Ugh these people suck so bad. On average, western leftists are worse than useless. Some bullet points are kinda interesting, even if annoying.
Some of these are absolutely ridiculous. “WATCH OUT FOR CHARISMATIC LEADERS!” Yes, if you want to make sure your organization is safe, make sure the leaders are unlikable morons who smell bad.
vanguard party filled with stinkos
This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask: Who was right?
In Guatemala, was it Arbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?
Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the d’etente between the Soviets and Washington.
Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported – what the rich countries said, rather than what they did.
That group was annihilated.
- Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method
Anarcho-libs / “Libertarian Leftists” love movements that maintained their moral purity by failing. As movements they’re relatively easy to defend. Because they never meaningfully took power, they’re never made to deal with the baggage of a real government that exists in a hostile capitalist world. Forever morally pristine and beautiful, in failure and death.
I really need to read Jakarta Method, his recent book If We Burn is great. He does a wonderful job as a journalist weaving the historical conditions and sprinkling Lenin quotes here and there.
Gonna break down a few of these.
Heavy Emphasis on Recruitment: Vanguardist groups constantly need new members: to pay dues, volunteer their labor, recruit for the group, and replace burnt-out members. Lots of effort goes into social media and marketing, and actions are heavily influenced by how they can serve as a recruitment tool: the flashier the better. Waves of new people and energy help make the group feel active and relevant, and mask the steady trickle of people leaving.
Feds in a boardroom have discussed what kills orgs and determined the number one thing that kills orgs is retention, or lack of it. Membership falling below retention rate results in a shrinking org, which is a dying org as far as the feds are concerned.
Ambulance-Chasing and Coopting: Seeking energy and recruits, these groups will suddenly appear around “crisis of the moment” events. As we write this zine, their current target is Palestine solidarity efforts that have increased in response to Israel’s recent escalation of genocide in Gaza in 2023-2024. Watch for groups who appear at events uninvited and focus on distributing newspapers and collecting e-mail list signups. They’ll often bring things like mass-printed signs with their group’s name and website or a large banner advertising the group they can prominently display in photos of events to advertise. They may even hijack open mics and chants.
They are basically singling out PSL and FRSO here in the first part. But the second part is conflating those two groups with the tactics of RCA, formerly IMT, formerly Militant. They do show up to stuff, put up their branding and make it look like they’re supposed to be there as a means of piggybacking of other people’s organising. “Hijacking open mics” is funny af though, an open mic is… Open? It’s not hijacking is it. And a chant? It’s a fucking chant anyone can do it.
Front Groups and Front Coalitions: Creating a front group or coalition is another way vanguards try tapping into movement energy to redirect to their own ends. The front is dominated by members of the vanguard without clear connection to the vanguard group, to better allow the vanguard to hide their politics and intentions. Its purpose is to find recruits for the vanguard, and to be a vehicle for the vanguard’s activities that appears to be separate from them.
Liberals do this? Pussyhat Project? Half the liberal lgbt groups? They’re front groups created by liberals.
Deceptive and Dishonest Practices: The authoritarian politics of vanguards generally aren’t liked, so they’ll be kept below the surface. Vanguards publicly claim values that can attract people—like police abolition, supporting labor rights, and horizontal power—while hypocritically supporting police attacking workers in authoritarian nation-states they support, like Cuba, Iran, or China. How can you value someone’s consent and autonomy if you lie to them?
Nope. There’s no deception whatsoever in any vanguard group. I have literally not seen an ML org that doesn’t make you read Stalin. Bourgeoise police are not the same as proletarian police. Making this about Cuba in particular isn’t going to win anyone over, this “Zine” would’ve done better to leave that part out because the point will be instantly dismissed by every Cuba supporter. BUT, this isn’t actually designed to deradicalise anyone who gets into these orgs (more on that).
