/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Through the vigilant application of the decentralized//distributed vanguard network method, that is tested by material analysis and reality. A single point of failure is suicide under the material conditions of the advance apparatus of high-tech, wide spread repressive forces.

>>2698485
decentralization anon your ideology makes my heard hurt, how does anyone actually contribute?

>>2698489

I would need you to give me a basic run down of your terrain ie; the situations at hand, skills you have, and needs of your community or friend groups. The state of local leftist orgs and organizing in your locality also matters. The capacity has mostly been grown in urban centers, Minneapolis being one of the strongest hubs for this form of organizing which is why the DHS intel led them to wage an open COIN operation beyond migration. Though if you even give me a run down of your local situation without doxxing, i can give you examples of how people tied into this model have acted in similar localities.

>>makes head hurt

It also makes the repressive wing of the state's head hurt, which is why they scream GEORGE SOROS! when they can't find a clear central unit of command, but notice bodies are moving in organized fashion from coast to coast, nation to nation.


If you want another example of this method of organizing spreading, DO YOU REMEMBER the neo nazis that showed up to an all black town in Ohio? Well the existing nodes that built skill, theory and principle from the "George Floyd era" in that locality, showed up to do armed patrols and checkpoints. It seemed spontaneous to onlookers because of how quickly it occurred among people who didn't even know one another; again it only seemed spontaneous because this form of organizing is highly secure by design.

https://www.rawstory.com/naizi-kkk-march-2671235338/

>>2698506
i guess my question is can there ever be any sort of end goal there, it just kinda sounds like ancom shit
or is it just morso contributing to the means necessary for a future movement?
i am somewhere around the pnw area

>>2698485

Decentralized forces can still get rekt

>>2698624

Yes, mostly a result in premature mobilizations and a lack of acceptance of the need for indirect but consistent connections with a political wing. Just like people who use tor STILL get caught. Nothing guarantees absolute security, in most situations political or otherwise.

>>2698555

Comrade, I appreciate the directness of your observation. At a superficial level, much of what I argue does echo classical anarcho-communist positions; the rejection of traditional hierarchical organization, the emphasis on grassroots self-organization, and the commitment to abolishing class domination through collective action from below. However, the distinction lies in our respective assessments of the concrete historical conditions under which revolutionary subjectivity develops today, particularly in the advanced capitalist core under conditions of advanced state repression and surveillance.

Allow me to frame this in more rigorously Marxist terms. The classical anarchist critique of vanguardism whether Leninist or otherwise rightly warns against the dangers of substitutionism, wherein a self-appointed elite displaces the self-activity of the masses; they are also right it's model's suitability is questionable in the modern times. Yet historical materialism compels us to examine not abstract ideals but the actually existing forms of organization that emerge from the contradictions of the present conjuncture. In the current period, the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state, digital / A.I. surveillance, financial exclusion mechanisms, preemptive legal interventions, and the systematic infiltration of oppositional networks is something that has materially foreclosed the possibility of purely both centralized militant vanguards, and purely spontaneous, unmediated mass upsurge on the scale required for systemic transformation. What we observe instead is a highly decentralized, distributed network of resistance across the west and global south, affinity-based collectives, encrypted communication channels, mutual aid infrastructures, autonomous spaces, and episodic direct actions and convergence of nodes in street battles and other forms of community defense support. These are not chosen purely on ideological grounds; they represent the necessary adaptive form that revolutionary initiative assumes under conditions of asymmetrical warfare being waged by a technologically superior adversary in the context of a highly urbanized pre-revolutionary social climate.

This distributed structure constitutes, in objective terms, a vanguard formation not in the classical Leninist sense of a monolithic, centralized cadre party, but as a de facto leading layer emergent from the mass struggle itself. Informal nodes of initiative, trust, and strategic capacity arise organically through repeated practice, reproducing leadership functions without formal traditional hierarchy. Mao's insistence on the mass line 'from the masses, to the masses' offers a methodological corrective here; such a decentralized vanguard must remain rooted in, and accountable to, the broader proletarian and popular layers, constantly testing and refining its line through practice.
The critical limitation, however, is the absence of an articulated political expression capable of operating at the level of the superstructure while remaining interlocked with this base level network. Without an open, semi-autonomous political wing capable of legal defense, resource coordination, public advocacy, and sustained ideological contestation, the symbolic and material energies generated by decentralized actions are inevitably recuperated by dominant forces; liberal NGOs channel them into reformist channels, electoral apparatuses absorb their momentum, or reactionary elements exploit their aesthetics (more true in europe).

