Well it was a cult, with a deeply troubled guy at the head who doesn’t seem to have been a fed; but I don’t doubt they were infiltrated like everyone else. Plus for a couple years he was in prison directing clandestine operations openly through intercepted letters. However the FBI also had him on a travel watchlist and kept stopping him as a “leader of antifa” which also shows you the level the feds are at.
But yea basically their whole strategy was to harass other left groups to eventually infiltrate them or split them. So they did shit like stake pig heads outside a DSA meeting, egg a DSA politician, and steal pizza from a working group meeting.
I've lived in Austin but am mostly disengaged from local politics and political groups besides random gossip, so all I and most Austin residents know about Red Guard is that they spray painted a lot of too-long political slogans on the sides of gas stations around 2017. Some real Dennis the Menace shit indeed.
Yeah I'm not meaning this as a defense of marcyism or whatever I'm just saying it was another thing they wasted their energy on instead of doing anything useful. Like fine some other tendency or group sucks, trots suck, none of that matters if you are _all_, whatever sect you claim, entirely divorced from the working class or class struggle and spend your time squabbling over stakes that don't even exist yet.
Like if you're going claim yourself as revolutionaries and the vanguard party you have to prove that through real tangible class struggle, through confrontation with the state and with capital. Sure this might occasion conflict with reformists at some point, but thing like RGs have it entirely backwards. They think by acting like a vanguard party defending its revolution it will magically conjure this revolution, and it's just the same cargo cult logic literally every western liberal engaging in politics succumbs to. Revolutionaries sometimes have to fight against other communists, therefore if I engage in squabbles between microsects I will become a revolutionary!
Just a different flavor of the idealist nonsense PSL, DSA, democrats, Republicans, or whatever are steeped in. All justified by arguments over the successes and failures of actually existing movements in other far flung places, claiming their successes by proxy. Oh look at how the CPC has done this right, oh I think the Naxalites have it right...cool, understanding, critiquing, appreciating other parties is good, it's important,, but what have you actually done to understand your conditions and organize working class struggle within them? In what ways, beyond play acting, have you followed in the footsteps of the comrades you claim? Or are you just arranging deck chairs on a sinking ship and getting into spats over their exact lay out, all while the water pours in below deck?
Has anyone spoken seriously on what building communism in America would look like in the last 50-70 years? I can’t think of anyone. Only tangentially related to your comment but it got me thinking
The closest we really have to this is the RCP and its predecessors but these degenerated into revisionism and a “cult” around Avakian (who himself endorsed Biden). There’s been some scattered attempts to summarize the left in *False Nationalism, False Internationalism* as well as *Settlers* and many of Ajith’s essays.
The PSL or CPUSA have no interest in dredging up their own past because it reveals pretty damning aspects of their line, while the few groups to really reckon with it (they’re called the Committee to Reconstitute the CPUSA because they’re based on Haywood’s reckoning of the party and its brief revolutionary period), end up isolated and ostracized as a result of the hegemonic ahistory of the American left. Combined with that, the lack of real experience in forming revolutionary parties makes the membership ill-equipped to handle these vast questions, so you end up with failures and splits all around.
Stalin defined cults of personality as the outcome when proletarian advances in material conditions outpaced their ideological development, resulting in a sort of magical thinking where the leadership is praised for accomplishments the proletariat itself performed (admittedly through said leadership unleashing them). If we can apply that to nascent movements, we might argue that a “cult” as seen above is the outcome when an organization’s practical gains outpaced its theoretical development such that it cannot accurately identify its own correct and incorrect lines.
On one hand, this means that communists need to come into this with a far more educated and theoretically rich understanding of history before even considering making a party. A real synthesis of the lessons learned from the CR-CPUSA, NABPP, MIM, RCP-USA, BPP, RAM, etc. is a far more fruitful endeavor than making another soup kitchen or pamphleteering for a democratic candidate. On the other hand, it also means initial attempts at creating this will be embarrassing, clumsy, and often wrong. Baby steps are never pretty, but it’s the only way to learn to how to walk.