Party Lines in General: Vanguardist ideas of discipline and a “scientific” revolution that must be followed to a ‘T‘ require conformity, obedience, and strict binary thinking. The world is more nuanced than that, but this nuance isn’t allowed in vanguardist politics.
The revolutionary party is organised like a military hierarchy because it is fighting a class WAR and militaries are designed with that structure for a reason, they are the most resilient and effective organisational style that humans have come up with for war fighting.
Centralization: A vanguard needs a power structure they can exert control from. If it doesn’t exist, they may try creating it to place themselves or their close associates at the center.
Almost all political parties are centralised. Given my experience in liberal parties like UK Labour I would say they are LESS democratic and MORE centralised than ML orgs. Starmer practically annihilated any democracy that existed within that party, all of which was mostly created by Corbyn.
Redirecting Autonomous Efforts into Spaces They Control: Autonomous efforts and independent projects can be enticed into spaces a vanguard controls, often with promises of resources, a plea to not “duplicate efforts,” or “left unity.” The intent is to gain influence over the project. Like a mixture of Entryism and Cooptation.
I’ve always argued against doing this in my orgs. Maybe someone with a good media skillset could do a NEW project that is under the org’s name in addition to their existing project (such as a radio or youtube or whatever) but orgs that take control of existing projects of members don’t realise that they’re annihilating the motivation of the person running that project. Projects live and die by motivation of the key people running them and it’s very important that orgs get some awareness of that and allow members to simply have their projects and their recognition for them sometimes. If you give them that, they often become very loyal and are more willing to run the project in conjunction with the org.
Hyper-Focus on Bureaucracy: Getting the group stuck in loops of committee forming, decision-making, writing points of unity, establishing cadre leadership, etc. Most likely during power struggles and Entryist takeovers. Often causes non-vanguard members to leave in frustration.
Nah man this is what feds do to break orgs and waste time. Specifically they want more than 2-3 people making decisions on every single project because it slows everything to a fucking crawl. This is something orgs should largely avoid apart from major decisions.
Never-Ending Tasks: Revolutionary change will require lots of effort, but within vanguardist organizations the pressure to fulfill duties and demonstrate commitment and discipline often lead to members committing most of their time to the vanguard group. This can lead to relationships outside the group weakening from neglect, becoming socially dependent on the group, and eventually burning out without a support network to help them leave the group.
How dare orgs have work to do!?
Incidentally I’ve actually never met anyone that regretted the social relations they get from organising. Not even people that eventually left them. Maybe the drama and things but the actual social relations? No.
This is an attempt to make vanguard orgs sound similar to what people have seen of their racist conspiracy uncle who the whole family now doesn’t talk to. To conflate the left with the far-right. It’s not the same. People don’t feel sad and lonely and isolated socially from the rest of the world in leftist groups.
Charismatic Leader: Vanguard groups often center around a charismatic leader or founder who is elevated to a level of importance. This can be a leader/founder of the group itself, or an ideological figurehead.
yes hello, this is the ideological figureheadSheltering Abusers: Patriarchal violence is a serious recurring problem basically everywhere. But vanguardist groups often treat attempts at accountability as an attack on the group and their ideology, or a distraction from “the cause.” They become defensive, and in practice shield abusers while dismissing survivors of abuse.
There is no Epstein within the vanguard. Shut the fuck up, liberals have absolutely no leg to stand on in the face of the overwhelming evidence against them for pedophilia and sexual violence and literal presidential coverups. Patriarchal violence IS everywhere and the only reason this attack is used is because the left is BETTER about it which makes people more worried when hearing accusations. If we could compare communist orgs with liberal and fascist orgs on this issue I am 100% certain that communist orgs come out on top as having the least of it, the least covered up, and the most harshly dealt with when uncovered.
All large orgs will deal with it. And the larger they get the more they will.
Taking Credit for Others’ Work and Actions: Vanguards may take credit for events, actions, and work organized by other groups. This is particularly true for things that are flashy or popular, but other things may be claimed by the vanguard group if it seems like it will be useful for recruiting.
