Interesting analysis. Haven’t been paying granular attention; id have hoped that Portland’s climate would’ve been more amenable to some concerted action across communities.

Edit: And to add, I’ve had to deal with so much paternalistic bullshit from white guys in their 30s who consider themselves “very serious organizers” who after lengthy conversations simply fall back onto thought terminating cliches (authoritarianism) or just outright threats of violence towards me and my friends.

What you said is deadass why I stopped organizing with crackers. I save my time, my energy, and my effort for explicitly Black causes at this point because I’m sick of the paternalism, I’m sick of the insistence on assimilation, I’m sick of the tone policing, I’m sick of the liberal optic games. The next cracker to talk down to me in a ‘left’ offline space is getting his nose broken; so I’m tryna avoid that assault charge for as long as I humanly can.

Like, it fucks me off so damn bad; I used to think my oldheads were just being backwards, recalcitrant oldheads about white folk and increasingly commonly these days, I find myself just "damn, my OGs were really right about y’all". That thought alone pisses me off bc if they’re right, that means a solid half of this bullshit society spent my formative years lying that we’d ever get past this together, rather than apart; and I really don’t know how to deal with that anymore than to protect my peace, and that of my community.

when I joined

I’m glad you finally got in, comrade - I lost access to my element so I wasn’t sure how things went

Don’t let this get to you, keep working to build a movement. I am sorry a lot of your friends are so unprincipled and have decided to act antagonistically toward you. it actually should be against their interests, but they live in an idealist bubble that is only maintained through policing the morality of other organizers through informal power structures and exclusion. These anarchist/chauvinists are in fact only a small minority even if they are very prevalent in inward-facing organizing circles, it is only a symptom of the defunct history & nature of the US left and the discontinuity in the US communist movement. However “very serious” these “organizers” are, they are not representative of the masses of people which is what we are looking to organize. Don’t worry about them. I think their influence in the movement for Palestinian liberation is being very exaggerated in this thread, a lot of it seems to focus on the PNW. Most parts of the country don’t have such a large anti-communist-left scene, and the student movement is a real mass movement that has incorporated so many different communities, most of this stuff becomes completely irrelevant day-to-day

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Adventurism is a violent expression of Utopianism.

It’s more productive to just out-organize anyone doing dumb things. And usually pretty easy because the people doing dumb things are usually either small in number of terrible at organizing.

Most of the time, calling people out just draws attention to infighting. Sometimes it’s useful and necessary but most of the time it seems to be an exercise in personal validation and a distraction from doing work. This goes for the people with whom you (probably rightly) disagree, but unfortunately they’re not going to see this message and they’re also not going to internalize it even if they did because it’s just some individual saying things.

Instead, imagine being able to mobilize 100, or even 1000 comrades with a unified plan and its own goals. This could be an org or a united front. You will eventually be able to marginalize wrong voices through largesse and progress to a stage of semi-open criticism that is no longer perceived as infighting, but instead a denunciation of and separation from organizations that are screwing up your work. You will no longer be that individual or those 4 people from the weird org fighting with other vague lefties. You’ll be a wall of voices making an intentional decision that can’t be ignored.

Basically… have a good internal political education program, recruit, and work in coalition. Resist the urge to crit publicly. It usually backfires. Only do so strategically and with intent and while considering your audience. Be prepared to play a longer game than the immediate issue or action. You want to be trusted by and recruit from the people in these spaces. They will care more about you being a contributing member than a person with the better argument.

that’s fine.

maybe you argued with me 10 years ago. but here i am now.

so it’s probably not the same people you are interacting with over and over again. there are new radicals coming up all the time.

it’s not on you personally to have to engage in this type of organizing and education. i’m just saying it is possible as a communist movement to do so and have a positive outcome.

Not as far as I was aware, but there were warning signs and we always could have cancelled the whole thing when we saw them all arrive at the start of the march, but didn’t.

Maybe the anarchists tried to tell us through their tried-and-true method of dropping a leaflet on the ground and hoping the right person reads it, but idk.

Most of the local articles I’ve seen make no distinction between the rally, the march, or the library occupation. I’ll see if I can find anything better from smaller leftist sources.

