i find that a lot of leftist discourse is very idealistic, like "X won't exist in our perfect communist society so engaging with it is counter-revolutionary", ie "sex work won't exist, so there's no need to engage with it" or "small businesses won't exist so engaging with them is wrong" or "drugs will be banned under communism, so engaging with the people who consume them is wrong"
This makes for easy theory posting and internet debates, but is really bad for actually engaging in material real world praxis because we do not live under the society we want to create, and the time it will take to create the envisioned society is literally multiple lifetimes, ie even if revolution happened tomorrow, the task of creating the society we want doesn't end, if anything, that's when it really begins. it's this idea that communism is a static utopia that will mysteriously happen in the future. This line of thinking ignores that communism will emerge dialectically from the contradictions of capitalism. This utopianism is ultimately the very counter-revolutionary thought it claims to defend against.
my honest opinion is that engaging in utopianism is significantly easier than engaging in materialism, especially if one is constrained by their material conditions, or consumed by a sense of hopeless nihilism. I think that's also why I piss people off so much, because there's proof that I've been able to *something*, and any amount of *something* is more than nothing, and that's in spite of my own material conditions being well, poverty and struggle. Which means that someone who has more comfort, more resources, more stability should be able engage in praxis too, but the fear of action paralyzes. Praxis means working with imperfect allies, making tactical compromises, making mistakes, failing, being embarrassed, taking losses, trying new things, applying theory dialetically and getting dirty. Utopianism keeps your hands clean and your theory pure. People with clean hands are disgusted by people with dirty ones.
the only thing standing between the comfortable leftist and material praxis is their own choice.
i don't care about theoretical purity. i care about practical efficaciousness. good theory informs us about what practical action is most efficacious. no one today in the west has a good theory about what practical action is most effective at furthering the real movement. "engaging" (whatever that really means, could mean a lot of things, some of them quite unsavory) with petty bourgeois and lumpen economic enterprises could potentially be tactically advisable on a case by case basis. it is not advisable to make it a programmatic premise of a proletarian political project.
why do you talk about sex work that much, just curious
>>2657110>no one today in the west has a good theory about what practical action is most effective at furthering the real movementI would say marxists have plenty very good theory, where do you see gaps?
>>2657249Considering his living situation soon that will be his job.
>>2657110couldn't have said it better
>>2657263>I would say marxists have plenty very good theory, where do you see gaps?nta but significant lack of organization or even correspondence on a international level. local organizing is lacking as well, but that is easier to explain. lack of international correspondence - not so much. marx and engels organized the first internationale from an embryo which was just correspondence between the then-leaders of the movement, centralized in brussles. that, for example, is a signal of bad theory.