We should normalise shaming wreckers. We should bully people for wrecker behaviour a lot more.
The left's main vulnerability is splitting and infighting. We are terrible at it. This is known.
To build revolutionary change, a revolutionary party is needed. It must do its work and carry on its work. In the military, they taught me that the number one priority is preserving your ability to fight. It's ok if you have setbacks, lose equipment or men or tactical position or advantage; but it's a catastrophe if you lose the capacity to fight.
Leftist infighting is what robs the movement of its ability to fight on. It kills the movements. (The Buddhists know this, and consider 'creating a schism in the sangha' the supreme sin. That's a tangent, but the Buddhists have maintained an ideological movement for 26 centuries so they're doing something right.)
We need to mock people who shame other leftists for impurity, who insult them for making mistakes. Liu Shaoqi said: "The attitude of some Party members towards these shortcomings and mistakes and towards those comrades who have incorrect ideas is one of “bitter hatred and gall”. They lightly sever all relations with comrades who have committed some mistake and whom they attempt to expel from the Party outright."
It is ok for comrades to make mistakes in action, and to have mistaken beliefs. That's the completely normal, inevitable part of having a movement. In fact, that's all a movement is: listening to people's beliefs, listening to their wrong beliefs, correcting them, unifying the thought of the party, unity makes strength. It is not ok to have incorrect ideas of “bitter hatred and gall”, and lightly sever all relations with comrades who have committed some mistake.
MAO MADE 30% MISTAKES, INCLUDING CAUSING THE BIGGEST FAMINE IN HUMAN HISTORY!!! If you can forgive that, you can forgive someone who made an off-colour tweet when they were a teenager.
People who try to cancel comrades for stuff they did/said in the distant past, or for non-core differences of opinion, are dong the imperialists work for them: dismantling the socialist movement.
PS: the aim is always to have a cohesive, united, strong movement with the correct views. Anything that serves the aim is good. Anything that wrecks the aim is bad.
A key motivator to splits is the desire for power, the need to be The One Person Calling All The Shots. People crave power, amd when there is a ladder of command, they wish to climb it.
Any organization that distributes its roles of power, and eliminates the concept of overall stratification, is going to make itself less prone to splits.
Having multiple ladders of power to climb, separate domains of expertise that are not ranked against each other, such as theory and analysis, recruitment, propaganda, facilitation and mediation, will allow people to fulfil their human nature* by pursuing distinction, while not stretching anyone too thin, nor putting all the party's eggs in one basket, nor limiting how many people can wield a personal influence on the group as a whole.
*Yes I said those words. Pursuing distinction and social value, broadly, is one of the few things that can truly be said to be universal human nature rather than frequent human tendency.
"the left" is whoever and whatever I say it is, so naturally anyone that disagrees with me is a wrecker and the only thing preventing "the left" from achieving electoral power through legal nonviolent political activity in the imperial core
alternatively
the overwhelming majority of the popularly understood "left" in the Anglophone world are liberal democrats who support capitalism and white supremacy, so everyone on this website giving anything less than full-throated support for Joe Biden and Kier Starmer is a splitter weakening "the movement".
splitting and wrecking in the context of a specific revolutionary party is an organizational problem solved with democratic centralism. complaining about "splitting and wrecking" in the context of an abstract term used specifically to obscure irreconcilable political differences is just being upset that reality doesn't rearrange itself to conform to terminology. it's like saying "humanity's main vulnerability is splitting and infighting; we should shame and bully humans who shame and bully other humans for being wrong". Rhetorically abstracting away difference doesn't make difference go away.
of course, "splitting from or undermining a group is sometimes good and sometimes bad depending on the specific context and conditions" is the kind of banal observation that doesn't drive social media engagement.
The Chinese Famine of 1906 - 07 was probably larger from a mortality standpoint, though it didn't last as long. The so-called Great Chinese Famine is only the greatest if you take maximalist anticommunist numbers, and recent scholarship is generally in the direction of it being significantly overestimated. Both that death toll and Mao's "30%" (while he did make serious mistakes, let me be clear) are things that were basically encouraged to be exaggerated even in China itself because of the Dengist revolt and new orthodoxy needing to discourage support for Mao-era policy.
