No.1052625[Reply]
It’s always easier for the defenders of the status quo to stick together. The status quo is a tangible, existant thing. It’s here and now, it’s what exists. Unity of purpose is simply defending what exists, protecting how things are. And not only that, they have the tangible resources to protect themselves, because what they are defending are those tangible resources. Meanwhile, the fight to replace the status quo means creating something new that presently exists only in the imagination. It’s a blank slate of infinite possibilities. Our goals are approachable from an infinite number of paths, some of them leading in wildly different directions. And because there are an infinite number of places to go and an infinite number of ways to get there, the critics of the status quo, the enemies of the status quo can divide into an infinite number of factions, while the defenders of the status quo can just sit tight and stay put. It’s literally all they have to do. It’s all they want to do. It’s all they ever will do.
From its inception, the international Socialist movement was run through with internal conflicts, arguments backbiting, shit-talking and infighting. Their assaults on capitalism and imperialism were almost as vicious as their assaults on each other. In a few short years, the first International Workingman’s Association, explicitly organized to unite them in unbreakable solidarity, broke into two rival camps, two internationals, with each side expelling all the members of the other side. Purges and counter purges were baked into the foundation from the start. And so it went for the Russian wing of international socialism, through the decades where nothing happened and the weeks where decades happened. Marxists and anarchists, orthodox and revisionists, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, internationalist and chauvinist, Social Democrat and communist, the Left Opposition, the Right Deviationists. Every few years or months or weeks, a new round of purges, expulsions, and walkouts, as any one of the several socialist parties out there broke into two camps, then those two into four, and those four into eight, those eight into sixteen, each group declaring themselves to be the avatars of socialist purity and righteousness, and everyone else a blockheaded bunch of losers.
How do we stop this?
No.1052633
>>1052625The only solution… revolution!