>>960442>Dude who would have gotten purged argues against purges.Yes, it's true that if Macnair joined an ML, Maoist or Trot party he would get purged. Likewise, an ML that joined a Trot party would get purged, a Trot that joined a Maoist party would get purged and so on. They key difference here is that if an ML, Trot or Maoist joined an Orthodox Marxist party they
would not get purged. So long as they agree to fight for the party's program of political demands, they would have full freedom to publicly argue for transitional demands, a mass line, giant Stalin portraits, etc.
The point is to unite the left around a program of
common action rather than a theoretical orthodoxy. All the dozens of ML and Trot sects believe that one day their "correct line" will cause the working class to flock in droves to their specific group, but it's been over half a century and this hasn't come true for a single one of them. If you want to build a mass, politically relevant communist movement, you have to start by uniting all (most) of the leftist activists into a democratic communist party that allows dissent.
This is the story behind the Gotha unification congress, best known for Karl Marx's withering critique of its program. It marked the fusion of two relatively small revleft groups: the followers of Ferdinand Lasalle and the followers of Wilhelm Liebknecht (a fan of Marx but far from an unquestioning sycophant). The unification marked a compromise between the two groups. The theoretical foundations were granted to the Lasalleans, which outraged Marx as you may know. The political organization and strategy, on the other hand, was granted to Liebknecht's supporters (quickly dubbed "the Marx cult" and the like by opponents). The Lasallean practice of "Labor Monarchism", wherein the leadership could contravene or purge whomever they didn't like, was abandoned in favor of a more open and autonomous structure. The result was a snowball effect in party membership. This fusion of two small groups quickly grew into a party of hundreds of thousands. Furthermore, this surge in membership led to a surge of theoretical debate, and the Marxists quickly gained the upper hand. Any traces of the Lasallean dogma that Marx inveighed against was formally expunged only 16 years later when the party adopted the Erfurt program.
You see the same pattern in other countries across Europe near the end of the 19th century: a fusion of several revleft sects creates a mass party much greater than the sum of its parts. Over the course of the 19th century socialism progressed from being a bookclub for political nerds to a mass movement with real potential for revolution. Over the course of the 20th century the exact opposite happened. The root cause of this comes from the decision of the Comintern to "create an iron military order in its own ranks" - the "vanguard", "cadres", all the military analogies were introduced
after 1917, during the Russian Civil War. That's a topic for another day, but the point is that it is radically different from the model that built a mass, politically relevant socialist movement for the first time in history, and which successfully led to victory in the Russian revolution. With today's left looking very similar to the disparate sects of the mid 19th century, I think this strategy deserves a second look.