Rebuilding the fragmented left

[marxleninist]

In Britain the left was completely fragmented when Thatcher came to power and since then all the socialist and communist groups/parties have been constantly bickering amongst themselves, so what tactics should the left in Britain now follow in order to build left unity again.

[The Feral Underclass]

In Britain the left was completely fragmented when Thatcher came to power and since then all the socialist and communist groups/parties have been constantly bickering amongst themselves, so what tactics should the left in Britain now follow in order to build left unity again.

Why is left unity something we want to build in the first place? Serious question.

[Sasha]

user called "marxleninst", a self declared "vanguard Leninist" from the youth section of one of the countless sectarian sects that at that keeps fraternal relationships with bourgeois exploitative regimes wonders why we can not all just get along?
gosh, uhm, yeah.

[DOOM]

Why is left unity something we want to build in the first place? Serious question.

I for sure have no interest in "left unity", the differences between some of the tendencies are just to significant to forget about them.

[The Feral Underclass]

I for sure have no interest in "left unity", the differences between some of the tendencies are just to significant to forget about them.

But thinking more pragmatically it also serves no actual purpose in terms of tactics and strategy, unless of course your objective is to control the left as a strategy. When Leninists talk about left unity, what they really mean is a unified left under their centralised command.

[PhoenixAsh]

Pragmatically there is certainly something to say for short term or topic based cooperation between tendencies or cross tendencies to reach common goals. Middle to long term however the strategy is self defeating and extremely time consuming.

And I forgot the important part...what is considered "Left" in "Left Unity?" From which position or perspective?

[Ceallach_the_Witch]

everything I was going to say has kind of already been said but I'll echo it - what is the utility of uniting the 'left' - except maybe rebooting the cycle of infighting, splitting and arguing whose ancient, ineffective strategies are least worst? Looking back, the left is littered with many failed attempts at 'left unity' which largely suggest only that collectively the 'left' is unable or unwilling to learn from past failures or attempt genuinely new tactics.

[Illegalitarian]

left-unity is meaningless. When a working class revolution does take place I imagine we'll all be on the same side more or less anyways. Unless we're not. lol.

[The Disillusionist]

But thinking more pragmatically it also serves no actual purpose in terms of tactics and strategy, unless of course your objective is to control the left as a strategy. When Leninists talk about left unity, what they really mean is a unified left under their centralised command.

I completely agree. There is no beneficial outcome to a completely unified leftist party, only the degradation of ideological variety and the creation of a centralized power structure. As an anarchist, that doesn't sit well with me.

[Raquin]

Ignoring the fact that there never has been and never will be such a thing as "the left", why would you wish to unite all the socialist sects in Britain?

If I have a small amount of feces in one hand, and a small amount of feces in my other hand, and I unite the two, I'm still holding shit and it doesn't smell like roses regardless of how much more shit I throw in there.

The socialist movement isn't so shitty because it's fragmented into a thousand different competing sects. It's fragmented into a thousand different competeting sects because it's so shitty. And it's shitty because
I) the administrative leadership consists of either opportunistic bureaucrats or delinquents
II) the intelligentsia and the theorists are either dipshits or pretension dipshits or delinquent dipshits or delusional dipshits
III) and this all leads to there being no adequate rank and file cadres, as pretty much all the decent ones run the fuck away once they see how shitty socialist sects are

Take all the morons that populate leftist sects and put them under one big tent and what do you get? Lots of morons infesting your fucking tent. Congrats. Now good luck trying to prevent them from drooling all over you.

[The Feral Underclass]

Ignoring the fact that there never has been and never will be such a thing as "the left", why would you wish to unite all the socialist sects in Britain?

If I have a small amount of feces in one hand, and a small amount of feces in my other hand, and I unite the two, I'm still holding shit and it doesn't smell like roses regardless of how much more shit I throw in there.

The socialist movement isn't so shitty because it's fragmented into a thousand different competing sects. It's fragmented into a thousand different competeting sects because it's so shitty. And it's shitty because
I) the administrative leadership consists of either opportunistic bureaucrats or delinquents
II) the intelligentsia and the theorists are either dipshits or pretension dipshits or delinquent dipshits or delusional dipshits
III) and this all leads to there being no adequate rank and file cadres, as pretty much all the decent ones run the fuck away once they see how shitty socialist sects are

Take all the morons that populate leftist sects and put them under one big tent and what do you get? Lots of morons infesting your fucking tent. Congrats. Now good luck trying to prevent them from drooling all over you.