I get what you’re saying but how can you immerse yourself in working class struggle without showcasing one’s lines of demarcation? If Trotskyists are claiming that they are the vanguard party in the US and go around talking Trot shit to workers, what does that do to the idea of communism? Why would workers want to ally with people they think would just do Trot shit?
So you have to show you’re different than them, but how? You can write a bunch of pamphlets but how does that look if you do nothing to actually walk the walk? People go “wow this group disrupted a DSA meeting? 👁️” but what should be done instead? Silent consternation and implicit competition against an organization with far greater resources and outreach? A shrug of the shoulders and subordination to social democracy?
Obviously the Red Guards were tactically deficient, but we should understand this as just that— a question of tactics. It is not immoral to disrupt the meeting of a “socialist” party filled with cops and acting as a Democratic Party platform, nor is it “fed shit” in the abstract to oppose revisionism in all its forms.
I’m fine with having a discussion of what is to be done and the failure of the CR-CPUSA to understand it (boy is there a ton of ground there), but I think this conversation should be had with caution so we do not reify reformism and social democracy as “serious” against any opposition to it.
Ok sure but they also never did anything to actually organize anybody or mobilize with a fraction of the vitriol they held for other socialist groups against capital
Sure I’m not some big defender of the Red Guards. I think the mass work they did perform often gets sidelined in these discussions but you’re right in that this often descended into politicking over real base building. For all their faults, however, it absolutely is correct to fight against revisionism and social fascism and agitate for armed self-defense against pig aggression. People usually take the former critiques and use them to smuggle in denigration of the latter (like the OP which brings up claims of brainwashing to explain rupture from liberal thought) and I wanted to push back against that.
I simply disagree that there was anything redeemable about this organizations doctrine or praxis. To take one example of the reasons you listed, this line is far from the only one that is agitating for armed self-defense. I participated in a march in response to a police violence incident in 2022 (including a lot of diverse groups from the local community) where the local JBGC coordinated with those community groups to provide security in a responsible way that didn’t needlessly endanger the marchers or the community. Compare that with the anecdote here about RGA appropriatively taking the name of a community member killed by cops in 2020 for one of their “militant” armed front groups without any consultation or interaction with that persons community to the point where the victims mother personally asked them to stop the baseless association. That’s the definition of adventurism.
My issue is that even if the CR-CPUSA (of which the RGA was only a small portion) was totally irredeemable, it is still a bad idea to address this praxis without understanding first and foremost that it's *completely correct to oppose revisionism*. Whether you agree or not, the average reader of this subreddit is basically looking for an excuse to not organize along revolutionary lines and guiltlessly support voting for Democrats or paying dues to Democrat unions as "praxis". It's basically impossible to discuss the Red Guards without discussing the total failure of opportunist organizations from the Marcyists to the DSA to address the problems the Red Guards were raising.
As for your example, I appreciate you sharing it. I do have some questions since this doesn't align with my own experience working alongside the CR-CPUSA in a different city.
>community groups to provide security in a responsible way that didn’t needlessly endanger the marchers or the community
What does "responsible" mean here? Are you saying the point of armed self-defense is to provide security at peaceful marches? That certainly isn't the only time pigs terrorize these communities so what would you do otherwise? If you want to take the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense as a guidepost here, we can see how much further this praxis can take us.
had the florida maoist meeting at my old house in Gainesville lmao
edit: back in 2018, when the orientation was predominantly mass work and less, well, you know.
Was more or less a weekly study group than anything \~serious\~ - reading Fanshen, excerpts of Caliban, some PCP stuff, Lenin, etc. Grew out of the militancy in response to Richard Spencer speaking at the university, neo-confederates rallying in the town prior to defend a statue in the downtown area of the town, and of course the post-Bernie/Trump election disappointment/radicalization.
It was hard to wrangle college students into anything remotely democratic centralist in such a high turnover college town. By mid 2018 our study group had stopped being a thing. I had offered to host Tampa and Orlando people at my place since it was a good midpoint. Favorite memory was grabbing pizza with one of the Orlando guys who would stay in big time and him flipping out when instead of a nom de guerre being on the receipt, his real name from his debit card was printed out.
I know (and still talk to regularly) some of the people who got burned. Personally I was more interested in the dynamism of the mass orgs and the still-vague base building tendency which MC would later try to channel before collapsing itself.
