Leftist Infighting: A community dedicated to allowing leftists to vent their frustrations

Most of the memes are fine but for some reason they have one saying either AES or Russia are fascist and we’re evil tankies for critically supporting them. The comments are strange. There’s Communists saying “you sound stupid when you say “tankie”.” And then when they get a reply they’re like “obviously I don’t support AES or Russia, stop grouping me with them.” There are a couple other people defending AES with me in the comments and one is a patsoc 💀.

https://www.initiative-cwpe.org/en/news/ON-THE-TERMINATION-OF-THE-ACTIVITY-OF-THE-EUROPEAN-COMMUNIST-INITIATIVE/

North Korea has also taken steps to strengthen the so-called "free economic zones", the "market", where the Workers' Party of Korea for several years has rejected Marxism-Leninism, promotes the idealistic theory "Juche", talks about "Kimilsugism - Kimgyongilism", violating every concept of socialist democracy, workers' people's control, within a regime of nepotism.

https://inter.kke.gr/en/articles/The-International-role-of-China

TW for all sorts of fucked up shit

“They gaslighted individuals with mental illness, they bullied people by harassing them, they crashed meetings they were not invited to (Tafadar and Khalil had attempted to crash gender struggle sessions, demanding that everyone surrender their phones for a search and seizure, like a hostage type of move), they threatened people with violence, and abused their leadership or popularity status as a way to avoid criticisms.”

I really recommend reading this, especially to Amerikan comrades and all comrades who feel ideologically inclined towards "Marxism-Leninism-Maoism [principally Maoism]".

...a member of RGA’s Revolutionary Student Front is confronted by other members for consistent creepy, sexist, and manipulative behavior. Jared argues for him to remain a member through undergoing “rectification” through physical violence, a method that will become a feature of the cult. Carlos agrees to rectification, not believing he will actually be assaulted. He is beaten, after which he flees the state.

It really only continues to get worse.

“Without letters our comrade has no contact with the outside world and he continues to not receive letters from the majority of his comrades. The consistent lack of initiative has forced the PPSC to take further action against the negligible support provided to our comrade. From now on a fine of 20 dollars will be given to those who have a personal relationship with our imprisoned comrade but fail to send out at least 1 letter monthly. The 20 dollars will go in a collection to support our imprisoned comrade’s wife and child."

It gets far, far worse.

This is by far the most interesting, detailed, and horrifying exposé I've seen regarding the Red Guards. In reading it, I believe there may be valuable insight on how to prevent ourselves from getting swept up in the political games of narcissistic opportunists. It is also crucial to be able to differentiate democratic centralism from "democratic centralism", lest any of us find ourselves stuck in a situation like this.

i am not very fond of anarchism as an ideology. It just cant function without contradicting its own principles....How in a revolution, or US intervention would strategic decisions be made? You cant just make everyone elect some shit every few hours during a war without somebody having to make decisions for other people. Or production? If you would like to have a car, or a house or whatever, you would need to ask hundreds of people for consent to produce the needed commodities as there is no state that regulates what and how much one should work....that would take a fucking long time which in return means not everyone gets to be supplied their needs. Anarchism is just not something you can achieve directly after a revolution, it needs to be gradual, when imperialist forces and other capitalist threats are annihilated, global socialism can deregulate its state-functions and transfer piece for piece more power to the people.

"...nah bro, it's still anarchist because they adhere to anarchist principles!!"

"...nah bro, the EZLN is actually anarchist even though they openly reject anarchism as their identity!!"

"...nah bro, it's not an expression of a colonialist attitude to appropriate the EZLN struggle as being part of my political beliefs!!"

It's astounding to me that western anarchists will defend to the death the right of trans people to self-identify but when a political struggle in the third world asserts its right to self-identify they'll steamroll it without a second thought.

Imagine claiming to reject unjust hierarchies and then placing yourself above the people of a movement to paternalistically appropriate their cause as being part of your own political ideology.

Here are the EZLN in their own words on the matter:

The EZLN and its larger populist body the FZLN are NOT Anarchist. Nor do we intend to be, nor should we be.

Over the past 500 years, we have been subjected to a brutal system of exploitation and degradation few in North America have ever experienced.

It is apparent from your condescending language and arrogant short-sightedness that you understand very little about Mexican History or Mexicans in general.

Our struggle was raging before anarchism was even a word, much less an ideology with newspapers and disciples. Our struggle is older than Bakunin or Kropotkin. We are not willing to lower our history to meet some narrow ideology exported from the same countries we fought against in our Wars for independence. The struggle in Mexico, Zapatista and otherwise, is a product of our histories and our cultures and cannot be bent and manipulated to fit someone else’s formula, much less a formula not at all informed about our people, our country or our histories. We as a movement are not anarchist.