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This is a good point; I don’t agree with the Bonanno-style exhortations for people to just go out and do more destruction of policing instruments (and also preemptively striking counter-protestors; most if not all university encampments have a strong policy against engaging at all with them, for good reason). A declaration that “they have been revealed as illegitimate and we have demonstrated that they are not safe amidst our escalations” would do.

Can’t wait to see this revolution that doesn’t harm any property or does anything that would make the media condemn them and doesn’t inconvenience anybody.

Nobody is calling for that.

What they’re calling for is for the organizing to make the property damage effective and bad press ineffective.

I cannot believe somebody is condemning burning police cars lmao. Let alone that they’re trying to frame it as “destroying tax payer funded property”

The property isn’t sacred because it’s taxpayer funded. I’m just saying that the action is symbolic but materially counterproductive because the fleet will be immediately replaced with better cars using taxpayer funds. That turns the public against the person who destroyed them, doesn’t deprive the police of anything they won’t replace by the end of the week, and it leads to nothing larger unless many people in your shoes are so inspired by it that you’re willing to martyr yourself for more symbolic property damage.

There are even moments for me when propaganda of the deed has merit. Huey P Newton walking down the street with a shotgun prepared to kill anyone who interferes with him putting up a stop sign at a dangerous intersection because the city refuses to, that’s a symbolic action which inspires and educates for decades after. It drives people right to the local BPP chapter because everyone knows who he is and sees that their safety is in their own collective hands. The assassin who killed Shinzo Abe turned an entire nation against Shinzo Abe and destroyed his power bloc because it exposed his corruption in the vacuum it left. No stated ideology I’m aware of, no party to recruit people to, one symbolic action which found public support because the public ultimately wasn’t ideologically with Shinzo Abe. I don’t know what the right adventurist move would be for the Gaza protests, but watch how this one develops and judge the effectiveness based on that. I think it sets too high of a bar for action, immediately alienates many of the most radical people who’d be doing that action, does an action which only benefits the police while making the non-radical public hate them more, and offers no Plan B if a bunch of people don’t individually decide to start a civil war before this leaves the news cycle in a few days. I’m condemning one idealist tilting at windmills because a group of people can swing swords more effectively at other things.

Anarchists when Communists want to support their project

Anarchists when Communists have a project they weren’t invited to

idk, that’s one example, and even if I disagree I can see why someone might say that. that is something anarchists say about every organization because anarchists don’t “recruit” really. but I have more than a few direct counterexamples I have personally witnessed, so I would not say that encampments are primarily organized by anarchist groups. that is probably just something that varies from city to city

And in my encampment PSL was very specifically invited because we are leaders and experienced organizers. If you look at most encampments you’ll see plenty of PSL collab on the relevant SJP social media post, which requires mutual approval.

Actions can be both cool and adventurist at the same time. For example, was the assassination of Hendrik Verwoerd, the apartheid president of South Africa, cool? Yes it was. It was incredibly brave and the morally correct thing to do. Was it also adventurist? Unfortunately also yes, as the assassination of Verwoerd did not lead to the collapse of apartheid, it continued for decades afterwards. There was no solid plan for what came after, Verwoerd’s assassin (Tsafendas) planned to flee the country and seek refuge in Cuba or Greece. While the actions Tsafendas took were commendable, deserve praise, and came at a great personal sacrifice (of being tortured for the rest of his life in prison), unfortunately they did not lead to his desired goal. Adventuristic violence is a very risky strategy that rarely leads to the desired outcomes. This is why many communists throughout history have spoken and written about the dangers of adventurism. I think the only recent example of successful adventurism was the assassination of Shinzo Abe.

It’s really not complicated. The burning of police cars is not the problem. Burning police cars is a show of power. If an organized communist party is showing power then it is good. If anti-communist individualists are doing a show of power, then it is bad.

You’re really showing your true colors by making a dozen salty posts about why you can’t see that anticommunists showing power is a bad thing.

K

In the US I’ve seen anarchists and MLs working together no problem, during any action I haven’t seen much disagreement, it seems more theoretical IMO.

I used to be one of those anarchists, until I started to get a better sense of the history of revolutionary movements and of the completeness of Western propaganda. Eventually I came to see anarchism and Marxism less as delineations and more as foundations.

The world is a lot friendlier without dogmatic grudges against leftists.