It’s a situation that I have been expecting for a while, but I wasn’t fully ready to accept it. Specifically it’s one of my LGBTQ friends who honestly believes in the democrats will protect them and their partner. I have tried to make the point that both parties are eroding any sort of civility towards all marginalized groups, but fear seems to drive them more than logical observations. They make the excuse that change doesn’t happen over night and that the left continues to grow and will have meaningful affects down the road. I fundamentally just don’t agree with that idea and vocalize it regularly. More and more it is ending up in a circular argument where I am painted as unrealistic and my rhetoric (leftist rhetoric) is doing more harm than good because it promotes distrust in the only system we have to work with. I try to tell them it’s kind of the whole point. We gotta start somewhere if we want to see a better, more representative system, but they are so hung up on the immediate future while simultaneously saying that my idealistic feelings are shortsighted and I cant expect change in the immediate future… The double-talk is wild, I know.
I am trying my hardest to stop from engaging at this point because on the most basic level we agree on a lot of stuff, but they are just way to wrapped up in the fear mongering of the democratic party. They know that the two party system is broken, they know that something drastic needs to change, but they also think that they are powerless to do anything except choose the lesser evil. It pains me because I am watching them do the same shit past generations have done, where they give up on their ideals for the sake of preserving the current status quo that they benefit from. I am legitimately watching them imply “fuck you, got mine” under the guise of civic duty and I hate it. I want nothing more than to be able to finally say “I told you so” without being a smug asshole about it and ruining our friendship.
Thanks for reading my rant. It’s probably a bit disjointed, but the frustration is boiling over and I needed to vent to the only group of people that seems to understand the hopelessness of being a disenfranchised leftist.
Honest question: How do people reconcile their approaches to these situations with what Combat Liberalism instructs? Because Mao says fuck your discomfort and yell at people.
Mao does not actually say yell at people and burning all available bridges in self-righteous fits of anger instead of searching for ways to interact constructively with people is closer to being what he regarded as liberalism, being that it can be described as “venting personal spite”. That segment, like most of them, only applies to intraparty affairs, but that’s why I said “closer to”. All he says about extraparty interaction is that you should continuously agitate and propagandize.
It’s been awhile since I’ve read Combat Liberalism, but I thought the context of that was for disputes between people in the same party or organization. If it’s someone who’s a friend but otherwise isn’t struggling alongside you to build communism, I’m not sure what the point of being super insistent on ideological correctness would be.
We live in different times than Mao. I don’t have an answer but it is that which should inform your praxis, not book worship, as it were.
Different times, a different part of the world, and radically different material conditions at that
Related - how can we possibly be less “moralistic” when it’s a moral question of such magnitude as “should people support genocide”?
Personally I think the takeaway from that text in the imperial core context is probably that of class and party collaboration. Your personal relationships with libs are yours to sort out but under no circumstances work to further their bourgeoisie party project.
Combat liberalism is more of a list of Mao’s personal grievances in the human condition/behaviour under the label of liberalism than anything else. It’s a short text written in the context of instilling party discipline then anything else.
There’s a uniting theme in all of the behaviors he highlights of a sort of moral flippancy, of regarding a decision as basically indifferent and then just picking the option you want instead of picking what is best. It makes sense to call this self-entitled version of freedom, where you are not obliged to act rightly but merely fulfill some set of requirements and then have free reign in the rest of it, “liberalism,” because that is exactly what many liberal moral frameworks look like, especially the more politically-involved ones (like social contract theory).
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Yes, there is a theme that is about subordinating personal advancement (a more liberal tendency) to development of the cadre / party (a more revolutionary tendency). But it is still very focused on that attempt to assert discipline over the cadres/party. Some of the advice is actually toxic to follow in other contexts. For example, I know many proto-MLMs that really take the “you better tell everyone when they are wrong instead of talking about it secretly, that is liberal and advancing yourself” thing to heart and they criticize the crap out of each other to allegedly create “unity” but it actually makes people hate each other. They completely miss how to develop constructive political education in the party because they are interpreting Combat Liberalism as Mao’s Guide to Party Behavior, but it isn’t even that. The meaning of that line is really more like, “hey you behind-my-back shittalkers tell it to our faces so we can hash it out and minimize factions” and not “you should focus on criticizing in full membership meetings and never air a criticism privately or sit in it for a while”.
I will admit that the sparseness of the text combined with the distance in time and space means it’s not the sort of thing you can just throw on someone’s lap like Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, but I think we ultimately agree.
Probably! I think it is fun to read and entertaining to quote but I think the main issues in Western left organizing are substantially different. I definitely keep “no investigation, no right to speak” in my back pocket though, which is from a somewhat similar but more widely applicable work. I swear to God 90% of Western leftists need to internalize that and shut the fuck up (not speaking about you or anyone on Hexbear lol). So many problems in left orgs could be solved if the people who have spent less than 10 minutes thinking about a topic just didn’t jump into conversations to share opinions and then die on a hill.
I haven’t read Combat Liberalism (and should), but FWIW I think I’d say Mao’s circumstances naturally were also very different in context- it’s one thing to say it in the global south, in genuinely brutalized and colonized countries where the masses can be receptive on some level, and another to say it in the heart of empire, surrounded by all those who have benefited from or see their lot as tied with that of the empire (also with a lot of colonized peoples- but even then with varying degrees of similar issues).
I’d say Mao was right, anyways. Fuck the discomfort… but then also we are all only human. We can yell all we want, I’ve stuck my neck out and gotten into arguments myself, but end of the day we know we’re swimming upstream, perhaps even trying to swim up a waterfall- not to say it can’t be done, nor to support defeatism, but our energy is finite, self-preservation on some level is valid (supporting the genocide however is wholly invalid and those who do will deserve what they get), and picking and choosing our fights is not only valid, but can be the better strategy (finding receptive audiences, using our energy elsewhere or going where we can actually contribute) than butting our heads up against a wall. If seeing industrial genocide cannot successfully appeal to someone’s humanity, nothing will- perhaps the material conditions in the future will be such that they will come to us all the same, or perhaps they will be worn down further still, but what can be said to those supporting, even if due to “lesser evil” bullshit, such atrocities?
It’ll only take a few minutes (for real, it’s less than 1000 words)! Link
Thanks! Having read it now it is- interesting. Good and unquestionably principles everyone should seek to follow, yet also of course a call to constant self-crit and what I’d call irreligious, tangible, revolutionary virtue.
I’d never really considered such behaviors liberalism, but it’s food for thought (and I don’t disagree with it). Of course, considering all that is listed, there is no one who doesn’t err or who will not err in due time, but it’s a means of bettering yourself, society, and protecting the integrity of the revolution or of any org, I suppose. It’s definitely something that will be sticking with me.
IMO it is not a useful text. It was a discipline document for militarized cadres that strained itself a bit to claim that things that undermined Mao’s preferred direction were liberalism. It is also primarily about intraparty discipline.
All of american society is set up to sitfle your voice. You can be uncomfortable and yell at them but every other person they know, all of the media they consume, and every interaction they have throughout the day is set up to reinforce you’re just a crazy hippy or something and the correct answer is to consume and subjugate.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t do it but the best that you can hope for is they brush you off and then encounter some especially stark contradictions in the next few hours that makes them consider what you said might have a point.
But then the 6 o clock local news, 2 hours of pr8metime TV and then every late night show is gonna try to convince them that’s just some weird coincidence.
But that brief moment where they thought “huh this sure seems exactly like what that looney lefty of a friend of mine described earlier” is about our only on ramp and it’s important that idea is planted before they encounter a contradictions and some chud tells them its because of immigrants.