Best post ever.

[consuming negativity]

itt: self-hating 2edgy4me holier-than-thou turds

yeah that's right

i just called you out for your condescension and by doing so condescended myself

get on my level

[Sinister Intents]

I'm sure in some cases left unity is possible but there is just too much difference between certain groups. We shouldn't be trying to organize the left, but organize people and workers regardless of their affiliation with politics. Striving for workers cooperating against the capitalists is more important than trying to get a Maoist to side with a Proudhon influenced anarchist

[Collective Reasons]

Substituting better fights for the usual bickering wouldn't hurt, but "unity" without some well-established common ground is worse than useless.

[motion denied]

This is the only unity I believe in: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ehI0eQ2Z5Ls/U5cRS3H_VmI/AAAAAAAAKKc/rLcw5rqfSnU/s1600/mtst.jpg



Grassroots combative social movement, targeting the core of immobiliary speculation and the logic of capital (even if unknowingly). .

[bricolage]

You know I think it's interesting that the OP mentioned Thatcher. The relationship between the Thatcherite/neoliberal 'revolution' and the left is actually irrelevant and/or non-existent except in the way that is mediated by the relationship between Thatcher and the working class. She didn't give a shit about the SWP or Militant or whoever else was peddling their wares, she gave a shit about strikes that had brought down two governments in a decade and mass forms of worker organisation that could neither be co-opted nor - in the previous two decades - defeated. So she brought in laws to smash the unions and other forms of, more militant, worker organisation and substantially re-organised work and the workplace to a way that was much less conducive towards such organising. And so the left, which was always parasitical towards the working class, predictably collapsed (I mean you could also say the end of the Soviet Union effectively eradicated many of the more Stalinist groups but I think that was less relevant). So of course the left is weak and fragmented and insular and weird - because for maybe twenty years it's had practically nothing to relate to. We're dealing with an entire generation who have no experience of picket lines or solidarity or collective power and so obviously very few people are gonna care about whatever brand of trotskyism or anarchism is in vogue. Now I'm not even opposed to political organisations but if you want them to have any relevance they need to have something to relate to, so before you even think about building or (lol) uniting the left, maybe think about ways you strengthen the working class as something substantive in itself.

[Decolonize The Left]

I think this all depends upon what you mean by "unity." If you mean a single party then it's obviously not going to work. If you mean a single program I don't think this will work either. If you mean a 'united front' of sorts then I still don't think it'll work.

What is needed isn't "unity," it's solidarity. It's when a Maoist supporters an anarchist squat. It's when an anarchist supports a M-L party protest. You don't have to hold hands and hug but you need to acknowledge when the class struggle is being actualized.

[The Idler]

Left unity for nationalised industry and taxing profits to varying degrees under a wages system is not worth a lot.

Socialist unity between all those openly for common ownership and democratic control in the here and now by being organised and shaping policy equally among all members to contest political power would be good.

Instead we have groups calling themselves socialist based on divisions other than class, groups run from the top as vanity projects for armchair generals, friends cliques based on who they like/dislike, history clubs working as reenactment societies or keyboard warriors inciting workers to become fodder for arrests.

[The Idler]

Ignoring the fact that there never has been and never will be such a thing as "the left", why would you wish to unite all the socialist sects in Britain?

If I have a small amount of feces in one hand, and a small amount of feces in my other hand, and I unite the two, I'm still holding shit and it doesn't smell like roses regardless of how much more shit I throw in there.

The socialist movement isn't so shitty because it's fragmented into a thousand different competing sects. It's fragmented into a thousand different competeting sects because it's so shitty. And it's shitty because
I) the administrative leadership consists of either opportunistic bureaucrats or delinquents
II) the intelligentsia and the theorists are either dipshits or pretension dipshits or delinquent dipshits or delusional dipshits
III) and this all leads to there being no adequate rank and file cadres, as pretty much all the decent ones run the fuck away once they see how shitty socialist sects are

Take all the morons that populate leftist sects and put them under one big tent and what do you get? Lots of morons infesting your fucking tent. Congrats. Now good luck trying to prevent them from drooling all over you.
The concept of having 'rank and file' and 'cadre' (even adequate ones) is part of the problem. 'Rank and file' in distinction to what? More important members? What can 'cadre' do that workers cannot do themselves?

