Brilliant. Yeah I'm so tired of these purity tests and in-fighting among socialists. I don't care! The only thing that matters is being anti-imperial and actually helping ordinary people in a material way!
That's why, as an anarchist, I don't really give a shit if you're a Trotskyist, or a ML or whatever. We're basically comrades, we agree on the important things, and the small things which we disagree on are purely theoretical.
My God, we are living in a harsh, capitalist neoliberal austerity hellhole. Any movement away from that ought to be applauded.
Thank you, I'm glad you found it useful. What I tried to make clear is that purism is always relative. You can be and often are accused of purism if you don't support Democrats and Labour as "the lesser evil", or if you don't wholeheartedly and uncritically support members of the squad even when they have terrible votes like on the railway strike and funding Iron Dome, or being critical of Corbyn and the leadership when they were constantly bowing to the hysterical witch-hunts against him instead of confronting it head-on.
I've been accused of purism over all those, but the difference is that they are wielding that accusation from a qualitatively different political vantage point, not emanating from what I outlined as the broad definition of socialism, but from some other much broader conception of "progressive liberal-leftism", which is amorphous and intentionally so. They would and actually did include people like Blair in that category, as they did with Obama and now do with Biden.
That's fine if that's your politics and you're happy to embrace all sorts of "evils" or harms to working class conditions at home and abroad that are on par with if not worse than what the conservative faction of the ruling class engages in, but that's not socialism under any definition, and never has been.
As I note in the piece, the boundaries of a broad definition of socialism are blurry, one can have discussions on what to include or exclude from it that are reasonable, that involve the basic principles I outlined of it having to be based in a mass working class movement that identifies as socialist. But there are boundaries, and they have been strictly enforced throughout the history of the socialist movement, as Marx and Engels did against those who sought to water down the definition and nature of the socialist movement, as Lenin did as well against Bernstein when he wanted to do the same, and then later on during WW1 when the split between Social Democrats and Communists happened over supporting the war effort rather than denouncing it as an imperialist mass slaughter that had to be opposed by every socialist.
But notice how in each of these cases there were real material stakes involved, these were mass movements clarifying the boundaries of their minimum programmes, what it meant to be to advocate for socialism. It wasn't 12 suburbanite 12 year olds larping as some niche ideological denomination that has no mass basis at all and has been extinct as a political and social force for at least half a century if not longer in the case of some of them.
Anyway this reply is turning into its own post lol so I'll leave it at this.
Look we are so far away from actual socialism right now, that, again, I would applaud ANY movement towards greater justice right now, from social-democrat to Chinese style communism or whatever. Anything to get away from the neoliberal hell-hole we are living in, even though I consider myself about as left-wing as can be. Don't have time for the infighting, calling people "Tankie" and crap like that.
It's one of the many deranged online meme larp ideologies, if you can even call that heap of contradictory nonsense an ideology, taken up by freaks who want to carve out a niche in the media space for themselves as anti-establishment and edgy. It's also a cult.
Brilliant. Yeah I'm so tired of these purity tests and in-fighting among socialists. I don't care! The only thing that matters is being anti-imperial and actually helping ordinary people in a material way!
That's why, as an anarchist, I don't really give a shit if you're a Trotskyist, or a ML or whatever. We're basically comrades, we agree on the important things, and the small things which we disagree on are purely theoretical.
My God, we are living in a harsh, capitalist neoliberal austerity hellhole. Any movement away from that ought to be applauded.
Thank you, I'm glad you found it useful. What I tried to make clear is that purism is always relative. You can be and often are accused of purism if you don't support Democrats and Labour as "the lesser evil", or if you don't wholeheartedly and uncritically support members of the squad even when they have terrible votes like on the railway strike and funding Iron Dome, or being critical of Corbyn and the leadership when they were constantly bowing to the hysterical witch-hunts against him instead of confronting it head-on.
I've been accused of purism over all those, but the difference is that they are wielding that accusation from a qualitatively different political vantage point, not emanating from what I outlined as the broad definition of socialism, but from some other much broader conception of "progressive liberal-leftism", which is amorphous and intentionally so. They would and actually did include people like Blair in that category, as they did with Obama and now do with Biden.
That's fine if that's your politics and you're happy to embrace all sorts of "evils" or harms to working class conditions at home and abroad that are on par with if not worse than what the conservative faction of the ruling class engages in, but that's not socialism under any definition, and never has been.
As I note in the piece, the boundaries of a broad definition of socialism are blurry, one can have discussions on what to include or exclude from it that are reasonable, that involve the basic principles I outlined of it having to be based in a mass working class movement that identifies as socialist. But there are boundaries, and they have been strictly enforced throughout the history of the socialist movement, as Marx and Engels did against those who sought to water down the definition and nature of the socialist movement, as Lenin did as well against Bernstein when he wanted to do the same, and then later on during WW1 when the split between Social Democrats and Communists happened over supporting the war effort rather than denouncing it as an imperialist mass slaughter that had to be opposed by every socialist.
But notice how in each of these cases there were real material stakes involved, these were mass movements clarifying the boundaries of their minimum programmes, what it meant to be to advocate for socialism. It wasn't 12 suburbanite 12 year olds larping as some niche ideological denomination that has no mass basis at all and has been extinct as a political and social force for at least half a century if not longer in the case of some of them.
Anyway this reply is turning into its own post lol so I'll leave it at this.
Well put.
Look we are so far away from actual socialism right now, that, again, I would applaud ANY movement towards greater justice right now, from social-democrat to Chinese style communism or whatever. Anything to get away from the neoliberal hell-hole we are living in, even though I consider myself about as left-wing as can be. Don't have time for the infighting, calling people "Tankie" and crap like that.
Good stuff. There is a typo however, it should be "Keir Hardy" above.
Thanks for the heads up, fixed now.
What are you thoughts on LaRouchites and 'PatSocs'?
It's one of the many deranged online meme larp ideologies, if you can even call that heap of contradictory nonsense an ideology, taken up by freaks who want to carve out a niche in the media space for themselves as anti-establishment and edgy. It's also a cult.