What is your opinion on left unity?

Someone shared this article a while back, and while I don't agree with it, I do think it's instructive. You cannot exactly have an "authoritarian left" get along with a "anarchist left". This video about Hegemony also covers how we can possibly work together.

One, because an authoritarian left looks a lot like an authoritarian right (to an anarchist left). When both the Fascist and the Marxist want to take away your rights, you really need to know which one you're looking at.

Two, even within Anarchist circles, there's some disunity about how to bring about "the revolution". Some advocate for destabilising forces, which would "naturally" cause people to seek freedom. Others think we need to strengthen bonds of society. This, for reasons explained in the article, does not work.

However, even the authoritarian left won't "work" because the end goal for a Marxist is to remove the actual infrastructure of oppression, and like Lenin said, it's not gonna happen; you can't get there from here.

So the real issue is that most of us can agree on where we want to end up, but we can't really agree on how to get there. The Authoritarian left has wet dreams that we'll all somehow learn "the theory" (and frankly given the comments even the commenters in this very subreddit do not know "the theory" and I barely know it), and then something something revolution.

The Anarchist problem is that we explain "the theory" in "common" terms, so it doesn't really sound rational to someone who knows "the theory". Even then, most people are dumb, like ChatGPT dumb. They'll use the right words in the right places but they mostly know that because they're text prediction engines, so they're nominally "anarchist" until the capitalist gives them more bread and circuses for a bit.

In the end, I think a lot of ostensibly "left" causes aren't really "left" at all, so we really need to look at these organisations one at a time. Like the Hegemony video states, this is less about "left" and "right" and more about shared interests.

The one thing that I know for a fact (as an Anarchist), is that the way anarchist and left Organisation works is through social interactions. Sports clubs, Mastodon / Lemmy, families, school friends, uni friends, etc etc. All of these links, if they are strengthened, if we can use them more often than we use the capitalist machinery, are the social consciousness we need. If you eat your neighbours' bread and give them your tomatoes, you're closer to a left utopia, closer to "left unity", and closer to working together against tyranny.

So, we need to fight for third places, we need to fight for places to live, we need to fight for social connections which are peer to peer, not mediated by tech companies. If we can work with that, we can work on a unified left.

I just had a white person tell me (a white person) that ask white Americans are colonizers. But she works elaborate on why other races of Americans are not. She also didn’t want to elaborate on what I should do. Just told me that if I cared I’d already know it look it up.

So this is part of the reason. People claim to be leftists without putting any effort or critical thought into it.

Unity for the sake of unity has little purpose...

...but unity for a common goal, or solidarity with a person / group who's been wronged - that has a lot of purpose. :)

If someone is being repressed, defending them should not depend on sharing my views. If someone is fighting back against repression, assisting them should should not depend on agreement about everything.

I have a fairly similar opinion to @mambabasa@slrpnk.net, I have no real issue working with anyone on the left, even the more liberal types as long as our goals happen to be aligned.

The only 'left' group I would not be able to work alongside in good conscious, are tankies. Every time in recorded history that Anarchists have teamed up with authoritarian leftists, it inevitably went south in some of the worst ways possible.

I've never met a tankie in real life, only ever encountering them online, but if I ever did meet one, that would be my line in the sand (at least, if anything meaningful was on the line). There's no need to repeat that part of history again.

Even Lenin was of agreement that left unity was overrated. He talked on a preference of a "unity of Marxists" over a "unity between Marxists and falsifiers of Marxism.”

Speaking more personally, I’m willing to unite with others on a shared common basis and a common program. But there are limits. I do not seek unity with Maoists and Stalinists and their armed struggle because history has shown that even before they have taken power, they already murdered hundreds of their own dedicated communists thirty years ago. The Communist Party of the Philippines has consistently refused to account for this atrocity. Then twenty years ago, they murdered Marxist-Leninists and social democrats. What kind of unity can be had with a group that murders their own cadre and the cadres of other groups? The answer is that there can be no such unity.