[human strike]

Let the poor Left rest in peace already - quit poking its twitching corpse with a stick.

[Futility Personified]

Implacable, inescapable doom. Capitalism is supposedly doomed, the left is dead, the environment is decaying, resources are becoming more scarce, class struggle is anomalous...

If there is no revolutionary left to direct the proletariat against capitalism, then what fills the void? Will capitalism just keep going indefinitely? I can't see that happening. Do we revert back to some weird new feudalism? Will Warhammer 40k's grimdarkwar come to being? On the one hand there is agreement that the left as it is happens to be so fucked it is not worth resurrecting, which might not be wrong, but every new movement is bourgeois...

Somewhere along the line, one of the dismal LARP fantasies that characterize a fragment of left thought is going to have to die. Then can we all hang out in the new workers party?

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

I think that a lot of "left unity" talk is actually stuck in the past - I think there is a new left emerging not out of the last left, but out of very different sectors of the working class (ie less the imagined "leaders" or "most advanced" sectors, more the most excluded and least traditionally organized). It's expressing itself in some really interesting ways - on one hand in the "spontaneous" movements of occupation, sabotage, etc. (e.g. in the Arab Spring, Occupy, etc.), on another in the emergence of an increasingly organized and entrenched autonomous politics (radical Indigenousist movements in the Americas, the PKK's turn to Democratic Confederalism, various WOC-led feminist prison-abolition and anti-violence initiatives, Abahlali baseMjondolo, ASSÉ, etc.). I think we see a lot of the older left organizations scrambling to keep up, and largely failing to make themselves relevant.

That's not to say that I think all left organizing/organizations are relevant - but rather that any unity needs to be on a basis that is cognizant of what's really going on, and not simply trying old things in a new situation. Existing left organizations need to unite with the leadership that is emerging organically from present struggles - to actually seek out the people who are at the forefront and struggle with them to develop a strategy for overthrowing capitalism. The existing left trying to hash things out with the existing left bound to lead nowhere.

That said, I am very hopeful. I do see some groups really going to meet people where they're at - which, generally, doesn't mean "watering things down" (contra a lot of the existing post-Trotskyist/de facto social-democratic groups), but actually catching up with the mass of people who have written off bourgeois reformism, legalism, etc.

[Raquin]

'Rank and file' in distinction to what? More important members?
Yes.


What can 'cadre' do that workers cannot do themselves?
I don't understand the question. What do workers have to do with it? We're talking about "the left", not the workers. Under the most favorable and revolutionary circumstances, most of the workers will never be anything more than passive supporters of the socialist movement and even then after the initial stages of the revolutionary transformation of society most of the workers will withhold their support from the socialists at one point or another; as we have seen every time in history, revolutionary transformation leads to large-scale economic disturbance(usually collapse, even) which always gets blamed on the ruling party(i.e the socialists if there's a socialist revolution going on).

Any sort of genuine socialist movement that consists of more than a few tiny sects here and there is going to consist of the "part-time" rank and file cadres that while dedicated to the cause have other things to do(like working to put food on the table for their families), and then the core cadres, your bureaucrats, administrators, trade unionists, media workers, theorists, and so on, that dedicate their whole professional lives to the cause. This type of work requires some specialized talents and skills which are in high demand, so yes, you can say that such cadres are more important because they are harder to acquire and cultivate. But they're just one part of the equation.

The answer to your "what can such [specialised] cadres do that the [average] workers cannot do themselves?" is "a lot". Again, different people are different. Skills and talents vary from person to person.

[The Idler]

Yes.


I don't understand the question. What do workers have to do with it? We're talking about "the left", not the workers. Under the most favorable and revolutionary circumstances, most of the workers will never be anything more than passive supporters of the socialist movement and even then after the initial stages of the revolutionary transformation of society most of the workers will withhold their support from the socialists at one point or another; as we have seen every time in history, revolutionary transformation leads to large-scale economic disturbance(usually collapse, even) which always gets blamed on the ruling party(i.e the socialists if there's a socialist revolution going on).