This is just repeating some of the above stuff I mentioned about motivation. It’s a careful balance and orgs should do it better. Incidentally, which is it? Are vanguards taking all credit or are they hiding behidn front orgs to hide their involvement?
Lack of Care for Members and Vulnerable People: The thirst for attention-grabbing actions can lead to vulnerable people and the group’s members being used as means to an end, resources to be exploited. Many “flashy” actions, such as an occupation, require extensive preparation, consideration, and care to manage various risks of harm (to the extent that we can). Nothing can be made perfectly safe, but a vanguard’s sloppy approach to actions can put people through unnecessary harm for what is ultimately a PR stunt.
Stop calling major issues “PR Stunts”. You are calling the Palestine protests against a genocide a PR stunt in the same breath as pretending you care about “vulnerable people”. The person that wrote this is a snake speaking double with a forked tongue.
The people that care THE MOST are in these orgs.
[cont in reply]
sometimes i womder where you get the energy to effort post comrade
i hope i can have a bit of your strength
[cont]
Coercive “Self-Criticism”: Space for intentional reflection and evaluation is necessary for anyone trying to have an impact on the world. However “self-criticism,” (sometimes called “crit and self-crit” or “struggle sessions”) can be deployed to coerce group members to dedicate more time and resources to the group, shut down dissent, and re-mold members into more obedient followers. Puritanical efforts to root out “bourgeois” sentiments/mentality/social influences are a serious indicator of manipulation.
This one is just a mess. Self-crit in order to understand why something is flawed is not a bad thing. Conflating it with a bunch of unrelated stuff is silly, a “struggle session” is just a debate. People exchange ideas and change their views. Not sure what “obedience” even has to do with this other than the feds trying to suggest “if you ever think critically about the world and change your views instead of being an ASSHOLE then you’re just being a bootlicker maaaaaan, you’re not an independent thinker maaaaaan”… This is fashy shit.
Defending and Glorifying Authoritarian Leaders and Governments: For ideological reasons, vanguards in the “Western world” (our experience is from the “US”) often uncritically support authoritarian governments and leaders in the name of “anti-imperialism.” In extreme cases, this ends up being a sort of conservative patriotism. The actual practices and values of the nation-states they defend don’t matter, only their geopolitical relation with the US. This comes from the history of authoritarianism in leftwing politics, and specifically the influence of a tendency called “Marcyist” or “Campist,” which encourages uncritically supporting governments the “US” opposes. The result can be ugly. During uprisings, they’ll callously attack dissidents under a regime the vanguard supports, calling them CIA removed and calling their autonomous revolts “Color Revolutions”—if those same dissidents were in the US, ironically, the vanguard group would try to recruit them.
Nobody gives a fuck what this person thinks is authoritarian or not because they included Cuba and undermined their entire argument.
Expecting Queer People and People of Color to Assimilate: Vanguards may try to make themselves more acceptable to “the masses” by sidelining the concerns of marginalized people, or pushing those people to be less visibly “different.” This can sometimes go as far as the vanguard adopting conservative stances like transphobia. This can also be ideologically driven, with vanguards claiming problems like racism and sexism are actually just created by capitalism, and fighting them is a distraction from the more important “class struggle.”
Some of the shit ones yeah. Not the ones that I think this person is scared of the most.
Use of “Left Unity” Rhetoric to Demand Inclusion in Spaces: Some imagine “Left Unity” as creating a friendly and powerful movement, but in practice it suppresses diverse opinions and approaches in favor of a false “unity,” frequently giving authoritarians power within movements they otherwise wouldn’t have. You don’t have to sacrifice all your values and autonomy to work with others on tangible, shared goals.
There is nothing that makes you stand out as OPPOSED to the left more to me than making the argument that the left is better off divided.
