Rehashing conflicts from 100+ years ago, that took place in wildly different context and material conditions than our own, strikes me as a particularly futile exercise.

Let’s work to rise above it, comrade.

I get it. I’m just saying, keep some perspective on the current stakes.

The Neoconservative Counterrevolution

Many of the early neoconservatives were members of “the family,” Murray Kempton’s apt designation for that disputatious tribe otherwise known as the New York intellectuals. They had come of age in the 1930s at the City College of New York (CCNY), a common destination for smart working-class Jews who otherwise might have attended Ivy League schools, where quotas prohibited much Jewish enrollment until after World War II.

Gertrude Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol, and their milieu learned the art of polemics during years spent in the CCNY cafeteria’s celebrated Alcove No. 1, where young Trotskyists waged ideological warfare against the Communist students who occupied Alcove No. 2. During their flirtations with Trotskyism in the 1930s, when tussles with other radical students seemed like a matter of life and death, future neoconservatives developed habits of mind that never atrophied.

They held on to their combative spirits, their fondness for sweeping declarations, and their suspicion of leftist dogma. Such an epistemological background endowed neoconservatives with what seemed like an intuitive capacity for critiquing New Left arguments. They were uniquely qualified for the job of translating New Left discourses for a conservative movement fervent in its desire to know its enemy.

Nobody reads books. Books are for fucking losers. If you suggest people read books you’ll have a very bad time.

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Cited the Simple Sabotage Field Manual and mentioned how it was used against civil rights organizers, anti-war demonstrators, and labor organizers.

Got called a Tankie.

Crazy how the term seems to shut down the higher brain functions for certain people.

Granted, nobody needs a conspiracy or invisible hand to create problems like this.

That said, it’s far easier to look for weak points to exploit for political means, than build a new movement from whole cloth. In the US, ideological divisions, wedge topics, racism, and even the ghost of the Civil War, have all been used to sow division for various means.

bonk

It’s both. Popular fronts are a thing, and Spanish Republican style coalitions are incredibly powerful tools. Political pluralism within leftist movements is healthy when we let it be healthy. The CIA, FBI, and various governments and reactionary groups have engaged in psyops against this for decades.

But these divisions are real and they come from real ideological differences and hurt. The CIA didn’t force the red army to fire on the black armies, it didn’t force the blunder of ideology at Kronstadt, it didn’t force the betrayal in Spain. And it also didn’t force anarchists to have issues controlling their people or implementing their goals. It didn’t force the syndicalists to fuck up in South America and Berlin. And it didn’t force the USSR and CCP to nearly go to war with each other.

What they did do however is project Gladius, COINTELPRO, operation condor, and various other anti left programs. They made damn sure Fred Hampton died and they made sure the Black Panthers couldn’t trust each other enough to be effective. They also made sure the inner cities were filled with crack to destroy black anti capitalist organizing.

And here’s where you get the mix. Anarchists already don’t trust MLs, because of the aforementioned betrayals and disorganization, then you get government campaigns working to ensure that trust remains broken and that the culture becomes one in which cooperation is anathema. And the trots are kept distrustful of the MLs and the anarchists. MLs are encouraged to keep thinking of themselves as the only real socialists except MLMs. It’s similar to the Russian campaigns between democrats and republicans, both already didn’t like each other and the goal is to keep picking at the wounds and encouraging off putting behaviors.

My general observation:

Yankistanis on their capitalists raining in on societal failures causing division:

Chinese 50 cent army, Russian Bot farms, Tankies. Russian Trolls. We see you, comrade. They’re trying to divide us. Reeeeee

Yankistanis when a recorded history of CIA interference, coup, embargo, wars, propaganda where most yankistanis shrieks at the mention of the words and country trying a different economic system:

It’s not the CIA. Trust me bro!

How can you be certain either way?

Speaking at least in the context of the US, any revolutionary minded leftists (or “leftists”, if you prefer) have goals that diverge so far from the present day as to be irrelevant.

3.2k over 2 months is numbers I generally attribute to bots/shills. Is that a normal level of online in your spaces?

There are real problems in organizing, and I too have seen things like you’re describing. I just try not to take part in such petty squabbles. If a group is too wound up with internal politics to get anything done, I just find somewhere else to put my energy.

I have not found this to be generally true.

And prefer it over doing anything.

And that’s a weakness that the elites target in us. We need to target their weaknesses, like their soft bellies, or their flimsy neck vertebra.