Any sort of genuine socialist movement that consists of more than a few tiny sects here and there is going to consist of the "part-time" rank and file cadres that while dedicated to the cause have other things to do(like working to put food on the table for their families), and then the core cadres, your bureaucrats, administrators, trade unionists, media workers, theorists, and so on, that dedicate their whole professional lives to the cause. This type of work requires some specialized talents and skills which are in high demand, so yes, you can say that such cadres are more important because they are harder to acquire and cultivate. But they're just one part of the equation.

The answer to your "what can such [specialised] cadres do that the [average] workers cannot do themselves?" is "a lot". Again, different people are different. Skills and talents vary from person to person.
Once you get distinctions between workers, rank-and-file party cadre and more-important privileged cadre, you're not going to have unity (this is more likely a recipe for sects), because which socialist party should the workers support? In all likelihood, workers will view it as a racket where participation in it is limited by how much you agree with the party line. Kind of like the new class Milovan Đilas observed.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Any sort of genuine socialist movement that consists of more than a few tiny sects here and there is going to consist of the "part-time" rank and file cadres that while dedicated to the cause have other things to do(like working to put food on the table for their families), and then the core cadres, your bureaucrats, administrators, trade unionists, media workers, theorists, and so on, that dedicate their whole professional lives to the cause. This type of work requires some specialized talents and skills which are in high demand, so yes, you can say that such cadres are more important because they are harder to acquire and cultivate. But they're just one part of the equation.

The answer to your "what can such [specialised] cadres do that the [average] workers cannot do themselves?" is "a lot". Again, different people are different. Skills and talents vary from person to person.

This is some utter nonsense. The "specialized" tasks carried out by "bureaucrats, administrators, trade unionists, media workers, theorists, and so on" are precisely those tasks which are most easily collectivized! Pushing papers and talking over problems aren't underwater welding or even carpentry! They are the epitome of unskilled labour, whose high value in capitalist society corresponds the necessities of class rule, and not to the difficulty of the tasks themselves in any way.

This elitist attitude is precisely the sort of thinking that leads to the utterly pathetic opportunism that plagues the contemporary left, with its "parties" of middle-class academics and students jockying for "strategic" positions. It reminds me of a certain Labour Council President, whose grand success (in addition to his great paid job as a hack) is a banner that says "Capitalism isn't Working for Workers" and an "anti-capitalist organization" of ~30 cadre that issues statements (which nobody gives a fuck about) telling people to vote for the NDP.

I mean, hey, call me when you've got enough goons to stage a coup, but I'm not holding my breath.

[renalenin]

I'm sure in some cases left unity is possible but there is just too much difference between certain groups. We shouldn't be trying to organize the left, but organize people and workers regardless of their affiliation with politics. Striving for workers cooperating against the capitalists is more important than trying to get a Maoist to side with a Proudhon influenced anarchist

Left Unity is not practical. Unity of Marxists just might be. If you go back a bit and look at the hard left in the days of the IWW and the early communist parties there was some conflict but not so much. Many on both the IWW and Leninist sides were agreed about the need for BOTH industrial and political struggle in the practical endeavour to uproot capitalism. As other posts have noted there was much more connection between the campaigners and the working class. Perhaps the unity we need is unity of Marxists and the traditional blue collar or impoverished masses, and the educated middle class can either fall in line or stay silent.

:hammersickle::hammersickle::hammersickle:

[Црвена]

I wouldn't be too thrilled about "uniting," with statists, since we all know what happens to the anarchists whenever that is attempted. And I don't think Trotskyists would love a united front with MLs (isn't the reason for founding the 4th International and not just sticking with the 3rd something to do with that?) or ardently internationalist left communists with Maoist third-worldists, either. Our means to our common ends are just too different. But what we could do is not, you know, try to obliterate each other. If the tendencies of the left would criticise each other and acknowledge the tactical differences that would make co-operation impossible, while still respecting each other and not doing what some groups, such as the PSUC, did in the past to organisations of a different tendency of anti-capitalism, that wouldn't be a hopeless dream and wouldn't divide and weaken the left either.