Comradeship // Freechat

First off there’s literally no need for this to get aggressive. Some of your latter responses are showing far mor about your own maturity frankly that making substantive points. It’s not milquetoast and it’s no issue with violence. Nor is it saying that you cannot cooperate tactically with reactionaries. It’s highlighting the dangers and pointing to what has happens to communists every time in the Global South when reactionaries who communists have cooperated with win. I agree that an FNL victory is preferable to French colonialism. That’s not what is at issue in my point. This is a serious discussion about what are the correct ways to view different third world movements whose interests are not the same as imperialists. And that’s not a trivial or obvious thing that you can reduce to lower school arithmetic of supportive of the yanks or frog munchers or not. Al Quaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram all define themselves as liberation movements and are opposed to US imperialism. That America is to blame for their existence does not contradict that. That’s a bizarre, arbitrary metaphysical inference that doesn’t follow at all. It’s just blowback. Taliban are also a material product of US policy, but their aims changed and diverged radically.

If you’re going to want to establish that the FLN was partly communist in some substantial, organizational, ideological sense then please provide evidence of them implementing actual communist policies which are not simply what any corrupt national bourgeois government would do and please explain their reactionary policies. Again comrade this is not me being passive aggressive, I’d just like clarification of what you mean.

By-the-bye, the political violence I was referring to was not against the French. I am mentioning against progressives and Algerian civilians. The idea that these were all q French lovers is not true. But yeh, again, and I’m going to keep saying it seems there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance: not all methods of national liberation or opposition to capitalism are equally valid politically or ethically imo. If people are able to understand this in the case of Sendero Luminoso and the Khmer Rouge it’s not clear to me why this isn’t clear in other cases.

Like it also seems to le that the a lot of the people self-identifying as Leninists don’t actually seem to have very seriously studied the history of the Bolshevik party’s foreign policy. The relevant example is that neither the Soviets nor the PRC ever took a position of unconditional support for all national liberation movements. They had to actually indicate substantial potential for progressive policy and change. There is some argument for that in the case of the FLN, but I personally think it’s often overdone.

On your comment that I’ve not made sense, respectfully I think you haven’t grasped my point. I was having a hunch at what your point was supposed to be. You said that they were not anti-communist and appeared to justify it by saying that they banned other parties and formed a one party state. The FLN were opposed not simply to that particular communist party, but communist movements in general. But if that’s the reasoning, then that would make any party that did that not anti-communist. Again, as I already mentioned in my above comment, I’m not saying that it makes them anti-communist to oppose other communists, I’m saying that the fact that a group opposed groups apart from communists doesn’t negate their anticommunism.

Also: my claim is not that the fact that Islamist’s ascended tit he detriment of communists is what makes the FLN anti-communist. What made them anti-communist was their ideology and their policies and material consequences of those. The point about the rise of Islamist is me pointing to the danger of these groups. That’s my central point. Their dominance and inevitable insufficiency, combined with their opposition to more progressive political developments, created the conditions leading to that.

Like are you just defining as communist now what happens to be the popular party or the one that can oppose western imperialism? I’m assuming you’re not but it’s difficult for me to know because you haven’t made clear what the terms you’re using mean. I’m not trying to be rude here but it’s not clear what the meanings or points or relations between points you take yourself to be making are to me.

Someone killing a communist does not preclude them being ideologically communists or implémentign some genuine policies of socialist construction.The Stalinist killing of many members of the party (and don’t bother linking me some brain dead Grover Fur garbage to argue otherwise, cos u can literally just read the actual archive documents) did not preclude Stalin being a serious, intelligent and self-consciously committed communist. That’s called being an inconsistent communist. Stalin has quite a few L’s. Like y’a know, ethnically cleansing tartars and putting bullets in the spines of quite a few innocent comrades who had given there lives for the revolution, known and unknown. At this point in history, not incorporating that into a balanced view of Stalin is not only pathetically childish and idiotic, and will not only alienate someone from from the entirety of the left we actually have to work with if you are an actual militant, but means that in any future hypothetical opportunity for socialism the same mistakes are more likely to be made.

Not giving a fuck about some of consequences is unfortunate and problematic but it is what it is. But opposition to imperialism and opposing unnecessary atrocity are not inconsistent. In any case, your lack of sympathy or empathy is not a guide to correct politics. That’s not his communist agitating or organizing is going to be effectively done. It breeds a reactionary politics and diverts attraction to reactionary alternatives like Islamism. Neither is outrage at atrocity a strict guide, that’s not the point. One of the great lessons and warnings of the 20th century in the post-WW2 period is that national bourgeois governments are in no way a solution to the post colonial dilemma or a sufficient response to imperialism and neocolonialism is even it formal independence is achieved.

I’d also add that I’m not saying that cooperation with the FLN or Hamas for local communists is the wrong move. But the communists in those positions are under far less illusions about the extent to which that’s a matter of necessity and survival. The first united front between the CPC and the GMD is a telling example of how that logic survival can apply even though it’s t might also be likely that once that group has an advantage and the shared opposition is no longer immediate, that they will crush it the communist movement when the opportunity arises.

Again not trying to make this aggressive or tense comrade.