I often see mentions of the disunity in the left and it being a real show stopper for achieving anything meaningful. Whats your take on that and also do you have any reasons(experiences, arguments etc) for that?
I often see mentions of the disunity in the left and it being a real show stopper for achieving anything meaningful. Whats your take on that and also do you have any reasons(experiences, arguments etc) for that?
Yeah of course. They’ve even read Bookchin and the anarchist authors. It’s not as if anarchism is the one true faith and all it will take is some enlightenment for all to come to it. Different people have different experiences and come with different conclusions. Under a different set of experiences, I could have thought Marxism-Leninism would be the logical conclusion. What makes Marxism-Leninism in the Philippines unique is that unlike Marxism-Leninism in the West, which is often anti-revisionist (and thus Stalinist), de-Stalinization forced a rethinking of principles and experimentation with new ideas. This, of course, happened in the United States as well. Angela Davis, once a staunch supporter of Soviet authoritarianism in Eastern Europe, eventually changed her mind on Marxism-Leninism after the collapse of the USSR and led a non-Leninist bloc within the CPUSA. What makes the US different is that the post-1989 wave of de-Stalinization in Western Europe saw former MLs rebrand as democratic socialists while the true faith MLs kept the ML brand. In the Philippines, the wave of de-Stalinization after the end of the dictatorship saw instead a reclaiming of the Marxist-Leninist brand while repudiating Maoism (but not Mao Zedong Thought).
Apologies for the late response!
This is something I’m interested in understanding. I think your new Communism community might be a good place for me to explore that topic further, when I have time to write a more compelling question.
See you there then!