Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension. It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organizations from the masses which the Party leads. It is an extremely bad tendency.

Liberalism stems from petty-bourgeois selfishness, it places personal interests first and the interests of the revolution second, and this gives rise to ideological, political and organizational liberalism.

People who are liberals look upon the principles of Marxism as abstract dogma. They approve of Marxism, but are not prepared to practice it or to practice it in full; they are not prepared to replace their liberalism by Marxism. These people have their Marxism, but they have their liberalism as well--they talk Marxism but practice liberalism; they apply Marxism to others but liberalism to themselves. They keep both kinds of goods in stock and find a use for each. This is how the minds of certain people work.

Liberalism is a manifestation of opportunism and conflicts fundamentally with Marxism. It is negative and objectively has the effect of helping the enemy; that is why the enemy welcomes its preservation in our midst. Such being its nature, there should be no place for it in the ranks of the revolution.

We must use Marxism, which is positive in spirit, to overcome liberalism, which is negative. A Communist should have largeness of mind and he should be staunch and active, looking upon the interests of the revolution as his very life and subordinating his personal interests to those of the revolution; always and everywhere he should adhere to principle and wage a tireless struggle against all incorrect ideas and actions, so as to consolidate the collective life of the Party and strengthen the ties between the Party and the masses; he should be more concerned about the Party and the masses than about any private person, and more concerned about others than about himself. Only thus can he be considered a Communist.

I have a problem. I am resolutely opposed to liberalism, am very good at sniffing out a liberal when I sense one, and also efficient in identifying and attacking the offending liberal positions, tendencies and character deficiencies that lend the liberal to his rightist deviance. My problem is this: I don't engage the liberal, which is reasonable, I think, and instead attack him or her without mercy or hesitation, and with no regard for saving appearances. I live a petty bourgeois life, 99% of my peers are counter-revolutionary and I myself am hardly revolutionary in anything but ideals. I do not participate in any sort of revolutionary action, so I am essentially a liberal myself. However, whatever my failings there, I still feel compelled to argue against those self-satisfied liberals who argue reactionary apologism with a level of dishonesty directly proportionate to the intensity of their superiority complex. I may be a liberal in practice, but I am then a liberal who attempts to combat liberalism. This personal contradiction of mine is not the problem, this is simply a matter of moral commitment and will of which little needs to be said. The problem concerns my engagement with liberals. I am unsure that vicious criticism unimpeded by any sort of social nicety, which I see mainly as a defense of bourgeois argument, is productive. I do believe that unapologetically firing all rhetorical cylinders in attacking liberals from a position of revolutionary anti imperialism opens up the impossible possibility of revolution for those sympathetic to the cause, and that to cede ground any ground to the liberal is a tactical mistake. To do so renders one a liberal. The position of the liberal is constant and eternal compromise with the right, to act as a sort of broker between the internal crisis of capitalism and the class that perpetuates it. To concede any rhetorical ground to the liberal--usually this means conceding that the liberal is in some way on the same side as the revolutionary--is to function as a liberal to the liberal, to broker between the revolution and those ambassadors of reaction. My question is this: is it a mistake to insist resolutely on a disciplined rhetorical anti imperialist position at all times and maintain an assault on any and all liberal attempts to fly into the revolutionary camp, or is there some more fluid strategy wherein the liberal can be invited to his own rhetorical demise. It is always the stronger strategy to invite the enemy to his own suicide than it is to try to fight off them off yourself. I feel that some sort of inclusionary rhetorical position that negates the false leftism of the liberal somehow by its very nature would be preferable, I just haven't been able to formulate it. So build with me a little bit here my brogues.

The more detached one is from a role, the easier it becomes to turn it against the enemy. The more effectively one avoids the weight of things, the easier it is to achieve lightness of movement. Comrades care little for forms. They argue openly, confident in the knowledge that they cannot inflict wounds on each other. Where communication is genuinely sought, misunderstandings are no crime. But if you accost me armed to the teeth, understanding agreement only in terms of a victory for you, then you will get nothing out of me but an evasive pose, and a formal silence intended to indicate that the discussion is closed. For interchange on the basis of contending roles is useless a priori. Only the enemy wants to fight on the terrain of roles, according to the rules of the spectacle.

Edited by blinkandwheeze (Sept. 11, 2012 05:37:47)

Impper posted:
in my view the liberals are the true enemies, as they will always claim to be on your side, on the side of decency, human emancipation, justice, and so on, even as they are sticking knives in your back. the kicker here is that they truly are on your side - until their weakness, t heir fear, their cowardice, their meekness, their retreat to stability compels them to betray the cause.

it is for this reason that they can never be compromised with. the enemy you see is never the one who destroys you

this suggests to me that a fluid revolutionary stance that would repulse liberalism in its constitution would reject the individual at all? i.e. dissolving the individual into the revolutionary collective so that a deviation into liberals means expulsion from the collective via the formation of the individual. there is probably more to say about that in terms of the individual as a bourgeois subject and the dissolved-individual as becoming-collective or somethign

shennong posted:
do you all meet a lot of ideologically committed liberals? most of the liberals i meet are more or less liberal-by-default and are unable to defend their positions without plunging themselves into cognitive dissonance

thats literally what it is to be an ideologically committed liberal

the more "honest" ones call themselves conservatives or libertarians

Lessons posted:
i'll never understand the impulse to purge the left of all liberal influence. the leftist program as originally forumulated, and also to a large extent in its numerous re-forumlations, appropriated heavily from liberal ideals and rhetoric, and a leftism entirely stripped of these would not only be rootless but also incomplete, possibly incoherent, less revolutionary and more easily defeasible.

Well, when you put it that way, this is exactly what we need.

