party is needed. It must do its work and carry on its work. In the military, they taught me that the number one priority is preserving your ability to fight. It’s ok if you have setbacks, lose equipment or men or tactical position or advantage; but it’s a catastrophe if you lose the capacity to fight.

Leftist infighting is what robs the movement of its ability to fight on. It kills the movements. (The Buddhists know this, and consider ‘creating a schism in the sangha’ the supreme sin. That’s a tangent, but the Buddhists have maintained an ideological movement for 26 centuries so they’re doing something right.)

We need to mock people who shame other leftists for impurity, who insult them for making mistakes. Liu Shaoqi said: “The attitude of some Party members towards these shortcomings and mistakes and towards those comrades who have incorrect ideas is one of “bitter hatred and gall”. They lightly sever all relations with comrades who have committed some mistake and whom they attempt to expel from the Party outright.”

It is ok for comrades to make mistakes in action, and to have mistaken beliefs. That’s the completely normal, inevitable part of having a movement. In fact, that’s all a movement is: listening to people’s beliefs, listening to their wrong beliefs, correcting them, unifying the thought of the party, unity makes strength. It is not ok to have incorrect ideas of “bitter hatred and gall”, and lightly sever all relations with comrades who have committed some mistake.

MAO MADE 30% MISTAKES, INCLUDING CAUSING THE BIGGEST FAMINE IN HUMAN HISTORY!!! If you can forgive that, you can forgive someone who made an off-colour tweet when they were a teenager.

People who try to cancel comrades for stuff they did/said in the distant past, or for non-core differences of opinion, are dong the imperialists work for them: dismantling the socialist movement.

PS: the aim is always to have a cohesive, united, strong movement with the correct views. Anything that serves the aim is good. Anything that wrecks the aim is bad.

  • porcupineEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    “the left” is whoever and whatever I say it is, so naturally anyone that disagrees with me is a wrecker and the only thing preventing “the left” from achieving electoral power through legal nonviolent political activity in the imperial core

    alternatively

    the overwhelming majority of the popularly understood “left” in the Anglophone world are liberal democrats who support capitalism and white supremacy, so everyone on this website giving anything less than full-throated support for Joe Biden and Kier Starmer is a splitter weakening “the movement”.

    splitting and wrecking in the context of a specific revolutionary party is an organizational problem solved with democratic centralism. complaining about “splitting and wrecking” in the context of an abstract term used specifically to obscure irreconcilable political differences is just being upset that reality doesn’t rearrange itself to conform to terminology. it’s like saying “humanity’s main vulnerability is splitting and infighting; we should shame and bully humans who shame and bully other humans for being wrong”. Rhetorically abstracting away difference doesn’t make difference go away.

    of course, “splitting from or undermining a group is sometimes good and sometimes bad depending on the specific context and conditions” is the kind of banal observation that doesn’t drive social media engagement.