"Left unity" is pointless. If you have a total of 5 leftists in your country,
it doesn't matter if they all unify, they're still powerless. People
seem to have this delusion that if only Marxists and anarchists stopped
fighting, they could come together in countries like the US and take
power, but in reality, this is more likely to be the
result.
It's also completely backwards. No revolution has been carried out by
only class conscious communists. Communists have to learn how to appeal
to the masses, and the masses then have to support it. This is the
problem, the highly class conscious communists will always be in small
numbers, and will never have the numbers on their own, even if they all
unify together.
Historically, the socialists and communists that come to power are
rarely even the result of "unity", but it's always one specific section
overtakes everyone else by storm. That's because some organization
figures out a way to rally the masses, and once you get the masses on
your side, all other organizations get in line or get destroyed.
The problem is not lack of left unity, but lack of any organizations
that have figured out a way to rally the masses. Nobody has figured out
how to overcome all the anti-communist brainwashing and to have a
message that appeals. It's only been successful in colonized countries
but not in the colonizer countries.
People who act like there's some simple solution that we're just all too
stupid to see, like, "if we just all stopped fighting we'd win the
revolution!" are not appreciating just how difficult the problem is. The
reason communists have not succeeded in colonizer countries is not
because they're all missing something "so simple", but because the
problem is fucking hard, and they have a mountain to climb.
Like, I kinda disagree that the only point of left unity is "if we had it, the revolution would happen". If you're setting up a kitchen for feeding homeless people on Thursday nights or something, you're not helped by burning every single bridge and are helped by having some spaces where disparate groups of 5 leftists at least talk to each other without airing their grievances about something Stalin did in 1928. This goes for setting up protests, or really any activity that involves more than 5 leftists. And within those spaces people will wander back and forth between groups on theoretical stuff and personal beefs and just time availability. Focusing on just "will this bring forth the revolution" is... idk, it probably leads to not doing very much.
(I agree with the point that left unity spaces or lack thereof is what is standing between us and "the revolution")
I'm largely talking about how it appears on this website and how I see it on the ground in my local area. Thus far, no one has suggested that all the trots, anarchists, MLs get together on the ground in my area, though they periodically try to recruit members from each other. Which, sure, I guess is tactical. I don't think I've actually seen very much of what emizeko is suggesting compared to what I'm talking about.
Thus far, no one has suggested that all the trots, anarchists, MLs get together on the ground in my area,
What does "get together" mean? How does it address organizational, structural, ideological, strategic, and tactical differences between different factions?
If you simply mean "talk to each other without spitting in each others faces" that already happens more than plenty among the more mature members of different factions thatve been in the game for long enough.
I don't know, I'll leave figuring out that stuff to people actually seriously suggesting it and people seriously arguing against it. When I hear "left unity" I think of the second thing.
How the fuck i can get together with people who called up pigs on my comrades and then proceeded to lick fascist monuments? Or with terminally online scribblers who call me "fascist"? Or with other terminally online scribblers which will call me "gauchist" whatever that means (but with the same emphasis as inquisitor use the word "heresy") and then let out a long rants of USSR bad, solidarność good, plus entire trove of 50's Mccarthyst propaganda they internalized who knows where and when.
Honestly 98% of what happens on the internet doesn't actually matter. If any of us were going to have any effect on anything tangible we wouldn't be here to begin with. I sure wouldn't