This is not a call to replicate bureaucratic centralism to a T, nor to discard it, but to recognize that revolutionary strategy requires differentiated organs of struggle. The mass base demands forms of protection and reproduction that exceed the skill sets of clandestine or affinity-group organizing; competent legal strategy to contest repression, financial mechanisms resilient to capitalist chokepoints, and interfaces with adjacent progressive forces (unions, community organizations) that can broaden the front without sacrificing revolutionary content.

In simple terms, the material development of the class struggle under late capitalism has already produced a decentralized vanguard form. Whether self identified marxists or anarchists like this observation does not change the objective nature of it. This is why i say holding onto ideas in their old format is like expecting the anti-virus software from 91 to hold up. The stagnant nature of the left will be eternal as long as this tendency haunts us. So the task for anyone on the revolutionary left is not to deny its existence out of principled aversion to 'vanguardism,' or "decentralization" but to consciously develop its necessary political mediations open, interconnected, and guided by the mass line, so that the movement may defend its gains, reproduce its forces, and prevent external appropriation. This is the strategic imperative that distinguishes a distributed vanguard from classical anarcho communism. It is an analysis of the objective conditions and the organizational forms they demand, not a moral idealism. If we fail to address this, we risk reproducing a cycle in which insurgent energies serve as raw material for others' political projects, rather than cohering into durable dual power for the working class political wing. That, comrade, is the precise theoretical and practical divergence I seek to highlight, it's not as a rejection of anarchist principles, but an observation on their necessary historical specification in our time and why it appears their movement has maintained a more long-standing active, growing militant wing than the rest of the revolutionary left.

Right now another task is to get the Anarchists to realize, that reality i mentioned earlier; the reality that they can be against the political party being invited into their streams of action, but somebody, likely connected to the DNC will almost always utilize the energy and power your movements have built, sucking it back into the field of capitalist normalcy as your comrades suffer PTSD, physical risk, and long term incarceration; you deny the need of a political wing only in word, and just end up being free R&D for the next wave of recuperators. Though the other task at hand is realizing the anarchist critique is a normal reaction to the distrust created by how horrible many open leftist organizations are in modern America. The goal for Marxist-Leninists and Marxists is realizing the necessity of the distributed vanguard, seeing the spike in global anarchist adjacent organizing activity as the material reality of the militant wing in modernity, and build the proper political channels to support that. This has already been happening, but it needs to be done by more people and thus on a larger more general scale. Small example is now many anarchists don't even go by the name anymore, and adhere to this exact model i speak of; they insert into political spheres and adhere to what I explained - above ground legal groups provide intel to distributed / decentralized networks in Minneapolis. DSA politicians and their associates work behind the scenes to sometimes do the same and support them with funding of lawyer teams. Now we need all leftists to engage in this to continue to generalize and solidify this model into something formidable. It's time to realize the political tensions and contradictions being pitted in conflict to one another is an FBI ploy, and an idealist trap.

I definitely do not engage in this, and I hate when anarchists and marxists engage in purity tests, while picking which label to identify as if these ancient ideas were some stagnant skyrim class to pick and play in some revolutionary game. The proper materialist knows marxism is not some eternal idealism that has a universal application formula; being fluid and enable to engage in lessons from contradictions, divisions, differences creates strength in theory.