Local Organizers Controlled by a Central Committee: For example, a vanguard’s central committee may order organizers to get involved in a particular struggle like Palestine solidarity work. At worst this launches a destructive wave of front groups and entryist takeovers. At best these organizers honestly aid in an effort, only to vanish when the organization’s whims change to a different hot new movement.
Literally every large liberal org is structured with a national executive committee or variant of such that functionally steers local orgs. If the local doesn’t want to do what the national wants then their funding can be cut off, which in most cases would mean death of the group, that funding will go to whoever is willing to do it. I really don’t see the difference, ML orgs are just more disciplined.
Going back to my earlier point: “BUT, this isn’t actually designed to deradicalise anyone who gets into these orgs (more on that).”
This isn’t really for people joining ML orgs, this is for people who are already anti-ML. This is written the same way the google docs and wikis are written. The “fact sheets” of talking points.
The purpose of this is to spread it as “educational content”, to arm people online with talking points. The goal is to create thousands of people with this information in their heads so that everywhere an org name comes up (PSL for example) immediately gets dozens of comments dropping these talking points. This is how they crowdsource narratives in social media. Nobody joining a vanguard party is going to read this and change their mind. But the online discourse about vanguard parties? Well that’s what this exists to do. They aim to educate everyone on the internet who is currently anti-tankie into being able to drop these mountains of talking points.
Shit like this will spread. Anticommunist discourse will change. Watch it happen.
If I were going to put my money on a new scareword for the future, tankie will fall away as its now being deemed less useful because of how polluted its use is, anticommunists will instead be pushed to switch to “vanguard”.
The actual practices and values of the nation-states they defend don’t matter, only their geopolitical relation with the US.
actually correct btw, if Satan invaded the USA I would join sides with him because the USA is the greater satan. That’s Lesser Evilism, I hear liberals like this writer are into that.
wish i could find that youtube clip, i think it was in farsi? anyone with a link to share would be greatly appreciated
i think it’s memri tv but that barely narrows it down
As usual the large number of comments turns out to just be due to some jackass lemmitor wandering in.
Lumping traits of bad orgs like sheltering abusers with traits of orgs you disagree with like “defending authoritarian governments” into one definition is actually gross.
Also these two traits are actually common among ML orgs in my experience and I wish they’d cut it out:
Redirecting Autonomous Efforts into Spaces They Control
This is a symptom of play-acting at being the One Important Group that will lead to the revolution. It reduces the total pool of active organizational talent by destroying something that’s probably already working, and removing a place where a group can learn to organize. It destroys the resiliency possible from a web of organization. Exchange contact info and get on each other’s mailing lists instead.
Hyper-Focus on Bureaucracy
I don’t know if this is more play-acting or just people’s minds being poisoned by capitalist bureaucracies. It wastes time and makes actual organization harder. Establish communication channels and interpersonal relationships instead.
During uprisings, they’ll callously attack dissidents under a regime the vanguard supports, calling them CIA removed and calling their autonomous revolts “Color Revolutions”—if those same dissidents were in the US, ironically, the vanguard group would try to recruit them
I love completely ignoring the actual evidence of CIA meddling/color revolution constantly presented in these cases because even mentioning it must be a sinister propaganda ploy to undermine “autonomous revolts” against “authoritarian regimes”!! How do I know this? Um because there’s motive on the part of tankies to defend these “regimes” (which are praised as “anti-imperialist”) against criticism, whereas there is no motive to attack these “regimes” (which we thoroughly condemn as “authoritarian” and seek the collapse of) on our part!! And with this the “irony” is revealed that our position is correct and therefore the tankies are silly.
zzz cointelpro
They really love to accuse PSL and ANSWER of co-opting the pro-Palestine movement because it’s trending. But these groups have been a central to that movement for at least 6-10 years. Where have the anarchist organizations been?
