Sweet, thank you!(this is the ‘recommended reading anon’)

autonomeme:

thepeacockangel:

autonomeme:

thepeacockangel:

autonomeme:

thepeacockangel:

Welcome. also though they’re Maoist the Sojourner Truth Organization has some useful stuff for other types of leftist thought

The STO wasn’t Maoist?

They called themselves Leninists, but if you study their theories and their practice, they were Marxist autonomists who didn’t have a conception of what that was yet.

They were actively opposed to and challenged the shit politics of their Maoist contemporaries like the Revolutionary Union (which became the Revolutionary Communist Party) and the October League.  Their paper, Black Worker/White Worker, actually gives a pretty damning critique of how the RU, which preached black liberation when they were in the margins of workplaces, would rapidly switch to the old white supremacist “black and white unite” politics that they thought could win them unionization drives with progressive unions like the United Electrical Workers.

Later in the 1970s they were actually involved in a project to build a national organization with a dozen other communist groups that could actually rival the outreach of the larger nationwide Maoist orgs like the RCP.

Sorry I meant Leninist, I haven’t been sleeping

Again, though, they might have called themselves Leninists, but they were part of the emerging Marxist autonomist milieu that was coming about in the 1970s in the US; i.e., not Leninists.

I think there are a variety of currents in Leninism, and that Leninist is a valid self descriptor for them in some respects.  I’m not saying I don’t like them, I do, just like… they do have Leninisty bits, and I mean TBH there are bits of Lenin I like, I don’t embrace him whole hog or anything, but he says some good stuff in some of his work, like his points about movement building vs. propaganda of the deed.

All Leninism has the organizational commonality of wanting to form (or be) a vanguard party though.

Marxist autonomism, the STO included, makes a definitive break from vanguard politics.

They might have called themselves Leninists, but they did so because there was nothing else that came close to describing their ideology except Communist, but in a movement of half a dozen different types of Communists, calling themselves Communists wouldn’t have sufficed.

I mean honestly, I think what tendency people say they are doesn’t matter all that much, and definitions of bits of definitions of different tendencies get so semantic and silly, like according to various definitions I’m an Anarchist, according to others I’m a Marxist, in any case, it doesn’t really matter