If you call me (or anyone who’s not literally a Pol Pot supporter or something) “red fash,” you’re probably getting temp banned.

all cops are bastards

A lot of accusations against China are Western propaganda. The concept that China might do something wrong is not Western propaganda.

Edit: I’m not saying “tankies” deny that China is capable of wrongdoing, but acknowledging that fact is what the post is asking, not that you repeat any particular anti China point.

Tanks at least are cool, Red Fash is (like imo “Social Fascist” outside of something like full Strasserism) an incoherent category that prevents proper critical discussion of the actual material differences.

wholecloth

l i n e n s

It also could be people joining who don’t have the exact same views as the people you are thinking of from before. Combined with people who were previously quiet getting more vocal, and people who were more vocal getting more quiet. I know I tend not say anything negative about people who are doing good less efficiently than I think they could because I’d rather they be kinda inefficient than discourage them from acting at all.

I was always extremely skeptical of Bernie, not really trusting him or thinking he or most of the people who supported him so vocally had quite the right idea, but I never said much about it because I didn’t want to get in the way of what was ultimately still a good thing. I suspect a lot of people felt the same way, I feel similarly about a lot of things, and behave the same way in response.

have critisisms of NK or China

good thing they say about these countries

every single percieved or real bad thing

Marxism is not moralistic! Even considering particular policies as “good” or “bad” is misleading. The actual question is “is ______ giving power to the proletariat?”

cant handle the fact that communists would support Dengist China and DPRK like Bernie shows a double standards and ideological incoherency

The difference is that Bernie is the only socialist politician, where those states have long histories of virtue signalling their communism. Deng literally had the audacity to call himself communist despite removing Marx

I think there is too much focus on what the state will be or not be post-revolution, which is worth pondering, but at this point amounts to navel gazing. We should be focused on revolutionary praxis where I think there is more shared vision.

What mostly rubs anarchist the wrong way is the insistence on democratic centralism. but what does discipline matter when if the Party is not in power? it is ultimately a voluntary association between individuals with no way for any of them to enforce discipline beyond social pressure – which is pretty standard fare for an anarchist. So there is no reason to bicker over the approach, when everyone is ultimately acting under voluntary association.

And it is fairly sensible to take a vote within a group on group actions, but maintaining also that it’s better to let people who really object to participating in something skip the parts they find objectionable without being totally excommunicated. A little flexibility on both sides and there is no reason anarchists and communists can’t work together towards revolutionary praxis, since no one really has any authority to wield in the first place.

Perhaps there would be tension as one gets very near to a revolution, but I don’t see that being the case for quite a ways, we need to raise class consciousness dramatically before that is even worth considering. There is no reason not to be united around that goal. If we are to be successful, many many more people that the current anarchists and communists will have to be involved, and the consensus on the approach may be much clearer by then.

I also don’t see any value to argue over what this country did or that country did in the 20th century. We don’t have to re-create what they did, nor likely could we if we tried. both because of being in the imperialist core, because of being under a condition of late capitalism, and because of having at least ostensibly a liberal democracy where elections occur with a peaceful transfer of power (though that tradition might be coming to an end!)

Even arguing over what is currently happening in China or DPRK isn’t helpful. Until we are to a point of deciding if we need to choose international allies for support, like real support, getting supplies (weapons), economic sanctions, intelligence, state-level hacking – whatever true “support” might look like coming from China or from Latin America – it is mostly just of academic interest whether China is state capitalist or true worker’s state of is or whatever else. It’s not worth dividing the left over these kinds of squabbles, and any kind of “solidarity” measures (e.g. a resolution to support this state or that group) are not likely to accomplish anything of material benefit for either side, so best to avoid those minefields entirely.

Finally, I sometimes see ML’s smug about “well this would have never happened with an ML org practicing DemCen” ok you’re right, in fact, it wouldn’t have happened at all because that ML org doesn’t exist. Why has no one created it? Because most people are not interested in getting involved with an org where they feel people are bossing them around, even if those people are right.

Maybe imagine how there is or could be a pipeline to a more disciplined approach like ML, after people have first been involved in more approachable, softer leftist ideas like anarchism or democratic socialism. Expect that some of them will mature in their views and realize that it is not possible to herd cats to a revolution. But surely they’ll be much less likely to reach that conclusion if they feel ridiculed or mocked.

People who say Left Unity have confused politics

While in reality most “leftists” reject the dictatorship of the proletariat which is basically conditional on being a Marxist

In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at the earliest possible moment, until such time as a new generation, reared in new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap.

Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

-Engels

The question then arises: What transformation will the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present state functions? This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousand-fold combination of the word ‘people’ with the word ‘state’.

Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

• Marx, critique of the gotha programme

Now, since the state is merely a transitional institution of which use is made in the struggle, in the revolution, to keep down one’s enemies by force, it is utter nonsense to speak of a free people’s state; so long as the proletariat still makes use of the state, it makes use of it, not for the purpose of freedom, but of keeping down its enemies and, as soon as there can be any question of freedom, the state as such ceases to exist.

-Engels, Letters to Bebel

if the left starts making any serious gsins these two camps will split pretty quick and be completely opposed to each other.

Actually, I think history shows the opposite: actual, material struggle for those gains has a tendency to bring everyone together and make the sorts of concessions to material needs that other revolutionary projects have made seem justified. Just look at the shift in the Bolsheviks over the course of the civil war, or how the CCP during the revolution was a coalition largely filled with and run by peasant anarchists and how their ideology shifted afterwards in the face of the actual material conditions they found themselves in.

That’s not to say every single sectarian ideologue would drop the infighting (because there were certainly always holdouts) just that, for example, someone’s going to start believing in full purges or suppressions of, say, monarchists and everyone who tacitly supports monarchists (like liberals) when the monarchists have literally been doing pogroms and burying people alive, even if that means you’ve got to toss them in prisons and you think that prisons are something inherently wrong.

One views the Dictatorship of the Proletariate as necessary, the other sees it as inherently counter-revolutionary and would vow to overthrow it

those are just tankies pre-revolution and post-revolution