According to an article in the same zine telling important truths like this
mfw Palestinians get belligerent over our no state solution
I swear the way these people talk about the PSL is like something from an alternate universe. I’ve been with the org for years now and it’s nothing like what they’re describing.
this is just an updated version of that old FBI handbook on sabotaging communist orgs
Authoritarian ideologies ignore that the methods you use for radical change influence the radical change that you wind up creating
So true bestie, it’s much better to fail miserably at engendering any societal change whatsoever, as is the “anarcho”-liberal tradition
They criticize Marxism and Trotskyism, but then have no problem doing the classic Trot thing of broadly painting their opponent’s as “campist” (down to the word). Is this what they mean by “diversity of tactics”?
Like, I won’t tell you that there aren’t, let’s call them, “national contrarians,” but they’re using the term the same way Trots do in obscuring why some people think these states deserve circumstantial or even broad support. “It’s all contrarianism!” “It’s all an inverted false consciousness!” The line of questioning ends there.
Boo!
I’m surprised how well it aligns with certain lemmy instances.
Go on
Don’t like dissent?
What subject exactly are you dissenting on that you’re afraid the left wouldn’t like?
That the article was pretty spot on.
comrade you are clearly delusional
Well, I’m not a tankie, if that’s what you mean.
Buckaroo, if you’re the one coming in vagueposting, it’s on you to actually make a point instead of just shitting everywhere. Otherwise, kindly get off my lawn.
The word ‘tankie’ means ‘a person who is correct’ and is usually employed by people who support the entry of NATO tanks into Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, etc.
okay dronie
Tankies [1] don’t usually believe that Stalin or Mao “did nothing wrong”, although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember). We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the bourgeois politicians who are typically put forward as role models (Washington? Jefferson? JFK? Jimmy Carter?), and that they haven’t been judged according to the same standard as those bourgeois politicians. People call this “whataboutism” [2], but the claim “Stalin was a monster” is implicitly a comparative claim meaning “Stalin was qualitatively different from and worse than e.g. Churchill,” and I think the opposite is the case. If people are going to make veiled comparisons, us tankies have the right to answer with open ones.
To defend someone from an unfair attack you don’t have to deify them, you just have to notice that they’re being unfairly attacked. This is unquestionably the case for Stalin and Mao, who have been unjustly demonized more than any other heads of state in history. Tankies understand that there is a reason for this: the Cold War, in which the US spent countless billions of dollars trying to undermine and destroy socialism [3], specifically Marxist-Leninist states. Many western leftists think that all this money and energy had no substantial effect on their opinions, but this seems extremely naive. We all grew up in ideological/media environments shaped profoundly by the Cold War, which is why Cold War anticommunist ideas about the Soviets being monsters are so pervasive a dogma (in the West).
The reason we “defend authoritarian dictators” is because we want to defend the accomplishments of really existing socialism, and other people’s false or exaggerated beliefs about those “dictators” almost always get in the way — it’s not tankies but normies [4] who commit the synecdoche of reducing all of really existing socialism to Stalin and Mao. Those accomplishments include raising standards of living, achieving unprecedented income equality, massive gains in women’s rights and the position of women vis-a-vis men, defeating the Nazis, raising life expectancy, ending illiteracy, putting an end to periodic famines, inspiring and providing material aid to decolonizing movements (e.g. Vietnam, China, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Indonesia), which scared the West into conceding civil rights and the welfare state. These were greater strides in the direction of abolishing capitalism than any other society has ever made. These are the gains that are so important to insist on, against the CIA/Trotskyist/ultraleft consensus that the Soviet Union was basically an evil empire and Stalin a deranged butcher.
There are two approaches one can take to people who say “socialism = Stalin = bad”: you can try to break the first leg of the equation or the second. Trotskyists take the first option; they’ve had the blessing of the academy, foundation and CIA money for their publishing outfits, and controlled the narrative in the West for the better part of the last century. But they haven’t managed to make a successful revolution anywhere in all that time. Recently, socialism has been gaining in popularity… and so have Marxism-Leninism and support for Stalin and Mao. Thus it’s not the case that socialism can only gain ground in the West by throwing really existing socialism and socialist leaders under the bus.