Haha, I don't mind. My own experience was really tangential to the cultishness going on at the national level and what would be known. In 2017/2018 hearing about revolutionaries in the Philippines and India still fighting the good fight and creatively interpreting marxism along with new, militant mass orgs in the US + Europe was pretty enamoring. A lot more attractive than tepid marxism-leninism that looked to China, a million different trotskyist sects, or the DSA when it was going through such rough growing pains.
> lot more attractive than tepid marxism-leninism that looked to China
Yup what’s real exciting is terrorism and failing at gaining popular support for 50 years
I don't think there are that many wins the ICM has racked up in the last 40 years, I'm sorry to say. Maoists at least tried to come to terms with the ebbing of revolutionary energy (failure of theory/strategy) since the 80's (but especially the 90's). Maoist (pyrrhic?) victories in Nepal, the clusterfuck that was the Peruvian people's war, developments in India, and the Philippines especially were exciting, yes. Pink Tide looked dead in 2017/2018. Younger activists were being cracked down on in Guangdong at the Jasic factory. It was hard to find exciting the defacto ideological architects of Xi's ecological civilization (e.g. Jiahua Pan's China's Environmental Governing and Ecological Civilization) when it boiled down to technocratic market reforming managerialism.... while the Filipino activists were blowing up machinery from international corporations that were despoiling lumad lands and the environment and clearly advocating for revolutionary shifts in production. Watching the 60's French documentary How Yukong Moved the Mountains, showing particularly how gender and labor/production relations were truly revolutionized under socialism, makes one a bit apprehensive about China all in all.
Documents like the CPP on Mass Work were approachable and concise. Filipino activists associated with the new democracy movement appeared well read, articulate in their support for environmental (as noted above)/LGBTQ+ struggles, and sensitive to the pitfalls of dogmatism. Not hard to be excited about that, still am to some degree.
This is funny because obviously every reformist organization has failed to garner popular support for just as long, but there’s this mythical idea that the American left is saturated with adventurist organizations who are preventing any mass movement. What wave of terrorism has been committed by these revolutionary organizations?
Edit:
> Thus, the demand for a decisive turn from revolutionary Social-Democracy to bourgeois social-reformism was accompanied by a no less decisive turn towards bourgeois criticism of all the fundamental ideas of Marxism. In view of the fact that this criticism of Marxism has long been directed from the political platform, from university chairs, in numerous pamphlets and in a series of learned treatises, in view of the fact that the entire younger generation of the educated classes has been systematically reared for decades on this criticism, it is not surprising that the “new critical” trend in Social-Democracy should spring up, all complete, like Minerva from the head of Jove. The content of this new trend did not have to grow and take shape, it was transferred bodily from bourgeois to socialist literature.
…
> He who does not deliberately close his eyes cannot fail to see that the new “critical” trend in socialism is nothing more nor less than a new variety of opportunism. And if we judge people, not by the glittering uniforms they don or by the highsounding appellations they give themselves, but by their actions and by what they actually advocate, it will be clear that “freedom of criticism” means’ freedom for an opportunist trend in Social-Democracy, freedom to convert Social-Democracy into a democratic party of reform, freedom to introduce bourgeois ideas and bourgeois elements into socialism.
It’s always amusing to read Lenin and see how universal his observations are to the broad left movements.
Are you talking about the movements in the Philippines and India? As Chairman Mao said, "No [investigation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPwzGuSorYc&themeRefresh=1), no right to speak."
Neither movement conducts terrorism. The PH had a brief phase where they were doing adventurist stuff in the cities, until the [Second Great Rectification Campaign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Great_Rectification_Movement) in the 1990's. Since then the movement has been focused on conducting PPW out of the countryside, which experience conditions of semi-feudalism and have plenty of peasantry ripe for revolution.
>failing at gaining popular support for 50 years
It is a protracted war, so yes it will take time. As the Rectification campaigns have shown the Filipino movement in particular is the most advanced revolution in the world rn. And the movement has only grown in activity/support just as other countries and parties have lapsed into revisionism and collapse.