An incomplete, open-ended ideology is truly indefeasible. To wit, the failure of the 20th century left was rooted in the failure of the totalitarian model to 'excuse the abyss'. Actions were objective, conditions were objective, history moved objectively, and thus the space for true emancipation was always dislocated, an incredulous attempt to 'close the gap'.

There is nothing less revolutionary than completing the gap, of trying to formulate a total-system which answers all contingencies. This was the failure of the Soviet Union, this is also the failure of technocrats, New Atheists, positivists, it is essentially the localization of the failure of modernity.

And minding the gap is exactly the route to radical freedom, to a revolutionary programme that is open-ended and thus indefatigable, for an idea doesn't die because it's simply some non-material spectre, but that it indeed is incomplete, open to new life.

So youre wrong.

e: To put it another way: what is the essence of 'One divides into Two, but doesnt form again into One'? it categorically rebuts the revisionist schools in the USSR and China which demanded harmony, a total balancing, and thus gave way to late capitalism. It, more importantly, situates an inherent gap which will refuse all totalization.

Edited by Crow (Dec. 13, 2011 00:23:08)

Crow posted:
Well, when you put it that way, this is exactly what we need.

An incomplete, open-ended ideology is truly indefeasible. To wit, the failure of the 20th century left was rooted in the failure of the totalitarian model to 'excuse the abyss'. Actions were objective, conditions were objective, history moved objectively, and thus the space for true emancipation was always dislocated, an incredulous attempt to 'close the gap'.

There is nothing less revolutionary than completing the gap, of trying to formulate a total-system which answers all contingencies. This was the failure of the Soviet Union, this is also the failure of technocrats, New Atheists, positivists, it is essentially the localization of the failure of modernity.

And minding the gap is exactly the route to radical freedom, to a revolutionary programme that is open-ended and thus indefatigable, for an idea doesn't die because it's simply some non-material spectre, but that it indeed is incomplete, open to new life.

So youre wrong.

perhaps i was unclear. what i'm saying is that notions like 'radical freedom' and 'a revolutionary programme', while hardly the exclusive province of liberalism, do belong to a liberal pedigree, and all modern notions of them are bound to be colored at least in part by liberalism, for better or worse. even if we can tease apart the liberalism from the leftism as individuals, (i doubt it), doing so socially isn't feasible, and wouldn't really do anything to make leftism more open-ended regardless.

e: To put it another way: what is the essence of 'One divides into Two, but doesnt form again into One'? it categorically rebuts the revisionist schools in the USSR and China which demanded harmony, a total balancing, and thus gave way to late capitalism. It, more importantly, situates an inherent gap which will refuse all totalization.

can you expand on this?

Lessons posted:
can you expand on this?

http://www.lacan.com/divide.htm

babyfinland posted:
youre using "liberalism" in a strange way

how so?

Lessons posted:

babyfinland posted:
youre using "liberalism" in a strange way

how so?

I don't really know how you're defining it and in any case its not the definition I was using the OP. Unless you're really trying to argue that liberalism and revolutionary anti imperialism are equally liberatory

DRUXXX posted:
ya that's the definition i use but it can be confusing. we could do some kind of Liberalism vs liberalism type thing when we talk about it to refer to enlightenment ideology and the western political ideology distinctly

works for me

Groulxsmith posted:
a lot of expressions of 'combatting liberalism' and application of lin biao thought you see from contemporary leftists strikes me as the radical's version of going galt. you retreat into a comfortable corner of ideology in an act of what you believe to be a transcendental withdrawal that is in reality an admission of your inability to deal with your own context.

like, some people would rather scoff at occupy wall street people their insufficient zealousness and political errors or whatever and wash their hands of any involvement and just rely on being a jerk on the internet and waiting for the third world to do their dirty work

http://moufawad-paul.blogspot.com/2011/09/understanding-social-reform-in-non.html
http://moufawad-paul.blogspot.com/2011/10/more-radical-than-thou.html

Edited by Lessons (Dec. 13, 2011 01:29:14)

DRUXXX posted:
lol yeah i totally don't support OWS not because of their utter lack of zealousness and innumerable political errors but because I'm 'waiting on the third world to do my dirty work,'

i don't want this to turn into an OWS debate, but generally i'm inclined to believe radicals are called upon to critically engage all potential allies. the groups i've worked with have all been either anarchists or 'trots', with whom i have plenty of disagreements, but at this juncture those disagreements are insignificant in comparison to our commonalities.

Lessons posted:

DRUXXX posted:
lol yeah i totally don't support OWS not because of their utter lack of zealousness and innumerable political errors but because I'm 'waiting on the third world to do my dirty work,'

i don't want this to turn into an OWS debate, but generally i'm inclined to believe radicals are called upon to critically engage all potential allies. the groups i've worked with have all been either anarchists or 'trots', with whom i have plenty of disagreements, but at this juncture those disagreements are insignificant in comparison to our commonalities.

this goes without saying. there is a huge difference between internal discipline and tactical policy

donno why youre finding disagreements with trots tho lol

babyfinland posted:
donno why youre finding disagreements with trots tho lol

Notice how he said 'the groups of worked with' in the context of the OWS movement were mostly trots and anarchists, which doesn't mention the fact that all the groups from outside ows have been trot groups, they've all been trot groups, and tl is a crypto-revisionist trot infiltrator.

DRUXXX posted:

babyfinland posted:
donno why youre finding disagreements with trots tho lol

Notice how he said 'the groups of worked with' in the context of the OWS movement were mostly trots and anarchists, which doesn't mention the fact that all the groups from outside ows have been trot groups, they've all been trot groups, and tl is a crypto-revisionist trot infiltrator.

there's been a theme to the replies in this thread and it seems to be "state the obvious"