cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/2139382
It seems most cross tendency engagement devolves in to fights between leftcoms/anarchists vs AES supporters or “Dengists” vs Maoists. Anyone can point at each other and say “they started it” and avoid responsibilities. We agree on 90% of stuff but Anarchists decide to randomly call us tankies and we feel the need to defend ourselves or else look like we lost without an argument. Likewise we make memes about Anarkiddies and write texts denouncing them and they feel the same. Among scientific socialists we see China as an ally and an example to learn from while Maoists want to call out “revisionism.” There seems to be a contradiction between the history of different socialist experiments and disagreements not really mattering to our own conditions and those experiments also being vital learning experiences for us.
It’s strange to think about how we pretty much agree with Patsocs on more than almost any other tendency yet they are almost useless because they don’t understand the basic dialectical method and why have our positions beyond aesthetics and thus cannot understand the basic material conditions of this country.
We can keep trying to bring more people into our own sects and hope they do work for our own type of socialism irl, but if we’re so divided how can this happen. Of course we should all just log off and do things irl, but then some will fall into the trap of either larping or just helping their own friends without the wider goal of revolution.
We all need to remember that the feds let us speak because we spend all our time bickering. How can we unify as a revolutionary left? There are projects irl for trying to find unity as scientific socialists like ChunkaLuta, but it would be nice to be able to do the same online. In a way I’m just wishing everyone could just listen to revleft and everything could work out, but what can Lemmygrad and hexbear do for this vision?
This is something I think about a lot actually. Even on the rez we ended up having a small struggle session about AES/revisionism but at least that was fruitful and everyone came away with better understanding of each others’ perspectives and some development of our own.
Online it’s very difficult to have productive struggle sessions and develop a coherent sense of unity because you’re interacting anonymously through text only, and so it’s easier to forget the person on the other side of the keyboard, or to simply retreat from a disagreement, or an entire community rather than challenge one’s own views.
Hexbear has had some small success on this because we cultivated a pretty tight knit community of people that care about one another genuinely as comrades regardless of our minor disagreements here and there.
That said I think both lemmygrad and hexbear are probably about as good as you’re going to find for this online and it’s just a process of calling out the worst takes and being patient when its clear someone is just misguided or misinformed, but still coming from a place of good faith.