Leftist Infighting: A community dedicated to allowing leftists to vent their frustrations

Named after Iskra, but not a single book by Lenin, 3 by Trotksy and even a couple anarchists. This is the trend among university "communists" over here. If a revolution was successful, it must've not been a real revolution, except for the aesthetics.

This is a persistent myth that is shared amongst anarchists and RadLibs alike that the Soviets betrayed the Makhnovists by reneging on their so-called alliance with the Black Army, turning on them immediately after the defeat of the White Army.

This furnishes the anarchist persecution fetish and common narratives about how communists will always betray "the true revolution" and how Lenin was a tyrant.

The historical facts, however, paint a significantly different picture.

For one, you do not sign pacts with your allies. There was a military pact that was signed but, like the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, this is something that occurred between two parties that were constantly at odds with each other and the pact was signed out of conditions where the interests of both parties were temporarily aligned. This simple fact escapes the historical revisionists constantly but, unsurprisingly, only when it serves their arguments.

Secondly, Makhno himself knew that this pact was only temporary. Upon the signing of the pact he had this to say in The Road to Freedom, the Makhnovists' mouthpiece, in October 13, 1920:

"Military hostilities between the Makhnovist revolutionary insurgents and the Red Army have ceased. Misunderstandings, vagueness and inaccuracies have grown up around this truce: it is said that Makhno has repented of his anti-Bolshevik acts, that he has recognized the soviet authorities, etc. How are we to understand, what construction are we to place upon this peace agreement?

What is very clear already is that no intercourse of ideas, and no collaboration with the soviet authorities and no formal recognition of these has been or can be possible. We have always been irreconcilable enemies, at the level of ideas, of the party of the Bolshevik-communists.

We have never acknowledged any authorities and in the present instance we cannot acknowledge the soviet authorities. So again we remind and yet again we emphasize that, whether deliberately or through misapprehension, there must be no confusion of military intercourse in the wake of the danger threatening the revolution with any crossing-over, 'fusion' or recognition of the soviet authorities, which cannot have been and cannot ever be the case."
[Source: Nestor Makhno: Anarchy's Cossack by Skirda and Sharkey, pp. 200-201]

Clearly these are not the words that allies speak about one another.

At the successful Seige of Perekop, whereby the Red and Black Armies successfully broke the back of Wrangel's White Army forces and brought the Southern front to a conclusion, Makhno's aide-de-camp Grigori Vassilevsky, pronounced the end of the pact, proclaiming:

"That's the end for the agreement! Take my word for it, within one week the Bolsheviks are going to come down on us like a ton of bricks!"
[Source: Nestor Makhno: Anarchy's Cossack by Skirda and Sharkey, p.238]

The fact is that USSR furnished the Black Army with much-needed military supplies without which they would have been unable to continue fighting and Makhno was no pluralistic leader who was open to Bolsheviks; in fact, his army incorporated Bolshevik forces which defected to the Black Army and Makhno set his military secret police force, the Kontrrazvedka, to at first surveil the former Bolshevik military leaders along with the rising Bolshevik influence that had developed particularly around Yekaterinoslav, and then later summarily executed the Bolshevik leaders when they posed too much of a threat to his power due to commanding some of the strongest units in his army.

But that's a topic which deserves its own post...

I think it makes some points. Does anyone more knowledgeable on this subject have a different take?

I'm astonished at how sensitive the mods must be over there.

Apparently you're allowed to say whatever baseless slander you like about the eeeeevil tankies but the minute someone says "Hold up a sec, you claim to be anti-authoritarian and yet you support authoritarianism either explicitly or implicitly?" and they have to shut it down immediately.

Regardless, I think I made a pretty solid counterargument to the typical complaint about communism being authoritarian.

Mfers skim read the Wikipedia entry on Hannah Arendt and start thinking they're justified in slinging accusations about "muh authoritarianism" smh.

Apparently this was an actual discourse going around.

Jesus fucking christ. For me, as an Ukrainian, it's such a fucking shame that our country, on one of the biggest platforms on the internet, is represented by a fucking NAZI BATTALION SYMBOL. FUCK OFF.

I got this from Socialist Roaders

Just making some light of it to the international community.

The PCB is currently under fire for housing an academiscist, revisionist and "enfortressed" Central Committe. They're ignoring their own proceedures, are hostile to the party's democratic centralism and are removing more radical members of the party (specially those with a large online presence that have more agency over boots-on-the-ground organizing, like Jones Manuel).

This comes at a weird point as the party (and other ML parties) seem to be growing due to effective online presence of Marxist-Leninists in the brazilian internet.

