Actions speak louder than words, but imo its disingenuous to say that the PSL failing to support RATWM is because of PSL disliking those lolbertarians.
I’ve spoken with Rainer about this, and while I don’t agree or like with everything he says, his point was that RATWM would expand the core message out to a broader populance, and that he doesn’t like associating with the Lolberts and likened this to the Bolsheviks working with reactionary trade unions and groups. Obviously not the same situation, but the general message is the same.
We didn’t fail to support the event. We rejected the event emphatically. It was a right-wing event.
The general message is not remotely the same. There is a difference between organizing workers in an imperial country where all non-explicitly-communist institutions are reactionary to some degree, and organizing with the fascists self-consciously responsible for making it that way. If you’re genuinely confused about that, you have a lot of reading to do, because even the democrats are better at recognizing their enemies.
The libertarian party is both fringe, and the most ideologically anti-worker organization in the US. It’s impossible to be further away from union organizing. You think they want to end the war and spend that money on healthcare for workers? They are literally repealing child labor laws. Some of them think slavery should be legalized.
Except that the people in RAWM are most certainly not “the fascists responsible for making it that way”, those fascists are sitting on the Atlantic Council, in the RAND corporation, at the State Department, in the CIA, in the White House, at the Federal Reserve, at NATO, and other institutions of bourgeois imperial power. What power do a bunch of libertarian nobodies have? Not to mention that reducing RAWM to just the right wingers is dishonest, afaik it’s a broad tent coalition and includes people from the left too as well as a lot of otherwise fairly apolitical people who are just sick of wars.
Of course i don’t think that the libertarians will support labor organizing or social spending. But that’s not what this is about, this is about one thing only and that is opposing NATO and the US empire’s proxy war on Russia. You can support that part without agreeing with the ideological viewpoints of everyone else in the coalition. It just comes down to whether you think it’s acceptable to put aside differences over domestic policy for the sake of preventing possible nuclear war and WWIII, because that’s where we may be heading if NATO’s escalations are not stopped.
I thought the same thing, that libertarians aren’t the most powerful group for reaction, but that doesn’t mean they are highly ideologically anti-worker and anti-communist. Libertarianism declined as a force once the rich realized they could get their same ideology in the mainstream through neoliberalism instead. It doesn’t make the more fringe form less bad.
You have good points in your final sentence. I was going to say that many of the audience at RATWM are probably led astray or misinformed by the establishment and not directly part of the capitalist oligarchical leaders, but now that I think about it, Tulsi Gabbard being there isn’t a great sign. You’re mostly right.
I mean, most of any audience is going to be workers, they’re 99% of the population. That’s never going to be sufficient for determining whether an action is worth supporting. This event was paid for by GOP-aligned billionaires. You couldn’t pick a less favorable environment for worker outreach. You could go up to random people on the street and ask them how they feel about the Ukraine war, and you’d have a more serious anti-war movement than this in a month.