Here is an example of the function behind the materialist observations we've made; why the distributed, decentralized network is the only viable way to maintain militancy. Still the scope of possibilities within this model are not fully realized yet; arguably 2008 in greece is a moment that set this model into global motion for the future (by proving the network models material ability to resist the post-911 GWOT policing methodology/apparatus)… glenn beck and right wing think tanks openly feared and discussed it long before trump existed, "theyre using anarchy methods to spread communism!!!" - FOX NEWS. I will argue that without this occurence in Greece generalizing globally, and later to a lot of latin american urban hubs, that the USA George Floyd situation would have not occured in the rapid, mass manner that it did. Many marxists and anarchists alike have rigorously studied and interacted with this methodology beginning in this time frames.

https://crimethinc.com/2008/12/25/how-to-organize-an-insurrection

>>Most of the tactics used in this struggle have been used for a long time now in Greece (junta era culture of rebels remains). The most important new characteristic of this struggle was the immediate appearance of actions all over the country. The assassination of a young anarchist boy in the most important area of anarchist activity provoked an instantaneous reaction; within five minutes of his death, anarchist cells all over the country had been activated. In some cases, the police were informed much later than the anarchists about the reason they were facing attacks from the people. For Greek society, it was a surprise that the majority of young people in the country adopted the tactics of “anarchist violence, smashing and burning,” but this was a result of the generalized influence that anarchists’ actions and ideas have had in Greek society over the past four years.

The glenn beck source:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45UfIEIU14w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4TfW8SrBQs


As for your location. I will reach out to people in the PNW and get a research analysis for the needed knowledge to consider praxis and get back to you on that.

>>2698958
>substitutionism
What is the self-activity of the masses? How can it be replaced? The spontaneous activity of the masses is always at a low level and incapable of enforcing changes in society. How does a vanguard replace it? It doesn't. The self-activity of people who don't feel represented by the existing political channels are not stopped from action by the existence of a group that is organized, dedicated, and pursuing the interests of the working class as a whole. The only way they could substitute for the spontaneous action of those people who don't feel represented by any existing political channel is if they successfully represented and organized those individuals who have, up till then, not felt represented (by the capitalist political organizations). It's a good thing to organize them and channel that energy. There's nothing effective 5 people with a Signal chat can do. However if those five people are able to join a wider movement that gives them specific goals in part of a wider fight, knowing that what they're doing actually contributes to something greater, then they can be effective.

>movement gets captured by DNC etc.
This is only an issue because you don't believe in building an organization. If you have the perspective of building an organization then there's no way for capitalist groups to use that against you. The organization is self-contained and its energies are directed towards its goals. But if you're talking about a bunch of individual actors, of course organized groups will end up channeling their energies. And of course the official "left" will end up grifting off of it and attempting to shout down people involved first and cover up their message with a capitalist-compatible message. But the second thing is really a different type of operation, not a recuperation but flooding the zone in order to keep information of your movement getting out. Informational control is a central COIN tactic.

>above ground legal groups assisting clandestine work
If you run finances through a legally established entity they can be frozen. Any open group can be RICO'd, outlawed, or attacked with violence. If your movement relies on using official channels, those channels are totally controlled by the ruling class and access can be revoked at any time. If anything this is one of the things currently holding us back and is the thing genuinely causing recuperation, unlike the groups that leech off of movements they didn't organize (this is a different issue). Having the legal groups pulls resources, people, and the ideology of the movement as a whole towards capitalist-controlled channels. It lulls people into reformism that never works. To compare to the BPP, look at how legal defense became the core purpose/pull of their movement while they abandoned armed struggle. They could have insisted on other methods of police intimidation, e.g. ambushes (which we know they would have gotten away with given how ambushes did occur and all they could do was frame Panthers), but instead they grew the legal side of their organization, and the huge sums of money they raised ended up being one of the major causes of contention that split the organization, as well as multiple people skipping bail without telling the party first, wasting huge amounts of money. Imagine how the pigs would have been shitting themselves if instead they put that money into buying guns and radios. And that was actually one origin of the ideological split, between those who supported more violence and those who supported legal methods. Eventually the party recalled all resources to Oakland to run a failed electoral campaign, and afterwards the BPP basically became a local NGO and basically DNC arm. They liquidated into a reformist local organization. If you look back at their national organization, this was basically one of the two sides of it. You had armed self defense, and the reformist side which bid on the state's desire to give a fair trial. This side won out even through assassinations, which is probably why the whole thing split seeing as how reformism stops making sense when they kill you for actually being successful.

