Western "leftists" often fall into a trap. In this trap, they get to announce the necessity of organizing for class consciousness without actually doing any labor work, political education work, or even joining an organization. In this trap, they get to announce solidarity with the global working class and say damning things about the worst imperialist excesses, but also get to retain the chauvinism of their imperialist upbringing, never actually doing anything to challenge their own countries' component of the imperial core while attacking imperialists' designated enemies. As no political project is without faults, but their idea of socialism is free of faults, they are bestowed a license to condemn every movement that wins a revolution and tell them to be more like those that never even get off the ground (the pure, clearly faultless ones).

Interestingly, people can fall into this trap because they refuse to educate themselves at all or because they spend all of their time diving deeply into a canon of purity and fail to have historical context or real-world experience in struggle. There are so many Western "Marxists" that have not read Capital in any form. There are also many Western "Marxists" that exclusively consume cloistered trade unionist or Trotskyist or MLM sources, failing to self-apply the criticism that they gleefully throw at "campists" and "revisionists". Consequently, they follow an idealist path, and this is most evident in their attempts to organize, or lack thereof. Most don't really do anything at all, they just read and pick fights. But when they do attempt organizing work, these are the people who overly congratulate themselves on a job well done for doing, more or less, nothing, or doing something embarrassingly incompetently, or losing, or just plain acting against our shared interests. For example, the "Marxist" paid trade unionist that spends half their time promoting imperialist party candidates and the other half trying to make jobs making bombs for genocide pay better. That person thinks of themselves as a true revolutionary and in the same breaty that they defend a concentration on facilitating class traitorism they will tell you that it is bad to defend the Palestinian resistance.

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

100%. It's far more exhausting talking to these "ultra-leftists" that operate more on vibes than Matetialism than it is to speak with liberals about AES, in my experience. It's intellectual anti-intellectualism, Marxist Anti-Marxism.

[–] TheOubliette@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago

Often, yeah. Some of these people are just straight-up liberals that refuse to read but have a compulsion to confidently share opinions and pick fights in spite of this. I think this is actually the most common form of Western "Marxist" that one encounters irl. The person that thinks their contribution to the leftist cause is to join a space and share their half-baked opinion. Usually a white cis dude and I don't think that's a coincidence lol. They're brought up in that culture.

Buy yeah there are definitely ultras as well. I dunno I have had decent luck in pulling them away from that tendency. My sample is biased because, among other things, it draws from people attempting to do real organizing work and who are somewhat realistic about it, so they are more open to some "campism" like, "sure we can internally criticize China, but externally we must understand that we would only be feeding into imperialist propaganda domestically". I have had noticeably less luck trying that with MLMs that are basically just a reading group that occasionally joins (and picks fights with lol) coalitions.

Honestly, in my experience the people with the best natural instincts for this are those doing principled anti-imperialist work. They are open to mutual learning, political education, and constructive self-criticism as a means for org development. I have had better luck with anarchists in such orgs than with self-proclaimed communists doing labor or electoral work.