We see narrow-minded ideologies like anarchism... as tools to pull apart Mexicans into more easily exploitable groups.

But what really enraged [us is] the familiar old face of colonialism shining through your good intentions. Once again we Mexicans [find ourselves put into a position where we] are not as good as the all knowing North American Imperialist who thinks himself more aware, more intelligent and more sophisticated politically than the dumb Mexican. This attitude, though hidden behind thin veils of objectivity, is the same attitude that we have been dealing with for 500 years, where someone else in some other country from some other culture thinks they know what is best for us more than we do ourselves.

Once again, the anarchists in North America know better than us about how to wage a struggle we have been engaged in since 300 years before their country was founded and can therefore, even think about using us as a means to “advance their project.” That is the same exact attitude Capitalists and Empires have been using to exploit and degrade Mexico and the rest of the third world for the past five hundred years.

Even though [you talk] a lot about revolution, the attitudes and ideas held by [you] are no different than those held by Cortes, Monroe or any other corporate imperialist bastard you can think of. Your intervention is not wanted nor are we a “project” for some high-minded North Americans to profit off.

So long as North American anarchists hold and espouse colonialist belief systems they will forever find themselves without allies in the third world. The peasants in Bolivia and Ecuador, no matter how closely in conformity with your rigid ideology, will not appreciate your condescending colonial attitudes anymore than would the freedom fighters in Papua New Guinea or anywhere else in the world.

Colonialism is one of the many enemies we are fighting in this world and so long as North Americans reinforce colonial thought patterns in their “revolutionary” struggles, they will never be on the side of any anti-colonial struggle anywhere. We in the Zapatista struggle have... asked the world to... respect the historical context we are in and think about the actions we do to pull ourselves from under the boots of oppression.

Source

(Excuse the minimisation that the editor feels compelled to engage in with their mention of "the subtle colonialist tendencies" and in saying "it is unclear whose voice is this Zapatista response, which uses 'we' to speak for all on such important themes. We [My note: Who is 'we'? It is unclear whose voice in this editorial note which uses 'we' to speak for all on such important themes...] fully agree that arrogance toward the struggles in Mexico should have no part in any commentary. Perhaps it is also worth asking whether centralization and representation can be anti-authoritarian?" — does the editor have no shame and no capacity for insight? Did they even listen to the author before typing this out? It's remarkable that this editor's royal "we" applies a standard of demanding proof of consensus from the EZLN in their communications which is entirely absent from their concern when other movements write or when Subcommandante Marcos writes but is not directly criticising western anarchists, not to mention in their own editorial note itself. They are setting their own personal standards for how they define the terms centralisation and anti-authoritarian then they're projecting this onto the EZLN and concern-trolling over what they assume to be the EZLN falling short of the editor's standards. Way to miss the point, guys!)

Makes you wonder why the most committed anarchists would go to the Ukraine to fight if they weren't really anarchists in the first place.

If the anarchists were really as disorganised as this article paints them to be, any adventurist would have had much better luck finding their way to the front through virtually any other route than as an anarchist.

Notice the unfalsifiable orthodoxy that kicks in in the editorial note, immediately dismissing any anarchist who joined the Azov Battalion or the OUN as being a false anarchist since joining with fascists disqualifies your from being an anarchist. That's very convenient and all but the lack of self-crit shown in this article is astounding.

Named after Iskra, but not a single book by Lenin, 3 by Trotksy and even a couple anarchists. This is the trend among university "communists" over here. If a revolution was successful, it must've not been a real revolution, except for the aesthetics.

This is a persistent myth that is shared amongst anarchists and RadLibs alike that the Soviets betrayed the Makhnovists by reneging on their so-called alliance with the Black Army, turning on them immediately after the defeat of the White Army.

This furnishes the anarchist persecution fetish and common narratives about how communists will always betray "the true revolution" and how Lenin was a tyrant.

The historical facts, however, paint a significantly different picture.

For one, you do not sign pacts with your allies. There was a military pact that was signed but, like the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, this is something that occurred between two parties that were constantly at odds with each other and the pact was signed out of conditions where the interests of both parties were temporarily aligned. This simple fact escapes the historical revisionists constantly but, unsurprisingly, only when it serves their arguments.

