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Just to add a funny piece of history to the idea of the idea of the cia intentionally splitting ‘leftists’. Back in the day the bolshiviks had an agent of the tsar high in their ranks that actively discouraged unity between the bolsheviks and the mensheviks - the intention being to stop the socialists from forming a larger political bloc. But from lenins point of view the main thing it did was prevent the bolsheviks from taking on the internal contradictions of the mensheviks.
This unity of the left that people fight for nowadays is a false unity based on ignoring internal contradiction instead of struggling on it and navigating it. If anything was a cia project I would say it’s the tendency to build false coalitions strife with internal contradiction that are bound to fall apart from the seems at the mere presence of any meaningful hostile external factor ( if these forms don’t already disassemble themselves before hand).
Maybe it is, but the question is whether we hash out those contradictions internally, as part of the combined struggle, or as separate tendencies taking potshots at each other.
Left unity doesn’t mean we don’t argue, it means we argue together, which means we can more easily arrive at the specific tactics needed to succeed in certain material conditions. And honestly, even as an ML I see the Ancoms generally being far more effective at small-scale organising and struggle, even if I’m skeptical about that becoming a larger movement.
I often feel that the different tendencies just have different focuses, and they’re actually all important. Imagine believing that any one particular school of thought has a monopoly on the truth haha it’s a very… competitive mindset, not really conducive to healthy leftism/social science imo.
It’s, frankly, intellectual arrogance to act as if ‘only my school of thought has all the right answers’. In any academic field, you’d get laughed out of the room for acting that way. It’s just not a realistic relationship with the truth, imo
There’s no such thing as “hashing out differences as a combined struggle.” There are irreconcilable differences. There’s no meeting in the middle. It’s ok to have different political programs. There’s some weird idealism of wanting everyone to be friends or something involved here
