Caesura109 posted:

why it is that leninists have such huge gaps in interpretation between different tendencies

not to put too fine a point on it but I wouldn't call ultras 'leninists' at all

Caesura109 posted:

Ultras seem to believe that ML vanguardism amounts to "substitution of the proletariat" by a party of bourgeois intellectuals, and that rather than raising "class consciousness", somehow the proletariat will just "know" communism through their own self activity. Why do they get the idea that communism can be understood by proletarians through self-activity without the need of a vanguard? Are they just determinists? Do they just believe that some day, conditions will get so bad everywhere that proletarians everywhere will natural understand that private property must be abolished?

Yeah, I don't think they'd phrase it this way themselves, but they're effectively throwbacks to a distorted pre-Marxist Hegelian world-spirit type thinking. They consider the world to be composed in such a way that communist thought and organization will spontaneously emerge from the masses with strictly no further causal input necessary than the material circumstances of capitalism, in some vaguely defined way that disavows most or all actually existing past and contemporary revolutionary movements (which imho is flagrantly ahistorical given how many significant revolutionary leaders didin fact come from proletarian backgrounds.)

The extremes of this attitude effectively deny the possibility of class treason by the petty bourgeoisie and intelligentsia: contact with the intellectual class irrevocably contaminates political movements with the replication of bourgeois power dynamics. This is how they categorize states as "bureaucratic regimes" and is leveraged for explanatory power of anything undesirable: of course there was horrific violence in a civil war, of course force was used to quell political unrest, of course there was an economic shortfall, of course there was a messy political compromise with besieging imperialists, of course there was famine, disease, suffering: this revolution was a bureaucratic distortion and not the True Revolution.

This might sound appealing for principled people who care about the world and their fellow human beings until you try to consider how one applies it to practical active politics: you can't, really. It is the political pinnacle of painting yourself into a corner, an elaborate excuse to sit back and do nothing waiting for the mass messiah, occasionally shitting on those who have the arrogance to actually strive for a better world. (this is why some folks here get really mad when ultra-left stuff comes up, when you're doing actual political work it's fucking infuriating to get heckled by holier-than-thou narcissists who have excused themselves from trying to help)

Imho this kind of thought develops from utopian attitudes held by people who never have to really face the consequences of their politics: they are emotionally moved by hardship, strife, and failure in the rest of the world, which is noble enough. But as bourgeois intellectuals themselves structurally isolated from these maladies in their own lives, they can't accept the price of committing to action in a conflicted world, the possibility of flaws or failure. The people I see drawn to ultra-leftism are almost universally either people who are too lazy or afraid to do political work in the first place but still want to call themselves leftists, or people who try for a little bit but find it too hard to actually confront material reality with their politics and retreat back to glorified social clubs as the maximum limit of their engagement.

Any "legitimate revolution" for ultra-leftists sits beyond a constantly receding horizon of impossible perfectionism: any excesses in violence, any mistakes in policy or development, any failure setback or hardship is evidence that this is must not be The True Revolution. They have no patience for the mistakes and frailties of actual human striving, only infinite unmitigated success is acceptable. They need an ideological framework to explain why they sit back and set themselves apart, and settle on the conclusion that they must be More Communist Than The Communists, More Dedicated Than The Dedicated, More Righteous Than The Righteous. Political asceticism for our contemporary holy renunciates.

Obviously Ultras wouldn't describe themselves as having excused themselves from politics, and some do individually participate in political action on at least a performative surface level, but in practice when the pressure's on they always have their exit planned and will be the first out the door the moment there's any real conflict, because after all this wasn't gonna be the true revolution anyways!

Caesura109 posted:

a messianic ideology. ultras masquerade as realists when the actual realists engage and adapt and fail and try again.

see I could have just written that instead of a wall of text. it's so hard not to ramble when stuff touches on my own experiences organizing. must be cross-contamination from the canadian maoist blogger tradition, one shudders to imagine the infinite tidal wave of words that would ensue were they to ever go outside and actually do something.

Themselves posted:

where do people actually go to talk about marxism-leninism online?

Themselves posted:

where do people actually go to talk about marxism-leninism online?

a bunch of places, where everyone there says all the time it's a bad place to talk about marxism-leninism online

shriekingviolet posted:

They consider the world to be composed in such a way that communist thought and organization will spontaneously emerge from the masses with strictly no further causal input necessary than the material circumstances of capitalism,

there was a period of time when i found myself falling into this trap by means of considering the actual details of radicalisation, organization and the activities of the vanguard to be epiphenomena whose details can be abstracted out. this is the curse of Jehuism

Gssh posted:

LOOK ON MY RISKS, YE PROLES, AND DESPAIR!


tag yourself i'm "rising cyber dependency"

Edited by Bukku_Man (April 16, 2018 21:22:33)

Bukku_Man posted:

LOOK ON MY RISKS, YE PROLES, AND DESPAIR!

this is a cool as hell looking graph of totally made up hidden numbers, i like it.

global corporate strategy discussion / capitalist economic shit has been extremely conscious of the acceletating potential for revolution(s) for years and years now. it keeps leaking out.

Edited by drwhat (April 22, 2018 18:28:37)

Synergy posted:

it's been mentioned countless times before that probably every leftist organization in the US has been infiltrated at some point which got me thinking about the actual infiltrators. i'm surprised there haven't been more stories about agents turning or quitting their positions. how do you spend years being immersed in socialist education, having devastating information about imperialism and facts about socialist states hammered into your brain and still come to the conclusion that "eh, capitalism is still better"? unless you're utterly dense or brain dead there is no way you don't at least question some of your ideological upbringing

The Basic Politics of Movement Security (2014) by J. Sakai and Mandy Hiscocks are two interviews that talk about infiltration, who is doing it, how it works within the bigger picture, what can be done about it, etc. with plenty of examples that might answer your questions.



What I got from this is that the bulk of infiltrators are not people who have been immersed in years of study and socialist learning who are then converted back or suddenly decide that they love capitalism, but people who were already cops, eager but naive people who don't know better, people who get blackmailed into it, trots, etc. That's not to say that people who present themselves as diehard MLs can't be plants but I doubt that's the core demographic.

(thank glomper_stomper for the pdf, rip)

Edited by odobenidae (April 21, 2018 08:48:39)

shriekingviolet posted:

2) snitching on cops or intelligence will utterly destroy your life and probably the lives of everyone you care about. once you're in you don't get out without a world power with the resources and clout to protect you, something even a large grassroots organization is utterly unable to provide.

this isn't necessarily true & it's unnecessarily demoralizing imo to act as though revolutionary organizations can't pull off something organized crime has managed since its beginning, especially since revolutionaries have done it before and continue to do it to this day. it's just not a good plan to offer yourself up as an informant to realize it.