On Principled Unity

As communists we are often called upon to unite with other leftist groups in the spirit of "Left Unity". But what is this, and what should it be to communists?

We adopt a policy of principled unity with anarchists and some other left tendencies. We will work with them insofar as it will accomplish things (such as teaming up with not just anarchists, but antifascists of all stripes to run nazis off the streets), but anarchism and communism differ fundamentally in many ways.

Revolutionary organizations need to be disciplined and principled, and that means conducting line struggle to see which method provides the most advantageous terrain for making revolution. Certain tendencies among anarchists (idealism, support for imperialism under the guise of "working class internationalism", anti-organization attitudes, lack of discipline, lifestyleism) are harmful. We must struggle against these tendencies. You can't just ignore them and hope that we can gather enough people to overthrow capitalism.

For example we defend things like the DPRK, rather than fall into the trap of ideological purity. Often times anarchists uncritically accept the narrative about these countries or refuse to see the way in which they are serving the interests of the US State Department by demonizing or even really giving unprincipled criticism of these countries or refusing to defend them against imperialism.

This completely ignores the reality that when it comes to areas of the world that are being actively menaced by imperialism (the peripheries), where capitalists are violently seeking to bring certain countries into the neoliberal fold, the primary contradiction is between imperialist countries and imperialized. By choosing "neutrality" in this struggle they are de facto serving the needs of the imperialists.

We're not trying to gather the disparate elements of "the left" into some big vague ideological soup until we get big enough to overthrow capitalism. We are trying to engage in mass work guided by clear policy and a materialist analysis of the conditions we find ourselves in. By doing so we form bases of power among the masses, and the party becomes embedded in the masses by serving them. In this way, we grow. Our goal is to serve the masses, not to bend over backwards to try to accommodate as many people as possible in "the left", be they anarchists, demsocs, or whatever.

We pick the most concrete and historically successful framework to develop from (which is Marxist-Leninism), and seek to expand from there as the situation and conditions demand. We should not be opposed to unity where it is fundamental to defeating the enemies of the working class, but we must not fall out of discipline and must always engage in line struggle and advancement of our understanding of the materialist contradictions of a situation. We are not here to gather round the campfire and hold hands, we are here to wage revolution.