What I'm saying is that your anti-wrecking post contains wrecking.
What I'm saying is that your anti-wrecking post contains wrecking.
In a nutshell what vampire's asking for is some sort of hexbear party line, which if taken seriously would yet again lead to a big site-wide argument and probably bannings because its trying to take what isn't a serious website in a serious direction.
my god, we've argued over stacking fucking rocks and are currently in a cold war over rule 8 of the dunk tank. I do not want to even remotely want to touch contentious theoretical topics - such as the sino-soviet difference on the concept of the national question and the right to self-determination. Also shut the fuck up we're not even going to talk about it, that's just something that would open pandoras box if the most arsonistic people got their hands on the concept - and have a gigantic shitflinging fest to end all gigantic shitflinging fests until in the name of wrecking wreckers for wrecking we stumble ourselves into a new gigantic shitflinging fest.
My point is that his mistakes were historically overstated by the Dengists as a pretext for right-deviation, and that's the portrayal we, as communists, have mostly inherited.
Hear me out hexbears, we have an infighting problem, therefore we should infight the infighters.
I agree we should forgive comrades more for making mistakes. I disagree that a philosophy of 'bully the bullies' is a sustainable approach to maintaining a community.
Alphabet infiltration of leftist movements has been incredibly successful historically speaking.
If you wanna know what kind of behavior to be on the lookout for, or what kind of behavior to watch yourself for (it's easier than you think to accidentally help your enemies) check out the sabateurs guide hosted by our alphabetic friends themselves.
Infighting, spurred by capitalists, has historically weakened and destroyed leftist movements very successfully. In order to have any chance cohesion is paramount.
I love how leftists will agree on 99% of things, but become sworn enemies with other leftists over AI or the ideal brand of masks or outdoor cats or some shit. I love purity testing and infighting so much, and COINTELPRO has been great.
Knew a guy who wouldn't volunteer at a soup kitchen because it was run by trots and he was an anarchist. Such a weird hangup. Like, okay dude they think society should be structured this way after the revolution and you think it should be that way? Okay, what does that have to do with making soup for the houseless?
I do not care if someone is "good" or even a socialist. I care if their actions will contribute to our aid socialism. I don't care if Norman Finkelstein is transphobic. I don't care what George Galloway said about this, that, or the other thing. I don't care what any historical figure said about gay people. If they work to contribute to socialism, they are a comrade.
I love how leftists will agree on 99% of things but become sworn enemies with other leftists over AI or masks or outdoor cats or some shit.
I don't care if Norman Finkelstein is transphobic.
What the fuck are you talking about, your other comment is about outdoor cats, now you talk about transphobia as if both are remotely the same thing. You have zero credibility if that is how you see the world.
Building socialism by supporting opinions that directly harm the people you want to help. The most generous take here is you're completely lost.
Norman's use is his academic work and knowledge about the history of Palestine. Once his other beliefs start to become more known or overshadow his usefulness, that becomes a problem. However, as it stands, his most know and most widely published content is on Palestine and is helpful. For someone who serves as a knowledge base on Palestine, the line where he becomes counterproductive would be Zionism.
The PRC did embrace Lysenkoism after the USSR had abandoned it, possibly out of fervor or possibly out of contrarianism, and along with other factors this was one of the causes of the famines in the 60s. By that time the PRC was by far the most populous country in history, and a few % dying puts it in the highest of absolute numbers.
What makes someone a wrecker in the context of a forum/shitposting space like Hexbear? We're not a party or org, so I'm not even sure what the equivalent to splitting the party would be here.
I still think it's bad that wrecker-jacketing is now no longer allowed. There's so many obvious wreckers that just get away with shit because people don't think about it anymore.
Can't even post anymore. Because of woke >:(
Exactly! I'm more MLM leaning, but I don't care what left tendency prevails so long as capitalism dies and stays dead. Anarchism and authoritarian left measures all have their place in different given material conditions. I think both avenues of pressure on the system are good. The Soviet revolution had different wings of the movement with different methods, all focused on specific pressure points of the system.