After reading some discussion on lemmygrad about veganism, I felt the need to share my thoughts in a separate thread, as comments weren't appropriate for the wall of text I'm about to throw.

Before we start, very important precision. This is not about environmental veganism, only about animal-liberation veganism. Consuming less animal products will be a lifestyle change we must anticipate to limit environmental destruction. This is about the moral philosophy of veganism and its contradictions with materialism. 

Intro

Veganism is often rationalised under the form of a syllogism : it is immortal to kill and exploit humans, and non-human animals are equal to humans, therefore, it is immoral to kill and exploit non-human animals.

Now, I must say, if one is to contest the validity of this syllogism as a basis for veganism I encourage them to provide one since it could drastically change my point of view.

Like many syllogisms, there is appeal and validity to it until you question the premises. Let's review them under a materialistic lens. 

Morality and materialism

The first premise is that it is immortal to kill and exploit humans. As leftists, we tend to wholeheartedly agree with such a statement, as it encapsulates our ambitions and dreams, however this cannot be pursued for a political manifest beyond utopian wishful thinking. Historically, killing has been justified as a high moral act whenever the one being killed was deemed worthy of death. The reason it is generally considered immoral to interrupt one's life is because humans simply have to collaborate to survive, therefore every society has developed a social construct that allows us to live as a social productive species. But whenever a war enemy, criminal, or dissident person is being killed under certain circumstances, the killing becomes justified, morally right. 

As materialists, we don't base our interpretation of morality on a notion of some metaphysical, reality-transcending rule, and even less in relation to an afterlife. Morality is a human construct that evolves with material conditions. In that case, the relationship of human morality with non-human animals becomes more complicated than it seems. Humans do have empathy for other species but are also able to consume their flesh and products, a contradiction that has defined the construction of morality around non-human animals through history. This explains why it seems desirable for a lot of people to stop unnecessary animal cruelty while still wanting to consume their flesh, there is an act of balancing between empathy and appetite.

Equality of species and violence

Now you might have noticed that this framework is definitely human-centric. That brings us to the second premise, which is the equality of all species. By all means, it is absolutely outdated to maintain the idea of "human superiority" on all non-human species in the current times. As materialists, we should realise that humans evolved at the same time as other species, are dependent on the ecosystem, and that there is no fundamental variable that we have to consider as a criteria for ranking in an abstract "order of things".

That said, the equality of all species doesn't automatically mean the disappearance of inter-species violence. Firstly, we cannot stop unnecessary violence between fellow living beings that don't share our means of communication (unless we exerce physical control over them, but that's even worse). Secondly, there is an assumption that only humans possess the ability to choose to follow a vegan diet, which is extremely strange considering that it makes humans the only specie to have the capacity to be moral. Either non-human animals are excused for their chauvinistic violence against other species because they are seen as too limited, determined by their instinct, but it makes humans actually morally superior to other species. Or the animals must be held accountable for inter-species violence, which no vegan upholds, thankfully. Last option would be to consider that inter-species violence is part of life, which I agree with and think is the materialistic approach, but that means there is no reason to adopt a vegan diet.

Conclusion

So what does that let us with? Morality being a social construct with a material use in a human society, and humans being fundamentally empathetic, it is completely understandable that society will be progressing towards diminishing meat consumption to allow the minimization of animal suffering. But the exploitation of animals as means of food production doesn't have a materialistic reason to go away (unless we're talking about climate change, of course). The inter-species violence of humans against cattle and prey is part of nature, because we simply are a productive omnivorous specie just like any other. 

This is mostly why I would discourage pushing people to abandon all animal products in the name of ethics. What should be encouraged is acceptance of every specific diet, be it religious diets, or animal-liberation diets. Strict vegetarianism must be a choice of heart that is based on profound empathy, not a superior moral choice or, worse, a moral imperative.

Spicy question maybe, but I'm interested in your takes.

Personally, I think there's some major issues with at least the terminology of the 2 phase model of lower/higher stage communism or socialism/communism as the terms are used in classical theory. Specifically the 'lower stage' or 'socialism' term is problematic.

In the age of revision and after the success of counterrevolution it has become clear that there is in fact a transitional phase leading up to the classical transitional phase. Societies did not jump from developed capitalism to socialism immediately and even the states that arguably did were forced to roll back some of the core tenets of 'socialism' as it is described in Marx, Engels and Lenin. Namely no private ownership of the means of production and no exploitation of man by man.

