In your view, what is the biggest challenge to the Revolutionary Left today?

[Left-Wing Nutjob]

Hopefully the title was clear enough. I want this to be as open-ended as possible.

Would be interested in the responses here.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

The very identity of the left. I think there is an almost total disconnect between who the left tend to be (for example, people who took part in Occupy London tended to be those who could afford to take a few weeks off and are disconnected from labour struggles) and the arenas of industrial and labour struggle.

There is an unwillingness on the part of the left to move past a very outdated insistence on a reductive class analysis of society. This is probably related to my first point in that Marxism in particular is better suited today as an academic exercise because those who purport it come from ever smaller, ever less-proletarian and ever more-academic origins. It therefore seems that even within left struggles and movements, there is a disconnect between 'communists' who reduce their analyses and solutions to reductive class analysis and other groups whom communists seem unwilling to include in 'their' revolution.

I think the biggest problem for revolutionaries is to make radical politics more cohesive. Rather than this being some crass attempt to 'unite' the Leninists, Anarchists, Stalinists et al. under one shaky banner, I think this needs to follow a period of collective, critical evaluation of who we are, who we stand for, and what sort of society we want to live in. We need to show a more genuine desire to be a movement that unites broad swathes of society, and abandon the tendency to pay lip service to such desires, and scream 'identity politics' at any person/group that tries to gain a deeper appreciation of genuine unity. Unity of workers, women, black people and people of colour is not just desirable but it is the only way that we can oppose the monolithic social, cultural, economic, political and military hegemony that capital enjoys.

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

In my view?

Communication.

We on the left are VERY bad at communicating our ideas to the workers of the world in an easy-to-understand, cohesive ideal or program. We're so wrapped-up in ideological turf wars with varying sects, debating the merits of people who have been dead for decades and events that are no longer relevant to the working class as a whole.

I would also argue that, coupled with this is a rather depressing lack of militancy on the part of the American left. Far too many of the major left-wing organizations are terrified of real conflict.

[Ele'ill]

I don't really think there's a lot of hope regarding talking at people to get them to become militants but to be honest, to those who wish to engage in such activities, I think a lot of radicals completely miss opportunities to, at the very least, cause problems and escalate situations. I think it partially has to do with radicals being completely out of touch with major issues going on around them, locally, conveniently, because the issues have never or haven't in a long time, actually applied to their lives. They are hung up on historical moments in time and want to replicate what they've read about being important to other people and its because that is the only reality they can comprehend. This isn't limited to historical reenactment though there are a lot of current topics that come up in the radical sphere of conversation that while important, maybe, aren't nearly as approachable as other projects could be.

[Skyhilist]

In organizing events, the radical left often forgets to ask "what specific goal do I want to achieve here?", and more importantly "How will the actions taking place here help achieve that goal, or how can they be modified to be more effective at achieving that goal?" There's no analysis of what actually works going on in many leftist circles so it's no wonder that no progress is made. Also given the stranglehold that bourgeois ideology has on almost everyone due to its dissemination in schools, government, law, and media, it's going to be difficult to achieve any type of class consciousness on a large scale no matter what, unless there is some grave event like millions dying that makes capitalism's culpability so obvious that not even these aforementioned enforcers of bourgeois ideology can conceal this fault from most people.

[The Idler]

Dropping Bolshevism

[Krasnyymir]

Isn't much of what you guys refer to as "lack of communication" and being out of touch, also caused by what wage-labor looks like today?

Few people think of themselves as "working class" today.
Many factory jobs pay a wage that gives the worker a comfortable middle class existence.

And even the people that do get a really shitty deal: The fast-food workers and minimum wage clerks usually don't see themselves as "oppressed".

We're using words and terminology from one hundred years ago, and that's also why people don't see it as relevant.

[Zoroaster]

Breaking away from dogmatic politics.

Suck it "anti-revisionists".

[Diirez]

Reactionary propaganda.
Whenever you bring up something like Anarchy or Communism or even Socialism people tend to just rattle off reactionary propaganda because most people are too lazy and apathetic to research anything.

[Prole]

I believe the key is taking control of technology and it's advancements for the people. We are under a time restraint of when technology will advance to the point where meaningful change will be increasingly more difficult to effectively carry out.

The bonus to having technology work for the people is that we would most likely see efficient socialist policies become able to be implemented, paving the way for the future potential to achieve a communist society, aided by technology.

