Think of it this way: criticism can be valid without a positive alternative being provided. An outcome of attenuation is itself valuable.
If you are in a planning meeting with comrades and someone suggests your org fights for a liberal politician to raise the minimum wage, a good org will listen to the (hopefully) many criticisms of this without expecting the critics to immediately provide their own alternative projects. Of course it would be good and healthy to develop alternatives, but imagine if the response to criticism of bourgeois electoralism was saying, “but you thought we should do rallies and that’s stupid” or, “so you think we should just do nothing!?” This is incorrect thinking both rationally and in terms of being productive and extracting value from criticism.
IRL organizing you’ll be able to navigate these things and achieve better outcomes by choosing other types of responses and thinking! Positive examples (lol) include open-ended questions, accepting critique and synthesizing new framings, and leading people to shared positions by going, “yes and…”, that sort of thing.
PS to contradict myself I don’t follow these recommendations all the time. Sometimes it feels inauthentic to be in “organizer mode”. But it could be something good to try out a few times.
Think of it this way: criticism can be valid without a positive alternative being provided. An outcome of attenuation is itself valuable.
If you are in a planning meeting with comrades and someone suggests your org fights for a liberal politician to raise the minimum wage, a good org will listen to the (hopefully) many criticisms of this without expecting the critics to immediately provide their own alternative projects. Of course it would be good and healthy to develop alternatives, but imagine if the response to criticism of bourgeois electoralism was saying, “but you thought we should do rallies and that’s stupid” or, “so you think we should just do nothing!?” This is incorrect thinking both rationally and in terms of being productive and extracting value from criticism.
IRL organizing you’ll be able to navigate these things and achieve better outcomes by choosing other types of responses and thinking! Positive examples (lol) include open-ended questions, accepting critique and synthesizing new framings, and leading people to shared positions by going, “yes and…”, that sort of thing.
PS to contradict myself I don’t follow these recommendations all the time. Sometimes it feels inauthentic to be in “organizer mode”. But it could be something good to try out a few times.