Critique is good, it’s how a movement progresses. If a movement (org, party, etc) did the same thing over and over again regardless of outcome, they would eventually run in circles and into their own exhaustion.

The problem is that no advancements have ever been made by a westerner saying for the nth time that china is not socialist because Y reason. To make any material change, they would have to be Chinese, they would have to be in the CPC, and they would have to bring it up there. Saying it to an English-speaking audience on Youtube, no matter how big, is just not going to change China’s mind. It is however going to change a lot of new leftists’ minds.

There is the same contradiction when I yell that the US is starting yet another war on false premises, making people believe that their war is just when they have fabricated all of the justifications. But – the difference is that I yell this to people to whom it will matter. I can plant the seeds of anti-imperialism theory in people’s minds, even if they are not receptive at first.

I’m not saying either are very effective in the grand scheme of things, rather I’m saying that despite similarities in tactics, both exist for different reasons.

So what is their goal then? We come to the conclusion that they want to promote the idea that there is no socialism, and might never have been (some ultras believe there has never been socialism, some believe only the USSR until Stalin’s death was ever an example of socialism). I find that conclusion not only very bleak but also very dangerous. Why do people want me to believe socialism has never succeeded, and that the only attempts at socialism that have been realized in the world were bound to fail, and not actual examples of socialism?

Isn’t that very defeatist? Like, what is the material reason there hasn’t been a Bordigist revolution that even grasped state power for a moment? Why is it only “fake” socialism that seems to succeed, according to ultras, and then turns into state capitalism? They are basically saying that capitalism is inescapable and there will never be anything else, but in other words from liberals.

I really don’t see how you can make a career out of saying “there has never actually been socialism” and then can claim you are anything but an anti-communist mouthpiece.

As for Trotskyists they are “communists who are afraid to call themselves communists”. I don’t really mean it as a compliment… I found that trots can rarely explain how their theory actually differs from what the USSR under Stalin did. They like to imagine alternative history where Trotsky “won” the “power struggle” (as if Lenin decided his successor and not the central committee of the CPSU) and how different it would have been from Stalin, when, if you read both, you realize Trotsky would probably have passed the same policies as Stalin but been even harsher than Stalin was. They think the purges are bad because anything that paints Stalin in a bad light is good to Trotskyists, but Trotsky was fond of collective punishments and particularly execution. Nobody could stand him. Frankly it’s a good thing he never ruled anything after the red army.

They can’t even define permanent revolution, just that it’s “different” from socialism in one country so it’s automatically better. They can’t define socialism in one country either. In reality permanent revolution would have destroyed the fledgling USSR. They are a group that has not read anything beyong Marx, Lenin and Trotsky (presumably because anyone after Trotsky was not Trotskyist enough) and it shows.

Truth is Trotsky was hated by everyone in the CPSU by the time he was first exiled to the Kazakh SSR, as he wanted to split the party and was impossible to work with. Then he tried to organize a coup. There was a reason he wasn’t elected to be general secretary.

why are ultras (and trotskyists, etc.) so universally disliked?

To piggyback off gramsci. They offer nothing but sterile vacous negative “criticism” without providing anything constructive and while achieving nothing.

Comrade Bordiga limits himself to upholding a cautious position on all the questions raised by the Left. He doesn’t say: the International poses and resolves such and such a question in this way, but the Left will instead pose and resolve it this other way. He instead says: the way the International poses and resolves problems doesn’t convince me; I fear they might slip into opportunism; there are insufficient guarantees against this; etc. His position, then, is one of permanent suspicion and doubt. In this way the position of the “Left” is purely negative: they express reservations without specifying them in a concrete form, and above all without indicating in concrete form their own point of view and their solutions. They end up spreading doubt and distrust without offering anything constructive.

This might be a good point to ask, why are ultras (and trotskyists, etc.) so universally disliked?

because

1. their organizing strategy has never worked or even had mass support
2. this is largely bacause they have purist stadards towards socialism. socialism is a checklist to them that has to be perfectly followed, instead of a winding path to communism.
3. they mostly take a western chauvinist attitude towards global south socialist experience (meaning they constantly look down on it)

I feel like I’m gradually shifting toward a point of view that goes something like: Streamer/podcaster/youtuber (or I guess we could summarize it as “content creator”) marxists should be de facto assumed to be untrustworthy.

I’ve written at least partial defense of one or more of them in the past, I think, but frankly the fact alone that the majority of them are not mouthpieces of a revolutionary movement, but are instead completely divorced from one and are simply doing an attempt at marxist theory takes, that already means they’ve got nothing to ground themselves on, no matter how good their intentions are.

At least when that’s an aspect of somewhere like here, we’re checking each other at the door regularly and none of us are being elevated as “the takes giver”. But these people are both elevated as thought leaders by fandom level audiences and can very easily have no connection to praxis at all, which makes no goddamn sense for being a thought leader.

So I would say, the basic litmus test should be something like: Are they part of a revolutionary movement and are speaking directly from experience gained from that organizing about things that pertain to that experience? If not, they can still make valid points, but the authority of their position should be treated the same way you would some random person you chat up on the street.

Most of us would probably gain far more from translating and reading Xi Jinping speeches than listening to podcasters bullshit about theory for an hour.

Eww, gross, thanks for showing this.

Ah, gotcha. That makes more sense.

Here is The Deprogram hosting a completely insane Russian leftcom (antitcommunist) to talk about how the Ukraine war is heckin imperialist Russian fascism.

That episode is where they lost me. Up until then I really thought they were a solid podcast, despite their flaws. But to me it is inexcusable to choose to platform a representative of a tiny minority of contrarian ultra-leftists over any one of tens of thousands of actual Russian communists, the overwhelming majority of who support the SMO and supported it before it even started. It is indicative of deeply entrenched western leftism on the Deprogram that they never thought of asking a communist from the Donbass who actually lived through the eight years of being constantly shelled and attacked by fascists to come on their program and explain the pro-SMO viewpoint, or give some insight into how the people of the Donbass view the Kiev regime. That is the very least you should do if you want to do the liberal “both sides” thing. You owe it to your audience to at least hear the side out that most Russian communists support, but they didn’t even do that.