A community dedicated to critical left unity and the synthesis of ideas. Everyone is welcome here, but, please avoid uncritical or unproductive sectarianism.
(Please read the rest of their sidebar as well to get a feel)
We as Marxists (regardless of whether ML, trot, Maoist, etc) I believe tend to universally uphold the notion that left-unity is not Marxist. That we practice only Marxist-unity (and with plenty of criticism amongst ourselves at that for non-ML’s especially that often goes as far as exclusion for those who don’t support AES at least critically).
To put it bluntly: I do not want people who practice left-unity to get a beachhead or toehold here with a dedicated community.
There is an anarchist alternative (raddle), at least one anarchist instance to my recollections on lemmy itself and most liberal and left leaning instances on lemmy allow anarchists but explicitly ban Marxists.
In other words, this is our one, singular space which these people are now pushing into. We should not cede an inch of it to allowing non-Marxists and those who discourage vicious criticism and yes even venting and sneering and meming on of the compatible-left, the CIA-left, the synthetic-left and other such names.
I’ll note that hexbear is basically a left unity platform and will be federating with us shortly. They tolerate and allow anarchists and discussion between them and ML’s so such content would be better there.
I believe at any rate that anarchists are not disallowed from here if they’re here to ask honest questions and not just spew imperialist propaganda and anti-communist, anti-AES dogma. Thus the community serves as nothing more than an attempted safe-space for anarchists and other deviations (left, right, etc), a safe harbor from site rules and standards.
I would make the case that the main, pertinent criticism is that this community wants to be an exception to instance-wide policy, and with its 3rd rule contain that exceptional behaviour within that community. Under those circumstances it just makes sense for it to exist elsewhere; being here is going to create unnecessary work for both the community’s mods and the instance’s admins for no benefit at all.
For it to exist on a different instance is objectively better for all involved. That said, if it existed on an instance that practiced left-unity, it would be totally redundant. In which case, does it have a reason to exist at all? Any discussion started there can just as easily be started on existing communities on left-unity friendly instances we’re already federated with.
And in consideration of all of the above, it just makes the reason for creating this community at all really rather suss. (edit: and it’s created by a new user, a day after the user account was created… they either don’t know this instance community at all, or they’re hiding behind an alt).
I agree. We must have a more principled stance on Marxism. This is not to mean that Left Unity is not possible, rather that it is limited. Anarchism and Marxism are fundamentally incompatible with each other, hence we should not even bother to consider uniting together. This should be served as a safe space for marxists.
I personally agree, if we need a dedicated theory comunity we still have https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzhou
This feels like unnesisarily ceeding ground, with hexbear being the spot for generic left unity, and a potential federation on its way, lets leave the left unity there, and leave here dedicated to Marxist unity.
Wanted to post the same quote, I think we ought to leave the Left Unity niche to hexbear and let ourselves stay a Marxist instance.
I can understand that, but my experience (mainly on Hexbear) has been that as long as we take a hardline on aggressive spammers and people starting shitfights, we can mostly reach agreements and in many cases convert baby anarchists from their more liberal positions with minimal effort.
Either converting them to Marxists, or at the very least forcing them to actually read anarchist theory to try and “debunk” us which usually leads them to a greater understanding of their own ideological biases and mellows them out, or starts them down a path where they see that their idea of “anarchism” is actually just street politics and is compatible with Marxist/Leninist political theory.
What with the hordes of unswayable liberal-dom making their way to using ‘left’ as a descriptor for themselves, I’m with it. We don’t do ‘left’ unity in my house, we save that shit for the Marxists and maybe the anarchists, but they can’t be settlers even in that case.