Again you don't have a dialectical outlook, you're just taking the movement as it is and saying "see this is what we have to do" instead of analyzing which aspects are helping the cause and which aspects are hurting it.

I want you to just think about one thing: if security culture was ubiquitous in all organizations at all level of openness, what would it look like? Because I think that security culture + legal organizations looks like underground organizations engaged in non-illegal activities. You seem to be against this and I can't figure out why, but I'd really like for you to consider this if you're a real person. You seem like someone who could be very useful, so please take this critique into genuine consideration.

>>2699025
Interesting post. I think I learned a lot from the Fred Hampton story. That is one example of why I would never fuck with someone I knew to be a criminal.

I don't think security is a reasonable expectation. I think if there is any group to learn from it is the Scientologists. How do they get away with it?. .

>>2699025
>>2698958
Also on vanguardism:
Most people do nothing, it's only a benefit if some subset of the working class is active and organized (and part of the reason people do nothing is because they're paralyzed by the impotence of any action they could take. They know it's not worth the reprisal to take only insignificant actions, so the lack of organization is itself a stifling effect. To give people a means of taking small actions that are part of a larger coordinated effort is to mobilize them into action. How anyone (trots and anarchists) construed this as substituting I have no idea). This is not "substituting" for them, because they weren't doing anything anyways! If anything that is the movement of the masses, insofar as nothing else is being produced from them. You're giving reflexive anti-bolshevik critiques without realizing that the bolsheviks had a model very similar to yours, but more refined (and if you disagree with that last part, please remember that they have produced successful results and you have not!).

How do you imagine your spontaneous reformist networks becoming of use to revolution? The only real answer to how they become of use to revolution is that they join a communist party, or if you don't like parties a communist initiative of some sort. Only communists have a revolutionary strategy. The groups that operate openly with limited scale are not capable of revolution because they don't believe in it and aren't organizing towards that aim. An organization with the aim of revolution must organize at the proper scale and not stay local or single-issue. It has happened before that reformist organizations assist revolution, but it's only when they join the communist party. E.g. Zhu De in the Chinese revolution. If you don't build anything (a national or international organization with a higher goal than local single issues) to win them over to then they'll simply never achieve it.

Also you might not be much of a socialist, idk, but say you have your distributed insurrection and let's imagine the army is asleep and isn't bothering you, so you're successful and you set up councils everywhere to elect a new government (idk if this is what you imagine, so I'm going based on your crimethinc article). Who do they elect? You don't have an organization of socialists who have a plan to transition the economy, so reformists are put in power and fail to challenge capitalism. Now the army wakes up, and they remove your government that probably crashed the economy and made everyone hate them. How do you deal with this without creating a large socialist organization? Hoping that small self-study initiatives will do the job spontaneously? That you'll create enough self-taught geniuses of socialism to win thousands of elections? If anything your anarchism is much more focused on heroic individuals. You substitute mechanisms for accountability in organizations for informal clique rule. We just have to hope to be ruled by a benevolent clique! Amazing. Or I guess you'd probably suggest dissolving the cell and finding some new friends to play revolution with, until we break with them also, and so on forever

>>2699029
Scientologists are rich and they aren't targeted by the state for being anti-capitalist revolutionaries.

However I also agree that we shouldn't expect total security, especially for the oldest generation of any hypothetical future successful revolutionary organization, since we'll have to be open and insecure to a certain degree to build it. But security in general is important so they don't just kill everyone. It's more common than you might think. Germany, Iraq, Indonesia, etc. They just go door to door and kill all the communists if you don't focus on security. Security doesn't always mean shooting back though. In China e.g. during the civil war, there were communists operating in the cities. They were often wiped out until they learned how to hide their presence better and operate entirely clandestinely. They would have open organizations that weren't overtly political and do work inside them to promote their views while not necessarily taking leadership. Or in large unions they would have multiple layers of reserves so that when one leadership (secretly communist) was purged by the state, another (secretly communist) would just be elected again.

>>2698475
Just like the bolsheviks did you convince large swathes of the existing military either to join your side or stand down and be neutral. Ethnic Minorities are overrepresented in the lower ranking positions of the US military and are mostly young and not heavily invested in US empire. Theyre poorly paid and just there for money. This is unlike the officer class and special forces which are mostly white and highly ideologically motivated

>>2699037
Did the Bolsheviks convince the army to stand down or the army independently decided to not attack?