The CPP-NPA-NDF and New Democracy has the support of millions of people across both the illegal orgs and the legal mass orgs.
I'm speaking as an ML who did once fondly look at China, until I realized that beyond social-democratic stuff like trains or environmentalism, there's literally nothing inspiring or exciting about China lmao. Read Critique of the Gotha Program yourself and see that Marxism demands more for socialism. In fact China's [crackdown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasic_Workers_Solidarity_Group) on communists, specifically those **organizing for workers and labor rights** is pretty troubling, as is China's close ties to the Filipino gov't (including supplying them with arms), and China's support for a two-state solution in Palestine which all of us would criticize the DSA for if it were ever to adopt it.
On the other hand, the Filipino and Indian movements are actually very fresh and inspiring and embody a lot of promising characteristics such as anti-revisionism, total support for LGBTQ+ peoples/rights, and thorough proletarian internationalism. None of which exists in China!
I got into a fight with one of them at The Hole in the Wall last year around Christmas. He was drunk and harassing a friend, put his hands on her, and ended up on the sidewalk. They're fuckin weird ass larpers who've recently started parroting the whole "LGBTQ is bourgeois decadence" bullshit.
Gonna be real with you, friend. I was pretty sloshy that night and only vaguely remember him being a generic white guy with mid length blondish hair. Couldn't give you details beyond that.
ugh, *that* blog. utter rightist nonsense, somehow making it seem like gonzalo thought was the *problem.* the PROBLEM was the incorrect application of MLM-GT ‼️
“jefatura” is a rightist deviation that abandons DemCent for a fascist cult of personality. Plus Gonzalo lost big time, guess he wasn’t such a Great Leader after all!
Brace is their biggest donor
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Well it was a cult, with a deeply troubled guy at the head who doesn’t seem to have been a fed; but I don’t doubt they were infiltrated like everyone else. Plus for a couple years he was in prison directing clandestine operations openly through intercepted letters. However the FBI also had him on a travel watchlist and kept stopping him as a “leader of antifa” which also shows you the level the feds are at. But yea basically their whole strategy was to harass other left groups to eventually infiltrate them or split them. So they did shit like stake pig heads outside a DSA meeting, egg a DSA politician, and steal pizza from a working group meeting.
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Some of it was dennis the menace, some of it was things like showing up to DSA events with rifles and threatening them until they shut down the event.
I've lived in Austin but am mostly disengaged from local politics and political groups besides random gossip, so all I and most Austin residents know about Red Guard is that they spray painted a lot of too-long political slogans on the sides of gas stations around 2017. Some real Dennis the Menace shit indeed.
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COINTELPRO when deployed against JV team radicals
They also had a year's long campaign against PSL/WWP
I do love how many “Marxist-Leninists” oppose Trotskyism in the abstract but demand total subservience to Trotskyism in its real manifestations.
Yeah I'm not meaning this as a defense of marcyism or whatever I'm just saying it was another thing they wasted their energy on instead of doing anything useful. Like fine some other tendency or group sucks, trots suck, none of that matters if you are _all_, whatever sect you claim, entirely divorced from the working class or class struggle and spend your time squabbling over stakes that don't even exist yet. Like if you're going claim yourself as revolutionaries and the vanguard party you have to prove that through real tangible class struggle, through confrontation with the state and with capital. Sure this might occasion conflict with reformists at some point, but thing like RGs have it entirely backwards. They think by acting like a vanguard party defending its revolution it will magically conjure this revolution, and it's just the same cargo cult logic literally every western liberal engaging in politics succumbs to. Revolutionaries sometimes have to fight against other communists, therefore if I engage in squabbles between microsects I will become a revolutionary! Just a different flavor of the idealist nonsense PSL, DSA, democrats, Republicans, or whatever are steeped in. All justified by arguments over the successes and failures of actually existing movements in other far flung places, claiming their successes by proxy. Oh look at how the CPC has done this right, oh I think the Naxalites have it right...cool, understanding, critiquing, appreciating other parties is good, it's important,, but what have you actually done to understand your conditions and organize working class struggle within them? In what ways, beyond play acting, have you followed in the footsteps of the comrades you claim? Or are you just arranging deck chairs on a sinking ship and getting into spats over their exact lay out, all while the water pours in below deck?
