Slop.

This isn’t directed at you personally, your comment just animated some thoughts in me.

I think the phrase critical support has outlived its usefulness, if it ever had any in the English language. The problem is it wrongly centers ideology instead of the material obstacles to the worker’s revolution.

What was originally meant by critical support is that the essential question is whether an action or policy materially advances the revolution. And since we live in reality, the subjects enacting those advances will be imperfect; they will be fraught with contradictions. The critical part means to critically consider the whole dynamic before deciding on a policy. But the western liberal, habitually adopting the colonizer’s penchant to correct “primitive” cultures, jumps at the opportunity to publicly criticize, in an ultraleftist manner, the ideology of those who they (now reluctantly) support.

The point isn’t to criticize while supporting, but to criticize internally as a means of evaluating policies.

Critical support can mean supporting e.g. social-democratic organizations if, after careful analysis of the entire situation, they further the revolution.

For much of the global south, the primary contradiction is not the wage relation. The primary contradiction is imperialism. Hence many socialist revolutions say little about capital, and much more about national sovereignty. But if one appraises those movements on the basis of Capital Volume 1, one might conclude that they are too conciliatory toward capital and too nationalistic. That would be a wrong application of critical support.