Speaking on the personal level:

For whatever reason, the right is a big tent. Most people just need to agree on a few points to be accepted into whatever group they wanna join.

For some reason, that doesn't seem to be true on the left. We expect our peers (and ourselves) to be flawless exemplars of whatever agenda we're trying to push. There seem to be weird purity tests that everyone needs to pass in order to be Left Enough.

That's toxic af and it harms our goals.

I'm not sure if that's what you're referring to, OP, but it gets my goat.

You just have to favor one particular flavor of leftism and ask the other leftists to fall in line for the cause.

There will be immediate, heated debates and arguing why that flavor is not the right flavor and what other flavor would be better instead and why. And then you have people arguing against either, and so forth.

We can agree mostly only on what is bad, and why. (Perhaps because the very essence of leftist ideology is egalitarianism and distributed power?) The right needs to only agree on one or two things like hating brown people and the leftists, and they fall in line, because they are naturally authoritarian.

@punkisundead absolutely opposed to it. From my experiences in the local activist scene which tends to emphasize left unity, it's especially shitty as an anarchist to be talked down because of my issues with tons of hierarchy and abuse in those orgs because "we've gotta have left unity". The only solution I can think of is to split off and commit to anarchist principles, knowing that it will alienate many.

Big coalitions are less stable. I doubt the left is less stable that the right though.

No liberals, no tankie, the rest are fine.

The best way I have learned to perceive it is that those of the "left" are best akin to a set of islands, loosely connected in that they are close enough to each other in range. Just like how different islands have different cultures, ecosystems, terrains, you find that the different groups of people of the "left" are that way, with their sole united fact being that they aren't the "other side"; however, when you ask where the line of the other side is, they all mark the line at a different point, some even going to far as to say those on the other lines are part of that "other side."

In my own experiences, I have seen this in discussions of equity, especially racial equity as a person who is mixed race, equity and rights for those who are LGBTQIA+ as a person who is part of the acronym, and the care for the environment.

I sadly have no true solution for this issue. People almost strive on the idea of disunity, being the sole group that has their perception of the proper answer, the single truth, and developing inane criteria to compare others to that aren't part of their same group, solely to justify hating them.

The left … progressive… that is the problem, which direction forward? The right just want to go back or at least just stop. But progressives want all the things, equality; racial , sexual and social. But also economic too

And often we snap at each other as they are getting more attention than we are.

You can’t put the same effort into everything at once. Workers get upset that we’re providing for immigrants; but then the races get snippy that one group gets favored over another. Then you have the fact that some issues are just damn complicated

Israel should have the right to defend itself. BUT Palestinians should too. And everyone gets bent out of shape … over all of it.

The left tries but we’re by nature self destructive. The right just has to say GOD and everyone says amen.

The left tears at left Christians as they get tainted by the crazy from the right

¯(ツ)_/¯. Where’s my outrage? None of us can just be nice and try to accept that we don’t all have to get everything all at once; or even at the same time

Left Unity means solidarity with every oppressed worker. It means being an ally to every member of the movement. Trans people who are disrespected by "leftists" and ask it to end aren't being disunifying. The guilt lies with the bigots who decided to attack their fellow workers.

I think we need more patience with each other and trust that there's good faith even in disagreement. When dealing with the right it's all bad faith, but we shouldn't let that sour our internal discussions.

In the United States in 2024, the most passionate and dedicated supporters of left unity are the Democratic Party and its supporters.

Most of the American left is in fact unified - behind the Democratic Party.

If your reflexive response is "the Democratic Party isn't actually leftist" and "no compromise with fascists" and blah blah... well, that explains your perception of disunity. Because the leftists who are willing to compromise their principles in order to accomplish some of their goals are already compromising - under the Democratic Party banner. And the ones who reject that banner are the ones who are the most stubborn about holding their principles and refusing to compromise for the sake of unity. Which explains why they can't compromise with each other, either.