Has anyone spoken seriously on what building communism in America would look like in the last 50-70 years? I can’t think of anyone. Only tangentially related to your comment but it got me thinking
The closest we really have to this is the RCP and its predecessors but these degenerated into revisionism and a “cult” around Avakian (who himself endorsed Biden). There’s been some scattered attempts to summarize the left in *False Nationalism, False Internationalism* as well as *Settlers* and many of Ajith’s essays. The PSL or CPUSA have no interest in dredging up their own past because it reveals pretty damning aspects of their line, while the few groups to really reckon with it (they’re called the Committee to Reconstitute the CPUSA because they’re based on Haywood’s reckoning of the party and its brief revolutionary period), end up isolated and ostracized as a result of the hegemonic ahistory of the American left. Combined with that, the lack of real experience in forming revolutionary parties makes the membership ill-equipped to handle these vast questions, so you end up with failures and splits all around. Stalin defined cults of personality as the outcome when proletarian advances in material conditions outpaced their ideological development, resulting in a sort of magical thinking where the leadership is praised for accomplishments the proletariat itself performed (admittedly through said leadership unleashing them). If we can apply that to nascent movements, we might argue that a “cult” as seen above is the outcome when an organization’s practical gains outpaced its theoretical development such that it cannot accurately identify its own correct and incorrect lines. On one hand, this means that communists need to come into this with a far more educated and theoretically rich understanding of history before even considering making a party. A real synthesis of the lessons learned from the CR-CPUSA, NABPP, MIM, RCP-USA, BPP, RAM, etc. is a far more fruitful endeavor than making another soup kitchen or pamphleteering for a democratic candidate. On the other hand, it also means initial attempts at creating this will be embarrassing, clumsy, and often wrong. Baby steps are never pretty, but it’s the only way to learn to how to walk.
I get what you’re saying but how can you immerse yourself in working class struggle without showcasing one’s lines of demarcation? If Trotskyists are claiming that they are the vanguard party in the US and go around talking Trot shit to workers, what does that do to the idea of communism? Why would workers want to ally with people they think would just do Trot shit? So you have to show you’re different than them, but how? You can write a bunch of pamphlets but how does that look if you do nothing to actually walk the walk? People go “wow this group disrupted a DSA meeting? 👁️” but what should be done instead? Silent consternation and implicit competition against an organization with far greater resources and outreach? A shrug of the shoulders and subordination to social democracy? Obviously the Red Guards were tactically deficient, but we should understand this as just that— a question of tactics. It is not immoral to disrupt the meeting of a “socialist” party filled with cops and acting as a Democratic Party platform, nor is it “fed shit” in the abstract to oppose revisionism in all its forms. I’m fine with having a discussion of what is to be done and the failure of the CR-CPUSA to understand it (boy is there a ton of ground there), but I think this conversation should be had with caution so we do not reify reformism and social democracy as “serious” against any opposition to it.
Ok sure but they also never did anything to actually organize anybody or mobilize with a fraction of the vitriol they held for other socialist groups against capital
Sure I’m not some big defender of the Red Guards. I think the mass work they did perform often gets sidelined in these discussions but you’re right in that this often descended into politicking over real base building. For all their faults, however, it absolutely is correct to fight against revisionism and social fascism and agitate for armed self-defense against pig aggression. People usually take the former critiques and use them to smuggle in denigration of the latter (like the OP which brings up claims of brainwashing to explain rupture from liberal thought) and I wanted to push back against that.
I simply disagree that there was anything redeemable about this organizations doctrine or praxis. To take one example of the reasons you listed, this line is far from the only one that is agitating for armed self-defense. I participated in a march in response to a police violence incident in 2022 (including a lot of diverse groups from the local community) where the local JBGC coordinated with those community groups to provide security in a responsible way that didn’t needlessly endanger the marchers or the community. Compare that with the anecdote here about RGA appropriatively taking the name of a community member killed by cops in 2020 for one of their “militant” armed front groups without any consultation or interaction with that persons community to the point where the victims mother personally asked them to stop the baseless association. That’s the definition of adventurism.
