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Leftist Unity and “Pan-Leftism” have their place, but overall it’s just idealism that’s supported the strongest by socialist centrists.

The contrast between Marxism and Anarchism is too stark for the two to spend any quality time together, and expecting the two to share a room will either result in the organisation ripping itself apart, or the moderation of the organisation will make it impossible for the two groups to discuss anything, thus grinding the progress of the organisation to a halt.

Not to mention that, at least if you live in the west, Anarchism has been used to bust up leftist organisations and our governments haven’t been shy about running psyops and murdering Marxists in the past. It’s important for Marxist organizations to actively gatekeep themselves from non-marxists who might want to join just to disrupt.

I’ve been around the block a few times, but I’ve never seen LU be successful in the long term. Not once. Because it simply doesn’t work out, it’s impossible to make it work without making great sacrifices.

Of course, Anarchists can be cool people and can be non-sectarian. Some Anarchists can be great comrades, and won’t bicker about shit that happened a hundred years ago. But those Anarchists are unicorns. As a fractured American left we still need to at least be open to non-marxists (in as far as our lack of stable, large leftist parties), but we should always stay very wary of allowing people who’ve made their minds up against us from joining into our groups.

I don’t think it’s possible to do any organizing in the US without encountering anarchists or radlibs in orgs, even people with just adjacent thought processes.

My two cents: socially privileged radlibs (white, middle class, straight, etc.) are going to be the most entrenched in liberalism. They will need to be asked to practice what they preach and let the less privileged members have their say in things. And you also need to be on the lookout for sex pests who are just there to abuse comrades and/or gain powerful positions in the org. They will tend to have more patriarchal or violent tendencies.

When dealing with less privileged comrades, no matter their tendency, it would be best to embody Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. You’re not there to dominate them as they will be rightfully suspicious of your hunger for control of the org, esp if you’re privileged yourself. Ideally you will want to listen to their concerns, internalize them, and thoughtfully come up with solutions or plans to alleviate them together. Being concerned with the well-being of the masses is a dialectical process and will gain you more allies.

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For socdems and other pro-capitalist “leftists”, no, and I don’t really consider them to be “left”. For anti-capitalists, it will depend on the organization. There are non-Marxist anti-capitalists who have formulated similar ideas (for example, I don’t think Gaddafi was a Marxist, but correct me if I’m wrong), and it has clearly been successful in some instances. For anarchism, I don’t really know – having a Marxist organization with some anarchist members might be fine (see other comments for potential issues), but I don’t think Marxists should be joining anarchist organizations in most cases (unless they’re just focused on mutual aid, e.g. helping homeless people, or it’s something like an indigenous revolutionary movement).

Personally I would (extremely cautiously) have tactical unity with damn near anyone, including people I can’t stand or even people I think are evil mfers. Just depends on the situation and what it calls for exactly. In general I always speak leftist unity in general spaces, if anything, to seem cool and level-headed and break up some “authoritarian” stereotypes to people who are on the fence, you know, meet them halfway and slowly try and see if they can be brought over.

You say it is from your time in an organization–I for one even thought about “should I ‘infiltrate’ the DSA and try and spread a little MLism in the ranks?,” in which case I would have to be very prepared to smile through the pain so to speak. However, if I was ever educated, experienced, and simply lucky enough (geographically) to land myself a spot in an ML organization, for example maybe something that was trying to take itself seriously as a vanguard party or with other serious long-term plans, I know I would be very very distrusting if there were anarchists involved, I might even question if they were narcs at this point to be honest. But I would also never 100% write somebody off just because of a label. I feel like half of people barely even know what they’re talking about when they self-identify as X Y or Z.

It sort of depends project to project. If you want to join or build a party, a necessary part of that is a certain level of ideological homogeneity. However, if you just say want to set up some local projects to help the workers and ease reliance on capital’s systems then you may be surprised at the number of colleagues you can find