To ultras this just means countries following this path aren't socialist. So then China isn't, Cuba isn't, no country still is really and those of us claiming they are then have to be revisionists. And to be fair, if you're dogmatic you can make that point going from the source material. China itself recognizes this inconsistency, thus not seeing itself at the stage of socialism. Yet it's a socialist state. But then what do we actually mean by 'socialism' when we use the term like this? Just a dictatorship of the proletariat? Any country in the process of building socialism?

That question comes up all the time and confuses the fuck out of people, because the term is either not applied consistently or as it's defined is lacking. I think discourse in the communist movement and about AES would profit immensely if we had a more consistent definition or usage of the term or a better defined concept of what that transition to socialism is and how we should call it.

For context purple thinks Cornel West should be supported, and they imply my “purity fetishism” is why communists haven’t had electoral success.

Yes, 1991. And it was forced to grant it

So, I'm not cool with genocide. Not cool with that at all. Even if they are landlords. I'm much more in favor of reeducation centers, personally. I'm against the death penalty on moral grounds. I believe that everyone deserves a second and third chance.

With that said, economically, I consider myself to be anarcho-communist or communalist or "left-communist" or whatever the fuck you want to call it.

But apparently all of that makes me a lib, and not welcome on the left? Is that correct?

This will probably be one of Rainer's most controversial articles to date.

I'm seeing a bunch of controversy surrounding which socialist organizations to join and I've heard the best things/least bad things about the PSL. Is this true?

In a recent call on the national question someone asked about how some people say the United States is not a legitimate nation because of settler colonialism and he said he knew it was obviously wrong but was wondering what their mistake is. Someone claimed that “landback” people never have a clear policy proposal. And I was shocked and hoping it could be rectified. Next was said in response that it’s true as Stalin said that the US became a nation when it left Britain because it was a specific group of settlers, but it expanded through brutal means and that should be rectified. After a while into the call eventually the issue was returned to. The fact that there are still many indigenous tribes within the US and therefore should be given their original land and sovereignty was said. In response people said that it would make them to isolated from the union and they have the option to have that sovereignty from their reservations, but obviously choose not to, which is absurd because these states should also get lots of aid and solidarity from other socialist areas (as this would be after the revolution and it would be different to now). I thought it was bad enough but after it was said that primarily settler colonial nations need their histories rectified they said that they don’t even oppose the existence of Israel anymore. Then the gensec said that people are ignoring “dialectics” that things change. People move in and out of territory- (though usually not by genocide)- and therefore the US is no different and we should not try to change that. “All the slaves are dead.”-Though people are still affected by that history, native Americans are still under special oppression by the state, and in the case of Palestine people are still alive that can remember having their land stolen and have physical evidence that it belonged to them- according to another “some Marxists read Marx and Lenin and come to the opposite conclusions” suggesting those bad Marxists are the “land-back” people.

Whoever warned me that they were PatSocs are right. What should I do? Is there hope of convincing them? Should I leave ASAP? Should I wait? It’s been mentioned here that we should follow the leadership of BIPOC people, does anyone know the modern equivalent of the White Panthers or AIM I should join?

Edit: I forget to mention the made the point that refugees are coming here now and if we do landback there would be refugees from here-like, sure people’d have to move but we’ve got space, and aren’t our birth rates declining anyway? It’s not like there’ll be an anti-white trail of tears. With socialist central planning we can allocate resources to support evicted settlers. Also, there’s a whole lotta land that’s privately owned that could easily be expropriated for indigenous people along with national parks which they’d manage far better. I think they also suggested that we need to integrate Native Americans as much as possible because their sovereignty won’t help. Finally, apparently they would’ve supported the new Afrikan struggle in the 30’s, but since I guess they don’t think you can fight fascism and racism and colonialism at the same time.

Communist Party of ~~TERF Island~~ Britain released a statement which includes the following questionable (and downright transphobic) statements:

States that the Gender Recognition Bill is a failure, and does not support it in any way, essentially siding with England because of their antagonism.

States that the bill will only bring confusion and legal chaos, because Scotland doesn't align with the UK

Claims that you need gender dysphoria to be trans, essentially falling into the transmedicalist ideology

Opposes both Scotland and Wales decision to allow people to change their gender regardless of gender dysphoria, utilising a TERF argument of "men" being predators in women-only and children spaces

Believes in Gender Ideology, and claims that "Gender Ideology" suits the capitalist class despite transphobic media being rampant especially in the UK

Anyways, if anyone supports CPTI (CPB), I hope you realise that they're no longer a good party.

Update: CPB has released a post saying that they won't be silenced. It just shows transphobic they are.