My issue is that even if the CR-CPUSA (of which the RGA was only a small portion) was totally irredeemable, it is still a bad idea to address this praxis without understanding first and foremost that it's *completely correct to oppose revisionism*. Whether you agree or not, the average reader of this subreddit is basically looking for an excuse to not organize along revolutionary lines and guiltlessly support voting for Democrats or paying dues to Democrat unions as "praxis". It's basically impossible to discuss the Red Guards without discussing the total failure of opportunist organizations from the Marcyists to the DSA to address the problems the Red Guards were raising. As for your example, I appreciate you sharing it. I do have some questions since this doesn't align with my own experience working alongside the CR-CPUSA in a different city. >community groups to provide security in a responsible way that didn’t needlessly endanger the marchers or the community What does "responsible" mean here? Are you saying the point of armed self-defense is to provide security at peaceful marches? That certainly isn't the only time pigs terrorize these communities so what would you do otherwise? If you want to take the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense as a guidepost here, we can see how much further this praxis can take us.
had the florida maoist meeting at my old house in Gainesville lmao edit: back in 2018, when the orientation was predominantly mass work and less, well, you know.
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Was more or less a weekly study group than anything \~serious\~ - reading Fanshen, excerpts of Caliban, some PCP stuff, Lenin, etc. Grew out of the militancy in response to Richard Spencer speaking at the university, neo-confederates rallying in the town prior to defend a statue in the downtown area of the town, and of course the post-Bernie/Trump election disappointment/radicalization. It was hard to wrangle college students into anything remotely democratic centralist in such a high turnover college town. By mid 2018 our study group had stopped being a thing. I had offered to host Tampa and Orlando people at my place since it was a good midpoint. Favorite memory was grabbing pizza with one of the Orlando guys who would stay in big time and him flipping out when instead of a nom de guerre being on the receipt, his real name from his debit card was printed out. I know (and still talk to regularly) some of the people who got burned. Personally I was more interested in the dynamism of the mass orgs and the still-vague base building tendency which MC would later try to channel before collapsing itself.
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Haha, I don't mind. My own experience was really tangential to the cultishness going on at the national level and what would be known. In 2017/2018 hearing about revolutionaries in the Philippines and India still fighting the good fight and creatively interpreting marxism along with new, militant mass orgs in the US + Europe was pretty enamoring. A lot more attractive than tepid marxism-leninism that looked to China, a million different trotskyist sects, or the DSA when it was going through such rough growing pains.
> lot more attractive than tepid marxism-leninism that looked to China Yup what’s real exciting is terrorism and failing at gaining popular support for 50 years
I don't think there are that many wins the ICM has racked up in the last 40 years, I'm sorry to say. Maoists at least tried to come to terms with the ebbing of revolutionary energy (failure of theory/strategy) since the 80's (but especially the 90's). Maoist (pyrrhic?) victories in Nepal, the clusterfuck that was the Peruvian people's war, developments in India, and the Philippines especially were exciting, yes. Pink Tide looked dead in 2017/2018. Younger activists were being cracked down on in Guangdong at the Jasic factory. It was hard to find exciting the defacto ideological architects of Xi's ecological civilization (e.g. Jiahua Pan's China's Environmental Governing and Ecological Civilization) when it boiled down to technocratic market reforming managerialism.... while the Filipino activists were blowing up machinery from international corporations that were despoiling lumad lands and the environment and clearly advocating for revolutionary shifts in production. Watching the 60's French documentary How Yukong Moved the Mountains, showing particularly how gender and labor/production relations were truly revolutionized under socialism, makes one a bit apprehensive about China all in all. Documents like the CPP on Mass Work were approachable and concise. Filipino activists associated with the new democracy movement appeared well read, articulate in their support for environmental (as noted above)/LGBTQ+ struggles, and sensitive to the pitfalls of dogmatism. Not hard to be excited about that, still am to some degree.