[Trap Queen Voxxy]

In America, since I've got here and such, and in my experience, it's more or less a joke. Being radical has been satirized, demonized, lampooned and decayed in the public mind it's hard to see the Labour movement or revolutionary politics being taken seriously outside of strikes of other work place actions which have also become a joke due to incompetent yellow unions. Students seem to be really interested, from the people I've spoken too or let's say sympathetic but there again, misunderstandings, complacency, sex and school become a big distraction. I don't know. I'm pretty fed up with it. And it's dems like every smart egghead lefty I come across is some suburbanite who's read a lot but has no direct experience to reference from. I honestly have no idea though. I do think we, as a whole, need to drop the old, dead horses and try new shit. Handing out papers and yelling at people doesn't work not does squatting or 'occupying' public spaces and scaring passers by do much good either.

Not to derail the thread but I wanted to say agin ftr, I'm very disappointed by the Occupy.

[motion denied]

Capital and its overthrow.

How to do it "from the premises now in existence"? I don't know.

[RedMaterialist]

I think one problem is the failure of the revleft to recognize the absolute importance of the international aspect of the struggle. It seems that if it doesn't happen in the US or the West then it's not really significant.

The Vietnam War (American War to the Vietnamese) was a huge victory for the Vietnamese left and for the American left, they defeated the largest, most brutal military force in history. In the 1980's the Angolan rebels defeated the US backed UNITA thugs. And Cuba defeated the South African forces in Namibia leading to the overthrow of the white government. There have been left successes in Central and South America. Iraq and Afghanistan, while not socialist societies, have been able to force the us military to withdraw. This should be seen as what Maoists once called the paper tigers of the Western decadent countries.

The international struggle is happening in Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Chile. The left seems to be failing to link up with, organize with third world countries where the sturggle is active right now.

We should use the internet to organize with our fellow comrades around the world in Africa, Indonesia, India, Central and South America.

[Five Year Plan]

The biggest impediment to revolution today is obviously the absence of revolutionary consciousness among broad layers of the population. That, in turn, can be attributed to capital's impressive ability to maneuver skillfully from crisis to crisis through the rapid serial creation of speculative bubbles, but more importantly it can be attributed to the absence of a steeled revolutionary leadership capable of, for lack of a better word, capitalizing on crises when they emerge.

This latter problem is, to dig another layer deeper, the result of impatient opportunism on the part of large percentages of revolutionaries who think that unity, divorced from program is a virtue, and underestimate the ability of capital to convey broad-based struggles for reforms into bourgeois ideological directions that actually lead workers to believe that the system itself is fundamentally sound and works.

So what is the largest obstacle we as revolutionaries have some kind of direct control over? It's that problem: opportunism.

[Orange Juche]

Besides the glaringly obvious like "get more people", self-awareness. It's totally inadequate when it comes to things like trans-issues, honestly not much better than the Democratic Party.

[Red Economist]

The legacy of Communism; the communists became the victims of the very social forces they tried to master and produced a Frankenstein monster that pretty much ate it's creators and anything in it's path. Whilst the neo-liberal propaganda about totalitarianism is very crude and simplistic- it appeals to people's legitimate fears over revolutionary violence, the dangers of dictatorship to personal liberty and security and the results of confusing an illusion of empowerment for actual liberation. This same fear of state action and radical politics cripples both the far left and the centre left and inhibits even modest reforms by neoliberals to keep their own house in order (e.g. US health care reform- which is not even radical). The failure of communism has made people very conservative and deeply fearful of the 'human nature' and what people could do with freedom if they actually got it. We've kind of lost faith in human progress as well and in our collective capacity to grow and develop morally, even as we gain greater power through science and technology. People might want change, but they don't want Gulags.

[consuming negativity]

I think we're too arrogant and trying to take responsibility for doing things that we don't need to be doing. Realistically, there's barely any of us, and half of us have a lot of bullshit to battle in our personal lives before I can see us waging any guerrilla war. Maybe we should stop trying to pretend that we're even capable of doing X or Y, and instead focus on doing what we are capable of doing successfully. We should work towards a better historical and economic analysis by incorporating the lessons learned from what has happened before. We should try to make our lives better, and we should play our part in the system, which is exactly what we make of it. There's not any right or wrong answer... there really isn't any answer at all. What we do is pretty irrelevant... that's alienation for you.

[Црвена]

Thatcher and her union-bulldozing.

Also, the way that most unions have become liberal, and made themselves content with raising pay a little bit for workers rather than seeking to tackle the root cause of all oppression and exploitation of workers. The revolutionary left needs to be a lot more integrated with labour struggles if we're ever going to make communism seem relevant to the proletariat and like something worth fighting and taking risks for.

[Red Star Rising]

Itself mainly.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

It's telling, I think, that in this thread we are all willing to chime in with our own (mostly un-substantiated) opinions, but there seems no real urgency or will to engage critically with one another, or with our own personal and political situation.

What tends to happen, especially on internet fora, but in my experience also at real-world events, is that any opportunity for critical engagement very quickly turns into defensive dogmatism and, as mariel points out correctly above, a resort to historical values and events to justify some current programmatic point/political decision.