The western left as it exists today is completely unfit for purpose. Worse, it is composed of people who each believe that they have all the answers, when in fact all they have is fantasies. These fantasies take many forms, from the naive to the inane, from "The Third World will fix society for me!" to "And then one day, as if by magic, Americans simply rose up and overthrew the bourgeoisie and established FALC."
Countless hours are spent on displacement activities. People will argue as though it as a matter of life and death that Khrushchev's legacy be defended, that a shitposting thread on /leftypol/ takes the correct line on critically supporting North Korea, that people understand that you cannot vote your way to communism, and so on. People who have no means of conducting either reform or revolution will argue furiously for one or the other. This is an insane state of affairs. The left purportedly has ends, but it has no means.
I am here to tell you now that your ends mean nothing, because you have no means to achieve them. More importantly, I am going to suggest to you the basic means necessary to achieve
anything.
First, a simple point: Communism is "the real movement which abolishes the present state of things". It is not "the theoretical movement that abolishes the present state of things." you can read every book in the Marxist canon, and if all you do is sit around reading a lot of books then your achievement will be no more meaningful than if you had read all the books of the bible. The left must be judged on what it achieves in the real world, and not on what clever ideas it has.
Second, a further point: It is important to grasp the paltry achievements of the western left in any of our lifetimes. You may want to live in a society on the Soviet model, but you're as likely to get that in the US Democratic party as you are in any of the rump Communist parties that litter the west today. Not because the Democrats are going to reform their way to socialism, but because the newspaper hawkers and front-group founders (yes, I know, "those are trotskyist stereotypes!") are never going to deliver on that goal. It is simply beyond them. It is like setting the goal of getting to the moon and choosing a bicycle as your means of getting there. Working people are never - not in any permutation of history, not in any alternate timeline - going to spontaneously recognise them as the vanguard and install them to power. The i
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