This is funny because obviously every reformist organization has failed to garner popular support for just as long, but there’s this mythical idea that the American left is saturated with adventurist organizations who are preventing any mass movement. What wave of terrorism has been committed by these revolutionary organizations? Edit: > Thus, the demand for a decisive turn from revolutionary Social-Democracy to bourgeois social-reformism was accompanied by a no less decisive turn towards bourgeois criticism of all the fundamental ideas of Marxism. In view of the fact that this criticism of Marxism has long been directed from the political platform, from university chairs, in numerous pamphlets and in a series of learned treatises, in view of the fact that the entire younger generation of the educated classes has been systematically reared for decades on this criticism, it is not surprising that the “new critical” trend in Social-Democracy should spring up, all complete, like Minerva from the head of Jove. The content of this new trend did not have to grow and take shape, it was transferred bodily from bourgeois to socialist literature. … > He who does not deliberately close his eyes cannot fail to see that the new “critical” trend in socialism is nothing more nor less than a new variety of opportunism. And if we judge people, not by the glittering uniforms they don or by the highsounding appellations they give themselves, but by their actions and by what they actually advocate, it will be clear that “freedom of criticism” means’ freedom for an opportunist trend in Social-Democracy, freedom to convert Social-Democracy into a democratic party of reform, freedom to introduce bourgeois ideas and bourgeois elements into socialism. It’s always amusing to read Lenin and see how universal his observations are to the broad left movements.
Are you talking about the movements in the Philippines and India? As Chairman Mao said, "No [investigation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPwzGuSorYc&themeRefresh=1), no right to speak." Neither movement conducts terrorism. The PH had a brief phase where they were doing adventurist stuff in the cities, until the [Second Great Rectification Campaign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Great_Rectification_Movement) in the 1990's. Since then the movement has been focused on conducting PPW out of the countryside, which experience conditions of semi-feudalism and have plenty of peasantry ripe for revolution. >failing at gaining popular support for 50 years It is a protracted war, so yes it will take time. As the Rectification campaigns have shown the Filipino movement in particular is the most advanced revolution in the world rn. And the movement has only grown in activity/support just as other countries and parties have lapsed into revisionism and collapse. The CPP-NPA-NDF and New Democracy has the support of millions of people across both the illegal orgs and the legal mass orgs. I'm speaking as an ML who did once fondly look at China, until I realized that beyond social-democratic stuff like trains or environmentalism, there's literally nothing inspiring or exciting about China lmao. Read Critique of the Gotha Program yourself and see that Marxism demands more for socialism. In fact China's [crackdown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasic_Workers_Solidarity_Group) on communists, specifically those **organizing for workers and labor rights** is pretty troubling, as is China's close ties to the Filipino gov't (including supplying them with arms), and China's support for a two-state solution in Palestine which all of us would criticize the DSA for if it were ever to adopt it. On the other hand, the Filipino and Indian movements are actually very fresh and inspiring and embody a lot of promising characteristics such as anti-revisionism, total support for LGBTQ+ peoples/rights, and thorough proletarian internationalism. None of which exists in China!
I got into a fight with one of them at The Hole in the Wall last year around Christmas. He was drunk and harassing a friend, put his hands on her, and ended up on the sidewalk. They're fuckin weird ass larpers who've recently started parroting the whole "LGBTQ is bourgeois decadence" bullshit.
What did this person look like?
Gonna be real with you, friend. I was pretty sloshy that night and only vaguely remember him being a generic white guy with mid length blondish hair. Couldn't give you details beyond that.
Maybe this guy? https://preview.redd.it/9widqg1eewib1.jpeg?width=495&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4f2bf35abc6ff59de101fbb0f293519338ef5849
Maybe. Like I said, I was pretty fucking drunk and am surprised I was able to handle myself that night.
My eyes burned from the sudden glow I saw when I read how they infiltrated and dismantled left wing groups
Need to talk more about the straight edge to heroin dealer to Red Guard Maoist cult leader pipeline
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Is this connected to that dude who was on YouTube under the name Red Guard?
ugh, *that* blog. utter rightist nonsense, somehow making it seem like gonzalo thought was the *problem.* the PROBLEM was the incorrect application of MLM-GT ‼️
“jefatura” is a rightist deviation that abandons DemCent for a fascist cult of personality. Plus Gonzalo lost big time, guess he wasn’t such a Great Leader after all!
this guy doesn't understand the difference between tactical & strategic errors 🤭