>>2699478
A huge part of their work was agitation inside the army. Trotsky was especially loved by the navy and it came over to their side pretty easily.

>>2699037
This seems reasonable, but at the same time I wonder if things are just different now. Many times throughout history (the original European fascist movements, Iraq, Indonesia, Brazil) the army has been a bulwark against communism even while the people are broadly supportive. If you think about it, the professional armed forces of a country make their wage from the fact that they keep their population (and if imperialist, outside populations) in line - going to work, paying taxes and fines, etc. The police even fund themselves directly through theft. It seems more correct to see them as a parasitic class similar to the bourgeoisie. They don't have to work to do anything useful for the economy. The consciousness this produces is probably pretty vile, as seen with special forces guys, but the concept of the fundamental difference of civilians is pushed hard on anyone who served, and baked in by facing danger with their buddies and committing murder, which is taboo for civilians. I want to believe you're right but I think a new analysis might be needed that places the professional armed forces as a key third class produced by capitalism, on the side of the bourgeoisie. In early 1900s Russia the people who made up the rank and file of the army came from working class backgrounds and had no expectation that they could have an ongoing career in the military or be taken care of by the state afterwards. This is one important difference. They were taken away from their jobs, and eventually to be returned to their jobs (or a grave). In imperialist countries the military is a career path, moving the whole of the rank and file towards an officer mindset. I want to agree though

>>2699573
If we are in a massive crisis, economic depression, huge foreign war with china etc. military members will be far more malleable. Also like I said the rank and file are disproportionately minority and not ideologically committed. Most of them signed up for a quick paycheck because they had nothing better to do after highschool and would be scared shitless if they had to fight their fellow citizens on home turf. If we seized the banks and used that to guranteed them better pay then what theyre currently getting many of them would certainly come over.

>>2700222
The part about seizing the banks is so real. For some reason the discourse on the left about the military in the US at least is always a back and forth of "it's a volunteer military, fuck them" and "it's poor minorities who just want a paycheck, they'll support us" but don't touch the concept of giving them a reason to defect.

Beyond banks, we could also promise them expropriated mansions, cars, etc. Tbh there's so many reactionaries to jail or kill we could do a very immediate and large stimulus program if we could functionally take cities (which only requires beating out the police). The same way reactionaries want to get rid of non-whites and give their shit to whitey. The same way ICE is stealing money and cars from people right now.

Also the fact that people tend to simply side with whoever has power. There's absolutely no reason for anyone who isn't a total masochist or idealistic moralist to side with communists right now because we offer no safety, all risk and thankless work. But if we were to achieve serious power, we could hope to sway careerists and opportunists to our side. This is what happened in the Russian revolution too. I think oftentimes the reality of the mechanics of the situations get overlooked for a more abstract vision. Past revolutions didn't immediately win over the military, it was after they had successful insurrections or a large enough force of their own. We should be focusing on "how do we win over the military?" and not "will they support us of their own free will right now or not?"

>>2698475
>How do we prevent or beat counter-revolutionary state violence?
Do what UNIT 731 did. Human experiments, no bounds no bullshit geneva conventions, chemical weapons, biological weapons, etc.etc.etc.

I feel like even the biggest of "tankies" become moralizing christian wussies when I tell them this, its a good thing we're going to do this on them next

>>2700283
retarded edgy LARPer

>>2699037
Now you are mostly correct, but the fact is that minorities from specific families are overrepresented. If your uncle was in the Army, that would seem like a valid life path and and he could help train you. And even within ethnic minorities, certain groups are vastly overrepresented in certain fields over others. For e,g Native Americans for various cultural reasons, are overrepresented in the US Army infantry, black Americans are overrepresented in support roles and White and Hispanic Americans tend to be more broadly represented across different branches.

>>2698958

Dont listen to this guy he is a drug addeled gang member who belongs to a camp whos agenda aims to destroy the truest form of socialism he will lead you to destruction and hatred. No different than a neo nazi.