Secondly, Makhno himself knew that this pact was only temporary. Upon the signing of the pact he had this to say in The Road to Freedom, the Makhnovists' mouthpiece, in October 13, 1920:

"Military hostilities between the Makhnovist revolutionary insurgents and the Red Army have ceased. Misunderstandings, vagueness and inaccuracies have grown up around this truce: it is said that Makhno has repented of his anti-Bolshevik acts, that he has recognized the soviet authorities, etc. How are we to understand, what construction are we to place upon this peace agreement?

What is very clear already is that no intercourse of ideas, and no collaboration with the soviet authorities and no formal recognition of these has been or can be possible. We have always been irreconcilable enemies, at the level of ideas, of the party of the Bolshevik-communists.

We have never acknowledged any authorities and in the present instance we cannot acknowledge the soviet authorities. So again we remind and yet again we emphasize that, whether deliberately or through misapprehension, there must be no confusion of military intercourse in the wake of the danger threatening the revolution with any crossing-over, 'fusion' or recognition of the soviet authorities, which cannot have been and cannot ever be the case."
[Source: Nestor Makhno: Anarchy's Cossack by Skirda and Sharkey, pp. 200-201]

Clearly these are not the words that allies speak about one another.

At the successful Seige of Perekop, whereby the Red and Black Armies successfully broke the back of Wrangel's White Army forces and brought the Southern front to a conclusion, Makhno's aide-de-camp Grigori Vassilevsky, pronounced the end of the pact, proclaiming:

"That's the end for the agreement! Take my word for it, within one week the Bolsheviks are going to come down on us like a ton of bricks!"
[Source: Nestor Makhno: Anarchy's Cossack by Skirda and Sharkey, p.238]

The fact is that USSR furnished the Black Army with much-needed military supplies without which they would have been unable to continue fighting and Makhno was no pluralistic leader who was open to Bolsheviks; in fact, his army incorporated Bolshevik forces which defected to the Black Army and Makhno set his military secret police force, the Kontrrazvedka, to at first surveil the former Bolshevik military leaders along with the rising Bolshevik influence that had developed particularly around Yekaterinoslav, and then later summarily executed the Bolshevik leaders when they posed too much of a threat to his power due to commanding some of the strongest units in his army.

But that's a topic which deserves its own post...

I think it makes some points. Does anyone more knowledgeable on this subject have a different take?

I'm astonished at how sensitive the mods must be over there.

Apparently you're allowed to say whatever baseless slander you like about the eeeeevil tankies but the minute someone says "Hold up a sec, you claim to be anti-authoritarian and yet you support authoritarianism either explicitly or implicitly?" and they have to shut it down immediately.

Regardless, I think I made a pretty solid counterargument to the typical complaint about communism being authoritarian.

Mfers skim read the Wikipedia entry on Hannah Arendt and start thinking they're justified in slinging accusations about "muh authoritarianism" smh.

Jesus fucking christ. For me, as an Ukrainian, it's such a fucking shame that our country, on one of the biggest platforms on the internet, is represented by a fucking NAZI BATTALION SYMBOL. FUCK OFF.

I got this from Socialist Roaders

Just making some light of it to the international community.

The PCB is currently under fire for housing an academiscist, revisionist and "enfortressed" Central Committe. They're ignoring their own proceedures, are hostile to the party's democratic centralism and are removing more radical members of the party (specially those with a large online presence that have more agency over boots-on-the-ground organizing, like Jones Manuel).

This comes at a weird point as the party (and other ML parties) seem to be growing due to effective online presence of Marxist-Leninists in the brazilian internet.

After reading some discussion on lemmygrad about veganism, I felt the need to share my thoughts in a separate thread, as comments weren't appropriate for the wall of text I'm about to throw.

Before we start, very important precision. This is not about environmental veganism, only about animal-liberation veganism. Consuming less animal products will be a lifestyle change we must anticipate to limit environmental destruction. This is about the moral philosophy of veganism and its contradictions with materialism. 

Intro

Veganism is often rationalised under the form of a syllogism : it is immortal to kill and exploit humans, and non-human animals are equal to humans, therefore, it is immoral to kill and exploit non-human animals.

Now, I must say, if one is to contest the validity of this syllogism as a basis for veganism I encourage them to provide one since it could drastically change my point of view.

Like many syllogisms, there is appeal and validity to it until you question the premises. Let's review them under a materialistic lens. 

Morality and materialism

The first premise is that it is immortal to kill and exploit humans. As leftists, we tend to wholeheartedly agree with such a statement, as it encapsulates our ambitions and dreams, however this cannot be pursued for a political manifest beyond utopian wishful thinking. Historically, killing has been justified as a high moral act whenever the one being killed was deemed worthy of death. The reason it is generally considered immoral to interrupt one's life is because humans simply have to collaborate to survive, therefore every society has developed a social construct that allows us to live as a social productive species. But whenever a war enemy, criminal, or dissident person is being killed under certain circumstances, the killing becomes justified, morally right. 