The thing is, delinking socialism from Stalin also means delinking it from the Soviet Union, disavowing everything that’s been done under the name of socialism as “Stalinist”. The “socialism” that results from this procedure is defined as grassroots, bottom-up, democratic, non-bureaucratic, nonviolent, non-hierarchical… in other words, perfect. So whenever real revolutionaries (say, for example, the Naxals in India) do things imperfectly they are cast out of “socialism” and labeled “Stalinists”. This is clearly an example of respectability politics run amok. Tankies believe that this failure of solidarity, along with the utopian ideas that the revolution can win without any kind of serious conflict or without party discipline, are more significant problems for the left than is “authoritarianism” (see Engels for more on this last point). We believe that understanding the problems faced by Stalin and Mao helps us understand problems generic to socialism, that any successful socialism will have to face sooner or later. This is much more instructive and useful than just painting nicer and nicer pictures of socialism while the world gets worse and worse.
It’s extremely unconvincing to say “Sure it was horrible last time, but next time it’ll be different”. Trotskyists and ultraleftists compensate by prettying up their picture of socialism and picking more obscure (usually short-lived) experiments to uphold as the real deal. But this just gives ammunition to those who say “Socialism doesn’t work” or “Socialism is a utopian fantasy”. And lurking behind the whole conversation is Stalin, who for the average Westerner represents the unadvisability of trying to radically change the world at all. No matter how much you insist that your thing isn’t Stalinist, the specter of Stalin is still going to affect how people think about (any form of) socialism — tankies have decided that there is no getting around the problem of addressing Stalin’s legacy. That legacy, as it stands, at least in Western public opinion (they feel differently about him in other parts of the world), is largely the product of Cold War propaganda.
And shouldn’t we expect capitalists to smear socialists, especially effective socialists? Shouldn’t we expect to hear made up horror stories about really existing socialism to try and deter us from trying to overthrow our own capitalist governments? Think of how the media treats antifa. Think of WMDs in Iraq, think of how concentrated media ownership is, think of the regularity with which the CIA gets involved in Hollywood productions, think of the entirety of dirty tricks employed by the West during the Cold War (starting with the invasion of the Soviet Union immediately after the October Revolution by nearly every Western power), and then tell me they wouldn’t lie about Stalin. Robert Conquest was IRD [5]. Gareth Jones worked for the Rockefeller Institute, the Chrysler Foundation and Standard Oil and was buddies with Heinz and Hitler. Solzhenitsyn was a virulently antisemitic fiction writer. Everything we know about the power of media and suggestion indicates that the anticommunist and anti-Stalin consensus could easily have been manufactured irrespective of the facts — couple that with an appreciation for how legitimately terrified the ruling classes of the West were by the Russian and Chinese revolutions and you have means and motive.
Anyway, the basic point is that socialist revolution is neither easy (as the Trotskyists and ultraleftists would have it) nor impossible (as the liberals and conservatives would have it), but hard. It will require dedication and sacrifice and it won’t be won in a day. Tankies are those people who think the millions of communists who fought and died for socialism in the twentieth century weren’t evil, dupes, or wasting their time, but people to whom we owe a great deal and who can still teach us a lot.
Or, to put it another way: socialism has powerful enemies. Those enemies don’t care how you feel about Marx or Makhno or Deleuze or communism in the abstract, they care about your feelings towards FARC, the Naxals, Cuba, DPRK, etc. They care about your position with respect to states and contenders-for-statehood, and how likely you are to try and emulate them. They are not worried about the molecular and the rhizomatic because they know that those things can be brought back into line by the application of force. It’s their monopoly on force that they are primarily concerned to protect. When you desert real socialism in favor of ideal socialism, the kind that never took up arms against anybody, you’re doing them a favor.