As materialists, we don't base our interpretation of morality on a notion of some metaphysical, reality-transcending rule, and even less in relation to an afterlife. Morality is a human construct that evolves with material conditions. In that case, the relationship of human morality with non-human animals becomes more complicated than it seems. Humans do have empathy for other species but are also able to consume their flesh and products, a contradiction that has defined the construction of morality around non-human animals through history. This explains why it seems desirable for a lot of people to stop unnecessary animal cruelty while still wanting to consume their flesh, there is an act of balancing between empathy and appetite.

Equality of species and violence

Now you might have noticed that this framework is definitely human-centric. That brings us to the second premise, which is the equality of all species. By all means, it is absolutely outdated to maintain the idea of "human superiority" on all non-human species in the current times. As materialists, we should realise that humans evolved at the same time as other species, are dependent on the ecosystem, and that there is no fundamental variable that we have to consider as a criteria for ranking in an abstract "order of things".

That said, the equality of all species doesn't automatically mean the disappearance of inter-species violence. Firstly, we cannot stop unnecessary violence between fellow living beings that don't share our means of communication (unless we exerce physical control over them, but that's even worse). Secondly, there is an assumption that only humans possess the ability to choose to follow a vegan diet, which is extremely strange considering that it makes humans the only specie to have the capacity to be moral. Either non-human animals are excused for their chauvinistic violence against other species because they are seen as too limited, determined by their instinct, but it makes humans actually morally superior to other species. Or the animals must be held accountable for inter-species violence, which no vegan upholds, thankfully. Last option would be to consider that inter-species violence is part of life, which I agree with and think is the materialistic approach, but that means there is no reason to adopt a vegan diet.

Conclusion

So what does that let us with? Morality being a social construct with a material use in a human society, and humans being fundamentally empathetic, it is completely understandable that society will be progressing towards diminishing meat consumption to allow the minimization of animal suffering. But the exploitation of animals as means of food production doesn't have a materialistic reason to go away (unless we're talking about climate change, of course). The inter-species violence of humans against cattle and prey is part of nature, because we simply are a productive omnivorous specie just like any other. 

This is mostly why I would discourage pushing people to abandon all animal products in the name of ethics. What should be encouraged is acceptance of every specific diet, be it religious diets, or animal-liberation diets. Strict vegetarianism must be a choice of heart that is based on profound empathy, not a superior moral choice or, worse, a moral imperative.

Spicy question maybe, but I'm interested in your takes.

Personally, I think there's some major issues with at least the terminology of the 2 phase model of lower/higher stage communism or socialism/communism as the terms are used in classical theory. Specifically the 'lower stage' or 'socialism' term is problematic.

In the age of revision and after the success of counterrevolution it has become clear that there is in fact a transitional phase leading up to the classical transitional phase. Societies did not jump from developed capitalism to socialism immediately and even the states that arguably did were forced to roll back some of the core tenets of 'socialism' as it is described in Marx, Engels and Lenin. Namely no private ownership of the means of production and no exploitation of man by man.

To ultras this just means countries following this path aren't socialist. So then China isn't, Cuba isn't, no country still is really and those of us claiming they are then have to be revisionists. And to be fair, if you're dogmatic you can make that point going from the source material. China itself recognizes this inconsistency, thus not seeing itself at the stage of socialism. Yet it's a socialist state. But then what do we actually mean by 'socialism' when we use the term like this? Just a dictatorship of the proletariat? Any country in the process of building socialism?

That question comes up all the time and confuses the fuck out of people, because the term is either not applied consistently or as it's defined is lacking. I think discourse in the communist movement and about AES would profit immensely if we had a more consistent definition or usage of the term or a better defined concept of what that transition to socialism is and how we should call it.

For context purple thinks Cornel West should be supported, and they imply my “purity fetishism” is why communists haven’t had electoral success.

Yes, 1991. And it was forced to grant it

So, I'm not cool with genocide. Not cool with that at all. Even if they are landlords. I'm much more in favor of reeducation centers, personally. I'm against the death penalty on moral grounds. I believe that everyone deserves a second and third chance.

With that said, economically, I consider myself to be anarcho-communist or communalist or "left-communist" or whatever the fuck you want to call it.

But apparently all of that makes me a lib, and not welcome on the left? Is that correct?